Definition of Concepts 6

Table of Contents

• [0:01] Opening: wanting to get to the issue of right and left
• [2:47] Directive vs. constitutive definition – a scientific method
• [5:38] Differences between science and philosophy: doctors and judges
• [6:58] Defining legal error as damage and comparing it to surgery
• [8:33] Talmud: comparison between prohibition and danger
• [12:58] Returning to the topic of right-left and the methodology
• [15:33] Characteristics of the left – rapid change, and the right – conservatism
• [17:19] Changing the system of government – a failed political experiment
• [18:36] Comparing American and Israeli politics
• [22:32] The economic aspect of right and left
• [24:54] Party mergers and change in Meretz and the political connection
• [25:59] Defining right and left – lack of definition
• [26:59] Collectivism versus individualism
• [28:03] The platforms of the Republicans and Democrats
• [29:34] Communism as the extreme of the left
• [31:27] The connection between the economic right and the political-security right
• [35:20] Right-wing and left-wing positions toward wars

Summary

General Overview

The text presents an attempt to arrive at an essential definition of complex concepts like right and left through a directive definition based on observation and systematic arrangement of phenomena, as opposed to a constitutive definition that creates a new concept. It argues that despite the historical jumble and the changing characteristics of right and left across time and place, it is still possible to identify deep principles that explain correlations between political, economic, moral, and security positions. In the approach to Passover, it ties this to the question of freedom and liberty, arguing that freedom is an asset consisting in the absence of constraints, whereas liberty is the value of autonomy within constraints; therefore slavery to God can be compatible with true liberty.

The Method of Definition: Directive vs. Constitutive and Intuitive Observation

The speaker wants to define right and left by observing their actual uses and inferring the abstract essence behind them, as he previously did regarding poetry, art, and intelligence. He states that the conceptual order being proposed does not emerge directly from observation but from an intellectual organization of the phenomena, and that someone else could propose a different organization without any decisive empirical test other than persuasion “in the eyes of the intellect.” He suggests that the more “scientific” a field is, the sharper its definitions are, and the more abstract or philosophical it is, the blurrier the definitions become. He links this to the distinction between mistakes in surgery and mistakes in law, and to the question whether a “legal error” in itself counts as damage.

Prohibition versus Danger and the Assumption of Spiritual Danger

The speaker cites a Talmudic passage that distinguishes between doubt in a prohibition and doubt in a danger, and asks why the Talmud insists on comparing them instead of accepting the intuition that danger is tangible reality while prohibition is law. He explains that this insistence stems from the assumption that spiritual danger is a real danger, and therefore a severe prohibition enters a framework similar to mortal danger—like the idea that a legal error can be considered damage even without immediate physical suffering. He uses the example of fixed and separated cases, and the comment that halakhic logic is not statistical, to emphasize the gap between legal constructions and the “you don’t fool around” attitude toward danger. He then suggests that the Talmud blurs the gap because it sees the prohibition itself as a real injury to the soul.

Collecting the Phenomena of Right and Left and the Claim that There Is No Definition

The speaker presents a book by two researchers from Bar-Ilan—Zisser and another researcher whose name he does not remember—that historically describes right and left and concludes that an essential definition is impossible because of the multiplicity of inconsistent characteristics and the weak connections among them, which change over the years. He argues that moving to historical description is a way of dealing with the dynamism without forcing one definition onto “the whole mess,” but he insists that it is still possible to try to locate an essence and show how it is expressed in different degrees. He describes the first stage of the work as brainstorming and observing all the phenomena called right and left, and only afterward trying to propose the idea behind them, rather than identifying “the right” with a single phenomenon like economic freedom.

Phenomenological Characteristics: Conservatism and Rapid Change, Social Engineering and Changing the System of Government

The speaker presents a relatively consistent characteristic according to which the left tends toward rapid and radical change, while the right tends toward slow, cautious change and conservatism. He brings an example from an article by Chaim Navon in praise of conservatism and the idea of “the wisdom of the generations.” He presents the left as seeking change “tomorrow morning” through legislation and top-down social engineering, and the right as preferring public persuasion and “natural” bottom-up development. As an example, he cites changing Israel’s system of government as an experiment in institutional engineering that failed because it did not produce the intended result of strengthening the prime minister, but instead weakened him through dependence on small parties. He adds a discussion that in the American system, presidential power also rests on conservatism and on norms—“there are things you just don’t do”—and not only on formal rules.

Israel and the United States as a Field for Comparison: Conservatism, Religion in Public Discourse, and Frequency of Legislation

The speaker argues that the State of Israel is not conservative in public and institutional terms, changes legislation frequently, and tries to “arrange everything from above,” whereas the United States is more conservative both in political conduct and in the visibility of religion in public discourse, including presidents quoting Psalms and biblical verses and the presence of faith “on every dollar.” He cites Bernie Sanders as an example of an exception who openly declares himself a socialist, and emphasizes that even in the Democratic Party the term itself is considered bold. He weaves in an aside about Donald Trump and public indulgence toward him in order to illustrate the political and cultural context in which those symbols exist.

The Economic and Class Aspect and the Difficulty of Reconciling Correlations

The speaker presents the relatively recent economic distinction according to which the right is identified with market freedom and minimal government intervention, while the left is identified with intervention, centralism, and top-down planning. But he argues that the model of “the wealthy versus the hungry” does not withstand reality. He gives an example from after an election, when poor people were blamed for supporting Netanyahu and, on the other hand, wealthy people were blamed for supporting Herzog, in order to argue that class division does not consistently line up with voting patterns. He argues that the political agenda and the economic agenda tend to go together even though the connection is not necessary, and gives as an example the establishment of Meretz as a union of Ratz and Shinui, which in his view were economically right-wing, with Mapam, which was far-left—something that was accepted calmly because the focus was the political left.

An Essentialist Proposal: Collectivism versus Individualism and the Tension with American Slogans

The speaker proposes that a central deep characteristic of right and left is collectivism versus individualism, and links this to correlations involving militancy, willingness to go to war in the name of values and national honor, and, on the other hand, opposition to wars out of concern for individual welfare. He challenges the proposal by quoting from party websites in the United States, where Republicans declare that individuals, not governments, make better decisions, while Democrats declare, “We are greater together than each of us is on our own.” He then argues that the essential melody is different from the slogan. He explains that the collective on the left is a means in the service of the individual, as in communism, where “Workers of the world, unite” is meant to improve the condition of individuals; whereas on the right the collective and the state are seen as legitimate when one needs to fight for values and nationhood. Therefore economic freedom does not stem from the claim that the state “has no right to interfere,” but from a practical claim in favor of using intervention as little as possible.

Wars, Nations, and Values: Historical Reversals and Conceptual Continuity

The speaker argues that the real argument is not whether one is “for wars” or “against wars,” but what justifies distant wars that are not immediate defense of life. He attributes to the right a tendency to justify wars in the name of national values and ideas like freedom and democracy. He describes a historical change in which, in the past, Democrats tended more toward foreign intervention and Republicans less so, but explains that such a reversal does not contradict the essence; it reflects different implementations of the same starting point. For those who reduce nations to a fiction, the goal is the good of people as individuals throughout the world; for those who see nations as actors, the goal is the advancement of national values. He presents the debate as deriving from the question whether values and collectives are ends that subordinate the individual, or means for improving his life.

Religiosity as a Possible Basis for Correlations and a Comparative Note About the East

The speaker deals with the suggestion that the basis for the correlations among positions is religiosity versus secularity. He notes that even within the religious world there are claims that the Torah is “socialist,” as against his own claim that the conception of charity is capitalist, and that socialism seeks to eliminate the need for charity by means of forced distribution. He argues that even if religiosity explains causally why people adopt certain positions, that still does not negate the possibility of an essential definition of right and left themselves. He raises a question about the Far East as an empirical challenge to the idea that this is a general principle of reality that should also appear in cultures not operating with Western religious concepts, but he does not decide the matter because he is not sufficiently familiar with the political structure there.

Exceptions and Hybrids: North Korea, China, Argentina, and the Reaction of Citizens

The speaker presents North Korea as a direct continuation of collectivist communism, “like the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 20th century.” He presents China as a challenge in which a left-wing regime runs a right-wing economy and keeps becoming more right-wing because it understands that “it doesn’t work any other way.” He presents Argentina as the opposite challenge, where Peronism is nationalist, fascist right-wing politics with a left-wing economy that looks after workers. He adds a sociological generalization that citizens tend toward a reaction against the regime because the regime always fails and always annoys people, and he connects this to the idea that “healthy” capitalism wants the state to stay on the sidelines in routine times but to exercise state power when necessary, including drafting people into war.

