Defining Terms 4

Table of Contents

• Definitions: intentionality, observation, and back-and-forth movement
• Giving a get and the Kehillot Yaakov: the process over the product
• Multiple intelligences: criticism and backing away from the mockery
• Theory versus facts: an active role and changing intuition
• Thought experiments in ethics: eating in the Andes and the validity of intuition
• Science, conservatism, and paradigms: Thomas Kuhn and theory change
• Jewish law as theory: Rabbi Chaim and the feeling that “it can’t be”
• Practical implication: sharpening understanding and testing a theory
• Agency in a get: power of attorney versus an extended hand, and the dispute between Maimonides and the Tur
• The Ran and the Sinai ox: “a practical implication for a Nazirite” and the yeshiva joke
• Lecture and practice: application as a way to understand theory
• Defining poetry: the absence of an encyclopedia entry and the need for a definitional exercise
• “Stop here, think” and the table exercise: prose dressed up as poetry
• Rabbi Kook: a free poet without meter and rhyme
• Yehuda Amichai: a poem without rhymes as a definition of poetry as experience and structure
• The axis model: encyclopedia entry versus “pure poem” and the relation between signifier and signified
• Meter and rhyme as symptoms: signals to the reader, not the definition

Summary

General Overview

The text argues that definitions are usually intentional rather than constitutive, because they arise from observing an existing concept and trying to capture its essential characteristics through a process of back-and-forth movement between cases and theoretical formulation. The text emphasizes that the process is sometimes more important than the final definition, because it deepens understanding and intuition even when the end product is complicated or not very useful. At the same time, it maintains that definitions and theories also have an active role in shaping intuition and not just describing it. From within that framework, the text goes on to show how a practical implication in Jewish law functions as a theoretical test that sharpens understanding and at times also challenges it without necessarily collapsing the theory, and it concludes by trying to apply the same method to defining the concept of poetry through a theoretical axis between an encyclopedia entry and a “pure poem,” in which structure and experience matter more than the meaning of the words.

Definitions: intentionality, observation, and back-and-forth movement

The text states that a definition is not always a constitutive act that creates the concept, but rather an intentional act that tries to grasp a concept that already exists prior to the definition. The text defines “correct” and “incorrect” as the result of comparing the definition with cases, and presents that comparison as an indication that the definition is a product of observation. The text describes an endless movement of back and forth in which one formulates a definition, tests it on cases, refines it, returns to examples, and approaches a fit asymptotically without guaranteeing a perfect match.

Giving a get and the Kehillot Yaakov: the process over the product

The text brings the example of giving a get as a process of distilling, out of cases in the Talmudic text, a theoretical definition of valid versus invalid delivery of a get. The text explains that the Kehillot Yaakov writes three long sections in such an attempt and arrives at a complicated definition that “doesn’t help at all” in the practical sense. The text argues that what matters is the process, which generates a deep intuitive understanding in the halakhic decisor, so that in a new case he can determine validity even without using the complicated definition itself.

Multiple intelligences: criticism and backing away from the mockery

The text recounts prolonged mockery of the idea of multiple intelligences as “science in the service of political correctness,” allowing almost any person to be defined as highly intelligent in some other way. The text initially presents a paradoxical claim: if the definition is supposed to describe social intuitions, then a definition that classifies Maradona as intelligent in the same sense as Einstein seems like a descriptive failure. The text then qualifies that and partly retracts it, because a definition is not only passive with respect to observation but also shapes intuition, and so it may turn out, after theoretical distillation, that the original intuition was mistaken.

Theory versus facts: an active role and changing intuition

The text distinguishes between a naive worldview in which theory is subordinate to facts and any contradiction requires replacing the theory, and a situation in which theory also has an educational role, sending us back to the phenomena and improving intuitive perception. The text argues that it is not always right to change the definition when there is a conflict with a case, and sometimes it is right to change the intuition and keep the definition. The text uses the example of instrument flight in a state of vertigo to illustrate sticking with the instrument against intuition, even though the instrument itself was ultimately built on conceptions that begin in intuition.

Thought experiments in ethics: eating in the Andes and the validity of intuition

The text describes a methodology in philosophical ethics in which one proposes a moral theory and tests it against cases and thought experiments. The text brings the case of being stranded in the Andes and eating one person in order to save the many, and presents the intuitive reflex to reject a theory that leads to such an “unreasonable” outcome. The text argues that intuition does not necessarily win, and that the theory may be correct and the intuition the one that is wrong, while emphasizing that there are no sharp criteria for when to revise a theory and when to revise an intuition.

Science, conservatism, and paradigms: Thomas Kuhn and theory change

The text argues that even in science, a theory is not replaced immediately when an anomalous result appears, and in practice there is a conservatism that waits until a sufficient threshold of explanatory failures has been reached. The text gives the example of a “speed of light” experiment in which they suspected experimental error because of the solidity of the theory, and presents that as legitimate in the right dosage. The text mentions Thomas Kuhn, who explains paradigm shifts in terms of the sociology and politics of scientists, but argues against him that such conservatism also expresses a genuine sense that the theory is capturing something true in reality and not merely institutional convenience.

Jewish law as theory: Rabbi Chaim and the feeling that “it can’t be”

The text states that one can relate to Jewish law the way one relates to scientific work on theory and definition. The text tells a story about Rabbi Chaim: they asked him about a Tosafot, and he said, “There is no such Tosafot,” not because of memory but because “there can’t be such a thing.” The text presents this as expressing the way a strong theory generates immediate distrust of conflicting evidence until one checks whether there is some error in the assumption, the source, or the application.

Practical implication: sharpening understanding and testing a theory

The text explains that “what practical difference does it make?” is sometimes understood as a tool for sharpening understanding through a practical consequence, and sometimes as a tool for checking the correctness of a theory, like an experiment. The text states that a practical implication has two parallel roles: improving theoretical understanding and putting the theory to the test. The text warns against becoming captive to practical implications alone, because sometimes “there is no practical implication” does not prove theoretical identity but only the absence of a practical difference.

Agency in a get: power of attorney versus an extended hand, and the dispute between Maimonides and the Tur

The text presents a conceptual inquiry in learning: is agency a matter of power of attorney or of being an extended hand? The text brings the practical implication of “the sender became mentally incompetent,” from which a dispute between Maimonides and the Tur begins, and presents the explanation of the Ohr Sameach and other later authorities that the disagreement depends on the model of agency. The text also brings the Ketzot, who raises the practical implication of “the sender died,” and the response of later authorities that this “can’t be,” and explains that the rejection is technical, because the woman is already a widow and therefore “there is no one left to divorce her,” and not necessarily a principled denial of the power-of-attorney model.

The Ran and the Sinai ox: “a practical implication for a Nazirite” and the yeshiva joke

The text brings the Talmudic passage in Sanhedrin about “as the death of the owners, so too the death of the ox,” and the question of “how many judges for the Sinai ox,” along with the Ran’s question: “what practical difference does it make?” The text quotes the Ran answering, “a practical implication for a Nazirite,” on the condition that the Sinai ox requires twenty-three judges, and interprets this as a joke parallel to “a practical implication for betrothing a woman.” The text uses this to sharpen the point that the demand for a practical implication sometimes misses the theoretical benefit of a question, and that even without an empirical practical implication there may still be two different theories with the same empirical content.

Lecture and practice: application as a way to understand theory

The text compares the role of a practical implication to the relation between lecture and practice session at the university. The text describes a personal experience of understanding the lecture while still finding it hard to solve problems, and from this concludes that practical application sharpens theoretical understanding even when it seems to be only “implementation.” The text states that the feedback loop between theory and application is a mechanism that deepens understanding in both directions.

Defining poetry: the absence of an encyclopedia entry and the need for a definitional exercise

The text recounts that while preparing for Shabbat Shirah, he looked for a definition of “poetry” and discovered that there is no encyclopedia entry on poetry in a Hebrew encyclopedia, and interprets that as a sign of a systematic difficulty. The text describes how he looked for attempts at a definition in Hebrew, mentions Mirsky’s article “The Beginning of Piyyut” and its claim that poetry is connected to “rhythm and meter and melody,” and declares, “I don’t agree,” because such a definition does not capture what today is called poetry. The text prefers an academic definition rather than an ars poetica that demonstrates an intuition instead of defining it.

“Stop here, think” and the table exercise: prose dressed up as poetry

The text describes a thread he opened on the forum “Stop here, think” in order to challenge people to define poetry as against prose, and even to ask whether Psalms are a third category. The text presents despairing responses that define poetry as “whatever is printed in lines” or “whatever is placed in a museum,” and argues that despair is not a solution. The text describes an exercise by Gonen Ginat, who took the opening post, vocalized it and broke it into lines in order to create a “poem,” and shows how that formal dressing-up challenges the distinction between poetry and prose.

Rabbi Kook: a free poet without meter and rhyme

The text quotes a passage from Rabbi Kook: “Against my will, I am compelled to be a poet, but a free poet. I cannot be bound to the inheritance of meter and rhyme.” The text interprets this to mean that Rabbi Kook is fleeing the “heaviness” of prose, but also does not want the “other constraints” of meter and rhyme. The text uses this to argue that meter and rhyme cannot be the definition of poetry, but at most a particular case or a sign.

