The Path of Halacha – Emotion Versus Intellect – Lesson 7

Table of Contents

• [0:17] Opening and deviating from the planned topic of the lecture
• [3:35] The move to chapter 9 of Tanya
• [7:24] An explanation of kelipat nogah and the kelipot
• [8:51] Knowing good and evil after Adam’s sin
• [10:45] The divine soul in the intellect and in the body
• [17:01] The joke about the Jewish orthopedist
• [20:31] An example from morality in the theory of maximizing good
• [33:11] Differences between the animal soul and the divine soul
• [34:39] Intuition versus emotion – what exactly is the distinction
• [38:11] Belief in God – emotion or intuition
• [39:44] The concept: intuition is not emotion
• [43:43] The case of the woman who was raped – a Jewish law decision
• [46:02] Conflict between heart and mind – who rules?
• [52:28] The sages of France versus the sages of Spain – sanctification of God’s name
• [55:04] Summary: the struggle of the divine soul versus the animal soul

Summary

General overview.

The speaker returns to his discussions about changes in Jewish law and the adoption of values from outside, and links this to the tension between serving God out of identification and serving Him out of obedience, as reflected in Maimonides at the end of chapter 8 of Laws of Kings and in the words of the Aglei Tal, who says that inner identification is not the whole picture; there is also a basic obligation to obey. From there he shifts the discussion to the axis of emotion versus intellect through chapter 9 of Tanya, and formulates the struggle between the divine soul and the animal soul not merely as a struggle between good and evil, but as a struggle over who leads the person. He shows how even moral conceptions and rational theories can be intellectual clothing for emotion, and distinguishes between subjective emotion and intuition as a claim about reality. He concludes that this subtle struggle sometimes explains processes of change in Jewish law, and that one must examine very carefully what is driving them.

Change in Jewish law, identification, and obedience

The speaker presents the question of what causes the desire to change Jewish law and how outside values are absorbed and realized. He cites Maimonides regarding a resident alien who fulfills commandments because of rational conviction and not because the Torah commanded them, and from this emerges a conception of serving God that can sound coercive, as though it suppresses identification. He attributes to the Aglei Tal the position that emotional identification is not harmed, but rather limited, so that it will not be the sole foundation; the deeper basis is the very obligation to obey.

Chapter 9 of Tanya: the dwelling place of the souls and the war over the body

The speaker quotes the opening of chapter 9 of Tanya: the animal soul, from kelipat nogah, dwells in the heart, in the left chamber full of blood, and desires, anger, and the like spread from the heart throughout the body and also rise to the brain to think about them, reflect on them, and rationalize them. He quotes that the divine soul dwells in the intellect in the head and spreads to the limbs and also to the heart, in the right chamber, and that love of God, joy, and glory are born from contemplation in the mind, and that the other holy traits in the heart come from Chabad in the intellect. He quotes the image that “the body is called a small city,” and that the two souls battle like two kings over one city so that all the limbs will submit to their authority.

Kelipat nogah, Adam’s sin, and the internalization of the impulse

The speaker explains that kelipat nogah is the instinctual dimension of the human being, where good and evil are mixed, and connects this to the four kelipot and to the Ari’s idea of the snake’s skin, and to the contamination that the snake cast into Adam and Eve. He brings in The Guide for the Perplexed and Nefesh HaChayim (gate 1), which describe the snake as initially acting from outside, but after eating from the Tree of Knowledge they become “knowers of good and evil” in the sense of an inner fusion, so that good and evil enter into them. He says that after the sin, a person experiences the good inclination and the evil inclination as though they are his own desires, even though the inclinations are not identical with his true self, and it becomes hard to distinguish between what he wants and what the inclinations dictate, both for good and for bad.

Reversing the struggle: from right-left to up-down, and then everything against everything

The speaker says that the familiar picture of the good inclination versus the evil inclination is replaced, in the view of the author of Tanya, by a picture in which both the good inclination and the evil inclination are inclinations, and a person is not supposed to be led by either of them. He presents a stage at which the struggle seems to be a struggle between above and below: the divine soul in the intellect and the animal soul in the heart. But he says that the author of Tanya adds that the struggle is not only head versus heart, because each soul seeks to rule the entire “city” and conquer both the intellectual dimension and the emotional-instinctual dimension, so the struggle is really “everything against everything.” He defines the difference between the souls as their point of departure and root, meaning where the “palace” is: the divine soul is rooted in the mind, and the animal soul is rooted in the heart.

Dov Sadan’s joke and the process of lowering the axis from the head

The speaker quotes Dov Sadan as saying that the next revolutionary will be a Jewish orthopedist, because Abraham our father or Moses our teacher taught people to follow the head and not the belly, “that man” taught people to follow the heart, Freud brought the whole issue down to “below the belt,” and the next stage leaves only the feet, hence an orthopedist. He says the joke is deep because it describes a real process of moving from rational conduct to emotional conduct and lower still.

Moral philosophy: an intellectual theory as clothing for emotion

The speaker describes the attempt in moral philosophy to define a principle such as “to do the maximum good for the maximum number of people or creatures” and derive obligations from it. He describes how one tests a theory through thought experiments, such as a situation on a deserted island where nine people eat one in order to save the majority, and then the result is rejected as “unreasonable,” and the theory is revised until it fits the intuitions. He asks who determines that it is unreasonable, and explains that conscience or moral intuition pushes the revision, so the theory becomes a logical description of the total set of feelings. He says that in such a situation, the person is not really being guided by the theory; rather, the theory is being guided by what he already wants. And that, he says, is a description of the animal soul, in which the heart decides and the mind merely rises “to rationalize them” and give the feelings a rational form.

Divine soul: deciding from the head even against the heart

The speaker says that a person of the divine soul starts with the theory, and if it says that the nine should eat the tenth, then that is what he is obligated to do even if the heart recoils, and the heart is required not to interfere. He says that presenting things this way makes listeners prefer the “people of the animal soul” to those who seem like automatons, but he signals that the problem is deeper, because the theory itself also comes from sources and interpretation.

