Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel’s Thought – Genesis – Lesson 4
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Maimonides’ interpretation of the verses of creation versus the eternity of the world
- Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s demand for an interpretation that is not evasive
- “Beginning” and “created” in the Guide for the Perplexed: causality instead of chronology
- The eternity of the world, the proofs for God’s existence, and the principle of sufficient reason
- “It always existed,” actual infinity, and infinite regress
- Examples about intuitions, laws of motion, and habits of perception
- Time: an independent reality or a form of thought, and Kant
- Time travel, the flow of time, and the parallel between time and space
- Time in Jewish law: attaching a vow to a day, and tensions between object-status and person-status
- Change in the Creator’s will, the creation of the world, and philosophical answers
- Thought, matter, and cogito versus materialism
- Critique of “above time” and of the solution to divine foreknowledge and free choice
Summary
General Overview
The text presents Maimonides’ position in the Guide for the Perplexed: that if there were a convincing proof for the eternity of the world, one could interpret the verses of creation so that they fit eternity, just as we interpret verses that seem anthropomorphic so that they fit the truth that God has no body. But in practice there is no need to interpret them that way, because we have a tradition that the world is created anew, and reason also tends in that direction. The text adopts Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s demand not to make do with a general declaration that allegorical interpretation is possible, but rather to present an interpretation that actually holds water and does not turn Scripture into a meaningless text that can be bent to support any position. It then proposes the Maimonidean reading of “In the beginning” as a causal beginning rather than a temporal one, and builds around it a philosophical framework involving the principle of sufficient reason, the eternity of the world, and the laws of nature, alongside a sharp critique of solutions based on claims that supposedly with the Holy One, blessed be He, there is no time and therefore the questions do not even begin.
Maimonides’ interpretation of the verses of creation versus the eternity of the world
Maimonides writes in the Guide for the Perplexed that if he were convinced that the world is eternal, he would interpret the verses whose plain sense points to creation in time in a way that accords with the assumption of eternity, just as he interprets verses whose plain sense suggests anthropomorphism in a way that accords with the proven truth that God has no body. Maimonides does not do this regarding the eternity of the world because there is no sufficient reason to take the verses away from their plain meaning, since we have a tradition that the world is created anew and it can also be shown that this is more plausible. The text emphasizes that Maimonides presents the issue not as a problem of linguistic fit, but as a philosophical-intellectual decision: Aristotle did not convince him, and therefore there is no reason to alter the plain meaning of the verses.
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s demand for an interpretation that is not evasive
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi poses a direct question: how can one interpret “In the beginning God created” so that it fits the eternity of the world? The text presents this as an unusual move that forces one to offer a concrete interpretation rather than settle for a slogan about allegory. The text argues that allegorical interpretation cannot turn simple facts into non-facts, and that an implausible interpretation makes the text redundant. It applies this also in modern contexts, arguing that attempts to derive a coherent socio-economic worldview from the Torah are often a forcing of the verses in a desired direction; and if one can build both a capitalist and a socialist picture of the world from the sources, it is better simply to state one’s position directly rather than hang it on verses.
“Beginning” and “created” in the Guide for the Perplexed: causality instead of chronology
In chapter 30 of the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides explains that the word “beginning” has two meanings: priority in time, or beginning in the sense of the cause of the thing and that which sustains it, where cause and effect can exist together. The text proposes that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” can be understood to mean that God is the cause of the existence of the heavens and the earth, the “first cause” and “cause of causes.” The text adds that “created,” which we usually understand as creation from nothing, can also be interpreted as “brought into existence” and not necessarily as making something at a particular moment in time.
The eternity of the world, the proofs for God’s existence, and the principle of sufficient reason
The text describes how the cosmological proof for God’s existence rests on the assumption that the world was created in time and therefore requires a creator, and how the Aristotelian eternity of the world threatens that proof because if the world always existed there is no starting point from which to ask “who created it?” It parallels this to the threat people attribute to evolution with respect to the physico-theological proof from complexity, and argues that the focus of the question can be shifted from the complexity of living beings to the complexity and specialness of the laws of nature themselves. The text cites Leibniz and the principle of sufficient reason, which distinguishes between demanding a cause for something that came into being and demanding a reason for something special even if it “always existed,” and formulates the possibility of a proof for the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He, even in an eternal world, because uniqueness and order still require a reason and a foundation that animates and emanates the lawfulness.
“It always existed,” actual infinity, and infinite regress
The text raises doubts about the meaning of the claim “it always existed” and connects it to the difficulty of actual infinity and to paradoxes such as Hilbert’s Hotel. It states that infinite regress in explanations is considered a philosophical failure because it requires an actual infinity of explanations and not merely “as large a number as you like.” The text wonders whether the principle of sufficient reason rests on a deep intuition against “always” as a consistent claim, or whether this is a separate position according to which things that have no cause need no reason.