Yehuda Amichai: a poem without rhymes as a definition of poetry as experience and structure

The text brings Yehuda Amichai’s poem “On the Day My Daughter Was Born” and presents a disagreement in class over whether this is a poem or “prose arranged in lines.” The text argues that it is “completely a poem,” because the aim is not to convey facts but to convey an experience, and the facts are only the medium. The text interprets the internal ars poetica in which Amichai says about a scientific sentence, “It was a poem and you didn’t know,” as claiming that the poetic happens when the utterance goes beyond literal, informational meaning.

The axis model: encyclopedia entry versus “pure poem” and the relation between signifier and signified

The text proposes the tool of “the heap” as a model for dealing with a complex phenomenon, and formulates two theoretical poles that do not appear in pure form in reality. The text defines the prose pole as a sentence whose meaning is “basically nothing more than the meaning of its words,” where the relation between signifier and signified is one-to-one, and places an encyclopedia entry as the closest case to that. The text defines the poetry pole as something in which the importance lies not in the meaning of the words but in the structure and atmosphere, to the point of saying that “if it were possible to write a poem without words, you would write it without words,” and all intermediate cases are different mixtures of the two poles.

Meter and rhyme as symptoms: signals to the reader, not the definition

The text argues that meter, rhyme, and line breaks are not the definition of poetry but symptoms or hints that signal to the reader to read the text as poetry and not as informative prose. The text proposes that poetry works “through the structure” and not through the meaning of the words, even when there is no formal structure of meter and rhyme. The text concludes that everything in the world contains something of poem and something of prose, and the question is “how much and how much” along a continuous axis of the relation between structure/experience and direct verbal meaning.

Okay, let’s see where we’re standing before we begin. We talked a bit about the meaning of definitions, and I tried to argue that, contrary perhaps to what people sometimes think, a definition is not something constitutive—or at least not always constitutive—but very often something directive. Meaning: there is some concept that already exists before we looked at it or dealt with it, and all the analysis is trying to do is capture the essential characteristics of that concept. So really we’re dealing here with a kind of observation. A definition is the offspring or result of a process that is observational in nature. We observe something and try to fit it into a definition, and that’s why I also said in the end that there’s a kind of back-and-forth process here, which could not happen if we saw definitions as something constitutive and not directive. Because then there could be no such thing as saying, “Wait, this definition is wrong, because in this example it doesn’t hold.” Such a thing as a right or wrong definition. If you set down a particular definition for a concept, and that’s what constitutes the concept, then that’s the concept. What does it even mean to say right or wrong? Right and wrong are always the result of comparison. You place it next to something else and ask whether it fits or doesn’t fit. And in fact that process of comparison is the clearest indication that the definition is the product of observation, and I said that basically there’s a movement here of back and forth. That is, you observe, you look at examples, at the idea, and that feeds into a definition. Then you test it on more cases—does it work, does it not work, do we need to sand down the definition a bit, send it back, return to the examples, then back to the definition, and so on. And in such an endless process, you hope that asymptotically somehow you eventually reach a definition that more or less fits the thing you were defining, although it’s possible that such a process never really ends, and you only get closer and closer without ever actually reaching a full match.

I mentioned that matter of giving a bill of divorce, where in the giving of a bill of divorce you can see some attempt to distill from the cases the Talmud brings what counts as a valid giving of a bill of divorce and what doesn’t. Out of all those cases they try to distill some theoretical definition—yes, a theory—that says what the giving of a bill of divorce must satisfy in order to be valid. And that constantly moves between the cases and the definition, between the definition and the cases. And I mentioned that there’s a Kehillot Yaakov that devotes three long sections trying to do exactly that, and in the end he arrives at some definition so complex that it basically doesn’t help at all. But in the end, it seemed to me—and this was the point I emphasized at the end of last time, I think—that what mattered there was the process, not the result. Because the way we come to know the idea fully has to pass through the attempt to define it, even if in the end the definition isn’t really useful to us or doesn’t quite fit the idea. But that’s how we think about things. The attempt to take some collection of phenomena that seems completely lacking in order or discipline and put it into the mold of a definition—even though it’s imperfect—that’s our way of understanding it. And when we look and see that it isn’t perfect, we’ve advanced in understanding, because we understood one more thing about the idea: the fact is, it doesn’t fit into this definition, which means there’s something else there, and then again we try to fit it into the idea, and again, and that’s how we understand better and better the concept we’re trying to define.

In the case of giving a bill of divorce, for example, my claim was that in the end, after a halakhic decisor goes through the whole course of the Kehillot Yaakov, he shouldn’t use the definition that the Kehillot Yaakov arrived at for a new case that comes before him, where he has to decide whether this is a valid giving of a bill of divorce or not. He doesn’t need to use the final product, the definition the Kehillot Yaakov came to. It won’t help him. He won’t be able to use it. It’s not so useful because it’s too complicated. But the process he went through causes him to understand very well this concept of giving a bill of divorce, and now, intuitively, he’ll be able to tell me about a particular case whether it is a valid giving of a bill of divorce or not. So the process is often no less important than the product, yes—the definition that comes out at the end.

And we talked a bit about this issue of multiple intelligences, and I told you that I always used to mock the whole thing, because it’s science in the service of political correctness—trying to show that every person is Einstein, right? Everybody’s a genius, just each one in a different field and in a different way. And you can define it in such a way that in effect everyone has very, very high intelligence—it’s just motor intelligence. And another kind of intelligence, I don’t know, emotional, and another intellectual, whatever—different kinds of intelligences. And in the end I said that I’m somewhat retracting the mockery, because all these years I always brought this as a ridiculous example, but that’s not entirely precise. Because the point is that the process of definition is not only passive.

What did I say there? I said that if you begin from a certain standpoint and look at human beings, just before they have gone through the process of defining what intelligence is—if you ask people, they’ll tell you, “Look, Einstein is intelligent; Maradona isn’t. A talented soccer player, yes, but I wouldn’t call that genius or intelligence.” Fine? That’s before the era of multiple intelligences. Then you try to distill from what people do call intelligence certain characteristics. What is intelligence? That’s the supposedly scientific, intellectual work. And you arrive at several characteristics—I don’t know, five, seven, I don’t remember how many—and then to your astonishment you discover that Maradona also satisfies those characteristics. And then you show that he is intelligent exactly like Einstein, and all is well in Zion, right? Everyone is wise, everyone is insightful, everyone knows the Torah.

And I always said that what bothered me about this was that the process is paradoxical. Because if the attempt to define really is the product of observing what people do, then if the definition in the end doesn’t pass the tests—if it doesn’t give me the same results as what people think intuitively—then that only means the definition simply failed in its job. It didn’t succeed in extracting from the way people look at things a good account of the matter, because the fact is there are things people don’t call intelligence and the definition gives you as intelligence. So that means apparently the definition does not fully and correctly describe what people call intelligence, and then it turns out we haven’t advanced at all. That’s what I always thought.

But why did I qualify that? Because that’s basically a way of looking at a definition as something passive. The definition is fed only by observation. And this is an important point; maybe I didn’t sharpen it enough, so it’s important to sharpen it here. It’s true that a definition is the product of observation—I said a definition is not constitutive but directive—but there is a constitutive dimension in a definition. Not really constitutive, but sort of constitutive. Why? Because after you define something, looking at the definition as passive basically says: the data are the collection of things people call intelligence. That’s the data. The definition is an intellectual attempt to fit that data into a structure, a theoretical structure. To propose a theoretical framework that captures what people mean, even though they themselves aren’t relating to theoretical frameworks—they’re just intuitive. But that isn’t precise, like I said before about giving a bill of divorce. A definition has a role in shaping intuition, not only in describing intuition. A definition is not passive with respect to intuition. It receives intuitive data and tries to describe what it sees—but it also has an active role. Meaning, it also helps me formulate my intuition. Sometimes my intuition misses things, and after I see the definition I suddenly understand something more that, before I had the definition—when I was just working intuitively—I didn’t understand. And therefore it is entirely possible that after I distill and define the concept of intelligence theoretically, I’ll discover that in fact Maradona was intelligent, and I was wrong before.

I said this last time too, but I just want to explain and sharpen here what this means for us, in terms of how we look at definitions. It means that although a definition is the result of observation, because a definition is directive and not constitutive, still it has a dimension that is not merely passive. Because one might have said: it’s like science. When I look at phenomena, the theory has to describe the phenomena; it has to deliver the phenomena to me. That’s what it means for a theory to be correct. And then the theory becomes secondary to the phenomena. The phenomena are what determine things. The theory is only an attempt to place the phenomena into some rigid framework—a theory. Okay, and what I want to claim here is that a theory also has an active role and not only a passive one. The theory sends us back to the phenomena and improves our intuitive perception of them; it doesn’t only try to describe that intuition. It acts on that intuition. It changes that intuition. It’s a kind of this back-and-forth game, where I go to intuition, I try to fit it into a pattern of definition. The definition illuminates intuition for me in some sense, including in places where I missed something. And when I miss something, it isn’t always true that I should change the definition. Sometimes what’s right is to change the intuition, while keeping the definition because it really does capture things correctly. That’s a very, very important point.