Emotion versus intuition: a fundamental distinction

The speaker distinguishes between emotion as a subjective event that is not evaluated in terms of truth and falsehood, and intuition as a type of thinking without systematic argumentation, but one that still makes a claim about the world and can be tested. He says that a statement like “I have an intuition that the solution is seven and a quarter” is different from “I love” or “I hate,” because it is true or false in relation to reality. He presents the mathematical genius as someone who sees the truth intuitively before the proof. He argues that belief in the Holy One, blessed be He, is often mistakenly treated as an “emotion” in a world that recognizes only logical proofs, and as a result, faith, aesthetics, and ethics get pushed into the subjectivity of “everyone with his own feelings,” to the point that opposing moral reactions are treated as equivalent with no criterion of truth. He says that in morality, what is sometimes called a “strong feeling” is actually intuition and not emotion, and that therefore a thought experiment that refutes a theory may not be “coming from the heart” at all, but from the head, in the sense of intuition.

Jewish law examples and provocations: “Don’t you have a heart?” versus subordinating the heart

The speaker describes cases attributed to Abraham Chazi of Jerusalem: one involving a gentile whom he did not save on the Sabbath, and another involving the wife of a kohen who was raped and became forbidden to her husband, and the public uproar that was framed mainly as the claim, “What, don’t you have a heart?” He argues that those Jewish law decisors had torment of conscience and heartbreak, but heartbreak does not determine the practical ruling, because a person of the divine soul subordinates the heart to the intellect when there is a conflict. He stresses that “animal soul” does not mean bad people, because even in the animal soul there is both good and evil; the distinction is whether the good and evil come from the gut or from the head.

Emotional motivation versus valid reasoning, hostility, agunot, and sanctification of God’s name

The speaker says that emotional motivations are permitted and even natural, but the reasoning and the Jewish law mechanism have to “hold water” on their own and not be a disguise for emotion. He brings the argument about desecrating the Sabbath to save a gentile because of hostility, and calls a person a “fraud” if he extends that even to a case where there is no hostility, like a deserted island, just in order to justify a moral agenda, because then the theory changes according to the feeling. He distinguishes between using valid Jewish law tools out of a desire to be lenient for agunot and a situation in which one permits something without Jewish law grounding. He mentions the dispute between the sages of France and the sages of Spain regarding sanctification of God’s name, and the scholarly explanation based on the circumstances of the Crusades versus a more relaxed environment, and argues that a halakhic decisor does not decide on the basis of psychological-social circumstances but on the basis of proofs and reasoning, even though motivations certainly existed. He says that a real conflict between natural feelings and theory is a sign of a person of the divine soul, whereas a person of the animal soul shapes the theory so that it will not clash with his feelings.

Summary of the axis: the struggle behind changes in values and changes in Jewish law

The speaker concludes that the struggle between the divine soul and the animal soul is not a simple struggle between emotion and intellect, because emotion rises to the brain and intellect descends to the heart in order to create identification. He formulates the struggle as a tension between intuition as part of the intellect and emotion that paints itself in intellectual colors through the process of “rising to the brain in the head to think about them, reflect on them, and rationalize them.” He says that this struggle very often also lies behind changes in Jewish law, and that one must examine very carefully where it is coming from.

Well, actually what I wanted to do today just wasn’t really part of the plan. It came to me בעקבות the previous two times, when we spoke about changes in Jewish law, about adopting various values from outside, how exactly a person—how things like that change, what really causes the desire to change, and whether, and how, it can be implemented at all. And by the end of that, I think that’s more or less where we finished, with Maimonides at the end of chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings, right? I mentioned that Maimonides, I think, regarding a resident alien who keeps the commandments only because his own reason compels him and not because they were commanded in the Torah. And in fact there’s some sort of conception here of what proper service of God is, and it doesn’t always fit what people assume at first glance. There’s a kind of service here of someone “as though compelled by a demon,” so to speak—a kind of attempt to suppress inner emotional identification and specifically force a person into a mode of service out of obedience, blind obedience, without identification. So I think we already managed to talk a little about these matters, right? From the introduction to the Eglei Tal, where it’s clear that this is not supposed to damage emotional identification, but only to make sure that emotional identification is not the whole picture. It can be only part of the picture, while there is some more fundamental basis, and that is simply the obligation to obey. So that aspect, and also in the context of the whole issue of changing values, brought something to mind that I think is still worth doing in this context, and that’s why I’m doing something today that isn’t exactly according to plan. Next week I’ll continue with the plan. In these two models that Maimonides describes—service out of identification, or service because of obedience—there arises, maybe not always justifiably, but it does arise, the question of emotion versus intellect. Meaning: am I supposed to serve in an experiential, emotional way, and so on, or in an intellectual and cold way, let’s call it that. It doesn’t exactly overlap with the previous question, but there are connections. I want to talk a little about these matters. Some of you may already have heard this; I’ve already spoken about it in the yeshiva. I want to start a bit from chapter 9 of the Tanya and see what the meaning of these things is. I spoke about this on Purim when I was here some—I don’t remember—one year, two years ago, something like that. What? I don’t remember anymore. Anyway, in chapter 9 of the Tanya, it begins like this: “Now, the dwelling-place of the animal soul, which derives from kelipat nogah in every Jew, is in the heart, in the left chamber, which is full of blood; and it is written, ‘for the blood is the soul.’ Therefore all desires, boasting, anger, and the like are in the heart, and from the heart they spread through the whole body, and also rise to the brain in the head, to think about them, meditate on them, and become clever about them, just as the blood, whose source is in the heart, spreads from the heart to all the limbs and also rises to the brain in the head. But the dwelling-place of the divine soul is in the brains in the head, and from there… it spreads to all the limbs, and also into the heart, into the right chamber, where there is no blood. And as it is written: ‘A wise man’s heart is at his right’; and it is the love of God, like fiery flames blazing in the hearts of the enlightened, who understand and contemplate with the knowledge in their minds matters that arouse love. And likewise the joy of the heart in the glory of God and the splendor of His majesty, when the eyes of the wise man, which are in his head—in his mind, his wisdom and understanding—behold the glory of the King and the splendor of His greatness, which is beyond all search, without end or limit. And likewise all the other holy qualities in the heart derive from Chokhmah, Binah, and Da’at in the brains. But behold it is written, ‘One nation shall prevail over the other,’ for the body is called a small city, and just as two kings wage war over one city, each wanting to capture it and rule over it—that is, to direct its inhabitants according to his will, so that they obey him in everything he decrees—so too the two souls, the divine and the vital animal soul from the kelipah, wage war with one another over the body and all its limbs. For the divine soul desires and wills that it alone rule over him and direct him, and that all the limbs obey it and be completely nullified to it and become a chariot to it, and be a garment for its ten faculties and its three garments mentioned above, all of which should be clothed in the limbs of the body, so that the entire body be filled with them alone, and no stranger pass among them, God forbid.” That part is enough for us for now.

