Dogmatics – Lesson 1

Table of Contents

• Opening the series and the conceptual problem of dogmatics
• The Christian origin of dogmatics and Maimonides as a formative turning point in Judaism
• Kant, Leibowitz, and the claim that the Jewish core is Jewish law
• Spinoza and Shabbetai Tzvi as illustrations: the environment reacts to practice
• Religion as “law” and the metamorphosis of religiosity in Christianity
• “Belief” and “commandments of emotion” as a cognitive component according to Maimonides
• Dogmatics as born outside Jewish law and returning to Judaism
• Hasidism, experiential dimensions, and the Vilna Gaon
• Critique of dogmatics from the view of Jewish law as the focal point
• The principles of faith in Maimonides as a binding framework and the distinction between principle and derivative
• The Sages, “one who denies a principle,” and the elephant parable in the Guide of the Perplexed
• The difficulty of classifying principles: counting the commandments, primary categories and derivatives, and logic
• The ketubah, stability, and normative commitment as a parable for Jewish law
• Mishnah Sanhedrin, chapter Helek, “they have no share in the world to come,” and the definition of an apikoros
• Maimonides in Laws of Repentance: heretics, apikorsim, deniers of the Torah, and the Raavad
• The Thirteen Principles as an expansion of the Mishnah and their halakhic implications

Summary

General Overview

The speaker opens a new series on principles of faith and dogmatics, and argues that the very concept of “dogmas” is problematic, because usually the discussion of principles is conducted externally instead of first clarifying the conceptual meaning of “binding beliefs.” He presents dogmatics as a concept of Christian origin, and argues that in Judaism the historical and empirical focal point is commitment to Jewish law more than experience, emotion, and religiosity; therefore an early Jewish dogmatics did not develop the way it did in Christianity, until Maimonides put it on the table. He uses examples like Spinoza and Shabbetai Tzvi to argue that Jewish society pushed people outside the fence mainly because of deviation from halakhic practice, not because of philosophical or kabbalistic views in themselves. Later he shows how Maimonides constructs a systematic classification of heresy into legal-theological categories—sectarians, apikorsim, deniers of the Torah—and connects this to the Thirteen Principles and their halakhic implications, while emphasizing that classifying principles is not a one-to-one project and invites disputes such as those of the author of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim.

Opening the Series and the Conceptual Problem of Dogmatics

The speaker presents dogmatics as a set of binding principles that define a religious community, and argues that the concept is problematic and requires a philosophical-conceptual discussion before getting into the content itself. He says the discussion will also touch on issues of authority over thought, over Jewish law, and over facts, but these will accompany the series rather than stand at its center. He plans to begin with dogmatics in general, move to Maimonides’ principles of faith, and then return to clarify what the meaning of “the principles” really is.

The Christian Origin of Dogmatics and Maimonides as a Formative Turning Point in Judaism

The speaker argues that the concept of dogmatics comes from Christianity and that in its simple form it did not exist in the Jewish world, and that Maimonides is the one who founded Jewish dogmatics in the sense of defining a series of binding beliefs that determine the framework of Jewish faith. He qualifies this by saying he is not an expert in Jewish thought, but still presents Maimonides as an important station on the timeline, even if not the absolute beginning. He stresses the historical gap: Maimonides in the 12th century comes after Christianity had already created dogmas, even though Judaism preceded Christianity.

Kant, Leibowitz, and the Claim that the Jewish Core Is Jewish Law

The speaker describes Kant as someone who argued that Judaism is not a religion but a “social code,” because Jewish law determines what one must do and what is forbidden. He says Kant’s Jewish students tried to defend Judaism and emphasize thought, experience, and religiosity within it as well, but in his view Kant was more right than they were, in that the focal point in the Jewish world is not emotional experience and an inner bond with divinity, but Jewish law. He formulates this through Leibowitz’s statement that the root is Jewish law, and frames the distinction as a historical-empirical fact: deviation from Jewish law immediately puts a person outside the framework, whereas deviation from accepted beliefs does not necessarily bring excommunication.

Spinoza and Shabbetai Tzvi as Illustrations: the Environment Reacts to Practice

The speaker argues that the ban against Spinoza did not stem from pantheism, but from criticism of Jewish conceptions and especially from biblical criticism, and above all from the fact that Spinoza presented an ideology of modern secular Judaism and deviated from halakhic commitment. He says the rabbis of the time were not dealing in philosophical categories like “pantheism,” and that this was not the point that disturbed the environment. He presents a parallel claim regarding Shabbetai Tzvi and the disputes around Sabbateanism, including the accusations of the Yaavetz against Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz, and argues that had Shabbetai Tzvi observed Jewish law and brought people back to halakhic commitment, “nobody would have batted an eyelash” at the kabbalistic cleverness, because the problem was the practical deviation from Jewish law.

Religion as “Law” and the Metamorphosis of Religiosity in Christianity

The speaker suggests that in its original sense, “religion” means law, and cites “the law was given in Shushan the capital” as proof that religion is the royal law. He says that in ordinary Jewish discourse, “religious” means observant of commandments, not necessarily someone who holds certain beliefs about divine providence. He describes a modern critique that seeks to bring emotion, morality, and relationship with the Holy One, blessed be He, into Orthodox religiosity, and argues that this critique rests on a Christian conception of religiosity as experience, emotion, and individuality. He argues that Christianity gave up the halakhic-normative dimension, and therefore was left needing to define religious identity through a conceptual and dogmatic framework.

“Belief” and “Commandments of Emotion” as a Cognitive Component According to Maimonides

The speaker corrects a student’s claim and says that Maimonides does not count all thirteen principles in his enumeration of the commandments, even though positive commandment no. 1 is “to know that there is a First Existent.” He states that belief means knowledge and not emotion, and that even “And you shall love the Lord your God” is a cognitive act and not an emotional one. He adds that his claim is that commandments of emotion in Jewish law are not really about emotion. He says that if an emotional expression appears in the end, this may be a possible indication that the commandment has been fulfilled, but it is not the goal of the commandment. As an example, he mentions a person with Asperger’s who could fulfill “Love your fellow as yourself” and “love of God” “in the finest way,” without an emotional component.

Dogmatics as Born Outside Jewish Law and Returning to Judaism

The speaker explains that precisely where there is no binding halakhic system, a need arises to define dogmatics in order to determine who is a “faithful believer.” He argues that in Islam there is a legal system, and therefore dogmatics does not appear there in the same way as in Christianity. He suggests that the need to define a Jewish dogmatics is an outside influence that comes back from the Christian world into the Jewish one, and that after Maimonides dogmatics “took up residence” down to our own day, including views that present the Thirteen Principles as binding and even as a halakhic ruling.

Hasidism, Experiential Dimensions, and the Vilna Gaon

The speaker argues that Hasidism brought into the Jewish world, in a powerful way, emotional-experiential dimensions that he attributes to Christian influence, and that in its beginnings this created concern over a weakening of Jewish law and even its neglect. He states, “Hasidism is a Christian phenomenon, completely,” and describes how the struggle of the Vilna Gaon restrained the phenomenon and inserted it into a halakhic framework, so that Hasidism continued within Jewish law and not in place of Jewish law. He emphasizes that the Hasidic ethos is not Jewish law, and presents the “stories of the Baal Shem Tov” as stories about non-halakhic dimensions, not as systems of halakhic rulings.

Critique of Dogmatics from the View of Jewish Law as the Focal Point

The speaker says his critique of dogmatics does not stem from the fact that it is “Christian” in historical origin, but from the fact that he thinks it is “incorrect” with respect to the essence of Judaism. He cites Rashi’s opening comment on the Torah: “Rabbi Yitzhak said: Why did the Torah not begin with ‘This month shall be for you the first of the months’?” and explains that the very question assumes that the Torah ought to contain only Jewish law, and therefore the Book of Genesis “requires explanation” within the Torah. He presents this as a demonstration that “Torah means Jewish law,” and that this is the basic conception through which Judaism should be understood.

The Principles of Faith in Maimonides as a Binding Framework and the Distinction Between Principle and Derivative

The speaker describes the Thirteen Principles as foundational principles that define a binding framework, such that one who disagrees with them is not legitimate within the binding Jewish framework, even if he is ethnically Jewish. He argues that additional principles are derived from the fundamentals, but the derivation is not rigid formal logic, and therefore there is room for disputes over derivatives. He sharpens the point that being foundational is not the same as being beyond argument, and illustrates that disputes can concern the very question of what counts as a principle, not only whether the content of the principle is true.