In other words, after I make this comparison between the definition I proposed—the theory—and the cases it is meant to describe, let’s say in scientific language, the theory versus the cases the theory is meant to explain—then in science it’s clear: the moment it doesn’t stand up to the test of the cases, if there’s a case that contradicts the theory, you have to change the theory; the theory is wrong. In the scientific method the theory has a completely passive role. But in the broader realm of definitions that’s not how it is. In definitions, theory also has an active role. Once the concept of intelligence has been defined, my conception of intelligence is better than it was before, when it was only intuitive. And now it may be that I discover that before, when I relied on my intuitions, I was mistaken. Therefore the person who did this theoretical distillation and arrived at the definition can correct the people who say, “Wait, this is intelligent and that isn’t intelligent.” He can say, “No, no—you’re mistaken.”

You might say: but he built the definition based on them and from them, so how can he then take that very definition and tell them they’re mistaken? Not true. Once I take that definition, it also has a directive role—meaning, it also has a constitutive dimension, not just a directive one. And then I can go back again and revise the definition again. Right—that’s the back and forth I talked about last time. I begin by looking at what people call intelligence; that gives me the initial intuition. I need to begin somewhere. So let’s say the science of intelligence begins with observing what people call intelligence; that’s my indication, those are the cases, the laboratory attempts from which I’m supposed to build the theory. Then I build the theory: this is what’s called intelligence. I go back into the field and check whether it correctly describes what people do or not. If overall yes, then fine—but there are still a few points that don’t fit, that don’t match the definition. What do I do? One of two things. I have to weigh it, and I don’t know how to give criteria for when I do this and when I do that, but sometimes you do this and sometimes that. Meaning, sometimes I change the definition, refine the definition because it doesn’t fit completely; and sometimes I don’t—I refine the intuition. That is, the definition captured something here that maybe intuition glitched on a bit, because there’s no cognitive oversight there; intuitive thought is uncontrolled. That’s just how I think, and that’s what comes out.

The advantage of a definition, and of scientific theory, and of fitting things into a systematic pattern, is that then you can work systematically and see whether you are arriving at a result. Intuition can often mislead you. There is practical importance in reaching definitions; it isn’t only some intellectual matter that interests me—defining what everybody already understands. As I also mentioned regarding Aristotle: when Aristotle wrote the Organon and systematized all the logical inferences, of course he didn’t invent them; people used logical inferences before him too. But on the other hand it is obvious that after I’ve studied Aristotle’s Organon, I’ll make better use of logical inferences than I did before, even though everyone understands intuitively what a logical inference is and uses logical inference. There’s a kind of feedback loop between the two planes: between the intuitive plane and the conscious plane, the higher plane in the intellectual sense.

So then you can never say about some product or something that it isn’t intelligent, because otherwise you’ll have to say—then you’ll have to change the definition. No—that’s what I’m saying. “Never”? I don’t agree. Sometimes I won’t be able to say that. You said “never,” and I don’t agree. This is exactly it—it’s a very delicate game. On the one hand I do assume that my intuitions generally work correctly; I built the theory on them. On the other hand, after the theory comes into conflict with some facts, or at the margins—meaning, it doesn’t fit completely—it’s not certain that what I need is to improve the definition, to refine the definition. It could be that I found points here where my intuitive thinking is mistaken. Many times, after I conceptualize my intuition, I suddenly understand that it too was misleading me a bit. Meaning, there are places where I need to be more careful now.

Yes, it’s like—I think we also talked about this example—instrument flying, when a pilot enters vertigo. Then he has to cling to the instruments, even though his whole intuition tells him that it’s wrong, that he should go there and not there. If the instrument tells you to go there, listen to it. And you have to train very hard not to follow your intuitions, even though the instrument itself is built on certain conceptions that in the end begin with our intuitions. But after we conceptualized it and defined it, and the instrument is already a machine—it works according to rules and definitions and all that—it can provide control and correct my intuition, even though it was built on the basis of our intuitions. That’s how we got to the theory, and the instruments, and all those things. It’s very similar to what we’re supposed to do in the intellectual process as well.

I think once I spoke about how we studied a chapter in the Tanya—I don’t remember in what context—and I spoke about how philosophical ethics works, meaning how you write an article in philosophical ethics. Someone proposes a moral theory, right? “We should do what brings maximum benefit to the maximum number of people.” Okay. Now I test that against cases. Let’s see: the plane that crashed in the Andes there, with the soccer players, with Manchester United—it wasn’t, I don’t know who it was there. No, Manchester United disappeared, I think. There was another crash in the Andes, right? The Manchester United one was a crash where they disappeared. But there was another story there where they got stuck in the Andes and ate one of them. And that’s a test case for ethical theories, because maximum benefit to the maximum number of people basically says: eat one person so that all the others gain. And then people say, “See? That shows the theory can’t be correct.” And I always ask myself: why? Maybe it is correct. That’s the theory, and therefore it really was what they should have done—to eat that one person. Why do people think that if my intuition says, “No way can that be the solution in this case,” then the theory must be corrected? If the theory is the correct one, then that means the intuition is wrong, and what really should be done is indeed to eat that one person so that all the rest stay alive.

And what lies behind this view is that basically you place your moral theory before thought experiments. You conduct a thought experiment. So you say, okay, let’s say I have even a hypothetical case—it was a real case, but even if it were hypothetical—let’s see what the result is. And then I check: does this work or not? Meaning, is it reasonable or unreasonable? If it’s unreasonable, that means the theory isn’t correct; you need to fix it—articulate the theory better, refine the theory in light of facts that don’t fit it. But very often that’s not how it works. Very often you have to consider the second possibility as well. After you arrived at the definition—that this really is your moral theory—then maybe, despite the fact that your intuition says it isn’t right to do this here, pay attention: it could be that the intuition is mistaken, and in fact this is what should be done.

Now, I’m not saying—I don’t know when you should do this and when that. It’s some kind of game that moves between the two. You look at the idea, you build a theory, and that theory helps you look better at the idea, and somehow you sense when you need to correct this and when—what? Isn’t it some kind of internal persuasion? You say, “Okay, now we’re going to die, so better to eat him—let’s adjust the intuition”? No. I’m saying: that’s when you’re inside the situation. But I’m talking about when I’m outside it, sitting in my academic armchair, asking what would happen in such a situation. Then I say: I don’t know. Some people will say, “Look, it’s all just nonsense—you’re fooling yourself; it’s all manipulations you’re doing inside yourself.” Why? “Because there’s no basis for it.” It starts from something inside you—but there’s no objective anchor. So I say: but that means there’s no objective basis, it isn’t that this moral theory is more correct, you’re not aiming at anything, because the definition is constitutive—there is no right or wrong. And I claim that’s not so. The definition is directive. Of course there is right and wrong. That’s exactly my claim: definitions are directive, not constitutive; they can be directive. Can they? Yes.

Now okay, one can argue whether morality consists of directive things or constitutive things. But I’m saying: on the principled level, there are people who claim that all definitions are constitutive—that it’s all just games you’re playing inside yourself. That’s not true. There is a kind of observation here, and you’re constantly in this struggle. And therefore one of the—this ought to converge in the end, though. What? It ought to converge. Yes, I think it does converge. In such theories, the way theoretical work progresses—you see that the theory becomes one that covers more and more of the thought experiments you perform, more and more of the situations you test; the theory will give the correct solution. But there will always still be someone who brings some situation you didn’t think of, where it gets stuck. Then you have to decide whether you trust your theory, and then you say: “My intuition got stuck because I simply made a mistake here, and I leave the definition as it is,” or whether you say, “Here—the definition has been challenged again, and it needs to be improved further.” Because I’m not—sometimes I choose this solution and sometimes that one, but it’s not an arbitrary decision, as some would say. “You do this sometimes and that sometimes, there’s no lawfulness here, that means it isn’t true.” Or someone says, “There was an error in the experiment, there was an error in the experiment.” Yes, exactly, right. Science says that too many times.

When you have a very, very solid theory—like that thing now, that they had supposedly exceeded the speed of light, right? Half a year ago, what was it, something like that, in an experiment. Now because there is such a solid theory that you can’t exceed the speed of light, and it’s so well-founded and all that, there were results in an experiment. So what do you mean—obviously that means you have to fix the theory? But everybody was suspicious, and in the end it turned out that the suspicion was justified: it didn’t work, it wasn’t true. Because—and this is exactly the example. Sometimes the theory—supposedly the theory has to describe the experiments. You have an experiment, so fix the theory. No. When there’s a very strong theory—Thomas Kuhn talked about this—you need a sufficiently strong threshold of failure in experiments, or inability to explain experiments, before replacing a theoretical paradigm. Meaning, we don’t replace a theoretical paradigm so quickly. He attributes that to sociology. He thinks it’s just scientists’ politics. Meaning, it’s convenient for us to use this, we’ve gotten used to it, and it takes a lot of challenges that the theory can’t meet in order to replace it. For him it’s political, because he is a sociologist of science, not a philosopher of science. But I think this is a scientific process, not a sociological one.