Basically, the way we usually understand a struggle between good and evil is as a struggle that we describe, maybe following the sages, as a battle between the good inclination and the evil inclination. Meaning, there is some inner war inside a person: the good inclination pulls him to do good, and the evil inclination pulls him to do something bad. But the picture that the author of the Tanya describes is a different picture. In fact, the good inclination is also an inclination, just like the evil inclination; both of them are inclinations, and a person is not supposed to be governed by inclinations—not by the good inclination and not by the evil inclination. There is something he speaks about here at the beginning of the chapter: “the dwelling-place of the animal soul from kelipat nogah.” What is kelipat nogah? In Kabbalah there are four husks; three of them are utterly evil, and the fourth is a mixture of good and evil. And the Ari writes that this is what is called the aspect known as the skin of the serpent. And the skin of the serpent is basically the contamination that the sages describe as having been cast by the serpent into the human being when he caused them to sin. Into Adam and into Eve, when he caused them to sin, the serpent’s contamination entered them. That is called the skin of the serpent, and that is essentially what is called kelipat nogah. What does that actually mean? Kelipat nogah is basically the instinctual dimension of the human being, whether good inclination or evil inclination. And the serpent inserted this instinctual dimension into the human being. You know that in the Guide for the Perplexed too, when Maimonides describes the sin of Adam, and also in Nefesh HaChayim, in a somewhat different way, when he describes the sin of Adam in the first gate, they are both basically describing—in their own words—a picture in which the serpent is outside and tries to tempt Eve from outside, and then after they eat, after she eats from the Tree of Knowledge, they become knowers of good and evil. What does it mean, knowers of good and evil? “Know” in biblical language basically means to connect. “And Adam knew Eve his wife.” “Knowers of good and evil” means that good and evil entered into them. At first, good and evil—Maimonides calls them intelligibles and conventions—at first, good and evil were like something external. The inclination would try to tempt the person, the evil inclination to do something bad, the good inclination to do something good, and this was from outside. The serpent stood outside and tried to tempt the human being—or in the serpent’s case, presumably, to sin—but basically the temptations both to good and to evil are temptations that stand outside the person. After eating from the Tree of Knowledge, this instinctual dimension entered the person. The skin of the serpent, or this contamination, this kelipat nogah, entered the person. And ever since, the person’s feeling is that the good inclination and the evil inclination are basically what he wants. Sometimes he wants to do good, sometimes he wants to do bad, but the truth is that this is not him; these are his inclinations, and his inclinations are really something that is not identical with his very self. Once it enters inside, it becomes harder for a person to distinguish between what he wants and what his inclinations dictate to him, whether for good or for bad—both inclinations together. Fine, that was just in parentheses.

Now let me return for a moment to what the author of the Tanya says. Basically, the author of the Tanya says that kelipat nogah is what is called the animal soul. And what characterizes the animal soul? It is in the left chamber of the heart, which is full of blood, and from the heart it spreads throughout the whole body and also rises to the brain in the head to think about them, meditate on them, and grow clever about them, just as the blood whose source is in the heart rises to the head. That is the animal soul. The divine soul, on the other hand, its dwelling-place is in the brains in the head, and from there it spreads and descends also to the heart, to the right chamber, where there is no blood. Never mind for now—that’s obviously not a physiological description. Or not a correct physiological description. I don’t know what he intended, or whether someone there actually intended physiology, I don’t know. But clearly it doesn’t matter for us. I don’t think there is any such physiological point here. And the divine soul is basically in the brains in the head, and from there it descends also to the heart. And this is also what he said later, that all the other holy qualities in the heart derive from Chokhmah, Binah, and Da’at in the brains. Wisdom, understanding, and knowledge—those are things located in the head, in the brain. So that is what is called the mochin, the mental faculties. Chokhmah, Binah, and Da’at are things connected to the head, to thought. Right? Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet—those are things connected to the traits, to the heart. Right? Netzach, Hod, Yesod are already lower. Netzach and Hod are the two legs, and Yesod is the reproductive organs, and so on. So the good qualities that ostensibly reside in the heart actually originate in the brains in the head; Chokhmah, Binah, and Da’at are the source of Chesed, Gevurah, and Tiferet.

And the picture he describes here is this: if before we spoke about the usual picture that speaks of a struggle between good and evil—let’s call it between the right side and the left side, in a certain metaphorical language—then the author of the Tanya flips the picture and claims that it is a struggle between above and below. In other words, the divine soul is in the brains in the head, and the animal soul is in the heart; the instinctual dimension, kelipat nogah, is in the heart. So the struggle is—and this connects to what I started with—the struggle is between the question whether I conduct myself according to directives coming from the head, from the brain, from the intellect, or whether I conduct myself according to directives coming from instinct. The heart in its emotional sense—“heart” can mean several things—but in the lower emotional, instinctual senses. So that is the basic reversal made by the author of the Tanya.

But the author of the Tanya doesn’t stop there. He takes one further step. What he says, in fact, is that the divine soul is not located only in the head. This is not a struggle of head versus heart, or stupidity versus wisdom, because the divine soul that is in the head also spreads to the heart; it is actually present throughout the whole body. The body is like a small city over whose control two kings are fighting, but the control is over the whole city. Each king has a certain palace where he dwells, but from there he goes out and tries to conquer, to take over, the whole city, to fill the whole city so that the entire city is subject to him. So the divine soul goes out from the brains in the head—that is its palace, so to speak—and from there it goes out and tries to conquer the whole body, or really the whole soul. After all, this is not only body in the physical sense; it means the whole soul. And the animal soul is in the heart—that is the instinctual dimension—and from there it tries likewise to conquer the whole body and also to rise to the head. So it turns out that both the divine soul and the animal soul both try, at least, to fill the whole body. There is no above versus below here, no intellect versus absence of intellect. There is some attempt by two different forces to conquer all dimensions—the intellectual dimension, the emotional and instinctual dimension, our entire full stature. The struggle is for the whole package.

