Dogmatics – Lecture 14

Table of Contents

• General Overview
• Zoom Check and a New Computer
• The Eighth Principle in Maimonides: Torah from Heaven
• Two Components of Faith: Divine Source and Continuity of Tradition
• David Hume’s Witness Argument and the Critique of It
• Induction, Begging the Question, and a Closed Loop
• The Example of Amnon and SIT, and Trusting Testimony About an Improbable Event
• The Blind Man and the Sighted Man: Trust in the Senses vs. “Logical Proof”
• Interests of Those Transmitting the Tradition and Distinguishing Between Links in the Chain
• The Oral Torah: Accepted Interpretation, Creative Derashot, and Gezerah Shavah
• “Its Accepted Interpretation” in the Language of Maimonides
• “Everything a Veteran Student Will One Day Innovate”: History vs. Norm
• The Written Torah, Biblical Criticism, and Presumptions
• Greek Texts and a Response to the Question About Foreign Sources
• Equal Holiness of Verses and the Justification of the Narrative Parts of the Torah
• The Claim That We Do Not Actually Learn Moral Values from the Torah
• Holiness vs. Meaning, and Hidden Wisdoms
• Questions About Rhetorical Openness, Sources of Inspiration, and Education for Values
• Conclusion and Checking the Recording

Summary

General Overview

The speaker checks Zoom issues on a new computer and presents Maimonides’ eighth principle: Torah from Heaven. This includes the belief that the Torah in our hands is the same Torah given to Moses, and that all of it is from the mouth of the Almighty, including apparently “marginal” verses and the accepted interpretation. He explains that this principle is made up of two separate assumptions, compares it to David Hume’s witness argument against the reliability of miraculous traditions, and offers critiques of Hume, including the charge of begging the question and creating a loop that prevents accepting testimony about miracles. Later he argues that a large part of halakhic interpretation is the creation of sages across the generations, and he suggests reading statements like “everything a veteran student will one day innovate” as normative rather than historical statements. He even raises a similar approach with respect to the biblical text and questions of biblical criticism. Finally, he analyzes the distinction between narrative and halakhic parts of the Torah, argues that in practice people do not learn moral values from the Torah in a way that changes their positions, and ends with a short Q&A and a check of the recording quality without a microphone.

Zoom Check and a New Computer

The speaker says he has a new computer and wants to know whether there is any problem with Zoom, and that he is using it without a microphone. He says it seems to him that the computer’s microphone is very good and asks people to tell him if they experience anything different. He has a momentary difficulty finding a file and explains that he still is not used to the computer, and then shares his screen.

The Eighth Principle in Maimonides: Torah from Heaven

The speaker quotes Maimonides’ wording that the eighth principle is Torah from Heaven: to believe that the entire Torah in our hands is the Torah given to Moses, and that all of it is from the mouth of the Almighty, with Moses serving as a kind of “scribe” writing what was dictated to him. He says there is no difference between “And the sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan” and “And the name of his wife was Mehetabel daughter of Matred,” on the one hand, and “I am the Lord” and “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” on the other; it is all the perfect Torah of God, pure, holy, and true. He cites Maimonides’ claim that anyone who says that even one verse is not from the Holy One, blessed be He, but rather from Moses himself, falls under the verse “for he has despised the word of the Lord,” and that the heretics attributed such denial to Manasseh because he thought that the Torah had a “kernel and shell,” and that stories and dates were Moses’ own ideas. He adds that every letter contains wondrous wisdoms, and that a person can only pray, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wonders from Your Torah.” He also says that its accepted interpretation is from the mouth of the Almighty as well, including the form of the sukkah, the lulav, the shofar, the fringes, and the tefillin, and that Moses is a “faithful emissary.” He notes that the verse pointing to this principle is: “By this you shall know that the Lord has sent me… for it is not from my own heart.”

Two Components of Faith: Divine Source and Continuity of Tradition

The speaker says that Maimonides divides Torah from Heaven into two parts: that the Torah in our hands is the same Torah given to Moses and transmitted in a reliable chain, and that Moses received everything from the mouth of the Almighty and invented nothing. He emphasizes that both assumptions are necessary, because it could be that the tradition is reliable but Moses invented it, and it could be that Moses received it but the tradition became corrupted. In either case, belief in Torah from Heaven is not established without both. He says that many arguments mix the two assumptions together and present a dichotomy of two possibilities when in fact there are four possible options.

David Hume’s Witness Argument and the Critique of It

The speaker presents David Hume’s argument as if there are two hypotheses: miracles and revelations are events of extremely low probability, as against the possibility that traditions become distorted, so it is preferable to assume that the tradition is mistaken rather than that the miracle occurred. He describes how atheists of the last hundred years relate to this argument with admiration and present anyone who still talks about the witness argument as outdated. He says that Hume’s consideration sets the assumption of the improbability of the miracle against the reliability of the tradition, but the miracle concerns the first assumption, namely Moses’ experience, while the reliability of the tradition concerns the second assumption, the transmission from him to us. Therefore there is no necessity to set these two assumptions against each other.

Induction, Begging the Question, and a Closed Loop

The speaker says that the assumption that “miracles do not happen” rests on induction from experience, and notes that this is especially strange in the case of David Hume, who presented strong arguments against the principle of induction. He argues that there is begging the question here, because someone who assumes there is no God concludes that there are no miracles, and then rejects a miraculous tradition on the basis of that initial assumption. He adds that Hume can never accept testimony about a miracle, because he will always prefer falsehood or distortion over a miracle, and then he concludes that “there is no testimony” because he rejected every testimony. He calls this a loop whose “tail is inside its mouth.” He says that he himself is suspicious of testimony about miracles and demands meaningful reliability tests, but he rejects the categorical dismissal of all testimony as intellectual rigidity.

The Example of Amnon and SIT, and Trusting Testimony About an Improbable Event

The speaker tells of a secular friend named Amnon who founded a company called SIT, Systematic Inventive Thinking, and says that the source of the method is Altshuller from the Soviet Union. He brings a story that Amnon led a gathering in the Midwest with a diverse group of representatives, and in a round where each person speaks and invites the next one, it turned out in the end that only white participants had spoken and five or six Black participants had not spoken, despite the feeling that everyone had finished. He uses this to confront Amnon with the choice between believing his testimony about an “improbable” event and assuming that he is lying, imagining things, or making it up for educational reasons. He concludes that because of a high degree of trust in the witness, even a fantastic story can be accepted. He says that each person has to determine the level of trust required according to the degree of fantasticality of the story.

The Blind Man and the Sighted Man: Trust in the Senses vs. “Logical Proof”

The speaker brings, in the name of Rabbi Yitzhak Kahan of blessed memory, an example about a blind man and a sighted man who enter a room full of furniture, leave it, and lock it. After an hour, the sighted man enters and sees that the room is empty. He describes how the blind man presents a crushing logical argument that the furniture could not possibly have left, and compares this to a mode of thinking that always prefers rejecting a “miracle” over changing assumptions. He argues that the sighted man will not accept the logical argument because he sees the room empty, and concludes that trust in instruments of perception like sight, or in testimony, can prevail even against a conclusion that appears “miraculous.”

Interests of Those Transmitting the Tradition and Distinguishing Between Links in the Chain

In response to a student’s question about the factor of desire and self-interest on the part of a believer, the speaker says that interests have to be brought into the reliability equation, and that strong interests in later links of the tradition can raise the evidentiary bar. He adds that the person who created the tradition at its beginning is not necessarily suspect of having an interest in defending something that does not yet exist. He notes a comment made during the lecture that Maimonides says Moses our teacher was not believed because of the miracles, and clarifies that he used the term “miracle” here also in the borrowed sense of improbability.

The Oral Torah: Accepted Interpretation, Creative Derashot, and Gezerah Shavah

The speaker asks whether Maimonides means that the entire Torah, including its interpretations, was given to Moses at Sinai, and argues that “obviously this is not true,” and that there is no doubt that Maimonides did not believe that either. He says that Maimonides himself limits what was transmitted from Sinai to the thirteen hermeneutical principles, to a few interpretations, and that the rest are later products of the sages of the generations, with most derashot being “creative derashot” that generate new Jewish laws. He cites the Talmudic statement about gezerah shavah, that a person may not derive one on his own, and Rashi’s continuation, “from his rabbi, from his rabbi, back to Moses at Mount Sinai.” He then says that Nachmanides and his students, the Ritva, Ran, and Rashba, wrote that even this is not true, because there are disputes about gezerah shavah. He suggests that the tradition provides hints, such as the very existence of a gezerah shavah or that a law is learned from one, but understanding the application is created by the interpreter.