We really have a sense that this is a correct theory, and then it may be that there was an error in the experiment. It may be—you don’t replace a theory so quickly. It does explain a huge number of facts; it can’t be that this is accidental. There’s something really strong here. Now maybe I’m mistaken here. And maybe indeed this experiment was not an error, and I always have to remain open to that possibility. Usually in science, this is what they say in labs: when the experiment succeeds, they never repeat it. What do you mean they don’t repeat it? If the experiment succeeds, they don’t repeat it—because it might not succeed. But that already enters the definitions of an unsuccessful experiment. They have to repeat it. No, and that is exactly the point. If it breaks a theory. Basically what they mean is that there may have been an error in the experiment; they don’t mean that we don’t—exactly. The sociological view says this is just conservatism. We’re comfortable with the current theory, we don’t want to replace it. We’ve already gotten used to it; all our instruments, all our literature, all our terminology—everything is already built around this theory. Do you know what it means to replace a paradigm in science? Today it’s such a complicated story. You have to update the whole scientific world, and certainly in practical fields, and replace terminology and publish new tables and all the things you need that guide people in their work. It’s complicated. So because of that, there are people who attribute everything only to that complexity. Meaning, you’re conservative because it’s complicated to be revolutionary. No—you’re conservative because you understand that it’s true. The sociology is an expression of something real. Again, that’s this sense of constitutive versus directive.

Okay, and therefore this basically means that theory is not passive with respect to facts. The naive view says that theory is passive with respect to facts. Meaning, once you perform an experiment, the theory has to fit the experiment. If it doesn’t fit the experiment, throw away the theory. But it doesn’t work that way even in science, and certainly not in the realm of definitions. And why not? Because when you’re very convinced that the theory is correct, that you’ve really gotten hold of something true, you won’t believe your own eyes if they contradict the theory. Then you’ll say there was some mistake here, that can’t be, something went wrong here, impossible. Okay, and that’s perfectly fine. Sometimes that’s perfectly fine, as long as it’s in the right dosage. You shouldn’t be conservative to the point of refusing to replace a theory at any cost. You repeat the experiment again and again. No, because when it’s correct in one segment, then it’s necessarily correct whenever there’s a theory. No, there could be a more general theory that explains all the facts that the previous theory also explained. One hundred percent. But that still doesn’t mean the lower-level theory—just because it explains some phenomena—that it’s correct. No, what does “correct” mean? It isn’t. But this phenomenon it doesn’t explain. And I claim it is correct for that phenomenon too—not that it’s partially correct, like Newton versus Einstein. No, I’m not talking about that. For my purposes, Newton here counts as incorrect. Meaning: it doesn’t explain all the phenomena; it explains a certain subset of the phenomena.

Now there are those who won’t want to replace Newtonian theory at all. Even at high velocities they’ll claim Newton is right and there was an experimental error. Fine—but there were enough experiments to understand that this was not experimental error, and apparently Newton is not right. But that process is difficult. Science is conservative by nature, and I think the fact that it is conservative by nature is not bad politics or bad sociology—it is the correct thing. Because if you’ve really gotten hold of something, then you understand now that it’s true. Meaning, you grasp that this definition or this theory captured something real in reality, and it isn’t just a passive construction, not something arbitrary. You always stand opposite reality, and if it’s true I won’t very quickly believe an experiment that contradicts it.

Is Jewish law a theory or a definition? Can I relate all this to Jewish law? Yes. In my view, yes. It’s a matter of perspective, but I think yes—in Jewish law too we do the same kind of work as scientific work. There’s a story about Rabbi Chaim, that they asked him about a Tosafot and he said, “There is no such Tosafot.” And he meant not “I’m not familiar with it,” but simply “There can’t be such a thing.” Right—there can’t be a Jewish law I haven’t seen. Of course, and we’ve already talked about that, yes, we talked about that in the past. Not only can there be, there are. There are quite a few of them, actually. I don’t know, there are several like that. And by the way, it’s not problematic either, but that’s a different discussion. I think Jewish law and morality are two different categories; they don’t have to overlap. But that’s another matter.

So now I really want to see the meaning of this issue of paradigm and move into the subject of poetry, which I said I wanted to bring as an example. In the Talmud, several times they ask: what practical difference does it make? What does “what practical difference does it make” mean? Often we understand that the practical difference comes to sharpen the understanding. Meaning, if you understand the practical consequence of a theory—say in this case your Jewish-law theory, because I’m now moving to the halakhic application—then you sharpen your understanding better. There is another view that says: no, the practical difference is the way to test whether the theory is correct. Meaning, test it. Suppose you proposed a conceptual Talmudic theory—for example, in agency: is it power of attorney, or is it an extended hand? Fine? So the agent—how do I understand the relation between the agent and the one who appointed him? Right? The classic conceptual inquiry among later authorities: is the agent the extended hand of the appointing party, or does the agent have some independent standing, with the appointing party delegating his powers to him, and now the agent acts in the name of the appointing party, but he isn’t just his extended hand?

So what’s the practical difference? That’s what we ask. On first glance this seems similar, but there are practical differences. What happens if the appointing party goes insane? That’s basically the practical difference people usually bring, and from there begins the dispute between Maimonides and the Tur. What happens in the case of one seized by insanity—there in tractate Gittin, at the start of the chapter. So if the appointing party goes insane, then it depends. If the agent is the extended hand of the appointing party, then go on—that doesn’t work. Why? Because the one doing the divorcing is the appointing party; he merely sent an extended hand that did the divorcing. But that hand, when he is no longer sane, cannot divorce. Fine? It cannot divorce. But if I say agency is power of attorney and not an extended hand, then in fact the one doing the divorcing is the agent. And the act the agent performs takes effect for the appointing party, but the one performing the act is the agent. He received the power of attorney—now he is the husband. For purposes of the divorce, he is called the husband. Fine? He steps into my shoes.

And by the way I’ve already introduced another definition here too, because this isn’t exactly power of attorney; there are several sub-definitions inside this whole thing. Not important. But that, for example, is a practical difference. The Ketzot brings an even more far-reaching practical difference, and everyone screams at him that it can’t be. What happens if the appointing party dies? The Ketzot wants to claim that this is a dispute between Rashi and the Rif. What happens if the appointing party dies? He appointed an agent to divorce his wife, and now he dies. The Ketzot wants to claim—so that she won’t be able to marry a priest? He wants, yes, yes—not that she is a divorcee? The agent would divorce her after the appointing party dies, and she would be divorced and not a widow. She would be divorced and not a widow, because for this purpose he is the husband. That is the power-of-attorney model. In civil law, I think power of attorney becomes void immediately if he dies. Okay, I’m speaking on the halakhic plane.

Meaning, the Ketzot is wrong here—that’s clear, and later authorities say so too. But for example, after death—only with a divorce bill, not with selling an apartment, for instance? No, exactly—that’s the difference. No, it depends on what. In selling an apartment—the point is this: the Ketzot isn’t really wrong. Many times lawyers continue representing someone who died, because you received an irrevocable power of attorney. There are different kinds of power of attorney. Maybe you represent the heirs, or the estate, or—not the appointing party himself. It could be that you remain the attorney of whoever now owns the property—the heirs, or the guardian, or whoever it may be. So the point is—why do they argue with the Ketzot? They argue with him because once the husband dies, the woman is a widow; there is no one left to divorce. Not because the agent can’t act in his name. Meaning, the claim is that this may indeed be true—and maybe it doesn’t exist in civil law, I don’t know—but in halakhic law the claim is that at least according to the power-of-attorney model, you can be the agent of a dead person; you just can’t divorce the woman, because there is no one left to divorce—she is no longer a married woman, she’s already a widow. That’s just a technical point.

And therefore, for example, if it were something else, then maybe indeed he could go on and do it in the case of selling a house. What Yossi said before—yes, in selling a house I could continue to sell it even though the appointing party died, because the house still exists and is in his ownership, and if he appointed you to sell it, then sell it. My cousin kept signing checks in the name of her boss for several days after he died; she didn’t know he had died. He died on Thursday and she kept managing the office affairs. And the decision was that everything was valid and proper, and the checks had to be honored with full respect and pride. Yes, I don’t know—that never got to court. It was… No, but she signed in the name of the business, after all. There is still someone who owns the business even when he dies. She didn’t sign in his personal name; she signed in the name of the business. So in the name of the business, because the business exists regardless of whether its owner died or not. I don’t remember exactly what happened there. Okay. She got frightened when it became clear to her—she thought, “Oh no, what will they accuse me of?” Fine, yes.

And according to the Ketzot, regarding insanity, is it the same law? What? If the husband becomes insane? That part is clear—that’s already been said, that’s Maimonides and the Tur. Maimonides says that if the appointing party goes insane, the Talmud says the agent cannot divorce, but Maimonides says that’s only a rabbinic law. Meaning, on the Torah level he can divorce. And the Tur says he cannot divorce on the Torah level. So the Or Sameach and several other later authorities explain that their dispute is exactly over the question of what the model of agency is: power of attorney or extended hand. Maimonides understands it as power of attorney, and therefore in principle he can divorce, except that there is a rabbinic law forbidding it. But the Tur sees it as extended hand, so if the appointing party dies, in whose name are you acting?