Right and Left within Haredi Society and Religious Zionism: The Individual versus the Character of the State

The speaker suggests that the relation between Haredi society and Religious Zionism sheds light on the distinction between an individual goal and a collective goal: Haredim may be seen as right-wing as individuals, but the Haredi collective does not behave “right-wing” in terms of aspiring to shape the state’s character, and religious legislation as an agenda originally belonged more to Religious Zionism. He argues that Religious Zionism fights more over the religious character of the state and over the idea that the state should not desecrate the Sabbath, while for Haredim it matters more that Jews as individuals not violate Jewish law. So the Haredi goal is the people, not the symbol of the state. He presents himself as someone who prefers persuasion and repentance over coercion, and argues that public character is at most an educational means, not a goal in itself.

Pig Capitalism, the Sabbath in America, and Economic Pressure as a Generator of Secularization

The speaker describes the secularization of Jewish immigrants to the United States through Rabbi Bar-Ilan’s description in his memoirs of Jews who took off their long coats already on the ship. He adds that extreme capitalist pressure in the United States forced people to work on the Sabbath to the point of risking starvation. He mentions the book Everything for the Master of All about Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Herman and his role in creating frameworks that made Sabbath observance possible, and parallels this with Upton Sinclair’s books about the exploitation of workers in Chicago’s meat industry as a reality of “slaves of slaves” that pushed toward the establishment of labor unions and tensions around communism. He argues that such capitalism erases values and forces people to give up tradition, but emphasizes that there is no modern right that seeks absolute freedom, and that even the right needs state or communal mechanisms in order not to operate at the extreme.

Passover: The Birth of the Collective and the Festival of Liberty, and Freedom versus Liberty

The speaker argues that on Passover the birth of the Jewish collective and the festival of liberty occur together, and that in modern eyes this contains a contradiction, because the collective is perceived as enslaving while liberty is perceived as liberty from the collective. He quotes Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi’s line: “The slaves of time are slaves of slaves; only the servant of God is truly free,” and describes his initial feeling that this sounds Orwellian, like “Freedom is slavery” in 1984. But he argues that Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi is expressing a real conceptual essence and not brainwashing. He states that freedom is the absence of constraints and therefore is not a value but an asset, and that depriving someone of freedom without justification is immoral because it damages a person’s asset, like taking away his money. Liberty, by contrast, is the value of autonomy within constraints and of not being enslaved to them. He argues that there is no liberty without constraints; you cannot take away liberty, only add constraints. He gives the example of gravity and climbing a mountain as an image for the free person acting against constraints, and also cites Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as a description of inner liberty even in a place with almost zero freedom.

The Liberty of Creativity, Constraints and Creativity, and the Example of the Chessboard and Amos Oz

The speaker argues that freedom of creativity is not a value in the way that liberty of creativity is. He presents the idea that a creator subject to religious constraints may actually be more creative because the constraints make creativity possible. He illustrates mathematically that a room with many “pieces of furniture,” like a chessboard, has more possible arrangements than an empty room, in order to argue that constraints and a multiplicity of given data can increase the space of possibilities rather than shrink it. He concludes by referring to Amos Oz’s example in Here and There in the Land of Israel, in the essay “The Full Wagon and the Empty Wagon,” about a space created at Mount Sinai that filled up with “furniture” until it was impossible to move—a metaphor for the petrification of Judaism.

What I want to do today is finally get to the issue of right and left. Not go back to the issue of right and left—and afterward I assume I’ll still have a little time left to do something that’s somewhat related to this in connection with Passover. Is there also right and left there? What? Is there also right and left there? It has to do with definition, it has to do with defining concepts? Yes, yes, it has to do with defining concepts. I’m going to start with right and left, and I deliberately continued with this even though it was the previous topic, but I dragged it out a bit because it was important to me to show how one deals with defining complex concepts. Because otherwise it will look completely speculative. I’m not sure that now it’ll be much more acceptable, but it seems to me that now at least it’ll be easier to try and argue for it.

So, there’s a book about right and left put out by two researchers from Bar-Ilan, from the political science department, Zisser and someone else, I already don’t remember the second name, who try to define or characterize these concepts, right and left, and their changes over the years. Right and left in Israel or right and left in general? In general. And in the end the conclusion is that there’s no chance—they basically describe it historically. Often, by the way, people do this: instead of giving an essential description they move to a historical description. Because with a historical description you can trace it—what it was when it was formed, what shape it took in Europe, in the United States, in Israel, whether there are some connections in how it developed—and that’s a dynamic description. It’s not an attempt to impose some essential definition on all this mess, to define what left is and what right is and explain all the phenomena through that.

They try to do that throughout the whole book, and very quickly they show—just like Gideon Ofrat with art, I mentioned his book, by the way, once again to refresh things a bit. So the same thing, basically, they try to do there, and they show that no—you can’t offer an essential definition. It’s a mixture of many characteristics that sometimes appear and sometimes don’t, and the connection between them is weak to nonexistent, and it changes over the years. At one point it was like this and afterward it’s like that, and therefore in the end they claim there is no definition.

And I claim that it still may be possible to do something here—and again, it requires somewhat more systematic work than what I did—but let’s try to work in a way similar to what we saw in previous times and see whether we can still do something here.

So the first stage, as I said before, the definition we’re looking for is of course a guiding definition and not a constitutive one. Meaning, I’m trying to observe reality and discover the correct definition, not propose some definition that creates a concept out of nothing. Rather, I’m dealing with existing concepts, and I have some assumption that behind them there really is an essence, despite the diversity and complexity and changes. Something is still supposed to define these concepts, and what I’m trying to do is make an observation, really like a scientific observation, and try to see what that something is.

Now that something is not the things you see. The things you see are supposed to be expressions of that something, and expressions in different doses, exactly like we saw with poetry and art and everything. So in the end, when I defined what poetry is or what art is, I used some abstract concepts that are not the concepts we see in front of our eyes. But I tried to show that these abstract things appear in different forms in the phenomena we encounter before our eyes, except that they appear in different doses, and therefore it’s clear that there’s some kind of order here that I can’t derive directly from observation. I’m simply trying to impose some order on all this mess, some systematic order, and hope that somehow, one way or another, I’ve captured the truth.

And as I said, someone else can certainly come and impose order differently and base it on something else and try to place all the phenomena we encounter within some different conceptual system. And the question of how to determine who is right and who is not right—there’s no answer to that except to say that, since this is a kind of observation, look and see. Look not with your eyes, of course, but with the eyes of the intellect, as we talked about when we discussed intuition in that series—whether we manage to see it the same way or not.

In that sense, this won’t become ordinary empirical science, and it’s not “go look, do this and that experiment, and see whether I’m right or wrong.” Here I’m trying… I need to convince you, even though again, since I claim that the definition is guiding and not constitutive, there is indeed some dimension of observation here. In other words, look with the eyes of your intellect at this world of phenomena we’re dealing with, and say whether you’re convinced that the structure I’m describing really is the structure that stands behind them.

That applies to poetry and art, and I think that more or less the same thing has to be done with these concepts of right and left as well.

I thought of something already in the previous class—as the topic is more, say, scientific, the definitions seem sharper and simpler and easier to define, and if it’s spiritual or abstract or philosophical, then the definition becomes much, much more abstract, almost nonexistent—more vague, that is. For example, with judges and doctors: with doctors you need the… regardless of what is cause and what is effect. I mean, it could be that those things that can be defined sharply are what we call science. It may be that in science we succeed more, and wherever we’ve succeeded in reaching sharper things, that’s what’s called science. And things that are philosophy—I don’t know why, because, I don’t know, this started from that argument we had with Lior, that the Rabbi might be able to serve as a judge on the Supreme Court without too much legal education, and the damages, in quotation marks, that he would cause legally would be minimized. But if you put him in an operating room for brain surgery, then the… then that he would have to know. There precisely, in the nuances, you either kill the person or you don’t kill him—I mean in practice. In use in court, if you miss it then… No, but I’m saying, this is exactly the distinction. Because when you look at it comparatively, make the analogy all the way through—today I actually saw something interesting on this issue.

So the question is whether you define a legal error as damage—not human suffering, financial loss, or what we ordinarily call damage—but whether, in your eyes, a legal error is itself damage. It may be the same kind of damage in court. Because if I don’t understand how the system works, I’ll simply make mistakes. Only what? Courtroom mistakes generally hurt less than a surgeon’s mistakes. A surgeon’s mistakes can cost a person his life. Unless you put a person in prison for thirty years. Right, but I’m saying okay, but there too a reasonable person generally won’t do that, and therefore there it was very hard to make definitions. No, I agree, but I’m saying that here too I agree that the difference between surgery and law is a difference that reflects what you’re saying—but I claim it’s not only what you’re saying. Because beyond that difference, it may be that if you’re willing to define legal error as damage—not people’s suffering, leave that aside, maybe they won’t suffer—but the very fact that you judged incorrectly, if you define that as damage, then law may be the same as surgery.