The Sages, “One Who Denies a Principle,” and the Elephant Parable in the Guide of the Perplexed

The speaker notes that already in the words of the Sages the expression “one who denies a principle” appears, and that it usually means someone who denies the Holy One, blessed be He. He raises the possibility that Maimonides expands this so that someone who believes in God “incorrectly” is in effect denying God. He brings the elephant parable from the Guide of the Perplexed: someone who describes an elephant as an animal with wings is not disagreeing about the description of an elephant, but is speaking about something else that he happens to call an “elephant.” He adds an anecdote about “plenty of fear of Heaven, except it’s not clear which heaven they fear,” and attributes the line to Rabbi Kook through a story he heard.

The Difficulty of Classifying Principles: Counting the Commandments, Primary Categories and Derivatives, and Logic

The speaker says that distilling principles out of a corpus of thought is not a simple or unambiguous task, and compares it to the difficulty in counting the 613 commandments and to classifying the Sabbath labors into 39 primary categories and their derivatives. He presents the act of classification as determining what the “axioms” are and what the derived theorems are, and gives an example from logic, where one can build different systems with different sets of axioms without any disagreement about what is true. He notes that the author of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim disagrees with Maimonides mainly over which things count as principles, not necessarily over whether they are true.

The Ketubah, Stability, and Normative Commitment as a Parable for Jewish Law

The speaker gives a parable from married life and friendships, and argues that getting down to legal details does not necessarily destroy a relationship, but can actually stabilize it. He explains the custom of reading the ketubah between betrothal and marriage as a step that emphasizes contract, commitment, and stability over against the fluctuations of romance. He uses this to argue that religiosity based on experience and religious feeling is not stable enough to transmit a community from generation to generation without an infrastructure of halakhic commitment.

Mishnah Sanhedrin, Chapter Helek, “They Have No Share in the World to Come,” and the Definition of an Apikoros

The speaker quotes the Mishnah in Sanhedrin 90a: “All Israel have a share in the world to come,” and then, “And these are the ones who have no share in the world to come: one who says that the resurrection of the dead is not from the Torah, and that the Torah is not from Heaven, and an apikoros,” with additions by Rabbi Akiva, Abba Shaul, and the three kings and four commoners. He argues that the first two clauses are binding beliefs, whereas in the Talmud the apikoros is later defined as one who disparages a Torah scholar or disparages his fellow in the presence of a Torah scholar—that is, a category of severe behavior and not necessarily of opinion. He says that “the world to come” is not a clear concept, and that there is confusion between the world to come and the messianic era, and that no one really knows what happens there beyond the claim that there is “something” after death.

Maimonides in Laws of Repentance: Sectarians, Apikorsim, Deniers of the Torah, and the Raavad

The speaker reads Laws of Repentance, chapter 3, laws 6–9, where Maimonides lists “the sectarians and the apikorsim and those who deny the Torah and those who deny the resurrection of the dead and the coming of the redeemer,” alongside many categories of deeds. He brings Maimonides’ detail: “Five are called sectarians,” including beliefs about God, multiple rulers, and the belief that the Master of the universe is a body and has an image. Then, “Three are called apikorsim,” including denial of prophecy, denial of Moses’ prophecy, and the claim that “the Creator does not know the deeds of human beings.” He quotes the Raavad’s gloss on corporealism: “Why did he call such a person a sectarian? Many greater and better than he went in this line of thought, based on what they saw in the verses, and even more from what they saw in the aggadic statements that confuse people’s opinions,” and explains that the Raavad agrees that God is not corporeal, but disagrees with classifying such people as sectarians. He says that in Maimonides the term “apikoros” differs from the Talmudic definition, and that the modern colloquial habit of calling all such people “apikorsim” does not reflect Maimonides’ distinctions.

The Thirteen Principles as an Expansion of the Mishnah and Their Halakhic Implications

The speaker argues that the Thirteen Principles are theological principles such that one who denies them loses his share in the world to come, and that this has halakhic implications such as “they are cast down and not raised up,” and directives for how to treat someone defined as a sectarian, an apikoros, or a denier of the Torah. He says the principles are not part of the enumeration of the commandments, but they are not detached from Jewish law because of the halakhic implications of these classifications of heresy. He explains that Maimonides details the principles in his introduction to chapter Helek because he understands the Mishnah as establishing a Jewish dogmatics, and he sees his detailed account as an expansive commentary on the question of who exactly are “these who have no share in the world to come,” even if many of Maimonides’ sources are unclear and depend on his own judgment. He concludes by describing the lecture as an attempt to clarify what Maimonides is doing, not as a ruling on whether it is necessary or agreed upon, and leaves questions and comments for later.

Hello, first of all. We’re starting a new series that takes a bit of a look at principles of faith, or at dogmatics in general. Dogmatics basically means some kind of principles or dogmas—the source is of course Christian—that we are supposedly obligated to believe, some binding intellectual foundation. And this concept itself, the very concept of dogmas or dogmatics, is itself a very problematic concept. Meaning, usually you can discuss—and those who discussed the question of principles of faith, and the disputes about them, and where they came from, and so on—they discuss the question on a level that, in my view, is a bit, let’s call it, external. Meaning: who said these are the principles of faith? Are there disputes about them? Where do they come from? The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), tradition, I don’t know, where do we derive them from? But there’s also room here to think about what the meaning is, in general, of principles of faith or dogmas that we are obligated to believe. A bit of discussion on the more conceptual-philosophical plane before getting into the specific contents—we usually do things that way. Of course this will touch on topics or passages that I already dealt with in other series, of course the question of authority over thought, over Jewish law, authority over facts, so those things will come in here too, but they’re not the center of the discussion; they’ll only accompany the discussion. So I really want to begin by looking a bit at dogmatics in general, and then to look a bit at Maimonides’ principles of faith, and then come back and try to understand what we saw—meaning, what exactly are these principles.

As I said earlier, as I mentioned earlier, dogmatics is basically a notion or concept—not the word, but what it signifies, what that word points to—that comes from Christianity. Meaning, this whole approach that says that a certain religion, or a certain church, or a certain religious group, needs to define a set of principles, of dogmas, to which everyone must adhere, which define the framework of that community—that is what’s called dogmatics. And this idea, at least in this simple form, didn’t really exist in the Jewish world. Yes, Maimonides was really—you can see some early signs before him—but I think the one who put it on the table and truly founded Jewish dogmatics was Maimonides. There were books of Jewish thought before him, but at least I don’t remember or know of an author who defined a particular set of beliefs, of dogmas, that define the framework of Jewish faith, the binding Jewish framework. And in that sense it seems to me that Maimonides is, I think—as I’ve said more than once—I’m not really involved in this field of Jewish thought, so I don’t fully rely on my knowledge in this field, so I’m saying what I think, but it could be that I’m missing something here. But it seems to me that it’s hard to dispute that it’s clear Maimonides was an important station on this axis, even if he didn’t entirely begin the matter.

And that itself calls for explanation. Because Maimonides is the 12th century, long after dogmas had already developed in Christianity. And we preceded Christianity by a lot, but in the area of dogmatics it preceded us. And I think this is not accidental. It’s not accidental in the sense that we didn’t have it, and the question of why it later entered is another question, but first of all: why wasn’t it there to begin with? So it seems to me—this is a hypothesis—but it seems to me there really is some difference here between Jewish religiosity and Christian religiosity in general.

I think I also mentioned in the past that Kant used to relate to Judaism by saying that it isn’t a religion at all. It’s some sort of social code. Yes, because he understood that Jewish law basically determines what you should do, what you shouldn’t do, what’s forbidden to do, and so on, and somehow the Jews are obligated to this code. But a code is not religion. So what is religion? For him, religion was some kind of faith, a religious experience, something more on what we might call the emotional-experiential plane, a relationship with divinity, a psychological bond. Not as Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin explains there, that a relationship with divinity means fulfilling the commandments, but something more experiential and emotional. And therefore, from that perspective on the concept of religion or religiosity, Kant was apparently right that Judaism is not a religion. It’s a kind of code.

And his students, some of whom were Jews—various Jewish philosophers who somehow followed in his path—tried to defend Judaism against this criticism and explain: what do you mean? In the Jewish world too there is thought and experience and a bond with divinity and religiosity and all kinds of things of that kind, and not only the formal code. Maybe one could even say that the code is only an expression of all those dimensions that are supposedly more fundamental. The code is meant to express them or turn them into something that comes to expression in the practical world. But I think Kant was more right than his Jewish students who tried to defend Judaism. Tried to defend Judaism, meaning tried to defend the religious character of Judaism, to show that Judaism too is a religion. And I think that in this sense Kant grasped it more correctly than they did.