Now even according to Maimonides, who sees it as power of attorney, if the appointing party dies, the Ketzot wanted to say that one could still divorce, and later authorities say that this can’t be. Meaning, you can’t divorce—but not because you are no longer his attorney. You are still his attorney; it’s just that the woman is no longer a married woman, so there is no one to divorce. Fine? So again, it’s only a technical matter. In principle, like the sale of a house you mentioned before, you really can continue to sell the house, because the house exists and is his property, and if he appointed you—sell it. So I’m saying: never mind, we don’t need to get into all the details here. I’m only saying this is a practical difference, and the question is what it does.

That is, I began with an inquiry: what is agency? Power of attorney or extended hand? What practical difference does it make? And I understand “practical difference”—if the appointing party goes insane, if he dies—we start discussing the practical differences. What does discussing the practical differences help with? There is help in both directions, exactly as I said before. On the one hand, the practical difference improves the theory; I understand the theory better. In other words, it improves the theoretical understanding. On the other hand, if the practical difference—say there is an authoritative source that shows me the opposite of the practical difference I expected—then it collapses the theory. Exactly like in science: it’s like an experiment that collapses the theory. Fine? So on the one hand, if the theory doesn’t stand the practical test, then apparently the conceptual Talmudic theory I built is incorrect. Agency isn’t power of attorney; it’s an extended hand, let’s say, or whatever in any inquiry. Okay? So it serves both functions.

Sometimes they reject the practical difference. What? They bring a practical difference and then reject the… Fine, because they say it isn’t really a practical difference—like here, for example, in the death of the appointing party. They reject it because they say it isn’t a practical difference, since she is no longer a married woman; there’s no one to divorce. But in principle it is a practical difference. That’s what I’m saying. It’s a practical difference, just a theoretical one, not a practical one in the concrete sense. In practice it won’t be a practical difference; according to both views, you can’t divorce once the husband is dead. Fine, that’s already a discussion within the practical differences. But I’m saying that the practical difference is the experiment. When I propose a definition or theory and want to test it, the test is the practical difference. And therefore the experiment has two roles. On the one hand, when I look at theory as passive—or definition as passive—you say, okay, if it doesn’t stand up to this test, you need to change it. On the other hand, maybe not. If on this test—then maybe this Jewish law itself isn’t being understood correctly. Maybe agency really should be power of attorney. And pay attention: then suddenly you discover that the reason you can’t divorce a woman once the husband dies isn’t because—one might have said, “Look, it says you can’t divorce a woman once the husband dies, so that means the power-of-attorney model is incorrect.” But if I’m very convinced that power of attorney is correct, very quickly I’ll realize: no, the reason you can’t divorce is because she’s no longer a married woman; but the power-of-attorney model is still correct. Do you see? So here I remained with my theory. I didn’t let the practical difference collapse the theory; I kept my theory and showed why the practical difference doesn’t collapse it.

Whereas if I had not defined the two sides of the theory—either power of attorney or extended hand—it wouldn’t have been clear to me why you can’t divorce after the husband dies. I would have remained with a vague intuition that you can’t divorce, but I wouldn’t have understood it properly. And precisely this theoretical sharpening helps me understand intuitively in a better way. It’s not passive with respect to intuition; it also builds intuition. Okay? It works both ways.

There’s a Talmudic passage—I may have mentioned it, I don’t remember—the Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin talks about “as the death of the owner, so the death of the ox.” The Talmud discusses there how many judges are needed when you judge an ox and kill it. So “as the death of the owner, so the death of the ox”: it is judged by twenty-three, just as a person is judged, so too the ox is judged. Then the Talmud asks: how many judges for the Sinai ox? It says in the Torah that “the ox or the flock shall not graze facing that mountain.” Right? An ox that went up the mountain is liable to death—Mount Sinai at the time of the giving of the Torah. Then the Talmud asks: by how many judges would that ox that went up Mount Sinai have to be judged? I don’t know whether such a thing actually happened or not, but by how many judges would that ox need to be judged?

So the Ran asks there, in his novellae: what practical difference does it make? Why is that interesting? And he says: it makes a practical difference for a Nazirite. If it makes a practical difference for betrothing a woman—that’s a yeshiva joke, right? You ask some conceptual question where the two sides seem like just two formulations of the same thing. Sometimes the two sides of an inquiry really are just two formulations of the same thing. And that’s the role of practical differences. So how do you discover that they are two formulations of the same thing? If there’s no practical difference. If there’s no practical difference, then the claim is… Now on this point I agree with the yeshiva approach that says that isn’t necessarily true. Even if there’s no practical difference, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are two formulations of the same thing; it may just mean there is no practical difference in the real world. And that’s what the yeshiva joke is saying: when you ask what practical difference it makes, the answer is: it makes a practical difference for betrothing a woman. How? If I betroth a woman on condition that my theory is correct, then the question is whether she is betrothed or not. So there’s always some practical difference in betrothing a woman.

Now that is true. I’m saying: the conception behind it is correct, because I really think there can be two formulations that are not equivalent even though they have no practical differences. Two scientific theories may have the same empirical content—there is no practical difference because there is no experiment that can decide which is right—and still, in my eyes, they are two different theories. Because I think a theory says something about reality, not just describes the facts. You can formulate optics through different modes of refraction; you can formulate it according to Fermat’s principle and according to Snell’s law. Two theories with no practical difference at all, because it was proved that they are entirely equivalent—yes, it’s the same thing—and still they are two different theories. Two different philosophies, and totally different conceptions. One is teleological, one is causal—two entirely different things. So in that sense I agree with that idea.

On the other hand, practical difference is often a very important tool, because if indeed you can’t find any practical difference between two things, then perhaps you really are mistaken and it is just the same theory translated into another language, the same theory in different verbal clothing. Therefore practical difference is an important tool, but one has to be careful not to be taken captive by it. And that’s what they mean by “a practical difference for betrothing a woman.” The source of that is the Ran here. That’s the source of this yeshiva joke. The Ran says: what practical difference does it make how many judges there are for the Sinai ox? He says: for a Nazirite—if a Nazirite vows Naziriteship on condition that the Sinai ox is judged by twenty-three, then the question is whether he is a Nazirite or not. That’s the practical difference. Now clearly the Ran is joking. It seems obvious to me that it’s a joke. He means to say: it’s the same as saying “a practical difference for betrothing a woman.” We want to discuss by how many judges the Sinai ox is judged—why are you bothering me now with the question of the practical difference? Why is it important now what practical difference it makes? The practical difference is what they did then—that’s the practical difference. What difference does it make? Here it’s not even a bad practical difference, because there really is a practical question: what did they do then? Why should it matter that right now it doesn’t affect me? There are cases where there’s no practical difference even theoretically. There are cases where there is a theoretical practical difference because what happened happened—even if it doesn’t affect me now. That’s no longer really a legal question. And that’s what the Ran means: if there is a practical difference, that means there are different theories here, and we need to check which theory is correct. So we put it to the test of the practical difference. Fine?

And for our purposes, when I ask the question “what practical difference does it make,” that question is trying to do two things. First, it tries to refine the theory, because you have to test it experimentally against the facts. Second, the theory sometimes shapes the practical difference. That is, the theory sometimes shapes my intuitive perception. And after I formulated that “as the death of the owner, so the death of the ox,” that means the Sinai ox is judged by twenty-three. And now that I understand that the Sinai ox is judged by twenty-three, my understanding of what “as the death of the owner, so the death of the ox” means becomes sharper, because I found a practical application for it. The practical application often sharpens the theoretical conception a lot. If you don’t understand what it means on the ground—that’s the relation between lecture and exercise session at the university. Anyone who studied at university knows there’s the lecture and then there’s the exercise session. What is the exercise session? It’s just applying what you learned in the lecture. So why do you need it? What’s the problem?

I, as someone who was always weaker in the exercises and precisely in the lectures always enjoyed myself and loved them and everything, until I got to the practical problems—and there I always had trouble solving them even though I understood the lecture perfectly—I suddenly discovered that although the exercise session is nothing but an implementation of what you learned in the lecture, still it’s not the same thing. After you go through the exercises and do integrals and solve differential equations and all sorts of problems, you understand the theory better. That’s how it is. Practical differences sharpen theoretical understanding better. Fine? It works both ways.

Okay, so that more or less is the theory of theories of definitions. Now we need examples, practical differences for the theory of definitions. Because what I came to do now is: this subject itself can be studied theoretically, and one can also try to see consequences. So let’s try to see consequences. I brought some examples about the divorce bill and intelligences and various things like that, but now I want to do a kind of exercise in defining the concept of poetry. Okay?