The Rabbi brought this up once when we talked about Jewish law, about definition. There was that story that there’s autonomy—you want the person to judge according to, even if he’s mistaken. Why? Because there’s spiritual damage—as if, how can you ask an elder to act contrary to what he thinks, even if he’s right? After all, he’ll have some kind of spiritual damage. And what spiritual damage—whether it’s to hear or to obey… Okay, but still not on the level of definitions. I claim that there really is such damage, and then definitions or non-definitions try to describe a phenomenon.

Today I actually saw a Talmudic passage where the Talmud compares prohibition to danger. The Talmud brings there, I don’t know, a wolf that bit into the intestines and made a hole. You don’t know—maybe there had already been a hole there before, okay? And if there had already been a hole there before, then it might be a fatal defect and then the meat would be forbidden to eat, but you can’t know. And there they don’t worry about the possibility that there had been a puncture in that spot where the wolf sank its teeth, because they don’t take that into account.

Now the Talmud brings that regarding danger, you see that—how did the story go there? It says something there also in passing—that there’s concern that some snake made a hole and inserted venom, and somebody else, I don’t know, later bit into it, and there they do worry. And that’s exactly your distinction, you understand? And the Talmud says: what’s the difference? After all, if in the case of prohibition you rule leniently, then in danger too you should rule leniently. A kind of innocence, as if—what do you mean? In danger I could die; with prohibition I committed a prohibition, okay, but if I’m in doubt then it’s permitted, everything’s fine, after all it’s only Jewish law, it’s not reality. And somehow the Talmud insists—what do you mean? It’s the same thing, as if danger and reality are the same thing.

And then I tried to ask myself—still in the objection to what’s said in the answer, an interesting topic—I tried to ask myself why, how does the Talmud ignore what everyone who reads this sees? What do you mean?

I once told you about my friend who keeps coming up with a new definition of what “fixed” means, to distinguish between fixed and separated in the laws of majority. So in the law of fixed location, even if there’s a majority, we view it as if it’s fifty-fifty. Right? A piece of meat found in a store—even if only a minority of the stores are non-kosher, for me it’s fifty-fifty whether the piece is non-kosher or not. But if it was separated and I find it thrown in the street, then you follow the majority of the stores. What’s the difference? It’s a rule; there’s no statistical logic behind it. Okay?

So my friend keeps coming with an idea—this has been going on for years, not now, from before we even studied—not just years. Every time he had a new idea. What’s the difference? I told him: before you tell me that idea, tell me whether you’d also drink poison based on that idea, or whether you only permit prohibitions based on that idea. Because basically the feeling is that in prohibition you can build some halakhic construction and okay, what’s forbidden is forbidden and what’s permitted is permitted. And if you do it right, the Holy One, blessed be He, will also support you and everything will be fine. But in danger, if you eat snake venom, you’ll die; nothing will help. This isn’t “a Torah-level doubt is treated stringently” and “rabbinic-level doubt leniently.” There’s reality here. If there’s snake venom there, you’ll die. So there—forget it—with doubt we go stringently; we don’t play games.

But somehow the Talmud insists on assuming it’s the same thing. Why? And I think what lies behind that assumption is that the Talmud thinks prohibition is also danger. In connection with legal damage. Prohibition is also danger. Now true, it’s not danger to the body and not something tangible, but it’s some kind of danger—in some sense something happens to your soul, I don’t know exactly what, okay? And then that’s really the same factual question exactly like danger.

After all, in the category of danger—there’s venom, and there’s just being injured, and there’s excision, I don’t know what, and there’s some tiny prohibition—the Talmud still compares them. The Talmud apparently assumes that spiritual danger is more or less—so as not to derive too broadly if that’s relevant—it’s not incomparable. And even among dangers, not every danger is the same, and still a general rule is set for dangers, that with danger one always goes stringently. Apparently they mean a danger that is genuinely dangerous—that’s common sense. Okay, so with prohibition they mean a prohibition that is sufficiently severe. Fine.

But I’m saying, still—take something sufficiently severe in prohibition and sufficiently severe in danger—the Talmud assumes it’s the same thing. And the question is why the Talmud doesn’t understand the difference that everyone understands when reading it. Because the Talmud assumes that spiritual danger is also danger. Even though for us it’s not tangible, and no one here is going to die and… but it’s the same thing as legal danger, right? Meaning legal error—if you really see it not as something of exposure, not humiliation—rather, there is legal truth and you’re mistaken here, then you caused damage. Not because a person happened to suffer, or what we usually talk about—being sent to prison unjustly; those are things we all understand to be problematic damage and bad outcomes of legal error. But I’m talking about the legal error itself as a kind of damage, as a kind of mistake. And if you define it that way, then surgery and law will look very similar, like danger and prohibition. Understood? So it comes out…

Okay. So I’m moving now to this matter of right and left. First of all, the first stage, if we’re trying to follow what I did in the previous example, or examples, or the example of intelligence if you remember—first of all I look at what people call intelligence, right? That’s the observation. Or what people call poetry or art and so on. First of all, gather the facts, in quotation marks. Let’s see what we’re talking about. After I have this big collection, within which I don’t find anything—I still don’t know what its definition is—then I start trying to think how to organize it, by what to sort it, and how to place some axis that will order these phenomena in some organized way.

But the first stage is a kind of brainstorming, which is basically observation. Okay, I collect all the phenomena people call right versus left and I say okay, let’s first see what we’re talking about. And afterward we’ll see whether there’s something common among them, and then I’ll try to offer some definition of something that is not one of these phenomena. I won’t say right is economic freedom. That’s exactly what I don’t want to do, because that’s the fact. For me those are the facts I collect in the observation. The theoretical analysis can tell me what the idea is, what the concept is that stands behind advocating economic freedom, and why it comes together with more violence in wars or less sensitivity to the rights of the enemy, or yes—what we discussed a little last time. I already started doing this there. But now I’m trying to put it on the same platform we used here regarding definitions. Okay?

And you’ll see that all these things are basically done in the same way, and in all these things there’ll be the same arguments about the method. I’m not speaking only about the results—the results will be argued over—but about the method itself. There’ll be those who say there are no such concepts, it’s just fiction, we’re merely defining them, you can define them differently too, there’s no meaning to it, there’s no essential link between the set of phenomena we call right and left—exactly as we heard about poetry and as we saw about art and as we saw about everything else, intelligence. In all these places it’s the same arguments, and behind them stand all these foundations I discussed here when I talked about definitions. Is a definition constitutive or reporting? Is there intuitive observation or is there not? These things stand behind all these phenomena. And therefore I’ll try to show, in these examples, the application of what I talked about earlier in a somewhat more general fashion.

Okay, so what are the phenomena? There are various phenomena. I tried looking a little in Wikipedia and in that book and trying to gather some phenomena. In terms of the central phenomena, there are phenomena here that in the end I see as somewhat marginal, but they’re still very consistent. So it is claimed there. The left, for example, favors rapid change, and the right is slow, conservative. The right is conservative. So it is conservative, gradually. You can make changes, but carefully.

There’s a nice article here by Haim Navon, in Hakdamot I think he wrote it, I think in Hakdamot, “In Praise of Conservatism.” Maybe his ideology is conservative; I’m not sure that’s how he defines himself, but he tries to insist there on defining the concept of conservatism. I don’t think he’s considered a conservative. He’s a conservative liberal. The rightmost marker of the left. Anyway, he tries to define what conservatism is and so on, and he also talks about this—that there’s the wisdom of the generations; that in the end it isn’t right to make changes so quickly, and one should respect accumulated wisdom. He tries to say something in praise of conservatism and also define the concept of conservatism and show that it’s not so disreputable—that conservatism is perceived almost as a dirty word today, but it’s not like that, and so on. There too he talks about this issue of rapid changes. The left is something more radical in a very characteristic way. Meaning, it wants changes, it wants to overturn things, it’ll use legislation much more than the right. The left generally—the left will pass it through legislation, it wants the change tomorrow morning. The right says okay, let’s persuade the public, let’s see, slowly, slowly, the thing will work. Let the invisible hand do it, not from above—not social engineering. Rather, we need somehow to reach this thing by ourselves. It should develop in a more natural way, not intervene from above and do social engineering. So that’s rapid and slow changes—that’s one characteristic.

We once talked about changing the system of government. Changing the system of government was also an attempt to change things from above through social engineering. And it failed. Very quickly it failed, changing the system of government. And very quickly people called to return to the previous system. They saw not only that it failed for other reasons—it failed because it didn’t bring the same results people thought it would bring. Many times failure comes from a direction you don’t expect. These outcomes—yes, we made the calculation, those we’ll achieve—but suddenly it hits you from another side. Something you didn’t think of. Here, those very results were not achieved. What people wanted in changing the system of government was fascinating—it was really a fascinating experiment. What they tried to do there was give the prime minister power. Because, since he would be elected directly, he would not be dependent on the parties. It was clear that we’d get that result. Maybe there would be other problems—and what happened? He lost all his power, the prime minister. Because the party wasn’t with him, he was basically a solo act. So even his own party didn’t support him. And then he was dependent on all kinds of little parties, because otherwise he couldn’t get the confidence of the Knesset. So what if he was elected that way? So let’s go back to elections.