And the question of whether this is a religion or not a religion is semantic, but he was right in this: the core of Judaism, of the Jewish world, is not what is called religiosity in the Christian world. Not emotional experience, not religiosity, not a bond with divinity, and “in all your ways know Him,” and all kinds of things of that sort. This exists here and there in the Jewish world, sometimes on the periphery, sometimes a bit less so, sometimes it has a source, sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s quite clear, when you look at Judaism as an empirical, historical fact—look at what actually happens—that it seems to me quite clear that this is not the focus. This is not the root. The root is, as Leibowitz always said, the root is Jewish law. And someone who believed beliefs different from the accepted beliefs did not necessarily leave the Jewish collective; they were not excommunicated and not banned. But someone who deviated from Jewish law, or did not recognize halakhic obligation, it was immediately clear that he was outside.

People think, for example, that Spinoza was excommunicated because of his pantheism. In my opinion, most of the rabbis who excommunicated him at that time didn’t know how to spell pantheism. They didn’t know what it was. That wasn’t the issue at all. Today, somehow, we try to justify it and ground it and conceptualize it, so people say: no, no, he had problematic views. That’s not the point. I think the point that bothered them about Spinoza was maybe a double point, two things connected to each other. One was a kind of criticism of Jewish conceptions—not conceptions of divinity specifically, but biblical criticism really began with Spinoza too, and so on. And the second thing—I once heard some Spinoza scholar at some conference say—that the second thing was that Spinoza was, you could say, the first secular Jew. There had been lax people before him, maybe even heretics before him and apostates before him and whatever you want. But Spinoza was, it seems to me, the first who presented a secular Jewish outlook or ideology. Secular also in the modern sense of the term. And maybe I can define that a bit, but that’s basically the point.

And the philosophies that surrounded the matter—maybe from a Spinozist point of view they were the basis—that’s not the point because of which they threw Spinoza outside the camp. That’s not why they excommunicated him. They excommunicated him because he deviated from halakhic obligation, basically because he deviated from the practical framework of Judaism and not because of philosophical conceptions. The same is true, by the way, with Sabbatai Zevi. Sabbatai Zevi—Kabbalah scholars discuss what Kabbalistic conceptions Sabbatai Zevi had as opposed to accepted Kabbalistic conceptions, and where he deviated. In all kinds of accusations—the disputes of Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz and the Yaavetz, where the Yaavetz suspected Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz of Sabbateanism, accused him of Sabbateanism, not merely suspected but accused. There too, the questions discussed were really questions of whether Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz’s Kabbalistic conception had Sabbatean dimensions. To this day there are scholars who discuss what exactly characterizes Sabbateanism, whether it’s really there or not there. I, in my sins, am not a great scholar and not a great historian, but from what I gather, that wasn’t the issue at all.

If, say, Sabbatai Zevi had been a standard righteous man who kept Jewish law and brought the Jewish people back to proper conduct and halakhic commitment, and had said all his little teachings about eternity within splendor—nobody would have blinked. And it wasn’t—what bothered people, I said Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz, I meant Sabbatai Zevi—what bothered them about Sabbatai Zevi was the deviation from halakhic commitment, and not his Kabbalistic views. Now, in the person himself of course there is a connection between the things. With Spinoza too, with Sabbatai Zevi too, there is a connection between the conceptions and the giving up of halakhic commitment and the halakhic framework. But as far as what bothered the surrounding society, why the society decided to ostracize them, to put them outside the camp—it seems to me, as far as I understand at least, it was not because of the conceptions; it was because of the practice. If they had maintained that practice, then in the end they would have remained inside the camp, with this worldview or that worldview, but they would have been inside the camp.

Rabbi?
Yes.
Why exactly do you need to separate worldview, beliefs, and Jewish law? Meaning, when Maimonides counts them among the Thirteen Principles, he’s basically also counting them among the 613 commandments; as if from his point of view it’s a commandment.
What do you mean? Maimonides doesn’t count among the 613 commandments anything from the principles.
Meaning belief in God, from his point of view, isn’t a commandment?
Belief in God is positive commandment number one. But not all Thirteen Principles appear in the enumeration of the commandments.
Okay, so no, I was talking about belief in God.
Belief in God is something else. Meaning, I’ll talk about that too: fulfilling commandments without belief in God is not fulfilling commandments, meaning it’s not…
Yes, but that too—I mean, belief is also emotion, meaning it isn’t something practical.
No, no, no—what do you mean? Belief means knowledge, as Maimonides writes: “to know that there is a First Being.” That is belief.
Belief is knowledge, not connected to emotion?
No connection to emotion.

In any case, what I want to argue is that the concept of religiosity in its Christian definition and in its Jewish definition are different concepts. Because in the Jewish world, religion—how do you translate that into Hebrew? It’s law. “And the law was issued in Shushan the capital”—what does that mean? The royal law was enacted in Shushan the capital. Meaning, religion is law. What do I mean? When you say that you’re religious in the Jewish context, it means you are committed to Jewish law. Right? Someone today who says—someone on the street today, without being a great philosopher—someone on the street today who says he is religious, what does he mean to say? That he keeps commandments. He doesn’t mean to say that he believes in the Holy One, blessed be He, or that he thinks there is divine providence or there isn’t divine providence. That is not the plain meaning of the concept “religious” in the Jewish context, in our discourse.

A lot of times there is criticism, by the way, and I think it also comes from the Christian world, criticism within the secular Jewish world but also the religious one, where people say: wait, wait, wait, but there are things no less important and maybe more important—where is the emotion and morality and the relationship with the Holy One, blessed be He, and all the things that supposedly are lacking in the Orthodox halakhic conception of religiosity? And this is a kind of very common criticism that has been expanding in recent generations. But these criticisms reflect the fact that the situation in itself really is not like that. There are all kinds of people who criticize this situation, but the situation in itself is not like that. And in my opinion this criticism is mistaken. This criticism is merely a result of a Christian conception of the concept of religiosity. Because the Christian conception of religiosity, as I said before, is religiosity in the sense of experience, basically experience, an emotional bond with the Holy One, blessed be He… things of that sort.

And so not by accident Christianity really gave up almost all the practical aspects. In Christianity there isn’t really Jewish law. There are certain rituals that people are supposed to perform, but even there the obligation—again, I’m no expert on Christianity—the obligation is not entirely clear. There aren’t positive commandments and prohibitions, and certainly not the concept of Jewish law that we know on our side. And they gave that up entirely. So what happens is that the concept of religiosity in the Christian world—which now, in light of the process I described, you can understand is not the original concept. Religiosity in its original sense is specifically the Jewish sense. “And the law was issued in Shushan the capital”—law, religiosity means being committed to law, religious law, yes? Christian religiosity, because it gave up the law—“the Merciful One desires the heart,” yes? Jesus and his disciples place a great deal of emphasis on the heart, on emotion, on feelings, and on experience, and not on practical expression. Morality maybe yes on the practical plane, but morality not in the formal halakhic sense, the almost legalistic sense, that exists in the Jewish context. And because of that, suddenly the concept of religiosity underwent a metamorphosis. From commitment to a legal normative system, it became basically some sort of experience and feeling. Something much more individual.

Can I ask something?
Yes. Again, there was someone here who asked something earlier.
I asked what “and you shall love the Lord your God” means.
So you’re kind of bursting through an open door here; it’s not our topic, but I wrote, both on the website and in an article and in several places, that commandments of emotion in Jewish law are not about emotion. “And you shall love the Lord your God” is a cognitive act, not an emotional act. You can see this in Maimonides, you can see it in several places.
Okay, from my point of view what the Rabbi just said is nonsense. I mean, how can you love with your intellect?
No, it’s not loving with the intellect. The concept of love itself is not the concept you think it is; it underwent the same metamorphosis that the concept of religiosity underwent. The commandment of love—I’m not talking about the concept of love in its everyday sense—the commandment of love does not require emotion from us; that’s my claim. Now again, I’m not claiming everyone agrees with this, but I think you can see it in Maimonides. Not only love, by the way—all this emotional material.
But it is directed toward emotion, right?
Even conceptually, it seems to me that commands about emotion are something very problematic, but that’s a different topic; I’m not going into it here. Whoever wants, I’ll send you references to places where I dealt with that.
Did you want to ask, Hadas?
I wanted to ask exactly about the commandment to love God, but now I understand why you insist on saying that the commandment is not connected to emotion, and whoever has Asperger’s—now I understand why you need this approach.
Not why I need it—why it’s correct. I reject the idea that I say this because I need it. I say it because it’s true.
Can I ask something?
What? I can’t hear.
Can I ask?
Yes, yes.