So if that’s the case, we really have here a three-stage picture. At first it looks as though there is some struggle between the good inclination and the evil inclination, between the right side and the left side. The author of the Tanya says: what are you talking about? Both the good inclination and the evil inclination are inclinations. The Ari says this too. They are inclinations. These inclinations are not me at all; they are something else, not me. Each one tries to pull me in its own direction, positive or negative. But taken together, at least after Adam’s sin, this has entered the human being; it is in the instinctual, lower dimension. The higher dimension is the dimension of the mochin, the intellective faculties. These two dimensions are now called by the author of the Tanya the divine soul versus the animal soul, and now they are fighting: the higher against the lower. But even that struggle isn’t really a struggle of higher versus lower; that’s only the second stage. Instead of right-left, it becomes above-below. But even that isn’t entirely accurate. It’s also not above versus below; it’s everything versus everything. There is no one who is above and one who is below. Each one wants to conquer both the above and the below, and we’ll see which prevails.

So what exactly is the difference between the divine soul and the animal soul? In the description of the author of the Tanya, the difference is basically: where is the palace? Not what they are trying to control, not what they want to bend to themselves, but where is the point of departure, where is the root? The divine soul has its root in the brain, in the head, and the animal soul has its root in the heart. And from there both go out to war over the whole body. So what is the struggle actually about? What’s the issue here? If both use both emotion and intellect, then this isn’t a struggle of emotion versus intellect. And if within the animal soul there is both good and evil, then this also isn’t a struggle between good and evil. So between what and what? In other words, what is the axis on which the struggle between the divine soul and the animal soul takes place?

Now I see that in a certain sense this is also an introduction to next time. In this context I’m always reminded of a joke I once heard in the name of Dov Sadan, the literature scholar from the Hebrew University, an interesting Jew. He claimed that the next person who will make a revolution in the world will be a Jewish orthopedist. Why Jewish—that is of course entirely obvious, because all the revolutionaries in the world are Jews. But why an orthopedist? He said: the first revolutionary in the world was, say, Abraham our patriarch, who taught us to think, to see what the head says and follow the head and not the stomach. Moses our teacher, Abraham our patriarch—you can hang it on either of them. Then there was another Jew, that man, who told us that one should follow the heart, right? So we already descended from the head to the heart. The next Jew who made a revolution in the world was Freud, who told us that everything goes on below the belt. In other words, we began with the head, moved to the heart, continued to the attribute of Yesod, and what apparently remains for the next stage is simply the soles of the feet. So the next one will probably be a Jewish orthopedist. I think there is something very deep in this joke, because this process really does happen. It’s not just banter; this process is a process that really does happen, and it seems to me it is also connected to the people to whom this story points, at least as symbols. What? In the stomach. Okay. And that even works chronologically. Fine.

So what is the meaning of this process? The meaning of this process is basically a struggle between rational conduct and emotional conduct and below that as well—yes? Meaning, all the way down to the soles of the feet and beyond. The question—and again, this is not a struggle between stupid people and smart people, contrary to what there is sometimes a demagogic tendency to think—this is not a struggle between smart people and stupid people. It is a struggle between intellectual conduct and emotional conduct, but intellectual conduct too wants to conquer the emotions, and emotional conduct also wants to conquer the intellect. Like the divine soul and the animal soul, this is basically the struggle in those stages I described earlier. But each one tries to conquer everything. Each one works with emotion, with instinct, with intellect, with the gut—both the divine soul and the animal soul.

How does this actually work? Maybe before how it works—well, actually, maybe I’ll come back to that later. How does this work? I’ll bring an example from the way questions are treated in moral philosophy. In moral philosophy, part of the effort is devoted to trying to find a theory that defines the moral act. A theoretical definition: what exactly counts as a good act and what counts as a bad act? What is an act that morality requires and what is an act that morality rejects? So there are various proposals. One of the common proposals is something like—and I’m formulating this very simplistically, and you can attack even the formulation, but we won’t go into details here—to do the maximum good for the maximum number of people, or the maximum number of creatures. That they should have a nice, pleasant time, and that’s all. That is basically the moral principle, and the rest—go learn. In other words, all moral obligations are derived from this.

Now when people come to deal with this—fine, nice proposal. The question is what do you do with it? How do you make a paper out of it? After all, you have to turn it into an article somehow; you can’t just stop at proposals, otherwise you won’t get tenure. So how do you turn it into an article? How do you treat this matter in a somewhat more systematic way? I’m presenting this a bit demagogically, of course. In short, when people want to treat these matters more systematically, what do they do? How do they test this proposal? How do they improve it? How do they examine it? Usually this is done by thought experiments. Let’s try to imagine some fictional situation in which we are facing a moral dilemma and see what this theoretical principle tells us to do. Then we’ll see whether it really stands up to the test, whether moral directives really do derive from this principle or whether they do not. So we can think of all sorts of examples in which I test the matter. Yes, of course, you can start thinking about human beings and animals. I want to eat animals, so maybe that’s good for human beings but bad for animals. The question is how we extract from here some principle that is best for the maximum number of people, or something of that sort. By the way, I once saw an article in aesthetics trying to argue for a similar aesthetic principle as well—to define the beautiful in the same way. Whatever is most pleasing in the eyes of the maximum number of people, or some technical thing like that.

Anyway, one example that can be brought in this context is—say—ten people are on a deserted island, there is nothing to eat, so they decide that the nine will eat the one. They draw lots and bon appétit, they eat one of them. And now one can ask whether this, let’s say, is actually the maximum good for the maximum number of people, because otherwise all ten will die and this way only one dies—at least as long as there is enough food. So the question arises: okay, that’s what comes out of the moral theory of maximum good for the maximum number of creatures or people. Now the question is what I do with that. Fine, that’s one implication, and I can find another hundred thousand implications. So when people try to test the theory, this theoretical proposal, they put it to the test through this kind of thing. And they basically say: wait a second—if this is really the directive that comes out of this theory, then let’s check it. It’s absurd. In other words, it cannot be that this directive is really a moral directive. So clearly there is something defective in the theory. Since something in the theory is defective, we need to patch it up a bit. So they start patching it up. They say—I don’t know—maybe if there is something very bad for one person and a little good for many others, maybe the balancing should be done differently, and they try to add a little more polish to the theory so it will fit this case too. Fine. So we’ve reached an improved theory, and now we test it by another thought experiment. We test it on another hypothetical case and ask what the theory—the improved theory—says about that hypothetical case. And again, there will be cases where it works, and cases where it doesn’t work. And every time it doesn’t work, we will try to patch the theory further, another little bit, patch it more and more until it fits all the thought experiments we can manage to think of. And then, basically, we have reached the perfect theory.