Examples about intuitions, laws of motion, and habits of perception
The text brings the midrash about Abraham asking “Who turns the sphere?” and contrasts it with Newton’s first law, according to which motion does not require a mover, only a change in motion requires force, while asking what explains the law itself. The text mentions a book by Mario Livio about whether mathematics is discovered or created, and cites the claim that a child’s natural intuition tends to think that something without force acting on it will stand still rather than continue moving. It adds examples of changes in neural adaptation, such as a bicycle whose steering is reversed and playing soccer with glasses that show a top-down view, to illustrate how deeply intuitions depend on habits of perception and training.
Time: an independent reality or a form of thought, and Kant
The text presents two possibilities for understanding time: time as an independent reality, or time as a human form of thought that arranges events into before and after, and parallels this to the question of space. The text says that some sages held the second possibility and concludes that according to that view there is no point in speaking about time before human beings existed, but rejects this and argues that one can use the “glasses” of time to speak also about the past before humanity, just as one can ask when a person’s father was born even though that person did not yet exist then. The text argues that a more precise way to speak about the eternity of time is to say that the time axis is infinite rather than to say “time always existed,” and presents a discussion that questions like “what was before time” are ill-defined because “before” is itself a temporal concept.
Time travel, the flow of time, and the parallel between time and space
The text argues that discussion of time travel does not begin on the physical level but already on the conceptual level, because the expression “after some amount of time, to be on Monday” creates an internal contradiction between “after” and “before.” The text also challenges the intuition that “time flows” and asks along what time flows if it itself is the axis on which change is measured, and cites Richard Taylor, who argues that one can formulate statements about time in a way parallel to space. The text notes that relativity describes history as a “world-line,” where one relates to the whole and not to a single moment in time, and mentions a letter of condolence attributed to Einstein in which it is said that it was always true that a certain person would die in a certain year, and they simply reached that point.
Time in Jewish law: attaching a vow to a day, and tensions between object-status and person-status
The text cites passages in tractates Nedarim and Shevuot about attachment such as “like the day on which Gedaliah son of Ahikam died,” and asks how one can “attach” to a day if attachment is the transfer of legal force from one object to another. The text suggests that from here one might see a halakhic conception of a day as an object, and then the question arises whether a temporary prohibition is object-status or person-status, with the claim raised that “a temporary prohibition is not an object-based prohibition” because the prohibition is not fixed in the object. The text disputes this by saying that the fast is on the person and not an “prohibition on the day,” but returns to the question of what exactly the legal force rests on when one uses attachment to a specific day.
Change in the Creator’s will, the creation of the world, and philosophical answers
The text presents the classic difficulty regarding the creation of the world: if the world was created anew, why was it created specifically when it was created, and does that imply a change in the Creator’s will, contrary to the claim that He is unchanging? The text suggests that the question becomes sharp only if one assumes time before creation, and cites a direction associated with relativity that offers a static picture in which no change “happens,” but one merely reaches a point on the world-line. The text also raises reservations about the very assumption that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot change, and argues that there is no clear source for that except the claim that He cannot “improve” if He is perfect.
Thought, matter, and cogito versus materialism
The text argues that the tangible world exists only in our thought and that there are ways to prove this, bringing Descartes’ cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” as a demonstration that the existence of thought is more certain than the existence of the matter perceived by it. The text concludes that materialism is absurd because the materialist conclusion itself is a mental conclusion, and therefore denying the existence of the mental while relying on it is incoherent. It also connects this to the discussion of time and the senses, arguing that the senses create in us the concept of reality, so that even the “tangible” is a product of cognitive translation.
Critique of “above time” and of the solution to divine foreknowledge and free choice
The text sharply rejects the claim that “with the Holy One, blessed be He, there is no time” as a solution to philosophical questions, and argues that since all speech about the Holy One, blessed be He, is done through human tools of thought, the questions are defined in the language of time and space and therefore require an answer in that same language. The text says that even regarding divine foreknowledge and free choice, the statement “for Him everything is present” solves nothing, because one can still formulate in a well-defined way that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows today what will happen tomorrow and then raise the difficulty for free choice. The text concludes that answers of the type “from His blessed perspective” are, in its view, just empty talk that does not clarify the problem but smears it over, even when one completes the interpretive move of reading “In the beginning” as cause, while the Torah’s language for us still speaks of the beginning of time.