“Its Accepted Interpretation” in the Language of Maimonides

The speaker notes carefully that Maimonides wrote, “And likewise its accepted interpretation is also from the mouth of the Almighty,” and asks: what is “its accepted interpretation”? He argues that Maimonides distinguishes between accepted interpretations that are a law given to Moses at Sinai, such as the form of tefillin or certain word-definitions, and derashot such as “You shall fear the Lord your God” to include Torah scholars, which are not the interpretation of a word and therefore do not require us to say that they were told to Moses. He suggests that Maimonides means only certain parts of the accepted interpretation, not all interpretations.

“Everything a Veteran Student Will One Day Innovate”: History vs. Norm

The speaker cites the rabbinic saying, “Everything a veteran student will one day innovate, the Holy One, blessed be He, showed to Moses at Sinai,” and brings the Tosafot Yom Tov in the introduction to his commentary on the Mishnah, who distinguishes between “showed him” and “transmitted to him.” He offers another interpretation, according to which this is a normative statement: all the Torah in our hands should be treated as though it was given to Moses at Sinai in terms of its halakhic and normative status, and not as a historical claim that every detail was transmitted there. He adds that Nachmanides writes that the Torah was given “subject to the sages, subject to its interpreters,” and that the Torah was given in a fairly cryptic form so that it would intentionally be interpreted over the generations. Therefore, the binding products of interpretation receive force “as if” from Sinai.

The Written Torah, Biblical Criticism, and Presumptions

The speaker says he is not very interested in biblical criticism, and argues that even the belief that the Written Torah was given at Sinai is best seen as a normative rather than historical statement. He brings verses such as “to this very day” and “the kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned over Israel” as signs of additions or later editing, and argues that this is plausible in a few isolated verses. He says that such additions were made with divine inspiration by prophets, and therefore they have the status of the word of God. He adds that in Jewish law there are presumptions: when there is no clear indication that a verse is a later addition, we treat it as though it was given at Sinai “unless proven otherwise.” He brings an example from the Rema in Yoreh De’ah about contradictions among versions of Torah scrolls, where one follows the majority, and explains that a presumption does not necessarily clarify the truth, but rather instructs us how to act in a case of doubt.

Greek Texts and a Response to the Question About Foreign Sources

A question is asked about a lecture series at Beit Avi Chai and about Greek texts that tell a different story about the Exodus from Egypt and mention Moses. The speaker says he has no idea because he does not know the texts, and asks what exactly “written and documented” means, because the Torah too is written and documented. He says that the question is why Greek sources should be treated as more reliable, and emphasizes that the Torah has a tradition spanning many generations, but concludes that this needs to be checked and that he is not familiar with it.

Equal Holiness of Verses and the Justification of the Narrative Parts of the Torah

The speaker returns to Maimonides on the equality between verses like “Mehetabel daughter of Matred” and “Hear O Israel,” and argues that in the background there is an opposite conception that distinguishes between central and marginal material. He presents Rashi’s first comment on the Torah in the name of Rabbi Yitzhak, who asks why the Torah did not begin with “This month shall be for you,” and brings the answer: “Because He declared to His people the power of His works, in order to give them the inheritance of the nations.” He argues that the answer explains only creation, and suggests that Rashi hints, through the phrase “and He gave it to whomever was upright in His eyes,” that the book of Genesis is the “Book of the Upright,” teaching the uprightness of the patriarchs, and therefore justifying their right to the land beyond a merely force-based or legal claim. He says that the names and historical unfolding are needed in order to show the lineage, and therefore even “and Lotan’s sister was Timna” and the like enter into the structure of the argument about inheritance of the land.

The Claim That We Do Not Actually Learn Moral Values from the Torah

The speaker argues that practically speaking, people do not learn moral values from the Torah in a way that changes their moral positions, and that in order to say that one learns morality from the Torah, reading a portion would have to cause a person to admit he was wrong and replace one moral value with another. He says that this “never happens,” and brings an example from the weekly Torah portion in which Joseph buys the Egyptians’ fields for Pharaoh and leaves them as tenant farmers who must give a fifth. He describes this as a brutal exploitation of distress, and even cites the She’iltot discussing the prohibition against profiteering and withholding produce. He brings Rashi’s comment that Joseph transferred populations from city to city so that his brothers would not feel like exiles, and argues that this sounds bizarre, while the midrash and Rashi present it as praise. He concludes that in practice, either people justify Joseph so that he fits their prior moral principles, or they criticize him, but in both cases the principles remain what they were and are not newly learned from the text.

Holiness vs. Meaning, and Hidden Wisdoms

The speaker says that the experience of distinguishing between “marginal” verses and central ones remains on the level of practical meaning, even if Maimonides rules that there is no difference on the level of holiness and divine source. He notes that Maimonides adds that the wisdom in the Torah is beyond comprehension, “longer than the earth in measure and broader than the sea,” and that one must pray, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wonders from Your Torah,” implying that there are secrets and wonders even in verses that seem useless. He says that he himself does not know how to draw that out—maybe Maimonides did.

Questions About Rhetorical Openness, Sources of Inspiration, and Education for Values

A claim is raised that art or rhetoric can create openness and change a scale of values, and that reading Torah can function similarly. The speaker responds that he is looking for examples and still has not found any, and that “factually it simply does not happen.” He is asked how people develop morally without the Torah, and he says they develop from many sources, such as Dostoevsky or the Torah, and that these are more sources of inspiration than study that imparts values. He says that education for values also includes conceptualizing what is already present in a person, but that values do not have proofs the way geometry does. The discussion continues around the possibility of “moral observation” and of an exemplary figure, and the speaker replies that even Joseph as a role model did not change his own moral perceptions through the story, but at most serves as a model to aspire to.

Conclusion and Checking the Recording

The speaker concludes by saying that “we inaugurated the new device,” and that he will listen to the recording to see how it came out. The participants say they heard excellently, and he says, “That’s without a microphone,” and “Goodbye, good night.”