And who decides whether it works or doesn’t work? Why is the feeling here that it doesn’t fit? Fine, that’s exactly the question I want to talk about in a moment. So that is basically how articles in this field usually proceed, at least. They try to test through various practical consequences whether this theory holds water or not, whether it really succeeds in providing a basis for all moral directives or not. Now the question really arises: how do we actually decide this? In other words, okay, we’ve reached the conclusion that the nine should eat the one. That’s what the theory gave us. Okay, so they should eat the one. What now? But the person writing the article of course says: what are you talking about? It’s unthinkable. So clearly the theory needs to be fixed so that this directive won’t come out of it. Why does it seem to you that this is unthinkable? That is exactly what follows from the theory. Why is it unthinkable? What’s the problem? That really is what the theory says. What is wrong here? No, it’s unthinkable. Why? Because my conscience tells me it can’t be. My moral intuition, my feeling, tells me it can’t be.

So what actually comes out here? What we are really doing in this process is trying to build a logical or intellectual description of the totality of our feelings. That is basically what we are trying to do here. Because the process of refining the theory is a process in which I trim it each time according to some feeling I have. I have this feeling—so this is unthinkable, okay, so we shave off that corner a bit. I have another feeling that doesn’t fit there—so we shave off this corner a bit, round here, trim there, until we end up with a theory that fits exactly what? The total set of our feelings, right? That is basically what comes out here. So now the question is: does the person who acts according to this theory really act according to the theory? Of course not. The theory acts according to what he wants, not that he acts according to the theory. He built the theory in such a way that it tells him only what he already knows. Right? That is basically what he’s doing. He already knows what the moral act is and what is immoral, and he built the theory in such a way that it tells him exactly everything he already knew beforehand. So what has actually happened here? In practice he acts according to what his feeling tells him—before the theory and after the theory. No one claims that after a moral theory is formulated, the person also becomes more moral. As is well known, the philosopher is not the mathematician, and he is not a triangle. In other words, you do not become more moral. So what do you become more of? More rational. Why? Because I have some intellectual theory that describes my mode of behavior. True, my behavior is in fact behavior rooted in feeling. Morality today is generally tied to concepts of feeling. So I basically act according to my moral feeling, and the role of the theory is only to try to propose an intellectual description of the collection of my moral sensations and feelings.

The picture I have just described is basically the picture of a person of the animal soul. Why? Because this is essentially a person who acts according to his feelings, his inclinations, his emotions—even the good inclination, as we said. Even the good inclination is an inclination. Meaning, he acts according to his basic primary instincts. But no human being can live only emotionally or instinctively like an animal. A human being also has to use intellect; a human being is a rational creature. So in order to be rational, or at least to appear rational, he builds himself a theory that changes absolutely nothing in what he will do—nothing. All it can do is provide an intellectual basis for what he would have done anyway. This is what the author of the Tanya describes here when he says that the animal soul has its source in the blood, in the heart, and from the heart it spreads through the whole body and also rises to the brain in the head to think about them, meditate on them, and become clever about them. About what? About those very feelings, those very emotions that came from the heart. So it rises to the brain, receives some shape, some intellectual pattern, and now I have an intellectual model of my collection of feelings. So who is actually managing the matter? Who determines what I will do? My heart determines what I will do, right? Only it passes through the mediation of the brain. The brain mediates between the heart and the act. It gives form to the raw feelings that emerge from the heart, gives them some intellectual shape, and maybe sometimes it really does help us decide in places where perhaps we don’t have a clear feeling from the heart. So we say: but the theory yields such-and-such a directive, and this directive represents what I basically want, so apparently in one sense or another I want to do this act here too, in that place as well, even though I don’t have the immediate feeling. But that is probably indeed what I want to do there. So you need the mediation of the intellect between feelings and actions. But in the end, the intellect here is a mediator; it is secondary. The one who determines, the one who runs the show, is the heart. That is why it is called the animal soul. The animal soul has its root in the heart. From the heart it rises to the brain, where it gets clever, meditates on them, all sorts of sophisticated thoughts arise around those feelings or inclinations in the heart, and then it becomes a wonderfully built theory. By the way, it is certainly possible that one has to be a very smart person to build this, and not everyone can do it. In other words, it may absolutely involve impressive intelligence. But that person, though he is a smart man, is not a person who conducts himself according to intellect. And those are two completely different things. A person can be very, very intelligent in terms of IQ, a very smart person. But what determines what he will do is not his intellect but his heart. So where will his wisdom come to expression? For example, in giving intellectual form to what his heart tells him. So very often theories of this sort, which overall emerge from the heart and return to the heart and are tested in light of the heart, are theories of people of the animal soul.

How does a person of the divine soul conduct himself? In the example you gave earlier with the monastery, when a person looks and says about such a thing, “it is unthinkable,” and so on—must that come specifically from feeling? It can also come from contemplation. I’ll get to that in a moment; I’ll soften the picture a bit. But for now I just want to sharpen what I mean. How does a person of the divine soul operate? A person of the divine soul basically begins from the head, from theory. And if the theory says that nine should eat the tenth, okay, then nine should eat the tenth—there’s nothing to be done. Why? Because if my heart says no, but my theory says yes—assuming the theory indeed says yes—then that is what I am obligated to do, because for me what determines things is the theory, the intellect, not the heart. And if the heart revolts, or the heart doesn’t go along with it, okay—then the heart has to be treated, or you take a pill. In other words, make sure it doesn’t interfere. Maybe afterward one can even create some degree of identification, but first of all, at the first stage, the intellect must rule over the heart, and that is basically the figure of the divine soul.