In the context of loving God—even though it’s not—the commandment is not about emotion, but it is directed toward emotion, right? Meaning, to know God in such a way that it will affect my emotions, at least to try that it affect my emotions?
Exactly the opposite. Right, someone who fulfills the commandment to love God, in the end it may also have expression—maybe it will also have emotional expression. But my claim is that the commandment is not about the expression; the expression is a sign or indication that you fulfilled the commandment. The practical difference is someone who lacks that capacity—Asperger’s—he’s not sick like us, he’s a healthy person, he has Asperger’s. So what—can he fulfill this commandment? My answer is yes, absolutely.
But the question is also: there’s a person who has no hand; he can’t fulfill the commandment of tefillin, so what?
So no. Quite the opposite. I claim that the person who has no hand cannot fulfill the commandment of tefillin, but the person with Asperger’s fulfills “love your fellow as yourself” in the finest way—not that he is exempt due to coercion. If I claimed he was exempt due to coercion, I would have said nothing. I claim he fulfills it.
Okay.
All right? And there is no direction—no direction at all toward a feeling of love?
There is no direction within the commandment itself. There is no direction toward eventually loving God? No. If in the end you love God, that can… that can be an indication that you fulfilled the commandment, but it is not the commandment.
Okay.
And that is a result of the way human beings are ordinarily built: if they fulfilled the commandment, probably love will also appear in them on the emotional plane. But that’s only a result; it’s not really something the commandment is aiming at. And as I said before, someone who does not have that aspect in his brain or in his psyche or whatever, then he can fulfill the commandment to love God in the finest way without it appearing on the emotional plane.

Okay, but this really is a topic I’m not going to go into here. You can expand on it, and I’ve already expanded on it more than once. Can I just ask one thing?
Yes.
In Maimonides—I don’t quite remember whether this also exists in the Talmudic sources—but in Maimonides there are all those people whom he classifies as having gone outside the Jewish collective, those who do not believe in the World to Come, but in the Mishneh Torah, not in the Thirteen Principles.
Yes.
And I assume it’s based on the Talmud.
No, no, I’ll get to that in a moment. In the enumeration of the commandments it doesn’t appear. There are some halakhic implications about which, also in the Talmud and afterwards also in Maimonides, we’ll talk more, okay? I only wanted to point out that the source doesn’t start with Maimonides, contrary to what you said earlier.
It’s a Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin, Mishnah and Talmud at the beginning of chapter Helek. We’ll get to that in a moment.

In any case, what I want to say—I’ll get there—but for now what I want to say is that in the Christian world, where they gave up the normative dimension, yes, the law, the normative system, what remained was basically a conceptual system. And therefore, I assume there was more need there to establish dogmatics. Now you have to determine how to define what a faithful Christian is. So you need to define what he is supposed to think and what he is forbidden to think. And therefore, in the various Christian councils, Christian dogmatics gradually developed, and of course there are also disputes between different streams and so on. But in principle, in Christianity it is very accepted—certainly in Catholic Christianity—that there is some dogmatic framework that obligates all believers. Whoever is not within it is basically not in the game.

But what I want to argue is that this dogmatics developed specifically there because there they gave up Jewish law. Meaning, as long as Jewish law existed, it was clear to people, it seems to me, that religiosity or a religious framework is basically commitment to Jewish law. Thought and emotion and all the other things—I’ll talk a bit about that too—but they are not the focus. They are not the focus. And precisely for that reason, I think, with the birth of Christianity, or a little afterward, but not much afterward, dogmatics was born too.

And by the way, in the Muslim world as well, as far as I know—again, I’m not an expert in these subjects—but as far as I know, dogmatics is not like it is among Christians. Meaning, there are of course modes of thought; among Jews too there are modes of thought. But there isn’t dogmatics. Or at least not as far as I know. And the reason for that is that among Muslims there is Jewish law—well, law. Islam too has a halakhic system. There are halakhic decisors, there are halakhic discussions; maybe not everyone is aware of this, but there is law there completely, very similar to what happens among us. And therefore I’m not surprised that dogmatics doesn’t really appear there either. It appears specifically in the Christian world. Meaning, a religious group that needs to define itself when it does not have a binding legal system or normative system has to define itself on the plane of thought. And then dogmas are created, or dogmatics is born.

In the Jewish world it was born at a later stage, when this came back from Christianity. Meaning, I think the need to define Jewish dogmatics is an influence that came from outside. Again, not as a result of historical research—I qualify this—I’m not a historian and not an expert in these fields, but that is my impression. I think it’s fairly clear to me that it’s true. And this dogmatics basically gained a kind of foothold after Maimonides and until our own day. People say the Thirteen Principles, they treat it as some very, very binding framework; some even see it as some kind of halakhic ruling. But in the end this too came from a place that had given up Jewish law. And it began and took shape in a place where there was no Jewish law. And afterwards they take it back and bring it into the halakhic world.

By the way, a similar process happened—though in my opinion somewhat later—on the emotional-experiential planes. Up to now I’ve been talking about the dogmatization of principles of thought. The emotional and experiential planes entered very powerfully with Hasidism. Before that, you could speak about “the Merciful One desires the heart” and so on; it was on the margins. Nobody examined a Jew to see whether he had the correct experiences or the correct relationship to the Master of the Universe; the question was whether he fulfilled the commandments or did not fulfill the commandments. When Hasidism brought in—and again, in my opinion under Christian influence—when Hasidism brought into the Jewish world these Christian dimensions, along with other Christian dimensions that entered with Hasidism, but also this dimension of emotionality. Emotionality, experience, the placing of emphasis on that—and therefore, by the way, Jewish law really did loosen somewhat in the Hasidic world. Later they restrained it, but in the beginning there was a real fear that they were going to abandon it entirely, because this was basically a completely Christian phenomenon. Hasidism is a Christian phenomenon, completely.

And in some sense I think that sometimes people come with claims against the Vilna Gaon. The Vilna Gaon was very worried about this phenomenon of Hasidism and fought against it. And in later generations people claim: look, you see, the Vilna Gaon was mistaken; Hasidism is fine, they keep commandments, there was no need to get into it, it wasn’t a mistake, it didn’t go off the rails, it didn’t scatter and explode. The claim of the Vilna Gaon’s students is of course—and I think there’s something to it—that it’s because of the Vilna Gaon. And this doesn’t prove that the Vilna Gaon was not right, but rather that because he fought against this phenomenon, apparently he—never mind—the very struggle against this phenomenon restrained it. Restrained it and brought it into a framework that did not give up the halakhic dimension, but rather did what it did within the halakhic framework, within the halakhic framework.

And therefore, in that sense I think this is a process quite similar to dogmatics. That too did not exist once; it went outside because they gave up Jewish law, which had once been the focus; an alternative arose, namely dogmatics; and then it returned and influenced Jewish religiosity, and there too dogmatics was created. And today maybe you can see this in what is called the Kav world, the yeshivot of the Kav, or that world of the “Kav,” where it seems to me that what characterizes it is really its dogmatics, its dogmatism and its dogmatics—both things. They too have intellectual principles from which one may not deviate; it is not politically correct to deviate from them. So in that sense this is a continuation of this Christian process of bringing dogmatics into the Jewish world.

And as I said before, Hasidism also made such a move with the emotional-experiential dimensions. Here it’s less sharp, I think. This did exist in the past too; there was the earlier German Pietism, and in the Talmudic world too there were people who were more mystical and pietistic and so on. But still I think this process did exist. In connection with the question asked here: when I talk about large social and historical scales, there will always be phenomena that do not fit. I’m speaking now about tendencies. There were Hasidim who were closer to rationality; there were Hasidim who were closer to emotionality. There were Hasidim who placed more emphasis on Jewish law; there were Hasidim who placed less emphasis on Jewish law. Great halakhic decisors, in my opinion, there were not there and still are not there, though about that one can already argue. But yes, there were this and there were that. But the Hasidic move is not the move of preserving Jewish law. That was there before; that is not a novelty of Hasidism. The Hasidic move is a move of bringing in something additional, beyond Jewish law, instead of Jewish law, alongside Jewish law—these are already nuances or differences among different approaches, different people, different courts, and so on, and also among different periods.