Hello, I’m using a new computer, so I want you to tell me if there’s any problem with Zoom. I’m using it without a microphone. I tried earlier and it seems this computer’s microphone is very good, but you tell me if you’re experiencing something else. Okay, we’re at the eighth principle, mainly the eighth. Wait, one second, why don’t I see the file here? Okay, just a second, something isn’t working out for me. Okay, fine. We’re at the eighth principle, mainly the eighth. I’m going to do screen sharing here, I’m just still not quite used to the computer. Okay. And the eighth foundation is that the Torah is from Heaven, namely that we should believe that this entire Torah that is in our hands today is the Torah that was given to Moses, and that all of it is from the mouth of the Almighty, meaning that it all came to him from God in a way that is metaphorically called speech. And I do not know the nature of that transmission except by him, peace be upon him, to whom it came—Moses. And that he was in the position of a scribe: one dictates to him and he writes it all down, its dates, its stories, and its commandments, and therefore he is called lawgiver. And there is no difference between “And the sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan,” and “And his wife’s name was Mehetabel daughter of Matred,” or “I am the Lord,” and “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one”—all of it is from the mouth of the Almighty, and all of it is the Torah of the Lord, perfect, pure, holy, true. I’m reading the whole thing and afterward we’ll go into detail. And Menasheh was not considered by them a heretic and denier more than any other heretic except because he thought that the Torah has an inner part and a shell, and that those dates and stories are of no use and Moses said them on his own. And this is what is meant by saying that the Torah is not from Heaven. They said that this means one who says that the entire Torah is from the Holy One, blessed be He, except for one verse, which the Holy One, blessed be He, did not say, but Moses said on his own—this is “for he has despised the word of the Lord.” Exalted be the Lord above what the heretics say. Rather, every letter in it contains wondrous wisdoms for the one to whom God grants understanding, and the full extent of its wisdom cannot be grasped; “its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea.” And a person has nothing to do but pray like David, the anointed of the God of Jacob, who prayed: “Open my eyes, that I may behold wonders from Your Torah.” And likewise its accepted interpretation is also from the mouth of the Almighty. And the way we make the sukkah and the lulav and the shofar and the tzitzit and the tefillin and everything else today is exactly the form that God told Moses and Moses told us, and he was only a faithful messenger in what he brought. And the statement that points to this eighth principle is his saying: “By this you shall know that the Lord sent me … for I have not done it of my own heart.” Yes. Moses our teacher says: this is not from my own heart; the Holy One, blessed be He, sent me. And that is essentially the source for the eighth principle. So there are several points here that are worth paying attention to. First of all, this principle of Torah from Heaven is divided by him into two parts, right? “That we should believe that this entire Torah that is in our hands today is the Torah that was given to Moses, and that all of it is from the mouth of the Almighty.” Two things: the Torah that is in our hands is the Torah that Moses started transmitting along the historical chain. And the second thing is that when Moses received it, he received all of it from the mouth of the Almighty. He didn’t invent anything on his own; everything came from the Holy One, blessed be He. These are two elements of this idea of Torah from Heaven, Torah from Sinai. That reminds me a bit of discussions that come up among philosophers, since David Hume, about the testimony argument. The testimony argument is the name given to the argument underlying the reliability of tradition. When I claim that tradition is reliable, I’m basically saying there is testimony from witness to witness to witness back to the original source. And in the testimony argument itself—for example David Hume has a claim, I devoted two columns on my website to this—he has an argument against the testimony argument. What’s the argument? He says this: he basically presents it as two statistical alternatives, two hypotheses, H0 and H1. So he says, after all, divine revelation or supernatural things, miracles, all kinds of things of that sort, are things that don’t really happen—in other words, we’ve never encountered them. Now what does that mean? It means that the likelihood of such a thing happening is negligible, okay? Very small. So then the natural thing to say is: okay, then apparently it didn’t happen. On the other hand, we do have a tradition that conveys to us the occurrence of this miracle, and that tradition, as the Kuzari says, father to son to father to son, and a father doesn’t lie to his son and so on—so the reliability of tradition underlies our trust in the occurrence of the miracle. Now David Hume asks: what seems to you less likely? After all, there are two possibilities. One possibility is that the tradition got corrupted—falsehood, simple distortion, no matter in what form. Or that the tradition was not corrupted and the miracle really happened. Now the second option, that the miracle happened, has virtually zero probability. If someone told you today, “I saw a miracle, something against the laws of nature,” you wouldn’t believe him. It’s something extremely, extremely unlikely. By contrast, traditions that get corrupted, or inventions, or lies, or various folk legends—those are things we know from history, meaning those are things that can happen. Now suppose we have extraordinary confidence in the reliability of religious tradition, right? Still, says David Hume, if you’re being honest, that level of confidence does not compare to our confidence in the laws of nature. In other words, if I have to choose between two possibilities—either the tradition got corrupted or a miracle occurred—those are the two possibilities. Which of the two is less plausible? That a miracle occurred: probability zero. That tradition got corrupted—even if you have a lot of confidence, okay, maybe that’s only ten percent. It’s not absurd, not something that never happens. Okay? You can estimate what you think the likelihood is. Some will say eighty percent, some will say ten percent. Fine. But it’s not on the level of a miracle. So if you have to discriminate between those two alternatives—that is, either the tradition is reliable and a miracle occurred, or the tradition got corrupted and the miracle did not occur—the second possibility is far preferable to the first. And therefore, he says, by simple statistical reasoning the conclusion should be that a tradition that conveys to us the occurrence of a miracle is an incorrect tradition. Now the atheists of at least the last hundred years relate to this argument with exaggerated admiration. In other words, anyone who still talks about the testimony argument after the beating it took at the hands of David Hume is an idiot who’s out of date, just doesn’t know how to think. It’s simply absurd—meaning, the testimony argument is finished. You can look at the Wikipedia entry on the testimony argument and see all these interesting superlatives from various people. But there are various defenses against the testimony argument and maybe I’ll comment on that later. But before the questions and answers, I want us to notice something. When we speak about tradition, when I accept tradition I’m supposed to assume two things, the same two things Maimonides says here. One thing: that the transmission from Moses our teacher to me is reliable, that things did not get corrupted. Second thing—and that’s not enough—the second thing is that Moses our teacher did not invent it. In other words, that Moses our teacher received it from the Holy One, blessed be He. Because it could be that Moses our teacher invented it, and from then until me it was transmitted reliably—it could be. In order to speak about Torah from Heaven, Torah from Sinai, I need to assume both assumptions: A, that Moses didn’t invent it but received it from the Holy One, blessed be He, and B, that the tradition up to me is reliable. Now notice: the statistical measurement in David Hume’s argument sets claims relating to the first assumption against claims relating to the second assumption. It’s not the same assumption. The occurrence of a miracle refers to the event experienced by Moses our teacher, not to the transmission of the tradition from him to us. Rather, what Moses our teacher experienced—divine revelation—that’s a miracle, yes, it’s not something that happens according to the laws of nature. So the undermining, or improbability, of the miracle actually undermines the first assumption Maimonides notes here, the assumption that says Moses our teacher received the Torah from the Holy One, blessed be He, and did not invent it himself. The second argument, regarding the reliability of tradition, talks about the continuation—from Moses our teacher onward, the transmission from Moses our teacher to us. Even if Moses our teacher invented it, there is still room to discuss whether his invention was transmitted reliably from him to us. Therefore, what we are attacking each time is a different assumption. I could say, for example, that the tradition is completely reliable but Moses our teacher invented everything. That’s the most plausible option, right? Because if Moses our teacher invented everything, that means no miracle occurred, since Moses invented it—it’s not divine revelation transmitting the Torah to us. And on the other hand I trust the tradition, so okay, then I also accept that the tradition is reliable and everything is fine, and I don’t have to set the two possibilities against each other at all. I can say: Moses our teacher invented it, since miracles don’t happen, and from him to us the tradition really is reliable, everything is fine, nothing got corrupted. You don’t have to assume something got corrupted in order to say that the Torah was not given to Moses from Heaven. These aren’t two things standing opposite each other. They are two different things. So therefore the split Maimonides makes—that Torah from Heaven is basically based on two claims, this principle of Torah from Heaven is based on two claims: A, that Moses received it from Heaven, and B, that the Torah in our hands is that same Torah Moses received. In other words, that it was transmitted reliably from Moses our teacher to us. These are the two assumptions under discussion, and both are necessary. If one of them—if I accept only one of them—it won’t help at all. Let’s say Moses our teacher received Torah from Heaven, but the tradition from him to us is garbage, nothing was transmitted correctly or it is blatantly unreliable from him to us—then it does me no good to say Moses our teacher received Torah from Heaven, because the Torah in my hands, the one that reached me, has no connection to the Torah he received. By contrast, if I assume the second assumption, that the tradition is reliable, but without the first assumption, that Moses received the Torah from Heaven, then what do I care that the tradition is reliable? The tradition is reliable, but it is conveying to me Moses’ inventions. And so Maimonides says that in order to state this principle of Torah from Heaven, you need both assumptions; one alone is not enough. And David Hume’s attack really does set these two assumptions against one another. He is basically saying: the first assumption is highly implausible, and even if the second assumption is plausible, still at most I can say that Moses our teacher invented it and transmitted it to us reliably. But to say Torah from Heaven, I need both assumptions. He says: both assumptions together you cannot accept. And that is basically the point. Because when this is usually framed, it is framed as one against the other. People say: either Moses received Torah from Heaven and the tradition is reliable, or the tradition got corrupted and Moses did not receive Torah from Heaven. But those are not the only two options; there are many more. There is the possibility that assumptions one and two are both true, that both are false, that the first is true and the second false, that the second is true and the first false. There are four possibilities, not two. There’s some kind of conflation here, and in my columns about the testimony argument I addressed this because I had a debate with Jeremy Fogel on a podcast I did with him; I argued with him about the testimony argument. He identified these two assumptions as one, and I told him they are two different assumptions and must be treated separately. In any case, that is the split Maimonides makes at the beginning between these two components of belief in Torah from Heaven. Maybe still one word about the testimony argument: if we believe that this Torah in our hands is so because it was received from Moses our teacher, then indeed we are supposed to present defenses against David Hume’s argument. Because in fact this principle of Maimonides apparently does not stand up to the test of probability. There is a strong probabilistic argument against it. Meaning, even if the tradition is reliable, there is no reason to assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed Himself. It is much more plausible that something was invented. Invented things happen from time to time, but divine revelations never happen. Therefore it is preferable to assume this was something invented rather than that there was a divine revelation. If we present this as two options and ask what the probability is—or not probability, there’s no quantitative measure here, but what the plausibility of each is—then the plausibility is apparently that nothing supernatural happened here. So let me make a few comments; you can read it in more orderly form in my columns, but I’ll make a few comments here. First comment: the assumption that miracles do not occur is itself the result of induction. From our own lives we haven’t seen miracles happen, and from that we infer that it is generally unlikely that miracles happen at all. Okay? Now one has to remember that David Hume was the one who raised strong philosophical arguments against the principle of induction. So it’s very strange that he uses the principle of induction in such, I would even say, fanatical fashion, believing in it so absolutely and decisively, when he himself is one of the great challengers of the principle of induction. How can you learn from cases we have seen and generalize to a universal law? That’s David Hume’s own claim. It’s just a form of thought of ours, but there’s no reason to assume it’s actually true in reality as well. But he himself says: well, if we haven’t seen miracles, apparently there are no miracles. That is wild induction. And he considers it so strong that he is willing to reject a tradition even if I grant the tradition reliability. He says: even if the tradition’s reliability is high, the chance that there was a miracle is negligible. Therefore even if the reliability of the tradition is high, it doesn’t matter. Now to say that the chance is negligible means that you have almost absolute trust in the principle of induction while you yourself are one of its greatest challengers. So that is a bit strange specifically with David Hume, but leave David Hume aside—what do we answer for ourselves, regardless of Hume’s consistency? Here we need to make several comments. A basic thing underlying this challenge is a kind of begging the question. The atheist who raises this challenge against the testimony argument, against tradition, is basically assuming there is no God, and therefore miracles cannot happen either, because there is no one who can produce them. Nature proceeds according to its fixed laws, and miracles, which are deviations from nature—if such things happen at all—there has to be something beyond nature to produce them. Nature does not produce miracles; nature works according to laws. Okay? So someone who doesn’t believe in God assumes there are no miracles. But if you assume there are no miracles, then of course you reach the conclusion that the tradition is corrupted and there is no God, or at least no divine revelation. Obviously—you assumed it. So that is begging the question. By contrast, if I reach the conclusion—say philosophically—I reach the conclusion that there is a God, through philosophical arguments unrelated to tradition and its reliability, through other philosophical considerations, I reach the conclusion that there is a God—and many people do, including some of the, I don’t want to call them atheists, but among the secular, there are still people who believe in God, they just don’t believe in Torah or are not committed to Torah or don’t believe in the revelation at Sinai and so on. But there are many people who believe in God, not only religious people. So if I arrive at the conclusion that there is a God, I see no necessity to say that it could not be that God revealed Himself and gave the Torah. If I already assume He exists, unlike the atheist’s assumption, then why rule out the possibility that He revealed Himself and gave the Torah? That is really not implausible. But when you rule it out so decisively, as David Hume does, it is simply because you are assuming it cannot be. If you assume it cannot be, then you are begging the question. You assume it cannot be, and the conclusion is that it cannot be. Fine, thank you very much. That’s just begging the question; there is no argument here. Maybe another point: an argument of this kind often rests on the degree of trust I have in the informer or informant. Think of the situation—how could I convince David Hume that there are miracles in the world? I would have to bring him reliable testimony that a miracle occurred, right? But David Hume would not accept any such testimony, because he would make exactly his own calculation. He would say: miracles don’t happen; people sometimes lie or get things wrong, whatever; therefore this testimony might not be correct, no matter how reliable that witness is, but still maybe he missed something, maybe he’s lying, maybe all sorts of things can happen—five percent. But miracles are zero percent. So I prefer the assumption that the person is mistaken or lying over the assumption that he is telling the truth and that a miracle indeed occurred. Or in other words, David Hume will never accept testimony about the occurrence of a miracle. He cannot accept it, because he assumes in advance that miracles do not occur. So if you assume miracles do not occur, then of course you will not accept any testimony about their occurrence, and in any case you will remain entrenched in your position that miracles do not occur. Because every time testimony reaches you that a miracle occurred, you will reject it. And then in the end you say: yes, but there is no testimony, so why assume miracles occur? Do you see the strange reversal happening here? He is basically assuming that miracles do not occur and reaches the surprising conclusion that miracles do not occur. He is not willing to accept any testimony about miracles, and then he says: well, there is no testimony, so apparently miracles do not occur. That’s ridiculous. Now true, I also say miracles are something rare. It’s not something about which I accept testimony simply or easily. Usually if someone came to me and said a miracle occurred, I would be very suspicious of it. I can’t rule it out categorically, but I would be very suspicious. So I agree that testimony about a miracle has to pass serious tests of reliability. But you can’t say I’m not willing to accept any testimony about the occurrence of a miracle in categorical fashion. That’s just rigidity or conservatism or, I don’t know, begging the question—call it what you want. I also gave an example in those columns. I have a good secular friend. We had many arguments about these issues, from childhood, and afterward we happened to be in the army together, met there by chance, and served in the same place, and to this day we remain in good contact. In any case, he founded some company called SIT. What does that stand for? Systematic Inventive Thinking. Right, the claim is that one can arrive at inventions systematically. The source of this method is some Jew from the Soviet Union named Altshuller. He invented the method of systematic inventive thinking, later got to the United States, had two or three Israeli students, they taught my friend Amnon, and in the end he founded the company. The company is called SIT and among other things they provide services to various organizations around the world. Once he told me—in fact he even directed me to read it, he wrote it on their website—about some story that happened in the American Midwest. There was a town there with a great deal of tension among different segments of the population. Whites, Blacks, LGBTQ people, women, men, I don’t know, all sorts. In short, there were heavy tensions among different kinds of population groups. The people in the town decided to try to deal with those tensions. So they held some kind of gathering of, I don’t remember how many, I think sixteen representatives who sat together for two days. Diverse representatives—women, men, Blacks, whites, LGBTQ people, all sorts. Okay, sixteen people sat together for two days, I think sixteen, I don’t remember exactly, something like that. And my friend Amnon facilitated those two days. And he says that on the first day they held sessions around the tensions and what could be done to solve them; there they applied systematic inventive thinking. On the second day they all sat in a circle, and then Amnon says to them: one person should get up, say something about what happened yesterday, sit down, and invite someone else to stand up; then the other person will speak and say something about what happened yesterday, sit down, and invite a third person, and so on until all sixteen in the circle are done. Fine. So they got up—one person got up, said something about what happened yesterday, sat down, invited someone else, and so on. At some stage it ended, everyone had finished speaking, and Amnon moved to concluding remarks and intended to continue the discussion, the gathering. Then a Black woman raised her hand and said to him: wait, wait, one second. Did you notice that only the white people spoke? In other words, out of those sixteen, I think there were five or six Black participants. As they stood and invited one another and completed the round, and everyone was sure it was over, everyone had spoken, moving on—five or six Black participants had not spoken; only the whites had spoken. Amnon was in shock. He was really in shock. It simply could not be. He was convinced everyone had spoken; how can you miss such a thing? And this was at a conference whose purpose was to connect all the groups and create some kind of dialogue between them and mutual consideration and shared life and so on. At a conference designed to do that, this is what happened. Unbelievable. In short, they began discussing how this happened, and of course he used the event itself to advance the conference’s goal. Then I said to him—not on the spot but later—I was dealing with the