Now this picture is one that, when I have described it a few times, the immediate reactions of the listeners were often: may my portion be with the people of the animal soul. In other words, not with these automatons who have some theory and for its sake are willing to kill the whole world and I don’t know what, because they have a theory. So it sounds bad. But here, it seems to me, we really need to distinguish between two things—and that somewhat undercuts the distinction, but I still think it’s important to make it. I’m returning here to what Arik said earlier. When I ask myself where the theory of the person of the divine soul came from—where did the theory come from? “The secret of the Lord is for those who fear Him.” Where did it come from? Fine, there are certain things, let’s say, that we received in the Torah. The Torah tells us, and that for us is the theory. But we know that even what is written in the Torah is open to interpretation. And the question is where the interpretation came from. Seemingly it comes from me, so once again the source starts with me; it does not start with the theory. To some extent I am also the one who constructs the theory. But here we really have to distinguish between two concepts that people often tend to mix together, but that is not good—they should not be mixed—and these are emotion and intuition. These are two different concepts, and I think it is important to distinguish between them. I’m not giving a dictionary definition; if someone wants to use the terms differently, fine. But it is important to understand that there are two things here. Call them whatever you want.

Intuition is thought for which I do not have a rational justification. I have an intuition that it is true. I have an intuition that the stock market will go down tomorrow, or I have an intuition that the solution to this equation is seven and a quarter. That is intuition. I don’t know how to do the calculation; I have no orderly, systematic reason. But I have some sense that this is the case. Would you call that an emotion? I would not call it an emotion. Why? Because emotion is something subjective. In other words, an emotion is not assessed in terms of true or false. I cannot check my emotion against reality and see whether the emotion is right or wrong. When I say that I love someone, then I love someone. If I hate someone, I hate someone. If I am stingy, then I am stingy, and if not, then not. There is no comparison here against some reality. But when I say I have a feeling that the solution to this equation is seven and a quarter—plug in seven and a quarter and see whether it is the solution. That is a claim evaluated in terms of truth or falsehood. It is not an emotional claim. And therefore it seems to me that this expression is not very successful. You can use it, but I think it is not very successful to say, “I feel that the solution is seven and a quarter.” It would be more correct to say: my intuition tells me it is seven and a quarter. What’s the difference? Intuition is a kind of thought. It’s just that we sometimes have the ability to think about things not through proof, or through axioms and systematic deduction from axioms. We sometimes have the ability to grasp things in some unmediated way. The scientific or mathematical genius often especially excels in this sort of grasp. There are geniuses who are geniuses in the other dimension, but the genius who makes revolutions is usually the genius who has some intuition. He sees the truth before he proves it, because otherwise you could try a million things to prove, and who knows which of them will eventually come out right. You have some sense of what is worth working on. Without that, you don’t even set out on the road. And someone with a good sense more often works on things that in the end also turn out to be true. In other words, genius is usually someone whose intuition is built correctly.

Emotions, on the other hand, have nothing to do with genius, and they are not assessed in terms of whether I succeeded or failed, whether that is the solution or not. Emotion is emotion. In other words, either I feel that way or I don’t. It is not a question tested against some reality, not in terms of truth or falsehood, yes or no. Therefore emotion belongs to the emotional planes of “I have this urge, I have that urge, this tendency, that tendency,” but in essence all these things are subjective. Intuition, by contrast, is entirely objective, just like intellect, in the sense that it makes a claim about the world. It may not be objective in the sense that not all of us necessarily have the same intuition, but still one of us is right and the other is wrong if we say opposite things, because we are making claims about the world. It is either true or not true. I have a feeling that seven and a quarter is the solution, someone else has a feeling that it is eight and a third. I don’t know who is right; each of us has a different intuition. We have to check, and if we manage to calculate then perhaps we’ll also know who is right. But clearly, in the end, when we know the truth, it will become clear that one had a justified intuition and the other had an unjustified intuition. I call it intuition now. His intuition was correct and the other one’s intuition was not correct. In other words, intuition is a claim that makes claims about the world. It is a tool that enables me to know things in reality, in the world—albeit not through systematic proofs but through some more direct approach.

Very often people also think that belief in the Holy One, blessed be He, is a kind of emotion. Why? Because I have no proofs, so it’s a kind of emotion. But emotion—what is emotion? One person loves the Holy One, blessed be He, one loves his wife, and one loves neither of them. Each one with his emotions. That is not assessed in terms of right or wrong. But the claim that there is a God—even if I arrived at it not through proofs and logic—the claim is a claim about reality. If I say that there is a God, then whoever says there is no God is mistaken. The logic here is straightforward—no tricks. And if he is right, then I am wrong. It is a claim about reality. It is neither correct nor useful to call that emotion; it is simply equivocation. Why, then, do people call it emotion? They call it emotion because in the world of the animal soul, or the denying soul today, this is basically a world that recognizes nothing except logical proofs. Therefore anything not based on a logical proof is emotion, and therefore also subjective, and therefore not binding—everyone has his own emotion. That is also why faith, aesthetics, and ethics are all pushed inward. All these things become some kind of collection of feelings. Everyone has one feeling, someone else has another. Hitler too had his own feelings, and I have the feeling that one should shoot him in the head, so that’s what I’ll do. But there is no real critique here in terms of right and wrong, true and false, because these are not questions touching truth and falsehood. They are not questions assessed in terms of truth and falsehood, but questions that belong more to feeling. And that is the price paid for identifying intuition with emotion. But that is incorrect. Intuition is not identical with emotion. Intuition is a claim that says: this is true. I don’t know how to justify it. I could be wrong, because of course it is not certain. But this is what I think. And if I am right, then you are wrong. And if my intuition says that there is a God, then the person who says there is no God is mistaken. If my intuition says that it is not good to be a Nazi, then the person who does become a Nazi is not a good person. It is not just a matter of feelings, or of having no meaning, because all sorts of things pop into his head and that’s all. That is basically the extreme conception on the other side, which says that there is in fact no way to measure one another or judge one another, everyone has his own truth—but one has to defend oneself. Fine, so I defend myself. There is no question here of justification or non-justification. Morality becomes something fairly evolutionary in that conception.