I think I already mentioned this—that on Shabbat Shirah I had to speak in Munkatch on Shabbat Shirah. So I started thinking to myself: what is poetry? I looked in the Hebrew Encyclopedia, and of course I still didn’t find it—there is no entry on poetry in the Hebrew Encyclopedia. I said Talmudic Encyclopedia—sorry. The Talmudic Encyclopedia hasn’t gotten to the letter shin yet. One day, when they get to shin, maybe. But in the Hebrew Encyclopedia there is no entry on poetry. That really surprised me. In any case, I had to do the work myself. So I tried to define it a little for myself, and I found that this really is a field where, not for nothing, there is no entry on the concept of poetry, because apparently they didn’t succeed in finding something orderly and systematic to say about this topic. You can’t even define the very concept you are dealing with, and that’s quite embarrassing for people who deal with the academic or scientific study of the field—the kinds of people who write encyclopedia entries. And when you look at the field of poetry from an academic, scientific point of view and try to define the field—not write a poem, but define poetry—you have to move forward somehow. And when people don’t manage to move forward, they don’t write an entry.

And in fact, when I tried to search—not in the encyclopedia, but in other places—for attempts to define what poetry is, first of all there’s very little, at least in Hebrew. I didn’t check the world literature. There’s that excellent article by Mirsky, “The Beginnings of Liturgical Poetry.” Ah, I know the… Excellent. Yes. He shows how midrash turns into poetry, and how the early paytanim, and how Yannai—he explains how the midrashim are half poetry. He says the basis of poetry is basically… No—but does he define the concept of poetry? Does he define the concept of poetry? What is poetry? Yes, he says meter—that something measured is poetry, and then measure is… So I disagree. I’ll explain why in a moment. Midrash also creates parallels. That’s how it is—he brings a lot of examples and moves slowly, slowly; I’m in chapter two or three now. Okay. In any event, I disagree.

There’s also a little book by some translator—Shimon… no, what was it? Zand? Shimon Zand? No, Zand is that historian, no? No, no, there’s another one, I forgot his name. He has a short book where he discusses the question of what poetry is. He’s the only one I found who really does orderly, systematic work on this, as far as I found. It could be Mirsky did too—I don’t know, I’m not familiar. I heard about the work but didn’t read it. Mirsky isn’t serious. In any event, there I found it. And most of the things people say on the subject are what is called ars poetica. Ars poetica is when poets discuss the question of what poetry is. So yes, “poetry is rhythm, wave and cloud, I built myself a brick city.” That’s called poetry. Whatever is displayed in a museum. Yes, exactly. It’s some kind of—almost that point. And somehow the feeling is that maybe this gives you some intuition of what poetry is. If it’s done well, sometimes it’s just babble—at least that’s my feeling. But sometimes it does mean to demonstrate to you what poetry is, and succeeds in doing so. But when I’m looking for an academic definition, I’m looking for a definition. I’m not looking for someone who will clarify the concept for me; I want someone to define it.

Now why do I need a definition if the concept is already clear to me? Well, that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about. But this tension between the formal definition, the conceptualization, and intuitive understanding comes out here very strongly, because here they don’t really manage to arrive at a definition. Okay? So I started looking at poems, and at what people say about them, and so on. I found here a passage by Rabbi Kook. Maybe—you know what, maybe before the Rabbi Kook passage, there was this internet forum “Stop Here, Think,” where I participated. After that Shabbat Shirah I gave a whole series there on what poetry is. In writing—not audio lectures. So a discussion started developing. There was a discussion; these weren’t frontal lectures. It was mixed—someone would propose a definition, then I’d add another chapter, and so on. So I opened that thread. Look, I photographed it here—just ignore the other side there, the prose side; the poetry is here. Look at it—maybe not everyone has it, but never mind, just look two people together, just glance. It begins with my opening post. The post opened the thread. I began the thread as an attempt to use the people there to help me define what poetry is, because I couldn’t do it; I didn’t find a definition. So I wanted to challenge them to help me define this concept.

So the post goes like this: “In honor of the upcoming Shabbat Shirah, I began pondering what the definition of poetry is as opposed to prose, for example, and whether there are additional categories on that axis. For example, psalms in Psalms certainly don’t belong to prose, but that also isn’t exactly poetry, right? So maybe psalms are a third category. I’d be happy if anyone from the holy public would bring sources that discuss the definition of poetry in the Bible and in general, and propose definitions for the concept. I don’t assume there’s a completely sharp definition, but distinctive characterizations could certainly be helpful.” In other words, I wanted to start moving forward. And I think it became a very interesting thread, because we did move forward. People brought characteristics and we talked a bit, and I felt that slowly I was managing to get closer to a definition. It really was work exactly like I described before, so to me this is really a clear example of what I described before, because that is exactly the process we went through there.

And of course there too there were people who said: “Well, it’s a complex concept and there’s a lot there, so poetry is whatever has vocalization marks and is written in broken lines,” or something like that—“whatever is displayed in a museum.” Right, those are the despairing ones. The people who say: “Look, it’s a complex phenomenon, and whenever you propose a definition they tell you, ‘It’s a complex phenomenon, you’ll never succeed.’” Those are always the people who discourage you. And it’s true—it is a complex phenomenon. But discouragement doesn’t buy groceries. So you have to understand how to deal with complex phenomena, and that’s exactly my goal in this exercise.

Now look at the exercise someone did there—this is Gonen Ginat, the journalist. Right? You see what he did in the table? He simply took what I wrote, vocalized it, broke the lines, and turned it into a poem—which is a wonderful exercise. Not bad. Okay, so that came to challenge the question of what a poem is, of course. Some there claimed that yes, it is a poem. Quite a few there claimed it was a poem. And we’ve seen worse things, he says. I won’t read it again—I already read it. It’s the same thing, only vocalized and broken into lines like that; sometimes he stops in places where really there was no reason to stop at all. It’s just random. But really, if I had presented this in some book, in some context, inside a book, then Yossi maybe, with his ideology, would find that it isn’t poetry. But a lot of people would see it inside a book of poems and nobody would bat an eye. Fine, it’s a poem, interesting, and move on to the next one. Maybe they’d even set it to music. Sure, they already set Mishnah to music—but poems, yes, some people composed melodies for Mishnah in order to help remember them.

There are sentences written on a page—what difference does it make whether you call it poetry or prose? You call it poetry. That’s the question: what practical difference does it make? It makes a practical difference for betrothing a woman. You asked what practical difference—it makes a practical difference for betrothing a woman. I want to know the definition of poetry. I use the concept; I want to understand it. Right. I have an intellectual aim, no other aim. What is poetry? I want to understand the concepts I use. I can read to you—okay. From whom is this? From Aharon Mirsky.

“These things that we saw, the passages from midrash, are the foundation of poetry and contain an aspect of poem, but needless to say they are not poetry proper, for content alone does not make a poem a poem. The body of a poem is spirit and form, rhythm and meter and melody within them.” What is spirit? Define spirit for me. “And all these,” Mirsky says, “are embraced and attached to one another and cannot be separated. Our examples”—he brings lots of examples from the midrashim and so on—“have no poetic form, no shape of poem, and are not poetry. Indeed, the way of poetry is to make use of measure, meter, rhythm, and other signs that are infused into it.” People are accustomed to think of those as ornaments of poetry… In any case, the formal definition—“A psalm of David: The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life, whom shall I dread?” Something like that, maybe. But what I’m saying is: I want to define something more abstract and general, of which that would be a particular case. Fine? And this actually gets closer—but yes, yes, a particular case of that style, and of poetry in general. Exactly. What is today called poetry won’t stand that test. It looks much less like a poem. From the postmodern period onward—today you’ll find poets who are entirely within the canon of poetry and they don’t meet that criterion. That was Zach’s attack at the time—Natan Zach on this matter. Yes, yes, and afterward people said Zach was wrong. Depends who said it. Anyway, in the end I think he was right, but he’s already been overruled, so it won’t help him now.

In any event, this whole thing raises in a very beautiful way the question of what poetry is. Really trying to define the concept. So yes, here’s an example from Rabbi Kook. I found a passage: “A poet of the song of infinity”—I think it’s in The Course of Ideas, I don’t remember exactly where; I didn’t bring the source. He says as follows: “My reflections are broad as the sea. To bring them in plain prose, without weakening them, I am forced, against my own preference, to be a poet—but a free poet. I cannot be bound to the inheritance of meter and rhyme.” Apropos Zach, this sounds like Zach. Zach, yes. “A free poet”—he doesn’t want to be bound by meter and rhyme, which is an even more abstract kind of poetry. So in what sense is that poetry? According to Mirsky’s definition, that would no longer count as poetry. That’s medieval poetry still. Fine, I’m talking about poetry in general.

“I flee from simple prose because of the heaviness in it, because of its constriction, and I cannot put myself into other constrictions that may be no smaller or less burdensome than the burden of the prose from which I flee.” What does he mean? Meter and rhythm. Meter and rhyme, yes—they themselves are already a bit like prose if there is meter and rhyme. It should be something entirely free, even without meter or rhyme. So what then? Is the concept empty? This paragraph is so beautiful, because it basically says that meters and rhymes are not the definition of poetry. They cannot be. There is something more abstract here. Of course there is some connection to meter and rhyme, but in my opinion that’s only a particular case, and in a moment we’ll get to that.