testimony argument at some point, and I said to him: you know what? I have two ways to relate to the story you’re telling. Yes, just as David Hume would put it. One possibility is to say the event indeed occurred and what you’re saying is true. The second possibility: the event never happened, and you either don’t remember well, or you’re lying, or doing something else. Now this event is so improbable that it seems to me that the possibility that you’re imagining it, not remembering well, or lying—I said even more than that, after all you’re a liberal, you advocate equality and non-discrimination, you fight against discrimination and so on. You even have an interest in inventing such a story. This is a story that serves to convey your message wonderfully, perfectly. In other words, I even have a justification or rationalization for the hypothesis that you were actually lying when you told me this story. So now you tell me—you’re one of David Hume’s supporters, right? You’re secular. So tell me now which of these two possibilities I should choose. Should I believe you that this impossible event, this so-called miracle, occurred? Or should I assume you invented it, lied, remembered badly, imagined it, or are using it for educational purposes? However you define it, basically this story never happened. Clearly the second possibility is more plausible, and therefore I adopt the second possibility. In short: I don’t believe you. It never happened. Well, we had a little fun with that, of course he laughed and so on. But I told him: forget it, I do believe you, between us. But what do you answer me? What do you answer that question? The question is a good one. Meaning, that’s the question David Hume asks me as a believer. Now I’m asking you, as an atheist, as a secular person—why should I believe you? It’s exactly the same thing… In the end the conclusion was that if I really have high trust in the person speaking to me, and in that friend of mine I do have real trust—I know him well and I’m quite sure he did not lie and did not imagine it—then I will accept it even if the report concerns a very improbable event. Still, because I trust the reporter, I will accept that testimony. In other words, David Hume’s calculation is not right. As we said, it also begs the question and so on, but after all that, even if everything were correct, there is some level of trust I have in the informant, the witness, whatever, that would cause me to accept from him even a fantastic story. Now each person has to decide what level of trust is required, how fantastic the story seems to him, and accordingly determine what level of trust he requires from the witness and so on. But in the end, the fact is that I’m not willing to be in a position where I’m entrenched in my own begged question—that miracles cannot happen—and any testimony that arrives about a miracle I will not accept because of David Hume’s argument, while David Hume’s argument assumes miracles cannot happen. Why? Since we have never had testimony that a miracle occurred—but testimony I won’t accept even if it did exist, because of David Hume’s argument. So this is a loop with its tail in its mouth. And for that claim—and I too think miracles don’t happen, or that the chance they happen is very small—but for that claim to be a claim that is falsifiable, meaning one I’m willing to stand behind and also willing, if I’m honest enough, to accept its refutation or give it up, that is only if there is some situation in which I would actually be forced to give up the claim. If there is no situation that would make me give up the claim, then that claim is just begging the question, and I simply assume it and refuse to accept any criticism of it. There is no point to it; there is no logical basis for such a claim. What would be the refuting experiment, so that the claim would be scientific? How can one refute the claim that miracles do not happen? If a very reliable person came to me and testified in my hearing about a miracle he saw—he saw a miracle—and I would believe him because he is very reliable in my eyes, despite my tendency to think miracles do not happen. In other words, there are certain levels of trust at which I am willing to accept testimony about miracles. This reminds me of something else—I think I wrote this there too, I don’t remember anymore. Once, when I was in Yeruham, Rabbi Blumentzweig, who was the Rosh Yeshiva there, had gone away one day, and on that same day the Chozer of Chabad, Rabbi Yitzchak Kahn, of blessed memory, came to visit the yeshiva. I hosted him because Rabbi Blumentzweig wasn’t there, and he spoke with the students in the study hall, gave some kind of talk—they call it a shiur, I call it a talk in the study hall—and among other things he gave an example there that really struck me and I’ve used ever since. I imagine some of you here have already heard it from me; I use it from time to time. He said: think of two people, one blind and one sighted, one who sees. They enter a room, a sealed room with no windows, no doors except the one through which they entered, and they see that the room is packed with furniture, full of furniture, a complete mess, lots of furniture. Fine. They go out, close the door, lock it, and sit on chairs by the door, at the entrance. After an hour the sighted man gets up, opens the door, goes in, and is shocked. He says to his friend—the friend doesn’t see the furniture—the room is empty. There’s nothing there now, no one was there, there are no windows, no doors, and they themselves were sitting by the only door, so nothing passed through it. He says to his friend Berel: you won’t believe what I see here—or what I don’t see here—there is no furniture, the room is empty. So Berel says to him: what are you talking about? Earlier we saw—or felt, whatever—that the room was full of furniture, right? We saw. The room has no windows, no doors, nothing. The only door there is, we were sitting by it, no one passed through it, no piece of furniture went out through it. Therefore even now the room is full of furniture, QED. A conclusive logical proof that what you’re seeing is fantasy—or what you’re not seeing. The fact that you don’t see furniture is fantasy; you’ve suffered temporary blindness. Obviously the room is full of furniture. Would the sighted man accept the blind man’s logical argument? Probably not. After all, he sees: the room is empty of furniture. Now here too one can raise an argument similar to David Hume’s. After all, there is a logical proof that the room is full of furniture. It cannot be empty. I have a crushing logical argument that says the room is full of furniture. True, sight is a reliable sense, but sometimes it deceives us. There are mirages and optical illusions and so on, right? Now I have to compare two possibilities. One possibility: the room really is still full of furniture, as the logical argument says, and the fact that you don’t see it is, I don’t know, an optical illusion. Second possibility: what you see really is reality, the room is empty of furniture, and something went wrong with the logical argument. I don’t know, the logical argument is not correct. A logical argument being incorrect—that’s a miracle. We say: yes, there’s no such thing. The logical argument is correct. So by the same logic I’m supposed not to accept the sighted person’s visual testimony and tell him: the fact that you see an empty room is an optical illusion. The room is full of furniture. That is the conclusion, yes, from David Hume’s mode of thinking applied to this situation. He didn’t bring it in the context of David Hume, but I use it in that context. On the other hand, the person who sees looks into the room and sees that the room is empty. Will he accept the blind man’s argument? It’s a logical argument—how can he argue with such a thing? And he says: I don’t know how to argue with it, but I see the room is empty. And no, it’s not an optical illusion. I’m convinced it’s not an optical illusion. How are you convinced? Maybe the illusion is so successful that it manages to convince even you. How can you determine otherwise? I can—fact is, I can. And my trust in my visual system, even though I know there are sometimes optical illusions—I agree, there are, I know the phenomenon exists—but now I examine myself and I see something. My trust in vision is strong enough that I will accept these conclusions even though they are in the category of a miracle. It goes against a valid logical argument. Meaning, the decision that seemed so obvious to David Hume and his atheist followers—that clearly the miracle did not happen even if the price is to say that the apparently reliable chain failed in this case, since that is certainly the preferable option—is not obvious to me at all. No, I do not think it is obvious that that option is preferable. And my trust in the informer has to receive very serious weight in this discussion when I compare the two alternatives. And if I have good trust in the witness, or in the visual faculty in the example I brought, then I’m willing to accept findings or results or testimonies that are blatantly improbable. So that’s regarding the testimony argument, and again, anyone who wants can read the two columns on my website. Rabbi, a small question? Yes. The rabbi didn’t address this motif, this factor of the believer’s desire. That is, there’s a difference when—in the case of the friend the rabbi spoke about, maybe he had a strong interest in inventing it—but when someone comes with the stories, like now with the blind man, there he has no interest, so you relate differently. When someone comes with a strong interest in proving that God exists and so on, and he tells me miracle stories, that’s problematic. Fine, you can add the interest into the equation, okay. Then you’ll need even stronger testimony in order to accept that testimony. Okay, I’m not getting now into quantitative estimates of what the probabilities are here. I’m only saying there is an equation with two sides and one has to decide which side prevails. So if you put into that equation also the interests people have, you’re right, one hundred percent—put that in too. By the way, regarding interests: the interests of someone already living inside a religious tradition are indeed fairly strong. But how did that religious tradition come into being? The one who started it or invented it didn’t necessarily have an interest. Why would he do it? He had no interest in defending something, because that something didn’t yet exist. He was creating it. Therefore the question of interest has to be taken into account, but one should notice that it concerns only the later links in the chain, not the first links. The first links that created this tradition are not suspect of having an interest. Maimonides really says that they did not believe in him because of the miracles. Can’t hear? Maimonides really says in some laws that they did not believe in Moses our teacher because of the miracles. Okay. Meaning the chain really started not from the power of a miracle, not even from the revelation at Sinai according to Maimonides. Well, obviously—the revelation at Sinai wasn’t because of miracles, they simply saw it. Why is that unrelated? No, I meant in the sense that it started from a miracle. I didn’t say it was a miracle. I said the story is improbable; I’m using the term miracle only metaphorically, like the room with the furniture. So that’s regarding, yes, those two aspects Maimonides includes in the eighth principle: that Moses received the entire Torah from the Holy One, blessed be He, and that everything was transmitted to us reliably from Moses. Now here maybe a few more comments on what Maimonides writes. Another comment: does Maimonides really mean to say that the entire Torah in our hands, including its interpretations as he writes later on there, was all given to Moses at Sinai? I have no doubt that he does not. First of all, plainly it isn’t true; clearly it isn’t true. But second, I also have no doubt that Maimonides himself did not believe that. Maimonides himself says that what we received from Sinai was the thirteen hermeneutic principles, some interpretations of verses, and everything else is the later product of the sages of the generations. And yes, Maimonides even writes about the midrashic derivations that the sustaining derivations—that is, derivations that come to support a law already transmitted in tradition—are maybe three or four. And all the rest are creative derivations. Now creative derivations are derivations that generate new laws that did not exist until that point, meaning these are laws that obviously did not come from Moses our teacher. So we need to distinguish here between the Torah and its verses, and the interpretations given to it over the generations, the surrounding interpretations. And Maimonides includes here the claim that the interpretations are that way too, right? He says: “And likewise its accepted interpretation is also from the mouth of the Almighty. And the way we make the sukkah and the lulav and the shofar and the tzitzit and the tefillin and so on today is exactly the form that God told Moses and Moses told us, and he was only a faithful messenger in what he brought.” In other words, Maimonides is speaking here also about the interpretations, not only about the verses themselves, not only about the text of the Torah, but also about the surrounding interpretations. Now here it is no longer so simple. First of all, factually, as I said before, clearly that is not correct. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the interpretations in our hands today are interpretations created over the generations. That is beyond doubt. Maimonides himself writes this. But anyone familiar with the Talmud knows this is how it is. Talmudic passages discuss various laws, propose interpretations, and arrive at this or that conclusion. They do not consist merely of “I have such a tradition, you have such a tradition, so let’s see whose tradition is more reliable.” There are questions, there are answers, logic and reasoning are applied. In other words, it is obvious that the sages are the ones who created all these laws discussed in the Talmudic passages, not things merely passed down in tradition; otherwise what are they discussing there? Even about a gezerah shavah, where the Talmud says in several places that gezerah shavah is a kind of derivation that a person does not derive on his own unless he received it from his teacher—and Rashi continues, and his teacher from his teacher all the way back to Moses at Sinai. In other words, derivations by gezerah shavah are derivations that reached us from Moses at Sinai. Now Nachmanides and his students—the Ritva, the Ran, the Rashba—all write that even regarding gezerot shavot this is not true. This is supposedly something that the Talmud itself says was given in tradition from Sinai. If there is anything that is the very core, the most distilled essence of the tradition, concerning which it is obvious that everything was given from Sinai, it is gezerot shavot. Even there Nachmanides and his students say: that’s not true. They show that there are disputes about gezerot shavot, and therefore it is not plausible that gezerot shavot are derivations given from Sinai. So what does the Talmud mean when it says that a person does not derive one on his own unless he received it from his teacher? It means that the gezerah shavah itself is transmitted in tradition, but not everything is transmitted in tradition. For example, what is transmitted is that between these two words there is a gezerah shavah, and you need to understand what is done with that gezerah shavah—what laws are learned from it. Or alternatively, there is a tradition that this law comes out of a gezerah shavah, and they don’t tell you which gezerah shavah, between which words, and that you have to find. In other words, there are hints transmitted in tradition, but clearly there is a part in every gezerah shavah derivation that is created by the expositor himself and was not received in tradition. And that is gezerot shavot; I’m not even talking about all the other things that were never said to be a law given to Moses at Sinai, where it is obvious that they are creations of the sages of the generations. Therefore, the interpretations of the Torah—what Maimonides adds here—there is no doubt that they were not given to Moses at Sinai. Even though if you ask an average person on the street today, of course everything was given to Moses at Sinai, down to the last detail. Complete nonsense. We were simply educated that way, and we don’t dare admit even to ourselves that it isn’t true. It seems to me that Maimonides himself is precise here in his wording. He says there: “And likewise its accepted interpretation is also from the mouth of the Almighty.” What does “its accepted interpretation” mean? What is “its accepted interpretation”? Here I think Maimonides distinguishes—and he does this in many places. There are accepted interpretations, and that is what is called a law given to Moses at Sinai. And there are many other interpretations such that even if the law has been ruled and today there is an authoritative interpretation, still it is not an accepted interpretation, but rather one created over the generations. Therefore with regard to the interpretations, it seems to me that even in Maimonides it is incorrect to read this as people are usually accustomed to read it. Maimonides is not speaking here about all the Jewish law in our hands with all the interpretations within it. He is speaking about that part called “accepted interpretation.” Certain parts or certain interpretations, like the shape of the tefillin, like “the fruit of a beautiful tree,” or things like that, where Maimonides’ approach in several places is that these are laws given to Moses at Sinai. Fine, so there are some things that are indeed so. It says “they shall be as frontlets”—what are frontlets? Presumably the Holy One, blessed be He, explained to Moses what “frontlets” means. But there are many derivations that are not explanations of words; they add things—“the Lord your God shall you fear,” to include Torah scholars. It is not necessarily the case that the Holy One, blessed be He, told Moses our teacher: derive this “et” and include Torah scholars from it. There is no unclear word here that the Holy One, blessed be He, needed to explain to Moses our teacher when He gave him the Torah. So therefore, when Maimonides here also adds the interpretations, he is speaking about the accepted interpretations, not all the interpretations there are. But I’ll say more than that. Everything written in the Talmud—after all it says in several places: everything that an experienced student will one day innovate, the Holy One, blessed be He, showed Moses at Sinai. There are versions that read: everything that a young student will one day innovate. In short, everything innovated over the generations, everything we have today, was all basically given to Moses at Sinai. So the Tosafot Yom Tov, in his introduction to his commentary on the Mishnah, speaks about this a bit. And he basically says that it says the Holy One, blessed be He, showed it to Moses at Sinai; it doesn’t say He conveyed it to him. What does that mean? He showed him in prophecy what the sages of future generations would innovate, but it is not that he received these things and transmitted them in the oral tradition from generation to generation and we received them from him. No; he was simply shown in prophecy everything that would be innovated over the generations. That is one qualification. But the truth is I don’t think one needs to get to that. The simpler explanation of those rabbinic sayings basically says that we are supposed to relate to the entire Torah in our hands as if it were the Torah given to Moses at Sinai. The status of the Torah in our hands—the halakhic, normative status of the entire Torah in our hands—is the status of a Torah as if it had been given to Moses at Sinai, every detail. Not a historical claim that everything in our hands really was given to Moses at Sinai. It is a normative claim: every detail in our hands has a status or should be treated as though it were given to Moses at Sinai. That is how we should relate to things. And why? Because the Torah was given, as Nachmanides writes, according to the understanding of the sages, according to its interpreters. Right, the Torah was given quite cryptically. Many things are unclear. Therefore the giver of the Torah presumably assumed that it would undergo interpretation over the generations. And from His point of view, apparently, that is perfectly fine—that is what He intended. That is plausible; one can infer it from verses, but it is also common sense. And therefore the interpretations created over the generations are not interpretations conveyed to Moses at Sinai, nor was he shown them in prophecy, and there is no need to get into all these things; rather, those interpretations are interpretations created by the sages over the generations. But since the Torah was given according to its interpreters, then from the Holy One’s perspective whatever the authorized interpreters derive from the Torah over the generations is, from His perspective, like something given at Sinai. It obligates us the way things given at Sinai obligate us. Therefore all those statements appearing in the Talmud—everything that an experienced student will one day innovate, and so on—in my opinion should be read as normative statements and not as historical statements. It’s not that historically it was really given there; rather, normatively it was given there. Another comment about the Written Torah. Up to now I’ve spoken about the interpretations and so on. What about the Written Torah itself? Here we already get into questions of biblical criticism and all kinds of things of that sort. I haven’t dealt with that much and I’m not very interested in it, I don’t have much to say. I’ll only say in principle, maybe explain why it’s not so interesting to me. It’s not so interesting to me because even the belief that the Written Torah was given at Sinai also needs to be treated as a normative statement and not as a historical statement. There are certain verses where it says “to this very day,” right? It has already been noted—by Ibn Ezra, I think, and others. “To this very day” means that the writer is writing later than the time of the events. In other words, “to this very day” means there is some later writer describing the events from his own point of view. Therefore these verses look like some kind of addition by a later editor. And similarly there are others—“the kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned over Israel.” Right, when did a king reign over Israel? Hundreds of years after the giving of the Torah. In other words, these kings of Edom are kings who did not exist at the time of the Torah; they are kings who existed after the Torah had already been given. This means there are certain parts of the Torah for which it is very, very plausible that they are later additions—later edits or additions. I don’t think there are many such cases, but here and there there are a few verses where it is fairly clear they are later additions. So what does it mean that the entire Torah in our hands—and now I’m speaking about the text of the Written Torah, not the interpretations and Jewish law and the Oral Torah and all that—that the Written Torah, here too I want to claim that the statement that