In other words, in the end the result was that the prime minister had less power—not that it failed for other reasons, but that what you thought it would bring, it didn’t bring. But that’s only half the way, because they only gave him half the power. If it had been a complete reform, like in the United States… Yehiel, here they landed on something in the middle. Right, but in the United States, you know that if you took only American formalism, then the president also wouldn’t have that much power. A lot of the president’s power comes—and I may have spoken about this once—from the conservatism of the American system. Not from the law itself; the law itself allows Congress to stop him. So you can go…

You see that there’s some discourse there that takes place not at the level of what can you do and what can’t you do, let’s arm-wrestle according to the rules. There are things one simply doesn’t do. There are things one simply doesn’t do, so they won’t do them. Somewhat like Britain. They won’t do them. There’s something very traditional in the American outlook. Even though it’s a new nation, yes? We wouldn’t expect that. And we, some ancient people like that—we’re a very non-conservative people. Very non-conservative. We’re a people that very much wants change and does everything. As a state we’re indeed a young state, but as a people…? But today’s people are disconnected from the long heritage, from Jewish law and all that. There’s no conservatism. The State of Israel is very non-conservative. Two hundred years ago were you conservative? What? In those years were you conservative? Yes, true. But today we’re a very, very non-conservative public. All the legislative changes—how much legislation is passed here. I once read—though it was a long time ago, I don’t know whether it changed; I’m not sure, but it faded from my memory—the number of laws passed here per unit of time. But it’s a very large number relative to other parliaments. But here everything is done from above, organized; we know how to do everything better, we legislate the Book Law and then repeal the Book Law, and then everything—and it’s all the same thing, we try to fix everything with legislation. And it doesn’t work with legislation. It doesn’t work with legislation. It has to work from below, if at all. So those rapid changes are essentially left. We conduct ourselves like the left. What do you mean? Good left, so to speak. It’s left-wing discourse. And the Americans conduct themselves like the right.

Yes, Bernie Sanders, who dares to express socialist positions—and what a novelty, even in the Democratic Party, who dares say “socialist”? Fifty years ago they would have arrested him. Yes, exactly. But even now, even today—no one dares today say he’s a socialist, even though many of them hold socialist views, but they won’t let that word cross their lips. It takes great daring to say openly that one advocates a socialist outlook. And that’s in the Democratic Party, which is supposedly the American left—but it’s not acceptable there, because the United States is a very, very conservative country, very conservative in many ways. But its political conduct too is conservative, not only the people in the street; the political conduct too is very conservative.

And not for nothing is faith there on every tongue and on every dollar. When you believed in something—at least until a few years ago here it was embarrassing; no one would have dared say he believes in God or something like that, no—or quote verses, or what, suddenly they’d topple the government. Here—not the religious people, I mean the secular people. The religious people would try to topple the government for the opposite reason, but that usually doesn’t work. There are a few myths, and maybe… But there—what are you talking about? Every president—and it doesn’t matter whether he’s a Democrat—quotes Psalms and verses and “God is with us,” and the discourse is religious discourse. It doesn’t matter now how religious the person is in practice. There’s a terribly conservative mode of conduct there. On every dollar. What? On every dollar, yes. Donald Trump went a bit too far here—he showed up at a ceremony in church and instead of putting the donation coin in the donation basket, he put it in the communion basket in front of television cameras from all over the world, and he was forgiven for it. Trump is forgiven everything. That too. He’s… today anyway, as you said, this election is something completely bizarre. A Passover Seder on one side and Trump on the other—just bizarre.

Anyway, one thing then is rapid changes and slow changes. The economic aspect is perhaps the sharpest. In economics, the right means an economy based on freedom—that is, zero or minimal government intervention and freedom for citizens or private actors, companies, citizens, doesn’t matter, but the players in the market. Whereas the left advocates intervention, centralism, organization—again engineering, only economic engineering instead of social engineering. But you already see that there is some connection between these outlooks. Still, there is government involvement, planning from above. And perhaps the model that sums it all up is those who have—capital owners, elites—versus the hungry, those who don’t have, who lose from the system.

But we already said that even that doesn’t hold up. Doesn’t hold up? After the last elections, we talked about it—there was an article I brought where someone wrote, “How stupid the poor are, that they support Buzhi Herzog rather than Bibi.” And then someone wrote him a response article: “And how stupid the rich are, that they support Buzhi Herzog and not Bibi.” Why are only the poor stupid? If you say everyone should go with his own interests, then both sides are reversed here, not only one side. Why do you accuse only the poor of irrationality? In other words, the fact is that it doesn’t go along with economic class. Very many people from the high economic class are actually left-wing people in their political and diplomatic outlooks. Whoever has money can afford ideology.

And fine—today exactly the case of Eimi Sterk, which again is discourse—but they’re not economic left, not economic left. Eimi Sterk moved more to the right. What? Yes, but she did it for the farmers’ benefit, and so that we won’t—yes, in favor of government intervention and not opening the market completely. But that’s the left. The rich are economic left? They want more power in government? Not economically—political left. Political left, but the problem is that the parties that support political left also go for economic left. Even with Bibi it’s not only economic right; with Bibi too it’s political right. And most weak people in society vote for him—right in that sense, not economically right. You accuse them of shooting themselves in the foot on the economic plane. The same thing: the rich shoot themselves in the foot economically because they want the left on the political plane.

But the fact remains that this package goes together. The fact remains that the political agenda and the economic agenda work together. There are relatively few parties that combine them. There are some, but relatively few. We once talked about Meretz, which started with Mapam and before that Shinui, and I was stunned when Meretz was established. I was genuinely stunned. Why? Because there were three parties there. Today it seems obvious to us, as though that’s definitely left—but it’s really not left. The Ratz party and Shinui are right-wing parties. Correct. And clearly right-wing in the economic sense. These are parties of civil rights and so on—that’s another matter. And Mapam is an extreme left-wing party. And they united together, and everyone accepted it with Olympian calm. Why did they accept it with Olympian calm? Because what everyone had in focus was the… exactly, the political left. And in that respect it seemed perfectly natural that they would join together.

There were Mapam people who were right-wing. No, Mapam people were Palmach people, more on that side, more in the Mapam direction. Various bohemians. There were poets here, you know—Alterman, and even Haim Gouri was there for a certain period. Haim Gouri was a right-wing nationalist. Today. Today. Maybe now he’s already at an age where who knows what he votes for, but as far as I know he changed his taste. But Meged, Meged moved to the right.

These complex phenomena make definition very difficult. And therefore very quickly we come to the conclusion: okay, so there is no definition; there isn’t really one common thing. So people say there is political right and political left, economic right and economic left, and all kinds of aspects that are all called right and left for historical reasons, but there’s really no true connection between them. And I’m trying to insist a bit and see whether maybe there is something common.

And again, if I don’t commit some very brutal violence here, then obviously I won’t fully manage to do… but yes, to try and show, exactly as with different doses, how there is still a connection between the things.

I’ll give you maybe an example of this mixture. Yes, we discussed right and left in classes, and I said that I think one of the characteristics—perhaps even the central characteristic—of right and left is collectivism versus individualism. Basically, collectivism is right and individualism is left. Which is the opposite of how it looks economically—we’ll come back to that in a moment. And we spoke about the fact that therefore the right is indeed more militant, more willing to go to war for ideas. And the left opposes wars in general, because it’s not for ideas, it’s for individual welfare. It doesn’t want—so far as possible to avoid wars, I avoid wars. Why is Obama such a pursuer of peace, and of course never manages to achieve it? Because whoever pursues peace never manages to achieve it—that’s the sad fact. Because he’s not in favor of national honor, and he gives up the whole Republican outlook. He becomes pragmatic—to prevent wars. Come on, why should I fight over American ideas and American national honor? That’s a distinctly left-wing outlook. In that sense he is entirely a man of the left.

So you might say: when I look at individualism versus collectivism, look, I’ll bring you here a section from the right’s and the left’s platforms from their websites. Okay? I did a translation from somewhere, maybe from that book or something, wherever Zisser is. Republicans believe—in the United States? Yes. Republicans believe that individuals, and not governments, can make the best decisions. Notice—this is the Republicans, this is the right—that individuals, and not governments, can make the best decisions. All human beings are entitled to equal rights, and decisions are best made close to home, not in the capital. Seemingly that’s really left—individualism. In other words, it’s all about the individual, leave me alone with the state.

And indeed, the idea of economic freedom that characterizes the right is an outlook that says: just leave me alone already. Let the state not intervene in my life. I want to conduct myself as I understand, and don’t stop my steps, don’t interfere in my life, and don’t plan my life for me.