“One who has the soul of a creator must be a creator of ideas and thoughts; one cannot remain enclosed in one’s study alone, because the flame of the soul rises by itself and cannot be stopped in its course.” Which at first glance sounds like something else, but it is exactly the next sentence, so apparently for him this is somehow connected to the concept of poetry he is talking about.

There is a poem by Yehuda Amichai—“On the day my daughter was born.” He says: “On the day my daughter was born, no one died in the hospital, and on the entrance gate it was written: today entry for priests is permitted. And it was the longest day of the year, and from joy I traveled with my friend to the hills of Sha’ar HaGai. We saw a pine tree, sick and bare, lacking countless cones. And Tzvi said that such things are harmful to agriculture.” And Tzvi said that trees standing before death produce more cones than living ones. “And I said to him: that was a poem, and you didn’t know it.” That’s ars poetica, of course. He’s talking about cones, yes. “And even though you are a man of the exact sciences, you made a poem.” And he replied to me: “And though you are a man of dreams, you made a very exact daughter, with all the devices necessary for her life.”

And this thing is entirely a poem in my view—entirely. And I’ll try to explain why, even though it has no meter, no rhyme, no nothing. And I think this poem is ars poetica in the highest sense, because it tries to show why it itself is a poem. When he says to Tzvi, “You are a man of the exact sciences, and you said a sentence: trees standing before death produce more cones than the living. That was a poem,” Yehuda Amichai claims. That’s what he told his friend, even though his friend didn’t think of himself as making a poem by saying that. So why was that a poem? There was no meter, no rhyme, nothing. It was apparently dry-ish prose. And understand that this itself appears as something Yehuda Amichai sees as a poem—all that I just read. And he wants to explain why this very thing is a poem. He explains why that passage itself is a poem by bringing the cones and the trees—which itself is prose—and saying: “You just made a poem.” So what exactly does he mean?

What his friend said was completely scientific in tone: there are more cones on a tree that is about to die. That’s all he said. The point is—and I’ll say it already now, this is like the final point, and afterward I’ll try to develop it a bit more systematically—the definition, in my view at least, the definition of poetry… maybe one sentence before that: there’s a strong sense that there are many things in which the poetic dimension appears in different dosages. Now lazy people—the ones who tell you “it’s complicated, don’t fit it into frameworks,” and so on—those lazy people basically say: “Look, it’s such a complex phenomenon, so you can’t define the concept of poetry.” And I think what you need to do when you face a complex phenomenon is try to get to its core, understand what the poem is in itself, in Kantian terms—the pure poem. And then show that all the varied phenomena you are talking about are appearances of that abstract concept in different dimensions or different intensities.

So I know there’s a poetic dimension even in the Iliad and the Odyssey, even though they tell a story. But it isn’t the same thing as an ordinary story. And even an ordinary story isn’t the same thing as an encyclopedia entry. An encyclopedia entry just conveys information. A story doesn’t merely convey information. So my claim is that a story has a poetic dimension. It is prose with a bit of poetic dimension. So what I’m trying to do now is propose a theoretical model for how to approach the definition. I say it’s like the heap. What? Yes, exactly, like the heap paradox. That’s why all the introductions I gave until now—I’m now trying to show you how I apply them to the concept of poetry.

I’m saying: basically what I have to do is find some axis and place two pure poles on it, pure extremes that you’ll never really find in reality, but never mind—for me these are fictions. All the real concepts will appear in between, in the middle. They’ll contain elements of both. Someone who takes only the two extremes and that’s it—he’ll wind up with poem and prose. But then he won’t find poetry and he won’t find prose, if he takes only the extremes, because they don’t exist; they’re abstract extremes. Or—well, “close” is already again some kind of middle, never mind. So the middle—not exactly the middle but closer. It doesn’t matter. The phenomena lie between them. The poles are theoretical concepts; you won’t find the poles. But that’s why this is intellectual work. I create abstractions and say: I formulate two extremes that you won’t find; they aren’t even part of the set of phenomena we’re talking about. So that’s the theoretical work here. I find two poles and then I try to show that the whole range of phenomena you’re talking about is basically 0.9 times this pole plus 0.1 times that pole, and this one is 0.8 plus 0.2, and so on. The question is how close it is to here and how close it is to there.

And this is theoretical work par excellence, because these poles you don’t really find in the examples, though you extract them from the examples. But one might have extracted them differently. I’m going to suggest my own proposal. Tell me whether you agree or not. I say the following. In my view, the encyclopedia entry is the least poetic thing possible. The least poetic. And the left pole—if the right pole is pure poetry—is the encyclopedia entry. Why is the encyclopedia entry the closest thing to that? Again, why “the closest”? Because the axis here is the relation between signifier and signified. Meaning, when you speak in ordinary daily discourse—what for our purposes I’m calling prose, not literary prose, but prose in the abstract sense that I’m defining here. Literature is not prose; literature is prose with a poetic dimension. The abstract concept of prose—which doesn’t really exist, but the theoretical one—is basically a sentence whose whole meaning is simply the meaning of its words. That’s all. It comes to tell you exactly the meaning of the words. I said a sentence—you should be able to translate word for word and understand what I said. The relation between signifier and signified is simple, one-to-one. Okay?

You can even translate word for word and put the translations together, and out comes the meaning of the sentence, roughly speaking. So the encyclopedia is very close to that, because it basically just transmits knowledge. There is no great importance to the structure of the entry, as long as it conveyed the information. Of course it can be efficient, exhaustive, clear—fine. But in principle the encyclopedia entry—the abstract encyclopedia entry, abstract prose, not real prose. And that is why I said that whenever you look at something concrete, some spark of poetry will already enter. Because there will be significance to how it is phrased, and so on. But when I want to talk about the abstract thing, I say: this is the encyclopedia entry in the abstract sense—not an actual encyclopedia entry, but something whose purpose is the transmission of knowledge. That’s one pole.

Poetry is the opposite pole. What does that mean? It too is phrased in words, of course. But the relation between signifier and signified is completely not the relation between words and their meanings. That is, when I say, “There once was a lone lamp at the edge of a neighborhood,” fine? I don’t mean to talk about a neighborhood, or a lamp, or loneliness. That’s not the point at all. I’m describing some atmosphere in which you are supposed to feel something. In principle I could have described that very same thing itself by talking about fish in the sea or angels in the heavens—or whatever. It doesn’t really matter.

I think I mentioned one of the previous times the book by Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery. I mentioned it, right? He said he came to Japan and asked to study Zen. Then his Zen teacher asked him whether he wanted to learn swordsmanship, flower arranging, archery, or wrestling—I don’t remember, four options. “I want to study Zen.” “No, not this, not this, not this.” “Yes, yes, but do you want to learn flower arranging?” What he was trying to tell him—and Herrigel explains this in the book—is that it really doesn’t matter whether you learn it through flower arranging, or through archery. You are learning the same thing itself. The same thing itself. That’s only the medium through which you learn the thing. The thing you are learning is not flower arranging and not swordsmanship and nothing of the sort. It’s just that the medium is needed to convey it to you. There is no form without matter. So I have to clothe the form in matter in order to explain what I’m talking about. But I’m talking about the form. You’ll never find the form detached from matter. Platonic? What? Yes, more or less, yes. It’s an attempt somehow to approach pure form. Okay? But in life we never find pure forms. Yet our abstractions do move toward pure forms. Again, you see the definition as directive toward an idea.

So poetry is basically something whose importance is not at all in the meaning of the words, but in the structure. That is the definition of poetry in my view. In the extreme sense? That is the definition of the pole called poetry. Yes. Now there is no such thing in actuality. There isn’t. Every poem obviously has words and uses content—that’s clear. You can’t write poetry without words. And words have meaning. And you didn’t choose that word by accident. There is a connection… Right, exactly—there was that remark about Alterman. When someone didn’t understand the poems, he said: it’s all just rhyme and this and that, all just fireworks with no content at all. Exactly—about Alterman. Okay, yes. But I’m saying that in the end, pure poetry really is that: structure. If it were possible to write a poem without words, you would write it without words. In gibberish? What? Exactly. In gibberish, exactly. Yes—very much to the benefit of postmodernism—to make some kind of gibberish. Though of course that opens the door to a lot of charlatanism. But on the theoretical level, basically you would need to do it in gibberish. That is the pure poem. The pure poem is the antithesis of prose. It is something for which words are only the vehicle. The meaning is not the point at all. In fact it’s a big question whether a poem even has meaning. That’s a serious question: is there even such a thing as the meaning of a poem? But even if there is meaning, there are people who say that “meaning” is a vulgar word in this context—that saying a poem has meaning is crude. A committed poem—what, is it there to convey meanings? Nonsense. That’s low, that belongs to prose. A poem is vocal music. Yes, exactly. It is pure structure.