everything was given to Moses at Sinai is a normative statement and not a historical statement. In other words, the status of the entire biblical text in our hands is as though all of this text was given to Moses our teacher by the Holy One, blessed be He, at Sinai. That is not factually true, or not necessarily factually true, but that is how it should be treated. Why? Because those editors or those later additions were added with divine inspiration, added by prophets. Even researchers talk about Ezra editing it, meaning these were prophets who edited this thing; it wasn’t just some riffraff inventing all kinds of things. So the editors, with divine inspiration, edited this whole business, and it still has the status of the word of God. Beyond that, there are also presumptions in Jewish law. What do I mean by presumptions? After all, regarding the vast majority of verses in the Torah I have no knowledge or clear indication whether they are late or early, whether they were given to Moses at Sinai or are later additions. I’m not speaking about “to this very day.” This is mainly relevant regarding legal verses. So I have no indications. So what do I do? I’m in doubt. I don’t know whether this thing is a later addition or not. What do I do in a case of doubt? There are presumptions. What is the presumption? The presumption is that everything was given to Moses at Sinai unless proven otherwise. In other words, so long as it has not been proven, I assume presumptively that it is part of the Torah that was indeed given to Moses at Sinai. Therefore, because of the laws of presumption too, I can reach the same result I mentioned before: that for me it is like—actually I think the halakhic decisors write this, I think it appears in the Rema as well in Yoreh De’ah—what happens when there is a contradiction in versions between Torah scrolls? They write a certain word differently, in a different form. In a responsum Rabbi Akiva Eiger counts, I think, seven letters for which there are disputes between different textual versions of Torah scrolls. What does one do in such a case? The Rema says: check all the scrolls and follow the majority. In other words, if the majority writes it in a certain form, then for us that is the correct writing of the scroll. Is that really an indication that that is the correct writing? Not necessarily. Who says the majority is right? Maybe the minority is right. No—but there is a halakhic rule that we follow the majority. In exactly the same way there is a halakhic rule of presumption. Presumption is not a tool—well, this is the kind of thing discussed in conceptual Talmudic study—but presumption is not necessarily a clarifying principle. It’s not that the presumption really reveals to me what the truth is. Presumption tells me how I am supposed to act in cases of doubt. So if I am told that there is a presumption that the Torah in our hands was given to Moses at Sinai, then whenever a verse has no clear indication that it is a later addition, my assumption is that I let the verse stand on its presumption. Not because that is necessarily true, but because that is how I am supposed to behave halakhically. Presumption is a halakhic rule that instructs me how to conduct myself in doubts. And that is enough for me to relate to the entire Torah in our hands as something given to Moses at Sinai, almost even in the historical sense, but certainly in the normative sense. Okay? Therefore I think that even regarding the Written Torah one must see this principle—the eighth foundation, yes, the eighth principle—as a normative principle and not necessarily a historical one. What? Yes. Can I make a comment? Yes, yes. How do you relate to external sources? There’s now a lecture series at Beit Avi Chai about Greek texts that explain everything you’re saying about the Bible differently, and the lecturer began with the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Completely outside Judaism, they mention the name Moses and that he took a group of people and went out with them into the desert because the Egyptians could no longer continue dealing with them because of what she calls some case of leprosy and the like—but these are Greek texts, written and documented. How should one properly relate to those texts? I have no idea, I’m not familiar with those texts, so I can’t tell you. But what does “written and documented” mean? The Torah too is written and documented. The question is why should you regard the Greek sources as more reliable? About the Torah we have a tradition spanning many generations. But I don’t know, it has to be checked; I’m not familiar with those texts. But so what if there are certain texts that give other interpretations of the events? In any case, that’s regarding the point that everything was given to Moses at Sinai. Another comment: Maimonides writes here that there is no difference between “And the sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan,” “And his wife’s name was Mehetabel daughter of Matred,” and “I am the Lord your God” and “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” All of it is from the mouth of the Almighty, all of it is the Torah of the Lord, perfect, holy, and true. Now first of all, when Maimonides writes such a thing, it is clear that in the background he has some opposite view in mind. In the simple view, “Hear O Israel” and “I am the Lord your God” are the most central verses there are in the Torah, while “Mehetabel daughter of Matred,” or I don’t know, “Timna was sister of Lotan”—those are just okay, verses with some story or random historical names; what holiness is there in those verses? Against that Maimonides writes what he writes. In other words, when you write this way—and Maimonides does not say, “The law of ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ is like the law of ‘And the earth was chaos and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’ Verse one is like verse two; there is no distinction between them.” He did not choose by accident two verses as against two verses, where the first two are supposedly the least important and least holy, let’s call them that, and the latter two are the most central and most holy in the Torah. It is precisely for that reason that he chose those examples. In other words, there is some initial assumption that does distinguish between these verses and does see “Hear O Israel” and “I am the Lord” as the holiest and most central verses. And then Maimonides’ claim is: no, there really is no difference. Now why am I reminded of this? Because it’s really the column I uploaded this morning, I think. I uploaded it to the website this morning. But I’ve already said this many times, here too in lecture series and in writing, that there is some difference between the narrative parts of the Torah and the legal parts of the Torah. One can present this through Rashi’s very first comment on the Torah. Rashi brings Rabbi Yitzchak’s question: why didn’t the Torah begin with “This month shall be for you the beginning of months”? Because that is where the commandments we received begin. Therefore one needs an explanation why the first quarter-plus of the Chumash appears in the Torah—or really why all the non-legal sections appear in the Torah. Rabbi Yitzchak’s assumption is that only laws should appear in the Torah. Everything that is not law requires an explanation, a justification for why it appears in the Torah. So what answer does he give? The answer he gives is: “He declared to His people the power of His works, to give them the inheritance of nations,” so that if the nations of the world say “You are robbers, for you conquered the lands of the seven nations,” you should tell them: the Holy One, blessed be He, created the earth and gave it to whom it was upright in His eyes to give it. He created it and gave it to whom it was upright in His eyes. In other words, the Holy One, blessed be He, is the owner of the house, He created the world and therefore He can give the land to whomever He wants. In other words, Rashi’s answer is that the book of Genesis was written in order to show that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world and therefore has the right to give it to whomever He wants. Fine, I’ve heard better, more convincing answers, but even if I go with this answer, that answer in itself can explain the creation story, chapter one of Genesis, where it describes how the Holy One, blessed be He, creates the world. But we have another quarter of a Chumash that still needs explanation for why it is there. What is the explanation for the rest of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus? And why do all the other non-legal portions of the Torah appear? Apparently Rashi, or Rabbi Yitzchak, didn’t answer the question. Even what he did answer seems to me a little dubious, but on that part he did not answer at all. So what is the answer? It seems to me that Rashi does hint at the answer, because Rashi says: “He created it and gave it to whom it was upright in His eyes.” The word upright is a key word, because the sages call Genesis the Book of the Upright, the book of the upright ones. In other words, the patriarchs, who kept the Torah even before the giving of the Torah, did so out of some inner uprightness. That’s how the Netziv speaks about it in his introduction. And basically that is why it is called the Book of the Upright, the book of the upright ones. What Rashi really wants to say is that if the Holy One, blessed be He, had only wanted to teach us or give us merely the legalistic, force-based basis of the matter, then indeed only chapter one of Genesis would have been enough—to show that He created the earth, and if He created it then He is the owner and can give it to whomever He wants. That’s it, full stop, story over. But the Holy One, blessed be He, is not content with the force-based or legalistic argument; He also wants to provide a substantive justification. So He says: first of all, I have the right to give it to whomever I want. Beyond that, let me explain why I chose precisely these people to receive the land. They were upright in My eyes because they were upright—they conducted themselves uprightly, morally, and so on. Therefore, Rabbi Yitzchak’s answer actually explains the necessity of the whole book of Genesis. Because Genesis comes to show that the patriarchs were upright, conducted themselves uprightly, and therefore they were chosen to receive the Land of Israel. And since the Holy One, blessed be He, has the right to give it to whomever He wants because He created it, He can therefore give it to them. And we are their descendants, so we also need the historical unfolding—yes, Mehetabel daughter of Matred and so on, Timna sister of Lotan. Those historical chains basically show whose descendants we are, and therefore by their merit we too can hold the land. But what this really means is that Genesis is not really a polemical tool to argue with the Palestinians. I don’t assume they will be persuaded so quickly even if they read Rashi’s first comment on Genesis. The book is intended to teach us what it means to be upright. What is an upright person, a moral person, how one should behave in life. And for that you need the non-legal parts of the Torah. The non-legal parts of the Torah come to teach us values, morality, and the like. It seems to me that this is what Rashi wants to say, and therefore he inserts “and gave it to whom it was upright in His eyes.” Except that for me that was only the introduction. Because when we look practically and ask ourselves: do we really learn moral values from the Torah? On that, yes, there have been endless arguments—I’ve been carrying on these arguments for years. I claim no. We do not learn anything from the Torah, certainly not moral values. First