The stories of the Baal Shem Tov do not bring systems of Rabbi Akiva Eiger by the Baal Shem Tov. The stories of the Baal Shem Tov tell wonder tales about miraculous travel and restoring simple people and the… the non-halakhic dimensions. Meaning, the Hasidic ethos is not Jewish law. And that is not arguable. What exactly the place of Jewish law is—that is already differences. Today it is clear that Jewish law is binding also in the Hasidic world, though there are still remnants there of earlier leaps.

In any case, this is only to place things in some sort of context. So basically dogmatics is born in the Christian world, but little by little it also comes back and is created in the Jewish context. In the Jewish context—I say this because I think that whoever hears a dimension of criticism here is not mistaken in my words—it isn’t only historical description. Meaning, when I say that this process is a Christian process, you could say it in a neutral way, descriptively. Meaning, yes, it passed through Christianity and Christianity influenced us and everything is fine. The fact that something comes out of Christian influence does not in itself disqualify it. There are influences from all kinds of sources and places, and that is perfectly fine. We live in a world and all sorts of things influence us. “Nothing human is alien to me,” as they said—Terence, I think; I don’t remember who said it. The critical dimension does not stem from the fact that it came from the Christian world, but from the fact that I think it is incorrect. Meaning, not from the fact that it came by influence. Because in the Jewish world I think Jewish law really is the focus that defines Jewish religiosity, and not experience, thought, and all the things—morality and all the things—that were somehow added more and more in recent generations.

I won’t go into details because I’ve also talked about this more than once, just in brief. My favorite example is Rashi’s very first comment on the Torah, where he says, Rabbi Yitzhak said: why didn’t the Torah begin with “This month shall be for you the beginning of months,” in the portion of Bo? Why did it begin with the book of Genesis? So he says: so that if the nations of the world come and say, “You are bandits, because you stole the inheritance of the seven nations,” we will say to them that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world and gave it to whomever was upright in His eyes. That is Rashi’s answer for why we needed the book of Genesis and the first quarter of the book of Exodus.

But as I’ve already remarked more than once, Rashi’s explanation, let’s say, limps in my opinion. But his question is an interesting question. Why did he think at all that the Torah should have begun with “This month shall be for you the beginning of months”? On what is the question based? Why does that require explanation? In this question he assumes that the Torah is basically supposed to contain only Jewish law. And if Jewish law begins in the portion of Bo, “This month shall be for you the beginning of months,” then the Torah should have started there. There is one and a quarter books that do not deal with law. Here and there one can learn law also from the book of Genesis, but it is not a book that comes to teach law, and therefore it really requires explanation why we need it, why it enters the Torah at all. You can accept the explanation, you can reject the explanation, but the very question in my eyes teaches perhaps much more than the explanation, than the answer. The question really teaches that the basic conception is that Torah means Jewish law. And everything learned in the book of Genesis, with all the great and small things learned there—in the end, it all requires explanations for what it is doing there at all; it shouldn’t have been there.

And you can bring more sources and arguments for this, but this is, for example, an illustration of why I think the basic conception is that Judaism means Jewish law. Why it is not morality, why it is not thought—I’ll maybe talk about that a bit later too. But for now I really want to go a little more deeply into dogmatics and principles.

Rabbi, even if the Rabbi is right that Judaism is Jewish law, that still doesn’t force the conclusion that there is no place for emotion within it. It could be the opposite. It could be that precisely because the place of emotion is so elevated, to grasp it and appropriate it would be idolatry, and therefore it isn’t the focus.
I’m saying it could be yes and it could be no. Okay. I’m not claiming because of that that there is no place for emotion. On the basis of a conceptual analysis of emotion, I claim it has no place. Fine, that’s a different argument between us. Okay.

So what I actually want to get into now a bit more is really the dogmas themselves, the principles—what Maimonides calls, or the roots, the foundations. This is from the translation from Arabic. The Thirteen Principles—when we say the Thirteen Principles, that is actually a translation. Some translate it as foundations or roots or something like that. What exactly are these principles? They are the fundamental principles of Jewish dogmatics. So Maimonides basically tries to distill from the Torah, our tradition, thought, whatever it may be, some foundational principles that he defines as principles or foundations, and he sees them as the binding framework. Binding framework for what purpose? Apparently, first of all in the sense that one may not disagree with them, that someone who disagrees with them is not legitimate, is not within the legitimate Jewish framework. He is Jewish because his mother is Jewish, but his Judaism is not Jewish—meaning, he is ethnically Jewish. Okay, so that’s one point. A second point is that the additional principles of thought are probably derived from these principles, and there disagreements can also emerge, because the rules of derivation are not rigid formal logic. So one can derive secondary principles from these Thirteen Principles, and in the secondary derivation disagreements can arise. So it is both secondary and subject to dispute. And the principles are a principle also in the sense of the root of a tree, yes? The root or trunk of the tree from which the branches grow. So it is both the fundamental thing and also something that cannot be disputed.

Okay. Those are two different things—what do you mean, what’s the difference?
Yes, but wait, I didn’t really understand. The principles cannot be disputed, and the principles are fundamental and have secondary implications, and you’re arguing with me both about the principles and about the secondary implications.
The fact that something is fundamental does not mean that it cannot be disputed. When I arrange my intellectual system, my axioms are the Thirteen Principles. It could be that you could have arranged your intellectual system with different principles, without principles, or whatever it may be. So the fact that it is fundamental does not mean it is beyond dispute. Those are two different claims.

Did someone ask? No, wait, but Rabbi, can I ask something? Maimonides defined heretics, apikorsim, and deniers by arranging them into three groups there in the Thirteen Principles, but I didn’t really understand what the big story is. Because in the end, what, is he claiming that someone who doesn’t follow the proper faith, who follows corrupted faith for argument’s sake—what, in the end if he is consistent with his views, then eventually he leaves Jewish law, and that’s what matters here in the end, or is it not connected?
No, he claims that the principles have an independent standing, not necessarily because they are connected to Jewish law. There are halakhic implications because there are rules about what to do with apikorsim, but not because apikorsut can lead you to light a fire on the Sabbath. I don’t think—I don’t remember such a source in Maimonides that says this. It doesn’t seem that that’s the point. The problem for him is the intellectual error, not the practical consequences of that error. To the very fact that you are intellectually mistaken there are practical consequences in the sense of what I’m supposed to do to you—it’s not advisable to say that aloud—but I’m not talking about what will happen to you or what will come out of you in light of your intellectual mistake. Yes, I don’t think Maimonides writes that anywhere; it seems to me he doesn’t.

So principles of faith are basically some principles that you distill from the overall system and say: these are the foundational principles, these are the basic axioms, and the rest can perhaps be derived from them, something like that. Maybe just one remark before I continue: already in the Sages there is the expression “one who denies the principle.” So the concept of principle—though in Maimonides, by the way, it doesn’t appear all that much; in Maimonides it is foundations, or qa'ida in Arabic—but the concept of principle does appear in the Sages, and in several places they speak of “one who denies the principle.” Except that in those places, usually the meaning is that “principle” means the Holy One, blessed be He; He is the principle, the root of the world, or the principle of faith is basically faith in the Holy One, blessed be He. “One who denies the principle” means one who denies the Holy One, blessed be He.

Now of course Maimonides can say that anyone who denies one of his principles—the famous elephant analogy of his in the Guide for the Perplexed—that someone who denies one of his principles is basically denying the Holy One, blessed be He, because he believes in God incorrectly. Even though he does not deny God, the existence of God, if he denies, say, that God provides, then he believes in God but not in the correct God. So de facto that is called denying God. In that sense, it may be that Maimonides takes the verbal concept from the Talmud of “one who denies the principle,” meaning one who denies the Holy One, blessed be He, and his expansion of it is not really an essential expansion. He says: anyone who perceives the Holy One, blessed be He, incorrectly is basically denying the Holy One, blessed be He.

The elephant analogy, what he says there, is that if someone says an elephant is an animal with wings, with some long beak and so on, and I claim that an elephant is an animal with a trunk and four thick legs and all sorts of things like that—there is no disagreement between us. I’m talking about an elephant and he’s talking about an eagle, or some bird or another. He isn’t talking about an elephant and disagreeing with me about what an elephant is; he’s simply talking about something else that he just happens to call an elephant. He has an error in the dictionary—or not an error, rather the dictionary has to be synchronized so that we can speak and communicate with one another. There’s no point in calling two different things by the same name, otherwise we’ll just confuse ourselves. But that’s only semantics, not a disagreement. Okay, that’s his claim.