And on the Democratic Party website it declares: Democrats believe we are greater together than when each person is on his own. A collectivist outlook. That this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair opportunity, when everyone does their part, when everybody plays by the same rules. Again, the collective outlook, the outlook from above, of social engineering. So how can one say that individualism is right and collectivism is—sorry, that collectivism is right and individualism is left? It seems backwards.

But if you listen to the tones and the forms of expression in a more detailed and subtler way, you’ll see that it’s not precise. The first challenge to the scheme I’m describing here was communism. Communism was perhaps the purest left, the most extreme, and it was blatantly collectivist. But notice that its goal was individual welfare. Only what? “Workers of the world, unite.” That is, we have power when we are together against the wealthy few. So we are poor individuals. They are rich individuals; they have money power and economic power and the means of production and so on, and our strength is in our unity—the unity of individuals in order to achieve results for individuals. But tactically we need to unite in order to achieve the results; the struggle is won—and notice, that’s the language—we are greater together than each one separately. There is no claim here that the state is the sacred thing and the citizens are its servants. Togetherness is a means, not an end. Exactly. The union or the collective is a means because it better serves the individual. That’s what’s written here. Correct.

Now in the Republican world this is earlier; here it’s very transparent. It’s clear that that’s how it is—from the communist period until today, the goal is the goal is the individual. It’s clear. On the left, the goal is the individual. And all the centralism and the attempt that the state should run our lives—that’s simply because people think, wrongly in my personal opinion, that this is how one reaches better outcomes for individuals. Okay, that’s the important point. In the end the goal is the individual. And the means, of course, can be the collective.

Now if I look at the level of phenomena, I never would have imagined that this is collective versus individual in this direction—that on the right it’s collective and on the left it’s individual. Because on the level of phenomena it’s not like that. When I listen to the discourse I look at it that way, and there I showed that it is that way—both the moral aspect and the militaristic, warlike aspect that go together, these correlations. Because one thing that book does not explain, the book by Dan Schueftan saying it’s impossible to define—then why does it go together? Why does economic right go together with political and security right? Usually, in most cases. There are exceptions, but broadly there’s such a correlation. Explain that to me. So they attribute it to historical variables—that’s how it developed, and we’re slow to change it, meaning we’re still there for historical reasons; in the end it’ll all fall apart. I’m not sure that’s right. Maybe it explains how it developed, but behind that there is also an essential explanation. Behind that there’s also something—there is a connection between the things.

And I tried to show there that the moral question too—whether to harm the innocent—and the political question too—whether to go to war, whether sovereignty over the land, and all the things of that kind, which are seemingly independent questions—actually arise from some collectivist outlook. And therefore there’s a connection between the moral question and the political and security question. Okay? And that connection tells me that there really is something in this direction that I’m looking for here, this essential definition of right and left. Even though it’s complex and has undergone changes and obviously it isn’t simple and obviously it appears in doses and the world is terribly complicated and it’s not right to impose some rigid theoretical mold of sharp definitions onto it. But still, there is something essential behind it.

And I think that someone who doesn’t understand that doesn’t understand a great many of the phenomena in our world. This expression that says “okay, there’s no such thing as right and left, everything goes, everything is…” —you lose your ability to understand what can in fact be understood. With the caution that one has to know, okay, this is a theory; theory never works perfectly in reality, and you have to take it with a grain of salt. But still, I think it explains a great many things that people don’t understand—how things are. And therefore it’s important to do this work.

Now let’s compare this with the Republican right, which wants the collective not to interfere. And where is the collectivism here? So in the left we already saw it: the collective is a means in the service of the individual. That’s clear. Yes, even though I used the expression “grease on the wheels of the revolution” as a description of collectivism. But understand that grease on the wheels of the collective revolution is ultimately so the revolution will succeed and then many more individuals will gain. So the individual is grease on the wheels of the collective revolution, but in order for the collective revolution to succeed and then more poor people will cease being poor, or more of the proletariat will reach a better state. In the end the goal is individual. We sacrifice certain individuals in order to help other individuals.

The left eventually recoiled from that, and today is no longer willing to sacrifice individuals at all, not even for the sake of other individuals. That’s a later left than the communist left. But what they share is that in the end the aim is to benefit individuals. Not to bring the collective into a more correct and better state, closer to its ideals and values. There is no such thing. Ideals and values in the world of the left are merely means for us to have better lives. There are no ideals and values there in the same sense they’re discussed in a religious context, say, of metaphysical ideals that subordinate the individual to achieve them, because they’re more important than the private individual. But the ideals and values there—of course there are ideals and values—the ideals and values there are simply means so that we will have better lives. In the end it comes down to the pocket. And this is almost Marx, of course; it starts with Marx. Huh? It’s true on the right too. No, I don’t think there it’s for the individual. I absolutely disagree, and that’s exactly the difference.

Now I move to the other side of the equation. The other side, seemingly, wants freedom—not collectivism, individualism—everyone does what he wants in the market and the government shouldn’t interfere, the collective shouldn’t interfere. But again, the claim is because this will bring us to a better state. Not because the government has no right to interfere. Quite the opposite: the right claims the government does have the right to interfere, it just should make minimal use of it. And that’s the point. It’s not because the government has no right to interfere. That’s actually the left’s outlook. Government as government is a collective. Their outlook is therefore that the government can send people to war, something the left basically does not accept. You go to war only when there is no choice—meaning only where your life is in danger should you organize to go to war.

The right is willing to go to war also over the Land of Israel, also over values. The Republican right in the United States—which is supposedly against collectivism, right? Everyone and his economic hedonism—it is more in favor of wars than the left. International wars, not only wars of necessity. Iraq, Kuwait, all those things. Or for the American idea. Notice—for the American idea, for the idea of freedom and democracy. They once thought—today they already think it simply doesn’t work, so they don’t do it. Today there’s already some retreat from that, so the stance is more like the left. But broadly, Republicans are more for that than the left.

And by the way, once it wasn’t like that. Once it absolutely wasn’t like that. The Democrats were in favor of wars and the Republicans opposed. Because the Republicans did not see the American nation at all as a player on the field. Leave it alone; give services to the citizen and leave me in peace. Sorry—the Democrats wanted intervention abroad because we want to save the world, create an international revolution. We don’t believe in the nation. For us there are citizens and there is the world, all the citizens of the world, and therefore one has to bring the American idea everywhere and save the markets and so on. And that was in the name of the communist revolution, basically—it’s the same ideas as the communist revolution, only instead of bringing communism, to bring socialism or American social democracy in the Democratic Party version.

Today the Democrats oppose every war in general. It’s a process they’re going through. But I’m trying to show you that this process doesn’t reverse the positions. It’s not true. Rather, things are moving from potential to actual. And the right supports wars—less so a bit today, but it’s still the side more in favor of going to wars—because it says no, wars are not only to protect life. If it were to protect life, then both the left and the Democrats would support war. Americans won’t give up—when they need to defend their lives, both parties will line up behind the army and no one should mess with them. If someone threatens their rule, their lives, themselves. The argument is always over distant wars. And distant wars come to repair the world.

Now once the left was in favor—repairing the world is left-wing. But today the right is basically trying to advance the values around which the American nation gathered. And they want to bring those values outward because they fight for values, not to defend themselves, their government, and threats to their lives. In that sense the right supports wars and the left does not. And I think that once again, when the right speaks in the language of values, of collectives that advance values, the right believes that there are nations on the globe and the game is a game among nations. Therefore there is our nation and other nations, and we operate among nations; there are relations among nations. For the Democrats, nations are fiction. What do I mean fiction? In the end there are people in the world, a collection of people. You want as many people as possible to have it good, that’s all. So once they went to war for that because Americans had it better and could bring light to others too and save the individuals outside too. And today they’ve despaired of that and think wars don’t help anything, and so they oppose war.

So there’s a reversal on the level of phenomena, but it seems to me that still, at the root of these ways of thinking, there is something that characterizes right versus left. And it is indeed connected to collectivism, looking at values, versus individualism and looking at the private welfare of the individual.

And are all these correlations and phenomena true only in the West or also in the East? Because maybe the answer is not religion as one of the phenomena but as the basis. Meaning, as if what fits… why… but why is the East more religious than the West? Wait, leave East and West for a second—say, in all the phenomena we’re talking about in the United States, Israel and so on, the basis is whether you’re religious or not religious. And if you’re religious, broadly speaking, at one level or another, then what goes along with religion is also the economic outlook that maybe better fits Torah values and… Who said? Who said the right fits Torah values better? A great many famous rabbis will tell you no. The Torah is socialist; it cares very much about redistribution, distributive justice. I don’t believe a word of that. But Poalei Mizrachi, the rabbis of Poalei Mizrachi, HaPoel… no, they were socialists. Well, that’s no surprise—they were workers. But I’m saying today too, you know, all kinds of people talking about social justice and helping the weak and all these things.