of all, factually that is how it is, I think. I don’t know of a single person who has shown me that some moral value is learned from it. And I’ll say more than that: to learn a moral value from the Torah means that if I believe morality says to do X, and then I read some passage in the Torah and come to the conclusion that actually X is not right—that not-X is the right way to act—what should someone who learns his morality from the Torah do? He should say: okay, then apparently I was mistaken; X is not the right way, not-X is the right way. Okay, and that’s it, I learned that from the Torah. That never happens. It simply never happens. Practically speaking. What does happen? And I gave an example from the weekly Torah portion, which is why I raised it now—I spoke about it on Sabbath. At the end of the portion Joseph buys all the fields of the Egyptians for Pharaoh, leaves them as tenant farmers who must give a fifth to Pharaoh even after the years of famine, completely changes the situation in Egypt. It looks bad, what Joseph did there. Some sort of general abuse of people and a brutal exploitation of distress. In the She’iltot on that passage he really discusses a bit the prohibition of inflating prices and hoarding produce—there is a Talmudic passage in Bava Batra—and simply, what Joseph did there is prohibited, on the plain meaning. Not halakhically, and certainly not morally. More than that: I brought what Rashi writes there, that Joseph relocated the Egyptians, moving the people of this city to that city and the people of that city to this city—what the logistics officer did to us in regular army service: the clinic moves to maintenance, maintenance goes to supply, supply goes to the clinic—every so often he would do crazy transfers like that, occupational therapy, so to speak. In any case, what is the point of that? So Rashi brings a midrash saying that he did it so his family, his brothers, would not feel like exiles in the land of Egypt. Everyone would be exiles. Wonderful. So Joseph abused all the Egyptians so that his twelve brothers and their families would not feel like exiles? Does that sound like reasonable conduct to you? It doesn’t to me. To abuse an entire country because I have twelve brothers and I don’t want them to feel exiled? That’s bizarre. And Rashi and the midrash bring this as praise of Joseph. Not only are they not bothered by the question and trying to find an answer—no, it isn’t even a question. On the contrary, they see this as great praise for Joseph, that he cared for his brothers so they wouldn’t feel exiled. Sounds bizarre. Fine, so I offered various explanations, this way and that way; one can remain with the conclusion that Joseph really didn’t behave properly, or find justifications that he did behave properly. But one thing is common to all these approaches: none of us will learn from this portion that indeed it is a commandment to inflate prices and hoard produce—hoard with an aleph, not to stop with an ayin. That, no. Or we will explain why what Joseph did fits our moral principles; we’ll give it some interpretation. Then what happens? We remain with the principles we believed in beforehand. The study of this portion does not change them for us. Or we will say Joseph was in the wrong. Okay, possible; the sages sometimes criticize the patriarchs for things they did. Okay? In that case too, what comes out is that the moral principles with which I came to study the passage are those that remain with me at its end. Either way, however we choose, I do not change my moral principles after studying this Torah portion. Even in a place where they praise the person for having done it. Why? Because it is obvious to me that if morality says such-and-such, then that is what morality says. No biblical passage will convince me otherwise. On the contrary, what I will do is try to explain the biblical passage so that it does not contradict my moral principles. Then what comes out? What comes out is that we study all these biblical passages, but in the end we remain with the same moral principles with which we began. So what are we doing this for? Those moral principles we derive from our conscience—I don’t know, from wherever one derives morality—but not from the verses, not from Torah study. Now it may be that historically, and it is even plausible historically, the Torah did influence the moral values of the world, certainly of the Western world. Historically I agree. But today, when I ask myself why study this or that Torah portion, from no such portion will I learn a moral principle. It simply does not happen. Now I brought one example and made general statements, but in one of my earlier columns I spoke about rabbinic aggadah too, where in my opinion we also learn nothing from them, and also from the non-legal passages in the Torah, and I challenged people: bring me examples. Bring me examples where you thought one thing, you studied an aggadah or a biblical passage, and came to the conclusion that you were wrong, that you changed your values. That you changed your values. I did not receive even one example. There aren’t any. There simply aren’t. And that means that when Maimonides speaks about these two verses, “Mehetabel daughter of Matred” or “Timna was sister of Lotan,” as opposed to “Hear O Israel” and “I am the Lord your God,” he says they have the same level of holiness. They were all given from the mouth of the Almighty, all are part of the text of the Torah. But the truth is that the substantive difference between them remains. That initial assumption that Maimonides argues against remains. That initial assumption basically says: look, those verses like “Timna was sister of Lotan”—with all due respect, I learn nothing from them. What do they teach me? Nothing. They teach me the fact that Lotan’s sister was Timna. Okay. But values, or things of value for my life—nothing. By contrast, legal verses, “I am the Lord your God” or “Hear O Israel”—not exactly legal, maybe, but never mind—such verses, then from the standpoint… their holiness is not greater, but it seems to me that studying them nevertheless has a different significance. The initial assumption that Maimonides rejects is based on the real experience each of us has. And in the real experience each of us has, there certainly is a difference between these two kinds of verses. Maimonides only says that despite that, on the level of metaphysical holiness—I don’t know what to call it—the spiritual status of the verses, all were given at Sinai, all were given by the Holy One, blessed be He, and all have the same level of holiness. However, Maimonides also adds—and with this I’ll conclude—that in all these things there is also, yes, “all of it is the Torah of the Lord, perfect, pure, holy, true.” And later he writes: “and the full extent of its wisdom cannot be grasped; it is longer than the earth in measure and broader than the sea; and a person has nothing to do but pray like David, the anointed of the God of Jacob, who prayed: ‘Open my eyes, that I may behold wonders from Your Torah.’” In other words, it at least implies—it’s not written explicitly, but it implies—that Maimonides apparently understands that within these verses too there is something to learn. Hidden there are secrets and wonders and so on. It’s not just a formal statement that these verses have the holiness of a Torah scroll like legal verses or “Hear O Israel” or “I am the Lord your God”; rather, there are probably also secrets there for one who knows how to extract them. Fine, I don’t know, in any case. Maybe Maimonides knew; I don’t. Okay, up to here. If there are any comments or questions? I wanted… I was thinking, if you said earlier that one can, for example, acquire values or bring in values by means of rhetoric. Meaning if, in an artistic way or in some way, you succeed in opening the other person up and getting him to try to see reality from another point of view, maybe he will change his scale of values in some sense. When we read the Torah and genuinely struggle with this portion of Vayishlach—I’ve struggled with it for years—it creates openness in us, and maybe at some stage we really will succeed in finding something to learn from it and develop. Maybe. Maybe, but I’m looking for examples. So far I haven’t found any. I’m not ruling it out categorically, but factually it just doesn’t happen. Regarding… how… how nevertheless… on another occasion I can bring the rabbi personal examples… I don’t know. Okay, I’d be glad. Fine, otherwise how do we develop morally if not through tools like Torah? We develop through all kinds of things. We can get inspiration from Dostoevsky or from the Torah or from whomever you like. I don’t think there’s any difference. So those are sources of inspiration, that’s not learning. I encounter it and it sharpens my insights. Yes, but no one can impart values to me because they have no justification. So how would I receive them? Only through some kind of openness and impression… through the choice you have, but one can help a person. Education in values also has an element of learning. It isn’t only internalization and absorption. Sometimes you need to help a person conceptualize things that are already inside him. In geometry too, the teacher basically explains to you what you already know in principle, because it’s all already contained within the axioms. So there is… that too is a certain kind of… also a type… a certain kind of learning. But values have no justification, whereas in geometry you can show him just… what? I didn’t understand. No, values have no justification, so it’s more problematic than geometry. No, there’s no justification, but still there is a way to become aware that values are right or not right, even though they have no justification. I call it observation—moral observation, ethical observation. So I’m saying, beyond moral realism, when you see a person who seems to you the embodiment of perfection, and you want to learn from his way of life, sometimes at first you don’t understand it, it seems strange, but gradually you suddenly do understand. I understand, but precisely—I showed you that practically that’s not what happens. Because when you—Joseph was supposedly the embodiment of perfection, one of the patriarchs, and from him one can learn everything, right? I read that portion and it did not change my moral views by a millimeter. But for example, the fact that he was able not to hate his brothers to such an extent—something I find hard to grasp to this day—we haven’t met a person like that. So practically, then tell me which person, yes? Which person, and what do you learn from him? Because I need to aspire to be like Joseph on that point. How to actually be it, I won’t, but at least I aspire. No, aspire like Joseph in what sense? To abuse Egypt for the sake of… No no, Heaven forbid. No, in relation to his brothers, in that he didn’t hate them. Right, but his relationship to his brothers—fine, that too I know; I didn’t learn it from Joseph. I also know that’s a good value; I didn’t learn it from Joseph. It could be that he’s an exemplary figure who can serve as a model or something like that, but he doesn’t teach me something. It’s not that when I read the portion I learned something new that I didn’t know before. Besides, learning values is not yes or no—it’s also a quarter, not just one or zero, even a quarter no—and it cannot really be described in words, and when one sees an example that’s how one learns. I don’t know examples of that and I don’t think it happens. Fine. Okay, anyone else? Fine, then we inaugurated the new device. In a moment we’ll listen to the recording and see how it came out. Could you hear okay? Yes, excellent. Nice, and that’s without a microphone. A pleasure. Okay, goodbye, good night.