And the same thing, he says, about someone who believes in a corporeal God—he’s talking there about corporeality, I think—about corporeality he says basically: if you believe in a corporeal God, then you don’t believe in God, because you believe in the wrong God. You’re not talking about an elephant; you’re talking about an eagle. Yes, it reminds me of an amusing anecdote. When I was in Bnei Brak, in my happy period in Bnei Brak, a joke circulated there quite a bit—I heard it several times—about the guys in Mercaz, that there is a lot of fear of Heaven there, only it’s unclear which Heaven they fear. Meaning, the heavens they fear are crooked heavens—that was basically the claim.

Just as an anecdote, I told this to a friend of mine who taught with me in Yeruham—today he’s the rosh yeshiva there, Rabbi Eitam. He deals a lot with Rabbi Kook and with thought and so on. So he told me he was surprised to hear this. He said: do you know the source of that joke? I said no. He said: the source of that joke is Rabbi Kook. When Rabbi Kook came to the Land of Israel and saw the Jews of the old settlement, he said there is a lot of fear of Heaven there, but the heavens they fear there are such black, gloomy, constricted heavens that that isn’t really… Meaning, it’s fascinating: the joke Rabbi Kook told about the Haredim became a Haredi joke about the students of Rabbi Kook. Fine—an amusing anecdote. But for our purposes, the claim is that if I see the principles as defining or binding foundations, then I can basically preserve the concept of principle in its Talmudic meaning: that one who denies the principle is one who denies God, denies the existence of God. Ah, but he doesn’t deny Him; he only thinks that He does not provide. A God who does not provide is not the God in whom you are supposed to believe. So therefore this is an expansion, but not an essential one, of the Talmudic concept of “one who denies the principle.”

Now this basically means that we have to take our intellectual system and try to distill from it—if we want to make dogmatics—we have to try to distill from it a system of certain axioms, intellectual axioms of Judaism. Okay? Which is a nontrivial task, not simple, and really not unambiguous. Even if I accept in principle that there should be dogmatism, or that there is dogmatics, and so on—how do you produce it? Because in practice Maimonides had to produce it. It didn’t exist until him. How do you produce it in practice? Very difficult.

It reminds me of the challenge that Maimonides writes about explicitly regarding the enumeration of the commandments. How do we take the whole system of Jewish law and distill from it 613 commandments, 248 positive commandments and 365 prohibitions? Not simple at all. How do you classify, how do you… define among all the Sabbath prohibitions which are primary categories and which are derivatives? There too you have to do a certain classification into 39 fundamental categories—the primary categories of labor—and derivatives, which are principles derived from the fundamentals. And all these acts are acts of classification. Before you there is a whole corpus, let’s say a corpus of thought, of Jewish law, of legal material—laws of Sabbath, commandments, the system of commandments—and from that corpus you have to distill which part will be the fundamentals, what my axioms will be. Only this is a project that is necessary and positive.

It could be that this process that really began from the giving of the Torah—first we dealt with the 613 commandments, and afterward with dogmatic principles, principles of faith—
I didn’t say it was positive. I think I even hinted at the opposite.
Let’s take a person and his relationship with his wife. He says to her: come, maybe let’s eat, let’s sit, and let’s define exactly what the meaning of the relationship between us is, what I am obligated to do, what I am not obligated to do, what this means—let’s get down to the details. That won’t end well.
In my view it’s very positive, and it will end very well. If you don’t do that, it will not end well. I wrote this too and also spoke about it at the wedding of my eldest son. The claim there was—I tried to explain there why the ketubah is read between betrothal and marriage. It’s such a custom, simply to pause between betrothal and marriage, but why did they choose specifically the reading of the ketubah? How much money he owes her and from where they’ll collect if he doesn’t pay—from the cloak on his back and from such-and-such properties and such-and-such properties, and how many silver zuz. What are you doing there, conducting a legal negotiation as if you’re buying a calf? What is that doing there? Everyone is glowing, romance is soaring, pink-winged angels are fluttering above the happy couple, and you read this legal document there—from where they’ll collect from the man if he doesn’t pay her if he divorces her or when he dies. Meaning, that’s what you do in the interval between betrothal and marriage?

And my claim was that in my view this— I don’t know if this was the original intention, because this is some custom that developed in one way or another—but it seems to me there is an excellent logic or good sense behind it. Maybe in marriage I understand less, but in friendships—does the Rabbi sit with a close friend, a dear friend, and say: let’s once define exactly what the meaning of the friendship is? In friendships really this has no meaning, because it has no legal aspect. Where there is a legal aspect and there are also other aspects—experiential, religious, emotional, and so on—there is a certain tendency to see those as the main thing and to belittle the legal component, and that is a very great mistake.

I think part of the stability of the halakhic religious family unit comes from this. Contrary to what people think—that it’s only social pressure and it’s unpleasant to divorce and unpleasant to dismantle the family unit and so on—maybe that’s true too, I assume it’s also true, but that’s not all of it. There is something in the stability—what law gives is a kind of stability. Romance is an unstable thing. This morning you feel this way, tomorrow morning you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, you’ll feel differently. The day after tomorrow she’ll annoy you, after that you’ll annoy her. What will preserve the stability of the matter? Commitment. Commitment—the legal contract that lies underneath. That doesn’t mean that that’s everything. It doesn’t mean I’m reducing it only to a legal contract. There can be additional stories built on top of that, and perhaps it is desirable that there be additional stories on top of that, but not instead of it. And I think someone who does it instead of it—his end will not be good. Someone who does it in addition to it—I think the end is likely to be much better. So it seems to me.

And in that sense I think that you actually brought this up and this is, I think, not a bad analogy for the subject I’m speaking about here. Meaning, one can speak about thought and emotion and experiences, everything is fine. But if the underlying halakhic commitment is not there, this whole story won’t hold water. Religiosity of experiences and religiosity in the experiential sense is not really something stable. It’s not something that can hold water, sustain a community, pass this on from generation to generation—it’s not stable. Now I’m not saying I use Jewish law only as a tool for stability—that would turn it into a means instead of an end. I’m only commenting on what you said before, that it’s actually the opposite, that it is unstable—so no, I think that is what is unstable.
I didn’t mean to say that—I also agree entirely with everything the Rabbi said, only I think that…
A legal system that you do not define in a contract phrased in words is worth nothing. It is not a legal system. That’s the whole idea. When you say there is a legal infrastructure here, that means you need to define it, write it, sign it, understand that we are committing ourselves, and now bring all the angels and butterflies and cupids and let them all dance around. Afterward—not instead of that. There is no legal system without that.

Okay, in any case, for our purposes: this process of distilling the foundational principles is a very difficult one, as we know from the fact that in the enumeration of the commandments there are disputes among different enumerators of commandments, although that dispute is not necessarily a halakhic dispute. The whole dispute is a dispute of arrangement and classification—meaning, what are the commandments and what are their derivatives, or what are the details of the commandments, what are primary categories and what are derivatives, what are principles of faith and what are secondary things. That can vary. We know that in logic, for example, there are many different systems that arrange the logical principles, and each one chooses a different set of axioms for itself, a different number of axioms. In the end they arrived at one axiom that can support all the axioms—Habakkuk came and established them upon one. So in logic too, eventually they managed to arrive at a system that builds all of logic on one axiom, but along the way there were various systems that were proposed, and each of those systems is built on a different set of axioms. And there is no disagreement. Meaning, all the principles that exist in system A also exist in system B; only in system B they are axioms, while in system A they are derived propositions, and vice versa. Because the difference between them is only in the arrangement of the principles: which are the axioms and which are the theorems or derived propositions. And not a disagreement about what is true. It is a disagreement over what is a principle and what is a derivative, what is a primary category and what is a derivative.

And in that sense, in the world of thought too there can be disputes both about the content question—meaning, whether a certain intellectual principle is true or not true. But regarding principles, often the disputes—like for example with the author of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim, we’ll still talk about that—the disputes he has with Maimonides are not disputes about whether such-and-such principles are true or not true. His dispute is over whether those are principles. So this is a classificatory dispute, not a dispute over content. This sharpens very much what I said before: that the distillation Maimonides performed—how he extracts from this entire corpus the set of his principles—is a process that is very far from one-to-one. That’s what Maimonides thought; someone else can think differently. Now note: he can accept all thirteen principles of Maimonides without disputing them—there are those who did dispute them—but I’m saying, even without disputing them, he can claim that these were not principles. That is, for example, Sefer Ha-Ikkarim.