I actually think the religious outlook is capitalist. Charity, not justice. Those are two different things. Charity, yes, absolutely, charity is strongly encouraged. But charity is a capitalist outlook, of course. Socialism comes to eliminate charity. That’s its goal. It thinks resources should be redistributed from above by force, not left to charity so the rich can give charity.

Let’s assume for a moment that the Rabbi is right. That these really are Torah values. So if you say that because I’m religious I have a right-wing outlook—fine. But still that is the right-wing outlook, regardless. It’s still the right-wing outlook; the question is why I advocate it—because I’m religious, let’s say. Fine. But that still doesn’t negate the fact that that is the definition of the right-wing outlook. Why are there correlations? So you can ask why the Torah, why does this economic and political outlook suit the Torah. And that’s the answer—exactly what I’m telling you—maybe because it’s true, I don’t know, because it’s the right thing. Why though? Why is it the right thing? I really think it’s the right thing. Why? Because I’m religious? No, because I’m a religious person. What? No, maybe I’m a religious person because I… So I’m taking the opposite direction, and it gives you an answer to all the questions—or no, not all the questions, but a few questions.

Never mind. Assuming, let’s say, that everything perfectly matches what the Torah wants, what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants. Certainly. But still, those who don’t believe in the Holy One, blessed be He—why don’t they believe in Him, and why do these people believe in Him? Why do these people identify with the Torah? If this is right in the sense that it’s what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants, then it’s also right in the world. That’s at least the standard assumption. He doesn’t want things that are not correct. Even if I would think about it as an atheist, maybe I wouldn’t arrive at these ideas, but in principle they’re also supposed to be the correct ideas. I think that ultimately this does define what is correct in the right and what is correct in the left, regardless of what reason brought us to see this as correct. That’s already a different question.

The directions of the correlation are even trickier. Because then you could say that if you’re a religious person and were educated in a religious way, I don’t know, a religious worldview, then all the rest are just phenomena flowing from that. Exactly, so that’s a left-wing explanation of this phenomenon, of the phenomenon of right and left. No, I’m not accusing. It could be true. Fine, that’s what I’m saying; it’s not an accusation, I’m just trying to show that this really is measurable on the surface. You’re saying religious people think this way, so religion must be causing it. I’m asking: could it be that at a deeper level… maybe. I’m saying we can discuss it.

That’s why I asked about the East. Because the Western world is Judeo-religious and its phenomena are… And in the East it’s totally different. In China, in the East… but in the East do you mean the Muslim East or the Far East? No, the Far East. In the Far East it isn’t even clear that it’s religious at all in the categories we’re talking about. Right. So that’s why I’m saying that there the outlook is completely different. I just don’t know it well enough to know what right and left there are there and around what the disputes are fought. But the correlation to religiosity there isn’t there. If the real concept the Rabbi is now searching for is correct simply because it exists in reality, then it should be there too, even if they don’t have a theological dispute. I think it’s correct, but left-wing people think it’s not correct. I’m not claiming—it’s what I think. Fine, I think they’re mistaken. There are people who think otherwise. So in the East too there can be people who think it’s correct and people who think it isn’t. The same argument will be there. Maybe we should also have expected to see in the East a correlation between economic outlook… That, yes. I don’t know, one would have to check; I don’t know.

The phrase “we compel charity” expresses a left-wing outlook. Yes, but “we compel charity” really is some sort of expression, in fairly extreme situations. Generally one doesn’t compel charity. Charity is compelled only in places where… That’s what happened in practice in communities. They built mechanisms, appointed communal leaders, and saw to it by force to distribute—not all the wealth, but… And secular capitalism too—or whatever, economic liberalism, non-religious—is not for total freedom. What’s called crony capitalism or predatory capitalism—that’s a left-wing slogan. They say all capitalism is predatory, but real predatory capitalism doesn’t really exist today. There is no right today that wants absolute freedom. Everyone understands that you have to be somewhere with state or communal mechanisms, depending on what sort of right, in order to implement this. It doesn’t work at the extremes.

And therefore again, and therefore again, the same question as with poetry and art brings us to this: okay, so really there are no definitions. And I say no, there are definitions, it’s just true—nobody is at the poles. There are sonnets and ballads and sagas and psalms and this and poetry. Fine, it’s exactly the same thing here. There’s a right that is very close to the pole of freedom, and a right that is less close to the pole of freedom. But still, these theoretical poles of absolute freedom actually go together with collectivism and not with individualism. Because it means that on the economic level it is more correct for there to be freedom, but the state still has the right to intervene. It’s not that there is no right to intervene, that the state is not a player on the field—certainly it is. One can go to war for our values. And right-wing people support going to war for our values even though it harms their welfare; it harms the economy too, sometimes, wars. Fine, still people go to war for values, those conservative and sometimes religious values. The left accuses them of exactly that—that religiosity creates wars, right? In our own regions too we hear this. It’s the same issue. Since religiosity and ideological right-wingness, even if it comes from a secular point of departure—which is rarer but also exists—is an outlook of wars for values, to conquer the land, our land, the land of our forefathers. It’s a discourse foreign to… It doesn’t speak that language. I go to war when there is an existential threat to me. If not, let me live quietly and let them live quietly too. What do you want from them? Fine, that’s the whole discourse.

North Korea is a little strange on this issue, no? What? North Korea. North Korea is the most collectivist, the most left that could be. I said—all communism. North Korea simply remained communist. Today there’s no communism in the world like there was in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the twentieth century. In North Korea it remained, that’s all. Everything I said about the Soviet Union earlier can presumably be said about North Korea. I don’t know enough, but I think it’s basically the same idea.

By the way, China is a wonderful challenge to this issue, and Argentina from the other side. In China there is a left-wing regime running a right-wing economy. It’s becoming more and more right-wing because it understands it doesn’t work otherwise. Which shows that the right is probably correct after all. In the end they’ll give up the left entirely; only power will remain. And in Argentina there was the opposite challenge. In Argentina there was Peronism, which was right-wing in the nationalist and fascist sense, and economically left-wing. It brought that to an even stronger expression, but it was economically left-wing; it constantly cared for workers, the state there cared a lot for the weak, and so on, while it was an extreme nationalist right. That’s why immigrants from Argentina are all left-wing people, also here in Israel. Whoever came from Argentina is generally left-wing. And the Russians, at least in the first generation, as long as they hadn’t yet shaken it off, were right-wing people. It’s always a reaction to what the regime tried to produce, because whenever a regime tries to produce something—whether in the direction of right or left—it creates a reaction among the citizens, because it always fails and always becomes oppressive.

I think in that regard healthy capitalism is correct when it says: just stay to the side, don’t bother us. And if we need to go to war, for that you need a state; they should draft us and we’ll go to war if necessary, no problem. As long as there are no wars, leave us alone. Decisions are made close to home, as it appears here in the platform. Decisions belong to the individual, or the company, or the private person, to make by themselves—not for the government to make on his behalf. So this does not contradict collectivist thinking. It only says that where needed, needed; where not needed, not needed. That’s all. But it’s not an outlook that says the state has no right to intervene.

People on the left keep talking about this. They don’t say the state has the right to intervene—it’s always being backed into a corner when you ask them, wait, how can it be that the state will coerce… it’s somewhat problematic from the left’s point of view. Fine, but in the end more private individuals will benefit from the fact that the state nevertheless imposes various things on private individuals, and wealth has to be distributed equally among individuals. So the state is the way—our strength is in our unity—or what I quoted earlier from those manifestos.

Therefore I think that in the end there is indeed an essence behind the concepts of right and left. With all the complexity and fragmentation that this undergoes over the years, and the changes, and sometimes reversals from one extreme to the other—like being for wars or against wars—because that is exactly the point. People look for definitions of right and left at the level of whether you’re for wars or against wars. But that’s not it. Those are the facts. I’m talking about the theoretical analysis, not the facts. What stands behind it, what philosophical ideas stand behind it. And at the philosophical level one can indeed find some principles that define right and left. Again, this too is challenging. It’s also not simple. It’s naive to think these ideas will appear as is in the world. Obviously not. The world is complex, and each of us is a bit right-wing and a bit left-wing. But still, right is right and left is left. There are these two poles, and each of us is a bit of this and a bit of that in different doses. And in that sense I think the same kind of work one does in poetry and art can also be done in the context of right and left.

I’ll give you an example a little closer to home. Say the relationship between Haredi Judaism and Religious Zionism. There’s something like right and left here too. Maybe not on the level of the private individual—the private Haredi individual is more right-wing than a Religious Zionist, most Haredim. But the Haredi collective does not conduct itself in a right-wing way. First of all, well, we won’t speak on the political level where it is more compromising politically, and it always was. But I mean beyond that, look at how it tries to impose religiosity on the state. In the end, religious legislation originally was a Religious Zionist agenda, not a Haredi one. The Haredim don’t recognize this state at all, meaning in the end you’re bringing back one more stray sheep and one more soul, you’re getting some neighbor to repent and causing that one to put on tefillin—a kind of right-wing outlook among the Haredim. It’s a right-wing outlook in that sense. And among Religious Zionists it comes from above—they want to do social engineering. As though like the left. But it seems to me that it’s not exactly like that. If we look at it through these theoretical glasses, it’s not exactly so.