A strong feeling of good and evil—so that means intuition? I think so. In other words, when we talk about feeling in the context of good and evil, it seems to me that we are really talking about intuition and not emotion. And here one has to be very careful. Sometimes the conduct I described earlier, in that article in philosophy, in ethics, which tests a theory against thought experiments and says “it is unthinkable, therefore we need to improve the theory”—that does not come from the heart; it comes from the head. But from intuition, not from recursive thinking, not from reasoned logical thinking through first premises. But it is still intuition. If so, then this is a person of the divine soul and not of the animal soul. If you ask me how to tell the difference—I have no idea. There is some sense—intuition, more precisely, not feeling—some intuition of when it is this and when it is that. But like all intuition it is not one hundred percent certain; one may be mistaken. And it is hard to know when it is this and when that. But it seems to me that, broadly speaking, my intuition tells me very strongly that the world is becoming more and more dominated by the animal soul and less and less dominated by the divine soul. The identification of the term emotion with intuition is not accidental. Why call everything emotion? Because that is really how people think. They think that everything is emotion. Therefore they call it emotion. This is not a random expression. When I say “I feel that this is right,” and I also feel that I love someone, that I am stingy, or that I feel hatred or anger or resentment or things like that—that is not “feel” in the same sense. But today they identify it. Why do they identify it? Because everything is perceived as belonging to the subjective plane, the plane of the heart, the plane that is not open to judgment.

So the struggle is of course much more subtle. It is a struggle between those for whom the matter begins in theory—but even theory comes out of intuition, because nothing comes out of pure logic. Logic is empty; it is only structures. The contents that we pour into logic always come from somewhere other than logic itself. So I have some premises from which I want to prove something. Those premises come from some intuition. But if I begin there and then check all the other cases, then I really am a person of the divine soul. If I begin from the gut and shape my intellectual theory according to the feelings of the gut, then I am a person of the animal soul.

In this connection, an example that I think I already gave, maybe even more than once: there was once a case—or several cases, actually, all basically cases involving Shachak, Avraham Chazi of Jerusalem, who liked every now and then to set off genuine or fabricated provocations in the press in order to stir up upheaval on the religious-secular front. Once he set off, already from the 1960s this was going on—he’s an older man, I don’t know if he’s still active, but until recent years he was still trying his hand at these things. He would bring up, for example, cases of a non-Jew who was not rescued on the Sabbath, where religious Jews passed by him and did not violate the Sabbath in order to save him, and then all hell broke loose and there was serious outrage from one side. On the other side there was another case of a wife of a priest who was raped, and the halakhic decisors told her she had to separate, because the wife of an Israelite who is raped may remain with her husband, but the wife of a priest, even if raped, must separate—she is forbidden to her husband. And there it was a real tragedy: children, a couple who love each other and want to remain together. It wasn’t enough that she went through the trauma of rape, now she also has to leave her family and her husband. In short, it really looked very bad, and the whole press was full of furious criticism of that halakhic ruling. Of course everyone was very relieved when in the end it turned out to be a journalistic duck, something that never happened. But the truth is that it is a real problem. What difference does it make whether it happened or not? It is true in principle. So let the straw have its life—but what do you say to me? In the end, the problem is a real problem. Both problems are real, and therefore the question really should be asked.

But what impressed me more than anything else at that time, during that whole big controversy, was that the main critiques were really of the type: tell me, don’t you people have a heart? How can you tell that woman to leave her husband in such a situation? Wasn’t the first trauma enough, and now you are inflicting another trauma on her? Now, there is often criticism that arises from disagreements. That is, there are people who do not accept the assumptions of Jewish law or Torah, and fine—they criticize the Torah worldview because they do not accept its assumptions. Here the feeling was that that was not the criticism. The criticism was not: I think there was no revelation at Sinai and one need not listen to the Torah, and therefore there is no problem, she can remain with her husband. No, that was not how it was formulated. It was formulated as a criticism of those who have a heart and those who do not have a heart. I happened to speak—with the people around that issue at the time, and I tried to tell them that those same halakhic decisors who told that woman to leave her husband, I assume they did not sleep the night before, and they had even greater pangs of conscience than all the armchair philosophers who discussed the case and raged in front of the television—how can such a thing be? But the fact that their hearts hurt does not yet mean that this is what they will do, because who said that the heart is supposed to dictate what we do? If indeed the theory—in this context, the halakhah—which from my standpoint is correct, that is how I believe, tells me that this woman must separate, then with all the pain of heart—and my heart hurts no less than anyone else’s, and maybe it is good that my heart hurts. I do not think it is very right for a person not to have heartache in such a case and to rule on it coldly. Fine. But still, the fact that there is heartache and that I have a heart does not mean that this will also be the practical ruling. Why? Because a person of the divine soul is supposed to subordinate his heart to his intellect. That does not mean suppressing the heart. It does not mean ignoring the heart. But it does mean that where there is a conflict, the intellect is supposed to prevail over the heart. Notice: not necessarily over intuition, but over the heart—because intuition too is part of the intellect. When there is a conflict between intuition and the intellect—the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere—the problem is harder. But right now we are talking about easier conflicts.

So these examples show that today’s world is exactly what the author of the Tanya describes here: a world of the animal soul. “Animal soul” does not mean bad people, because “animal” is not worse than “divine”; it is not in the sense of bad and good. Within the animal soul there is both bad and good. The question is only where your good and evil come from—whether your good and evil come from the gut or from the head. That is the question. And the struggle here is over what leads the conduct: the head or the gut or the heart. That is the struggle. It is not a struggle between good and evil, and it is not even a struggle between above and below, as I showed earlier, because people of the animal soul will then also build a theory for why it is not moral at all to make that woman leave, and it’s not right, and that itself proves that there was no revelation at Sinai, because if there had been a revelation at Sinai, how can it be that this is the result—that they tell a woman to leave her husband? There—that is another classic example of constructing theory on the basis of gut feelings. So this is exactly the struggle between those thoughts that begin in the gut and rise upward, and those traits that are in the heart but whose foundation is in Chokhmah, Binah, and Da’at in the brains, because everything really begins in the head.