This has implications, because both Maimonides and the author of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim say that denying a principle is different from denying something that is not a principle. This has halakhic implications too; it’s not just a game. There can be halakhic implications to it. But in the end, the way to arrive at a certain arrangement of the system—of principles and derived principles, yes, axioms and theorems—is not unambiguous. People can disagree and arrive at different systems. Sometimes there will be actual disputes over the principles, and sometimes there won’t be disputes over—for example corporeality, the famous Raavad regarding corporeality. But sometimes it is not a dispute over whether the principle is true, but whether it is a principle. That is the dispute.

There are those, of course, who disputed the very concept of principles; they denied that the Jewish intellectual world should be arranged at all on the basis of a set of principles. They were not willing to accept such a thing, for all kinds of reasons.
For example what?
So here too, are there halakhic implications?
What?
So here too there are halakhic implications in a situation where there are no principles?
Right, there would be halakhic implications, because now you need to discuss: so who is that apikoros that we “lower and do not raise”? Is it anyone who basically denies anything our tradition says? Someone who says there are no principles is apparently saying that, which is very strange. There are plenty of disputes in Jewish law, in conceptions, there are lots of disputes, and if everything is the same, then everyone basically has to lower… lower the other one into a pit, if we disagree with one another. That’s very unlikely.

In that sense it is actually very attractive—or called for—to go with Maimonides’ approach: that there is a basic dogmatics that is binding, and beyond that there can be various disputes. And there needs to be some framework that defines within what the disputes take place. Within it there will be disputes, but there is a framework within which they take place. As an example, we’ll also mention the disputes in our legal world today—the reform and all these matters. Again, the claims are that one has to create some framework—call it a constitution, a Basic Law of legislation, whatever—and then we can begin to argue within it. Today there is an argument, but there is no framework within which it is conducted. That is part of the problem.

Anyway, that is basically the motivation, and those are basically the fundamental difficulties of how to classify this. But I want to go back for a moment and really enter the Talmudic concept and then what Maimonides does with it. So the story begins in Sanhedrin at the beginning of chapter Helek. In the Mishnah, chapter Helek is chapter 10, and in the Talmud it is chapter 11. And in Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah, the introduction to chapter Helek, in his commentary to chapter Helek, that is chapter 10 in the Mishnah.

What is the relation to the Talmud in Makkot, with “and established them on this and established them on that”?
What? I didn’t understand.
What is the relation of what the Rabbi is going to talk about to the Talmud in Makkot regarding…
No, that’s something else. The Talmud in Makkot is some kind of aggadic text, and I don’t know what to do with it. You can explain it in ten ways. It’s hard for me to derive from there any clear conclusions. I know many little homiletic explanations people said about it. I don’t know of something that is really a conclusion that I think clearly arises from the Talmud there.

So the Mishnah in Sanhedrin on 90a: “All Israel have a share in the World to Come,” except for whoever doesn’t, of course, yes? “All Israel have a share in the World to Come”—they always quote that. All Israel have a share in the World to Come. What a wonderful and pluralistic Torah we have. Only in the next sentence: “And these are the ones who have no share in the World to Come”—that they quote less often. Fine.

“All Israel have a share in the World to Come, as it is said: ‘And your people are all righteous; they shall inherit the land forever.’” Leibowitz always used to say: in the Reali School, the slogan is “and walk humbly,” right? You know this in Haifa? I’m from Haifa, so the emblem of the Reali School is “and walk humbly.” So Leibowitz always said: “with your God.” The verse says, “walk humbly with your God.” And that they forgot. “And these are the ones who have no share in the World to Come: one who says that resurrection of the dead is not from the Torah, and that the Torah is not from Heaven, and an apikoros. Rabbi Akiva says: also one who reads external books, and one who whispers over a wound and says, ‘All the sicknesses that I placed upon Egypt I will not place upon you.’ Abba Shaul says: also one who pronounces the divine name as it is spelled,” and so on. “And these three kings and four commoners have no share in the World to Come,” and all kinds of things and so on.

This is the Mishnah from which the whole story begins. So the Mishnah lists several types of people who have no share in the World to Come. The first two types are conceptions: one who says that resurrection of the dead is not from the Torah, and that the Torah is not from Heaven. Okay? So apparently these are really principles of faith. Yes? Resurrection of the dead and Torah from Heaven. Two principles of faith, and the Talmud says that one who does not have these principles of faith, one who does not believe in them, has no share…
Can one explain what the World to Come is?
Wow, what a question.
Isn’t that also a principle of faith? What is the World to Come?
To believe that there is a World to Come is fine, but the question is: what is the World to Come? Who knows what the World to Come is? There are various descriptions in the Talmud, there are descriptions in the commentators—they know about it, in my opinion, as much as I do. Meaning, I don’t think any of them can really tell me what goes on there. The claim is that there is some kind of thing one reaches after finishing one’s career in this world, yes? After we die. There are places, by the way, where this is interchanged with the Messianic era, where the Messianic era is called the World to Come. There are confusions about this even on the conceptual level, and all the more so on the content level. I don’t deal with these things at all, and anyone who deals with… yes, the Mishnah all the same claims that this is, let’s call it, a principle in our current language, something you must believe, and if not then you have no share in the World to Come.

Now, the first two are beliefs, so here there is already an initial hint that there are foundational beliefs, what Maimonides perhaps calls foundations or principles. Even though the term itself, principles, doesn’t appear here, here you do see that thing. The third thing is apikoros. Now what is apikoros? We are used to thinking that it means a heretic, yes, someone who does not believe the correct beliefs. But the Talmud there later—yes, the Talmud here on 99a: what is “one who says the Torah is not from Heaven”? The Rabbis taught: “‘Because he has despised the word of the Lord and broken His commandment, that soul shall utterly be cut off’—this is one who says the Torah is not from Heaven. Another explanation: ‘Because he has despised the word of the Lord’—this is an apikoros. Another explanation: ‘Because he has despised the word of the Lord’—this is one who reveals improper interpretations in the Torah.” Fine. And what is an apikoros? So the Talmud later says, here is an apikoros. Now on 99b there: Rav and Rabbi Hanina both said: this is one who disgraces a Torah scholar. Rabbi Yohanan and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: this is one who disgraces his fellow in the presence of a Torah scholar. Fine. Never mind how that fits with the Mishnah; there’s another similar view later—it doesn’t matter right now, less important for our purposes—but that’s what the Talmud says about apikoros.

Meaning, when I go back to the first Mishnah, page 90, where we were at the beginning, there really are only two principles here such that someone who does not believe them loses his share in the World to Come—two principles of belief or intellectual principles: resurrection of the dead from the Torah, and Torah from Heaven. But apikoros is behavior; it isn’t belief. Yes? “What benefit have the rabbis done for us?”—disgracing… “What benefit have the rabbis done for us?” We didn’t read that, but that’s another option that perhaps concerns beliefs. But really what appears in the Talmud is: one who disgraces a Torah scholar, and one who disgraces his fellow in the presence of a Torah scholar. It’s simply a grave action. It’s not the concept of apikoros that we’re used to. The concept of apikoros that we’re used to is a concept of someone who does not believe the right things. In the Talmud, apikoros appears as an additional category: there are two things which are the binding beliefs, and apikoros. There is also Maimonides’ definition.
Wait, wait—I haven’t gotten to Maimonides yet; first the Talmud.

And Rabbi Akiva says: also one who reads external books—again, that’s an act. And one who whispers over a wound, and one who pronounces the divine name as spelled—all these are acts. Meaning, if I want to look in the Talmud at what the Talmud speaks about concerning those one “lowers and does not raise,” what appears later here and so on—beyond certain types of actions, the principles under discussion first of all are not connected to apikorsut. The principles appear as principles, and there are two: resurrection of the dead from the Torah, and Torah from Heaven.

Now if I move to Maimonides, Maimonides says as follows in Laws of Repentance, chapter 3, halakhah 6. By the way, it’s very interesting that this appears here and not in Laws of the Foundations of the Torah: “And these are the ones who have no share in the World to Come, but are cut off and perish and are judged because of the greatness of their wickedness and sin forever and for all eternity: the minim, and the apikorsim, and those who deny the Torah, and those who deny resurrection of the dead and the coming of the redeemer, the rebels, those who lead the many to sin, those who separate themselves from the ways of the community, one who commits sins openly and defiantly like Jehoiakim, informers, and those who cast fear upon the community not for the sake of Heaven…” In short, most of it is actions.