Exactly so. Because here Religious Zionism, many times, if you push someone into a corner and say: what do I care whether this nation works on the Sabbath or not, the main thing is whether you sit with a Jew in the kitchen on the Sabbath or not? Why does society need to observe the Sabbath? What do I care about society? I care that Jews observe the Sabbath. Now for Religious Zionism, the religious character of the state is more important than whether people observe the Sabbath. That’s mainly what they fight over. It’s far more important to them that the state not desecrate the Sabbath, that the state embassy not desecrate the Sabbath, than that a hundred thousand Jews not desecrate the Sabbath. And among the Haredim it’s the opposite.

So you see that among the Haredim, even when they do religious coercion and all the rest, the goal is not the religious character of the state—that doesn’t interest them. The goal is that Jews should not violate Jewish law. In the end the goal is people. In that sense it’s a left-wing approach. And Religious Zionism—its goal, there are such goals too, ask the rabbis no doubt—but the conduct is not like that. Because if your goal were to bring people to repentance, then you would also make outreach movements in the same sense as Arachim and like everything they’ve tried to do in recent years. But traditionally that was more with the Haredim. We don’t bring people to repentance, I’m not saying—we only want the character to be Jewish and so on. And that’s a real statement, not an apology. It’s a real statement. And it’s a real statement because I’ve always mocked this outlook, because precisely on this issue I’m left-wing. What do I care? I don’t have to be right-wing in the same way everywhere. It has no significance for me what the public character of the state is. For me it matters that Jews observe Torah and commandments, and as much as I can I’ll try to make that happen. I don’t think coercive tools are effective, and they’re worth nothing, but yes, to try to bring people to repentance. In that sense I’m not embarrassed at all—I’m completely in favor of bringing people to repentance. Right on the table—what’s the problem? Why not? I’ll try to persuade you, either I’ll succeed or I won’t, so what?

And in the end, by contrast, this thing of “don’t fly on the Sabbath”—let them take El Al on a Boeing and fly it on the Sabbath, what do I care? The main thing is that Jews not desecrate the Sabbath. What do I care that the character is the character—why should that interest me? For me, that character is at most an educational means to achieve that individuals observe the Sabbath. I don’t think it’s a particularly effective means. I mean a day of rest. What? A day of rest. It’s a day of rest only because private individuals won’t be able to observe the Sabbath if there isn’t a day of rest on the Sabbath. If the day of rest is on Sunday and people work on the Sabbath, how will I find work? I, as a private individual who observes the Sabbath. And other people who find work on the Sabbath—if they decide to give up the Sabbath—like happened in the United States when the immigrants came from Europe to the United States.

A large part of the abandonment of tradition, the secularization, happened there. There is an amazing description there by Rabbi Bar-Ilan. He tells there about a ship that docked, in his memoirs—it’s called something like From the Heights of Jerusalem, something like that. A memoir book, something in Jerusalem, something like that. So he says there that he boarded a ship in the port of Odessa to the United States, and there were many Jews there emigrating. They boarded wearing kapotes and hats and all the traditional dress; they got onto the ship and immediately took it off. Immediately they took it off, abandoned everything right away. It wasn’t a process. What? On the ship? On the ship. On the ship—as soon as they left the holy soil of Ukraine, they took everything off.

But beyond that, they arrived in the United States and then something else happened. The United States was at that time predatory capitalism in the full sense. Okay? The books of Upton Sinclair—if anyone has read him; my father really loved him, so from childhood I read those books—they’re shocking books. I recommend reading them; just be careful not to turn into leftists and communists, of course. Though in truth it’s hard not to become left-wing when you read that book. He tells about the meatpackers in Chicago, how the people there were slaves of slaves of the industrialists. The meat industry ground people up. They didn’t give them pensions, didn’t give them a salary, didn’t give them anything. If anyone dared say something, they told him: by all means, you can leave; there are a hundred thousand job seekers here by the door looking for your place. Whoever worked had to obey. Then all the labor unions began, and things awakened, and McCarthyism and communism—all that was stirred up from there.

But in the end that also caused the rest of the secularization after the secularization that happened on the ship. They arrived in the United States, and there too—even among those who didn’t remove the kapote on the ship—something happened. Why? Because there is no such thing as not working on the Sabbath. Whoever didn’t work on the Sabbath simply didn’t work at all. He had nothing to eat. There was no national insurance there. If you don’t work on the Sabbath—and there still weren’t organized communities able to provide charity and support and kindness and so on; this was the capitalist stage, there weren’t yet highly organized Jews and so on—you would simply starve to death. And people were forced to work on the Sabbath. It was a clear compulsion. Everybody worked on the Sabbath.

Read the book All for the Boss, that Haredi or semi-Haredi book, by the daughter of Rabbi Sheinberg—actually the wife of Rabbi Sheinberg. She’s the daughter of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Herman, whom he describes as having established the world of Torah in America. Maybe that’s a bit hagiographic, but he probably really was a very central figure there. He didn’t compromise. He wasn’t willing to work on the Sabbath; he called on people, and he created frameworks so they could succeed. And it’s described there in the book—you can’t imagine, it’s an amazing reality, the counterpart of Upton Sinclair. You see there how capitalism crushes everything. Meaning, you can’t stand against it. No religiosity can stand against it, nothing. You work on the Sabbath and give up everything; you can’t do anything else. You’ll have nothing to eat; you’ll starve if you don’t do it.

And in a certain sense, such capitalism really is a capitalism that erases to a large extent many things that perhaps belong to what I earlier called the right-wing outlook. It doesn’t allow you to hold onto things; money does everything. So that really is predatory capitalism. But there is a right that is not like that, that is willing to accept values. It will not trample values in the name of economics, contrary to the common accusations. But it depends what sort. It isn’t willing to give up the values of freedom, and it is willing to give up some of the individual’s welfare. Usually people talk about that as giving up values, because they think that ultimately the individual too will benefit economically. Fine, those are already technical arguments, not essential ones.

Okay, the truth is this took me much longer than I thought. So I’ll just say in telegraphic form the thing I wanted to mention for Passover. I thought of speaking a bit about the definition of freedom and liberty in connection with Passover. And it’s somewhat related, I said, to what’s going on here, and it’s also about the definition of concepts, so I thought it would fit in. In the ten minutes left I’ll devote myself to this issue.

On Passover two things basically happened to us. First, the Jewish collective was born; we said it came together. And second, we celebrate the festival of liberty, as though the festival of freedom; we went out from slavery to freedom. And in our current way of thinking, such a thing often seems contradictory. The collective is perceived as something that enslaves you, and freedom or liberty is usually freedom from the collective—in other words, the individual, basically. Collectivism is the opposite of liberty. But both of these things happen together on Passover. Even today people talk about the liberation of a people and so on, but today less so—the liberation of a people is a means to liberate individuals. People don’t speak—or speak less—in this language of the liberty of the nation, okay? Rather, as part of the liberty of the private individual, he wants to live with his people. Fine, but that’s…

So there are basically these two things that one might have seen as contradictory, at least through modern eyes. And there’s that epigram by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi where he says: “The servants of time are servants of servants; the servant of God alone is free.” And I always felt that this is an Orwellian statement. You know in Orwell: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, in 1984. Yes, it’s a parody of communism, and there the communists—the regime there—tries to drip its nonsense into the masses, and the hope is that if you wash their brains long enough it’ll sink in, even though these are complete oxymorons. Right? What the communists wanted to convince their citizens was that they were in fact the most productive in the world, with films about the combines and the successful collective farms, where the grain yield per acre was something… Stakhanovite. Huh? Yes, Stakhanov, exactly. Or all kinds of things like that. It’s a kind of propaganda trying to explain to those miserable people how much they are…

There’s a fellow from the Soviet Union—not new, twenty years in Israel—when it comes to the space race and the education there in those years, there’s nothing he can say that Stalin didn’t sign off on. That’s how I present the matter. Yes, he completely internalized the… My father, when I studied engineering for my first degree, I came with a sharp line: the sampling theorem—we learned it in signal processing—Shannon’s theorem. My father told me: that’s Kolmogorov’s theorem. They invented everything. Yes, with them everything… there’s some theorem… Actually that can also be true, by the way. Because there wasn’t much exchange of information. A great many things… The French have that phenomenon too; they invented everything. Also the English. Also the Americans. Yes, and because of the compartmentalization of the whole story, a great many things—articles published in the Western scientific literature, in physics and in many such fields—had in fact already existed forever in the technological institute of, I don’t know, Kazakhstan somewhere, and someone had already done it. Moshe Gitterman would attribute half of physics to Landau. Landau is known in the West too, yes. Anyway, in short—so we studied, we studied Landau, not Landau.