Once I think I spoke about sounding the shofar, and I said: what is sounding the shofar? The blast itself—I’m talking not about the broken notes and staccato notes, but even the plain blast. If you abstract: start with a song, strip the words from the song, and what remains is the melody. Fine? Then strip the melody of its rises and falls, its oscillations—the modulation we make in sound—and leave only the pure sound. That’s the shofar blast. The shofar blast is the most abstract thing possible that can still be heard. The next step after that is simply—I heard there is “a sound coming out of silence,” what Rashi writes there in Kings, with Elijah in the cave. Yes, there is a sound emerging from silence. The shofar blast comes to express that. It is the greatest abstraction possible. There isn’t even melody anymore; there are no fluctuations in the sound at all. Just the bare sound. Period. It is the sound—the simplest possible thing. “A plain blast before it and a plain blast after it”—that’s why it’s called plain. Yes, yes, of course. So I’m saying this is the greatest abstraction there is. After that come groans and cries—that’s already complexity. A person who groans and cries is already a complex person, a person expressing something. The plain blast expresses nothing; it is some kind of abstraction. Completely abstract.

So pure poetry too is something completely abstract. And now the whole range in between—my claim is that all the things we know are somehow in the middle. The encyclopedia entry is closest to the left pole, but not exactly there. Why not? Because even in an encyclopedia entry you can be impressed by the way it’s written, by how he arranged it. There is significance to structure, not only to… I could have conveyed the same content differently, but it would have been much less successful, much less meaningful. If the encyclopedia is written in a somewhat literary way, that also adds some kind of value. Everything in the world has something of poem and something of prose. The question is how much and in what proportion.

And that’s the way… Now, the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, are stories, but they’re stories that are broken up, and maybe—I don’t know how it is in the original—some translations do try to create meter and things like that, which means they have poetic dimensions even though they are telling a story. Now, when he did that exercise for me in the table, he basically took something that completely conveys a message, but clothed it in poetic features, and he really did turn it somewhat into a poem. It’s still close to the left pole. What Yossi said—that it’s not a poem at all—was right in principle. Because you hear it, you see it. Exactly. Why? Because it is indeed a passage whose purpose is to convey a message. I’m coming to ask a question. The meaning of that “poem” is just the words I said. But that could have been written the way it appears above on your page. So why does what’s in the table create a poetic dimension? Because it inserts something of this abstract poem into the dry prose I wrote there. That’s why it really did make it a little poetic. Only right: it made it a little poetic. Like the heap paradox. If you speak in terms of yes or no, then it isn’t a poem. If you speak in terms of a continuum, as in the heap paradox, then yes—some poetic dimension entered the prose.

So I don’t know—Shakespeare’s plays, for example, seem to me to be somewhere left of the Iliad. Because they are even more story-like than the Iliad, and still they are not an ordinary story. They aren’t a story like a prose book—literature, I mean. There is some poetic dimension there. It’s not for nothing that they vocalize and arrange them in poetic lines, because they mean to say that there too there is something a little more poetic than plain story. Literature itself, for example, isn’t prose either. Because in literature there is enormous significance to structure—to how the book and the story are built, what you open with, what you close with, whether you do it in flashbacks or narrate it linearly. No, also who tells the story. No—who tells the story is, ostensibly, still prose. He tells you that someone went here and did that. But through the story you convey things that are not the plain meaning of the words. And I say: the way to show that is indeed through vocalization, rhythm, and so on. That hints to the reader: pay attention, the context here is poem. What does that mean? That when you read this “On the day my daughter was born”—I’m returning to Yehuda Amichai, because I want to explain why this is poetry—Yehuda Amichai is not at all trying to tell me what he did on the day his daughter was born. That is not the purpose. He is trying to convey some kind of experience he perhaps had when his daughter was born.

Now he doesn’t know how to convey the experience. Experience is something abstract. How do you convey experience? So he tells me a story: I went to Sha’ar HaGai, and there were cones and dead trees and Tzvi and exact sciences and so on. He doesn’t mean to tell me about Tzvi or exact sciences or anything of the sort. He is trying to convey to me that same experience he had. That is why it’s a poem. By the way, it’s a poem that is very, very close to the pole. To the right pole. Here I completely disagree with you. In my “poem,” what he did to me in that table, I agree—it is very close to the left pole. It isn’t a poem; it has a poetic dimension, but it is basically prose. With Yehuda Amichai, it seems like prose, but in my opinion it is very close to the right pole. Very close. And there is no meter, no rhyme, no nothing.

Now what is the idea of meter? Why do people so often connect poetry with meter and rhyme and so on? It’s exactly the point, because meter and rhyme are patterns. And a poem in its essence is something that conveys what it conveys through the pattern and not through the meaning of the words. Now it is only natural that I should convey this in a way that shows me: pay attention to patterns. How do you show me that here I need to pay attention? If I had read this Yehuda Amichai passage outside a book of poems, it would never have occurred to me that it was a poem. He’s telling me about an interesting experience he had on the day his daughter was born. But once he put it inside a book of poems, then someone like Gideon Ofrat would say: because it appears in a book of poems, therefore it’s a poem. And I say no. The fact that it appears in a book of poems is an indication that it’s a poem. It doesn’t define it as poetry. Rather, he was trying to tell me: listen, when you read this, don’t read it as prose—read it as poetry. What does that mean? I’m not trying to tell you now what happened to me on the day my daughter was born. I’m showing you how my face lit up, how that day suddenly no one died in the hospital—that’s very interesting. Meaning, heaven is rejoicing that my daughter was born, and the priests can enter because nobody died, and then we went to Sha’ar HaGai. But he isn’t trying to report those facts. Through those facts he is trying to show you some experience of radiance, or some inner movement he went through on the day his daughter was born.

He conveyed it through that. So you understand this is very far from an encyclopedia entry. It’s completely on the right side of the axis. Not all the way, because it enters into words and description, and words have meaning. You do have to pass through the meanings of the words. You can’t detach from words and do Zen. You have to read the words and understand what the words said—Sha’ar HaGai, cones, and all that. But in the end that is just the medium through which the message passes to you—a message that does not really belong to the level of the literal content. So where does it belong? It belongs to context, to form, to atmosphere. Here, for example, there isn’t even a clear pattern. There’s just the fact that it’s broken into lines. I don’t know—I didn’t understand what that line break means. Maybe it has significance; maybe I don’t understand enough; I don’t know. But there can even be poems like those postmodern ones that look like nothing, just some odd text, and still it may be that the poet had some reason why he broke the line here and not there. Sometimes I can’t see any reason; he just broke it arbitrarily. But there may be reasons for it, perhaps I don’t understand, perhaps I can’t define them for myself. Yet when it works on me, maybe I can even feel why he broke it here and not there, without being able to define it.

And what this basically means is that all these characteristics of poems—melodies, rhymes, meters, all those things—they are not the definition of a poem. They are symptoms. Once you want to show a person that the connection between signifier and signified is not a connection of lexical meaning—the meaning of words isn’t the point, assuming there is even a signified in a poem; I claim there is—but the relation between signifier and signified is not a relation of meaning. It’s not the meaning of the words, but rather something conveyed through pattern, through atmosphere. Then a poem without meter, without rhyme, without anything—like this one—that conveys some experience is also a poem. Because in the end the experience passes through the words, but not as the content of the words themselves. Through the words he is trying to convey something else.

Now very often a poem does this through patterns. And by the way, sometimes it’s not that the poem itself works through patterns; rather, the patterns are only a signal to the reader: pay attention, this text should be read as poetry. But it’s not certain that the patterns themselves are part of the essence. They may just be a marker that you need to notice that here the meaning of the words is not what I’m trying to convey to you. That’s why people do it with patterns, rhymes, meters—but these are not the definitions. In my eyes these are just particular cases. In other words, sometimes form or pattern is expressed in meter, rhyme, and so on—but it doesn’t have to be. What defines a poem is that it is not prose. That is what defines a poem. Meaning: it is not something that operates through the meanings of the words themselves, though it passes through the meanings of the words. That’s the point, and that is poetry.

And all the intermediate appearances—from the encyclopedia entry, then literature, which already has more of a poetic dimension, then the Iliad and the Odyssey, then—no, Shakespeare, okay? The plays. Then the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then all sorts of sagas and epics. The Iliad and the Odyssey are among those, or at least if they’re written in the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Even within sagas and epics there are different kinds. And after that you begin to move here more in the direction of poem: poems with meter or without meter. I’m not sure at all that meter makes them closer or farther. On the contrary, as Rabbi Kook writes, he doesn’t want to surrender to meter and rhyme, because meter and rhyme are themselves still something that anchors the poem, makes it more concrete. Which means that if there is meter and rhyme, it is still a bit removed from the right side. Not on the left side, because it isn’t just a collection of words, but still not entirely on the right side either.

And Rabbi Kook was somehow trying to say something beyond words and beyond meter and beyond rhyme and beyond everything—a kind of pure poem. And that is really the true poem. Meters and rhymes are only symptoms. Therefore when people tell me there are poems without meter and rhyme, in my view that challenges the definition of poetry—but in truth it means, at least as I chose to put it, not that these things aren’t poetry, as Yossi wanted to suggest earlier, because he assumed that meter and rhyme are the definition itself. I wanted to claim: no, meter and rhyme are hints. If so, apparently I missed something; there is a more abstract definition. A definition according to which the relation between signifier and signified is not a relation of lexical meaning. Meter and rhyme are just one specific example. When you use meter and rhyme, you show me that not only the words matter but also the structure. That’s all. But it’s just a particular case.