But there are beliefs here too: minim, apikorsim—here it appears within the framework of beliefs—and those who deny the Torah and those who deny resurrection of the dead and the coming of the redeemer. It’s not entirely clear where he got this from, because it doesn’t appear in the Talmud. Now he starts to elaborate. “There are five who are called minim”—that is halakhah 7. “One who says there is no God and the world has no leader, and one who says there is a leader but there are two or more”—meaning beliefs regarding the Holy One, blessed be He, these are minim—“or one who says there is one Master but He has a body and form,” yes, “and likewise one who says that He alone is not the first and source of all, and one who worships a star…” and so on.

And here is the Raavad that I mentioned before. The Raavad, in his gloss, says: “One who says there is no one Master, but that He has a body and form. Abraham said: why did he call such a one a min? Many greater and better than he went with this thought, according to what they saw in the verses and even more according to what they saw in the aggadot that confuse the mind.” What does the Raavad say? How do you define a person who believes in the corporeality of the Holy One, blessed be He—how do you define him as a min? “Many greater and better than he went with this thought.” Now the Raavad himself agrees with Maimonides that the Holy One, blessed be He, has no body, because he says that those people, those greater and better ones who went with that thought, did so because of “aggadot that confuse the mind.” Meaning, he agrees with Maimonides; he only argues that you cannot define those people as minim. This is a dispute that apparently does not relate to principles but rather to some secondary issue regarding which you cannot say he is denying a principle. Okay? So that’s regarding minim.

Now he says, halakhah 8: “There are three who are called apikorsim.” Note: “One who says there is no prophecy at all”—denies prophecy—“and there is no communication,” meaning information, notification, a message that comes from the Creator to the hearts of human beings; “and one who denies the prophecy of Moses our teacher; and one who says that the Creator does not know human actions. Each of these three is among the apikorsim.” Then he says: “There are three who deny the Torah: one who says that the Torah is not from God, even one verse, even one word—such a person denies the Torah. And likewise one who denies its interpretation, and that is the Oral Torah, and one who denies its transmitters such as Tzadok and Baitos; and one who says that the Creator replaced this commandment with another commandment and that this Torah is already nullified, even though it was from God…” and so on. “Each of these three is one who denies the Torah.”

So these are the apikorsim and the deniers of the Torah. And now there are apostates—an apostate regarding one transgression, an apostate regarding the whole Torah. That is already completely practical. Here we begin with actions. But up to this point—those who lead the many to sin are still actions—up to this point, yes, the apikorsim, the minim, and those who deny the Torah are all about beliefs and opinions. And this is a question the commentators here discuss: where does Maimonides get this from? The apikorsim in the Talmud are apikorsim in the sense of one who shames a Torah scholar, one who says “What benefit have the rabbis done for us,” or one who shames someone in the presence of a Torah scholar. But for Maimonides, the concept of apikorsim and the concept of minim are an internal division within principles of thought.

And in fact, Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles are the principles he also counted under minim, under apikorsim, and under those who say the Torah is not from God—those who deny the Torah, sorry. Three categories: apikorsim, minim, and those who deny the Torah. If you define and conceptualize all the sub-clauses Maimonides places under these categories, you will arrive at the Thirteen Principles of Faith. The Thirteen Principles of Faith—one who denies them, regarding some of them he is a min, regarding some he is an apikoros, regarding some he is one who denies the Torah. Are all the Thirteen Principles inserted into these laws?
Are all the Thirteen Principles inserted into these laws?
It seems to me not all. What I just read now includes the principles. For example, reward and punishment—is that inserted here?
I can’t hear.
Reward and punishment, for example—is it inserted in these laws?
I don’t know, in chapter 10 it appears. Because it seems to me not everything is inserted. I don’t remember at the moment; we can look in a second whether reward and punishment appears—I don’t remember now. No, I don’t think it appears here. It says there that He provides.
He provides, but that’s not reward and punishment; that’s something else.
What, what’s the difference?
“One who says that the Creator does not know human actions”—that is probably what he means. Only passive providence.

But in any case, I’m saying that the concept of principles is not specifically associated with apikoros. There are principles of thought such that one who denies them is, one way or another, someone who has no share in the World to Come, which means “one lowers and does not raise,” and so on, but these are not necessarily only apikorsim. These are minim, apikorsim, and those who deny the Torah. Today, in common speech, all of this is called apikorsim, but that’s only a manner of speaking. In Maimonides it’s something else.

For our purposes, we’re not interested in the concept of apikoros; we’re interested in the concept of principles of faith. And therefore, indeed, principles of faith are those things such that one who does not believe them has no share in the World to Come. And that is basically more or less the principles of faith. Apikorsut, in the Talmudic sense—or in the Maimonidean sense, not the Talmudic one—is only part of them, but not all of them.

What is the verbal origin of this word? What is “apikoros”?
The verbal origin—I haven’t done that etymology, but I assume it is from the Greek philosopher Epicurus. And quite a few people have already written about this: why did they choose specifically that philosopher? He was not the greatest heretic among the Greek philosophers. It isn’t entirely clear why he specifically was taken as the generic name for one who denies the principles of faith. I don’t know.

In any case, so Maimonides here creates a classification of principles of faith or of intellectual principles that is also divided into subgroups: minim, apikorsim, and deniers of the Torah. But for our purposes there are thirteen principles, what Maimonides later details in his introduction to chapter Helek. And these are basically the fundamental principles in which we are supposed to believe. This whole lesson, or everything I’ve said until now, was trying to explain what Maimonides is doing. I haven’t said anything yet about what I think about this matter, whether I agree, whether it is necessary—that is another matter. I’m trying to explain what exactly Maimonides is doing, how we arrived at this system of principles, at this concept of principles, at the dogmatics that Maimonides established as some kind of framework of Judaism.

Of course there are no judicial punishments for someone who thinks incorrectly—this is a prohibition without an action, and so on—so there are no court-imposed punishments. But at the hands of Heaven he is indeed supposed to take a hit, and also at human hands in the passive sense: one does not save him, one lowers and does not raise, but not court-imposed punishments, for various reasons. But yes—and with this I’ll close—there are halakhic implications. The way one behaves toward such a person is halakhic instruction. Therefore the fact that these are principles of thought is true, and that they do not appear in the enumeration of the commandments is also true, but that does not mean they are entirely disconnected from Jewish law. There is a halakhic implication to defining someone as an apikoros or a min or someone who does not believe in principles of faith.

When Maimonides basically—Maimonides not by accident details the Thirteen Principles in the introduction to chapter Helek. Why? Because from his point of view, what the Mishnah at the beginning of chapter Helek says—whoever has no share in the World to Come, whoever says there is no resurrection of the dead, and so on—that is a paradigm, meaning it refers to all thirteen principles. Maimonides basically wants to explain here who those are that the Mishnah said have no share in the World to Come. The question of where he got this from, why he thinks the Mishnah is talking about all this—that’s another question. But the placement of what Maimonides says is apparently that he understands this as an interpretation he is giving of the Mishnah. Meaning, when the Mishnah says they have no share in the World to Come, the Mishnah intends to establish Jewish dogmatics here. And the meaning of that dogmatics is that anyone who deviates from it has no share in the World to Come—one lowers and does not raise, and so on, as appears later in the Talmudic passages. So from Maimonides’ point of view, what he did is an interpretation of the Mishnah in Sanhedrin. Of course, a very expansive interpretation. A lot of it is Maimonides’ own judgment; the sources for some of what Maimonides says here are very unclear. But that is basically, from his point of view, the interpretation he understands of the Mishnah in Sanhedrin.

I’ll stop here if there are comments or questions. Rabbi, I was just thinking about the point we discussed regarding marriage and the binding contract, and then you compared it to religion without commandment observance in terms of durability, and I couldn’t help thinking about Christianity. They removed that aspect and it became—this still preserved stability more or less.
They essentially established rituals to replace it. They do have practical aspects in Christianity too. There is a ritual framework that preserves exactly the communal-social structure. Without that it can’t work. Indeed they made do with certain ritual elements and didn’t enter into the everyday legal life that exists in the Jewish world, but a religiosity that remains totally amorphous—it’s hard to sustain such a framework.
I hadn’t thought about that.

Okay, more? Did the Rabbi address in this lecture also positions in scholarship that Maimonides himself didn’t really hold by all the principles?
I’ll comment on that. I’ll comment on that. It doesn’t convince me very much, but I’ll comment on it.
What was the question about Pirkei Avot?
I didn’t understand the question. You’re on mute.

Okay, that’s it? So okay, goodbye, Sabbath peace, good tidings. Thank you very much.