If he says it on the basis of intuition, then yes. But as I said earlier, when people begin with the connotation of “don’t you have a heart?” or expressions like that, it strongly suggests that the criticism is not coming from there. In all kinds of halakhic questions like these, in the end the halakhic decisors do take the heart into account. For example, in the issue of a non-Jew and saving a non-Jew, in the end the halakhic decisors do. I know of no such taking the heart into account by the decisors. The question is whether that argument is correct. If it’s called danger to life, then yes. How did that suddenly grow? Because I think it counts as danger to life. Someone who thinks it is not danger to life, but says it in order to promote his moral agenda, is a criminal—not because the moral agenda is not justified. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t know of such an approach. Agunot are something completely different, because with agunot they use halakhic tools. You can say this anywhere. But the emotion is in the background here. No. If my emotion says that now I want to permit her, and so I find all sorts of leniencies everywhere… But the question in the end is whether the leniency is grounded in Jewish law. If yes, then there is no problem. I have no problem at all with motivations. Motivations are allowed to exist. In the end the leniency has to hold water. People who say: I permit saving a non-Jew on the Sabbath because of hostility—that is, so that Jews won’t be killed afterward. But you know what? Even if you are on a deserted island with that non-Jew, and you know, “a bird of the sky will carry the sound”—save him there too. Violate the Sabbath to save him even on a deserted island. Someone who says that is simply a criminal. He is a cheat. Because the Torah says one may not save him, in Jewish law. I say no—I said before, last time we spoke, that maybe this is not correct, but let’s assume that this is the true halakhic interpretation. Fine? Then that is what it says there. So if you go with hostility, fine, that tool is correct. Hostility is a valid consideration. But apply it where it is really justified to apply it. Once you have applied it, you can step aside and breathe a sigh of relief morally too, saying: I escaped the moral problem that otherwise I would have found myself in, by means of the technical tool of hostility. There is no problem with that; it is perfectly fine. But the tool of hostility has to hold water.

But what is the difference between that and someone who begins from the soul and then afterward basically builds a theory that descends all at once? Because that theory does not stand any independent test. That theory stands only on the heart. For him, for example, even on a deserted island they would save the non-Jew. Because if the theory were that one may save him because of hostility, then what follows? Ah, so if I’m on a deserted island, then in fact I don’t need to save him—there is no bird of the sky and no voice carrying from that island. So there is no need to save him. So the theory must be wrong. I’ll replace the theory. In the case of the non-Jew, say—take an agunah instead; it doesn’t matter, in any case it will be the same. The basic natural feeling that it can’t be that we now forbid this woman—that feeling comes and causes me to find various leniencies in order to… But those leniencies have to be halakhically valid. If they are not halakhically valid, throw them in the trash. They will be halakhically valid. Fine, then what’s the problem? But still it comes from… What do I care? That isn’t the motivation causing me to do it; it isn’t the justification. I’m not talking about motivation. And isn’t that my point of departure? “Point of departure” is a phrase with a double meaning. Point of departure in the heart, or point of departure in the head. In terms of motivation, I can absolutely begin from that motivation. There is no problem with that. On the contrary, that is perfectly fine. When there is distress, one should look for a source to permit. But the fact is that they look for a source to permit; they don’t just say immediately, okay, there is distress, so it’s fine. They look for a source to permit, and if they don’t find one? And if the circumstances do not allow it? Then they do not permit. Right? It’s not that all agunot are okay because somehow I can always permit it. No. There are agunot who, sadly, will not be permitted. In other words, the motivation is all well and good, but it is only motivation.

We spoke about the dispute between the sages of France and the sages of Spain, right? Regarding sanctifying God’s name. I think I mentioned it one of the previous times: the sages of Spain are very lenient regarding the obligation to die for sanctifying God’s name, while the sages of France are very stringent on that issue. The sort of leniencies of Beit HaLevi, yes. The accepted explanation for this in the scholarly world is that the sages of France, the Tosafists, lived during the Crusades, and they needed to draw a very sharp line—no compromises, no nonsense, “there is no wisdom, no understanding, and no counsel against the Lord.” And the sages of Spain, at least some of them, lived in a more relaxed time, in a more relaxed environment, and there they could be calmer. And in my opinion that is really true; there is no reason to assume it is not true. And still, no halakhic decisor today would come and say to himself: okay, so now I ask myself what the Jewish law is. According to this scholarly approach, what one master says and what the other master says are both true, and they do not disagree. They are not disagreeing at all. In circumstances similar to those in Spain at that time, the halakhic ruling is the lenient one; in circumstances similar to France at that time, the halakhic ruling should be the stringent one. No problem—check the circumstances in which you operate. If it is like this, go with them; if like that, go with them. So then there is no disagreement at all. There is no need even to decide the Jewish law, no need for anything. I simply let the circumstances dictate the approach. Nobody—no halakhic decisor—does that. Why not? When we discuss the Tosafists and the sages of Spain on their own terms, what they said has to hold water halakhically. What is the argument? What are the proofs? What is the reasoning? I examine this, I examine that, and I decide according to the rules, however I… what I think is what I decide. It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t depend on circumstances at all. Not because those weren’t their motivations—they absolutely were. The sages of France wanted to erect a fence. I have no doubt that this is true. It cannot be accidental; it is very consistent. And the same with the sages of Spain. The motivation was certainly that. So what? Each of us has motivations, lots of motivations, and that’s perfectly fine. The halakhic argument has to stand on its own. Therefore in the end the theory, let’s call it that, has to be true. It does not merely give form to my collection of feelings, because otherwise there would never be any conflict between the theory and the feelings. When there is a conflict, I would simply bend the theory. Anyone who finds himself in conflict between his natural feelings and the theory is a person of the divine soul. Anyone who finds himself in such a conflict. Because a person of the animal soul never finds himself in such a conflict. The feelings shape the theory, and everything is fine; there is never any conflict. Only where there are contradictory feelings—that too can perhaps happen. But not a conflict between above and below.

Fine, I just want to finish; I really have to finish. I only want to return to our discussion. In the end, there is some struggle here between the divine soul and the animal soul, and in a subtler way it is not a struggle between emotion and intellect, because emotion too rises to the intellect and intellect too descends into emotion and nevertheless tries to create some kind of identification. And this struggle also cannot be easily distinguished, because it is really a struggle between intuition and emotion. Intellect too is really not logical intellect but the intellect of intuition. And it struggles against this approach of emotion that paints itself in intellectual colors through rising to the brains in the head. And this struggle, in the end, is very often also the struggle that lies behind—and now I return to the point with which I began—it is the struggle that also lies behind changes in Jewish law, and one has to examine very, very carefully where it is coming from.