The claim, the description in Orwell’s book, is that basically—look, if you explain enough times that you are the happiest and freest and most productive and most everything, then in the end you’ll buy it. And therefore he says they constantly had to recite there: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength—until in the end we, the ignorant slaves who are constantly in wars, become convinced that we are the freest and smartest and strongest and most powerful, and so on.

And my feeling is that this statement of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi does a bit of that Orwellian brainwashing to me. I am a slave of slaves to the Holy One, blessed be He; at every step He tells me what to do and what not to do, and “the servant of God alone is free,” “the servants of time are servants of servants.” It sounds like some sort of Mercaz HaRav-style talk, from Har Hamor, like that, that the greatest freedom is to be a servant of God, and all kinds of things like that. These confusing oxymorons always kill me, every single time.

But Rabbi Yehuda Halevi I try to give a little more credit than the rabbis of Har Hamor, and the question is what he meant—and this isn’t many things. He meant that basically you can’t live as a free-floating particle; you’re always under some potential, there are always forces acting on you. And basically what I want to claim is this: the question is whether freedom is a value. First of all, with Rabbi Yehuda Halevi apparently it says yes, because the very fact that he’s trying to persuade me that the servant of God alone is free means he apparently recognizes that being free is something important. That itself is already an interesting novelty. In a religious world I would say what do you mean, freedom isn’t important at all—be a servant of God. So the very fact that you even bother, even if it’s tendentious preaching and missionizing, the very fact that you bother to do this is already an intellectual novelty, because you recognize that the aspiration to freedom, and freedom itself, is something of value.

Now the question is whether being free really is something of value. Today people generally think yes. I tend to think no. And I think what causes people to think that being free is something of value is that taking away someone’s freedom unjustifiably is an immoral act. Right? If you put someone in prison for no reason, when he hasn’t done anything, or you shackle him in handcuffs for no reason—taking away someone’s freedom when he doesn’t deserve to lose it, just like that, without justification—that’s an immoral act. Therefore very often people say: look, freedom is a value; after all, taking it away is an immoral act.

But that’s not true. Money too—being the owner of money—is not a value in itself. You can do many nice things with money, but being the owner of money, wealth, is no more ethically valuable than poverty. In other words, having money is not something of value, in the ethical sense—not that it has market value, but that it is ethically valuable. But taking money from someone unjustifiably is an immoral act. Therefore the fact that taking something from someone unjustifiably is immoral doesn’t mean that the thing itself is a value. What it means is that the thing is an asset. It belongs to him. Not a value, exactly. Just as money is my asset, and it’s perfectly fine to have assets—no problem, I’m a capitalist at least in that regard—so too with this. Therefore taking that thing from me is an immoral act. But that doesn’t mean that owning money is a value; owning money is an asset.

And the same with freedom. Freedom means being without constraints. Right? That’s the dictionary definition. Freedom means no constraints. Now no one is completely without constraints. But in principle that’s the axis of freedom. The fewer constraints you have, the freer you are, and vice versa. Freedom means the absence of constraints. Complete freedom means no constraints at all, and partial freedom means some constraints, and so on, okay? But freedom is the absence of constraints. Now the absence of constraints cannot be something of value; it’s a state. So what value is involved here? It’s simply a state. If you’re in that state, then good for you. It’s an asset. Therefore depriving you of that state is an immoral act, true. But being free, without constraints, is not a value—it’s an asset. Giving freedom is a value, meaning causing freedom, producing freedom. Like giving charity. Producing freedom, like giving charity, giving money to someone who doesn’t have it. Giving freedom to someone who doesn’t have it—maybe, fine. But those are already processes. I’m speaking about the state of being free. That state is a state. Someone who merited and is free—great, he’s happy, like someone who merited and is rich. But that doesn’t mean that being free or being rich is itself something of value. Okay?

Now what is of value? I call it liberty—but again, this isn’t a dictionary definition. In dictionaries these appear as synonyms. But for me it’s more convenient to use the two words differently. Liberty means conducting yourself autonomously within the constraints. Not being enslaved. Not being enslaved to the constraints. Not being without constraints. Rather, it means acting within the constraints as a free person—that is, acting according to what he thinks is right to do, and not according to what the constraints are trying to dictate to him. And that is called a free person.

Now that really is a value: being a free person, as opposed to being free, which is an asset. Being a free person is a value. Taking away freedom is an immoral act, but liberty cannot be taken away. I don’t understand this definition. Say that now there’s a force acting on me called gravity. No, you’re talking about physical constraints—that’s exactly the point. You know what, even with physical constraints. How can I be a free person when gravity is acting on me? You climb, you climb a high mountain. You climb and you don’t—alternatively, you don’t fall. Gravity acts on me and still, if I have willpower, I climb. So you’re saying that to be free is to be in a constant state of conflict with reality. Correct, correct, exactly—a constant struggle against the forces trying to restrain me. Against constraints. Conflict at the point where the forces are taking me to places I don’t want to be.

Sometimes just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. In other words, the fact that forces are trying to make you do something doesn’t mean the thing itself is wrong. There are social forces trying to make you do correct things, and then you shouldn’t fight them; on the contrary, you should do it—but do it because I have decided that that’s the right thing to do. You don’t always have to fight society. You need to be in a state where you are prepared to fight society—so that if it isn’t right, then I won’t do it even though society, or constraints, or whatever it may be, or my inclination, doesn’t matter, all the constraints trying to make me do it. That’s called being free. And to be a free person is something that has value.

To be free is an asset. And it’s the opposite in another sense too, as I said earlier: taking freedom from someone is immoral, but taking liberty from someone is impossible. All you can do is impose more constraints on him. But if he is truly free, then he will act, as much as he can within the constraints, as a free person. Yes, the first half of Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, where he describes his experiences there in the Holocaust before the logotherapy—the second part is his psychological theory, but the first part is the description of things in the camps. And in his description of the camps he speaks exactly about this: people with the least freedom imaginable on earth—there, that’s where you really see whether someone is truly free. People in our little things—it seems… And how does this connect to Passover? What? Where on Passover is there liberty? What? They were passive—“The Lord will fight for you, and you shall be silent.”

You cannot take away liberty. If you’ll finish… Shi, Shi, ten—I only want to complete this point. The point is that there is no liberty without constraints. The point is that… fine, so I accept that limitation upon myself. The meaning is that in the end, to be a free person is something of value. To have freedom is an asset, that’s all. When people speak of the value in freedom, they mean liberty and not freedom.

Now in that sense it’s the opposite, because if you have no constraints, you cannot be a free person, by definition. If you have no constraints, how can you be a free person? A free person is the question of how you are within constraints, how you cope with constraints. Therefore “the servant of God alone is free” is not an Orwellian statement—it’s a definition. Not that I have some excuse why it’s not contradictory; it can’t be otherwise. It would be contradictory if it were the other way around. If you were not a servant to objective givens outside yourself, that don’t depend on you, then your liberty would have no meaning. We talked about the Swiss example and all that; I won’t go back to it now because I’ve already mentioned it several times. It’s the same thing from another angle. It’s exactly the same thing. Once you have constraints and within them you act freely, that has value. If you have no constraints, if everything is Swiss-like, and if you act freely—then it has no significance.

That’s why creative freedom versus creative liberty too—people think creative freedom is a value, not putting constraints on creators. And that is a complete mistake, the same mistake. What should matter is liberty of creation, not freedom of creation. People often talk about how a creator subject to religious constraints, say, is not a true creator. He is a thousand times more of a true creator than the other creator, because he actually has to be creative in order to manage within the additional constraints he’s in—not only the ordinary constraints everyone is under. And then you see his creativity. So in the end, the amount of constraints doesn’t mean you’re not creative. On the contrary—it is what enables your creativity to appear. I’m speaking now in the artistic context just as in the ethical context.

And one last example, a somewhat mathematical one. Think of a room like a chessboard: eight by eight squares. There’s a chair—one chair, each one taking up one square, okay? And you have one chair in the room—how many possible ways are there to arrange the room? Sixty-four. Sixty-four, right, on each of the squares. And there are two different chairs, for simplicity. Two different chairs—how many ways are there to arrange the room? Sixty-four times sixty-three. Sixty-four times sixty-three. Sixty-four possibilities to place the first chair; then sixty-three places remain. Many, many more than with one chair. With three chairs there are many more possibilities. So where is there more…

So where is there more creativity? In a room full of chairs, or in an empty room with no chairs at all? Amos Oz, in his example in Here and There in the Land of Israel, brings in the essay “The Full Wagon and the Empty Wagon.” He says that at Mount Sinai some sort of empty space was created, and since then we’ve been filling it with furniture until finally we’re unable to move. Judaism has become completely ossified.