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So we’re on page 83. We finished the introduction to the creation of the world. “In the beginning God created.” Maimonides writes in the Guide for the Perplexed that if we were convinced that the world is eternal, then it would be possible to interpret the verses whose plain meaning indicates that it was created anew in a way that agrees with the assumption of eternity, just as we interpret verses whose plain meaning points to anthropomorphism in a way that agrees with the proven truth that God has no body. But regarding eternity we have no reason to interpret things that way, because we have a tradition that the world was created anew, and it can be shown that this is more plausible, and that is where reason tends, as Maimonides shows in the previous chapters there. And therefore we should not take the verses that indicate the creation of the world away from their plain meaning. And this is a famous statement of Maimonides, that regarding eternity—we already talked about this—regarding anthropomorphism, sorry, Maimonides does take the verses away from their plain meaning, seemingly, because the plain meaning of the verses—we already talked about whether that really is the plain meaning or not—but the plain meaning of the verses seemingly gives God bodily form, like “the hand of God,” and that He regretted, and all kinds of things of that sort. And Maimonides, because of his philosophical conclusion that the Holy One, blessed be He, has no bodily form, takes those verses away from their plain meaning. And then he says: if so, then this technique can work anywhere there is a contradiction between my scientific, philosophical, or other conclusions and the verses. For example, on the issue of eternity. Aristotle claimed that the world is eternal, and if I were persuaded, says Maimonides, then I would fit that too into the verses. Except that there I was not persuaded. Meaning, it doesn’t seem to me that there is sufficient reason to take the verses away from their plain meaning. Now Rabbi Yehuda Halevi makes here a classic move that people usually are not accustomed to make. His next question is: how could Maimonides interpret the verse in a way that would agree with the assumption of the eternity of the world, when it explicitly says, “In the beginning God created”? Meaning, we always stop there. Fine, I’d interpret the verses allegorically. Okay, let’s see how you would do that. In other words, that’s not enough. The point is this: many times we see a statement of that kind as basically some kind of evasive move. I can interpret it, and therefore everything is fine. Well, no. Or alternatively, what that means is that once I go to interpretation, once I’m willing to accept allegorical interpretation, there are no limits. You can do whatever you want. So nobody asks, okay, how exactly would you do that? Because fine—if the gates of interpretation have not been locked, if everyone can do whatever he wants, then what’s the problem? There’s nothing to ask. I’ll say yes is no and no is yes and flip everything around, and that’s it. But Rabbi Yehuda Halevi already anticipated in the introduction that it doesn’t work that way. Meaning, you can’t take verses, for example, that describe a simple fact—that so-and-so lived nine hundred years—and say, this is allegory, he only lived four hundred years, or I don’t know, a hundred years. Facts are not allegories. That’s not reasonable. It’s unreasonable interpretation. And basically he continues here with his fundamental approach, that the goal here is not to evade. Meaning, if you’re evading, then leave it, it’s worth nothing, don’t do anything. If what you mean is that there is an interpretation here that you can insert into the text in a credible way—meaning, in a way you’re willing to stand behind—let’s see how you do that. Because without continuing and asking that question, the text says nothing. It says absolutely nothing. In the end, whatever you decide the text should say, that’s what it will say. And to a large extent—and I think we talked about this—to a large extent that is really true in many contexts. I know, we talked about socialism and capitalism. People who dream of extracting from the Torah—or from the Oral Torah, doesn’t matter—some kind of socio-economic worldview. In my view that’s fantasy. You can’t do it, and what people are really doing is just a group assault on the verses in order to drag them to the place they want them to be, and each person takes them to the place where he thinks the verses ought to be. Now since I really think the Torah has no clear socio-economic doctrine in that sense—there are comments here and there, but it doesn’t rise to the level of some coherent and clear picture—then that whole stage is unnecessary. Meaning, just do what you really think is right to do, and don’t try to lean on verses. Why are you forcing the verses in order to show yourself that it’s there, or in the words of the Sages, or among the halakhic decisors, or whoever it is one chooses to force? It’s unnecessary. In the end, if you thought the opposite, you’d do the opposite. So why do it at all? Just say what you think, and that’s it. If there is a constraint that emerges from the sources against what you think—fine, then we have a problem, then it doesn’t work. But if you can make the sources line up with whatever you want—meaning, you can take the sources and build from them a capitalist worldview, and take the sources and build from them a socialist worldview—then leave the verses alone. What do you want from them? Why plant it in the verses? And in that sense I’m saying now: that’s in halakhic or current practical contexts, about how to behave in practice. But Maimonides says—or Rabbi Gedalia says—also regarding the description of creation and the Torah’s ideas and stories: if you want to say that you can think whatever you want, then think whatever you want, but leave the verses aside. But if you want to tell me that you can also interpret the verses, let’s see an interpretation that really holds up. You can’t tell me, okay, we’ll do what I want, we’ll turn yes into no and no into yes, because then the text is redundant—erase it. What is it for? It says nothing. It says whatever you want it to say, so why was it written? And there’s something here that really is a demand that may seem totally obvious when you think about it, but a great many people didn’t take this extra step. They read Maimonides and move on. They don’t ask, excuse me, how exactly would you interpret this? I don’t understand—the verses say, “In the beginning God created.” How would you explain that the world is eternal? You have to give us…
[Speaker C] Does Maimonides really say that in the Guide for the Perplexed? Because Maimonides ruled—for example—that in Yishtabach one says “the one King, the living God of the worlds,” and not “the life of the worlds,” because whoever says “the life of the worlds” is a heretic. But according to how he’s presenting Maimonides here, right, it’s legitimate, it just fits the words a little less.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the opposite, no, it’s not that it fits the words less—
[Speaker C] it fits, Maimonides is saying here that everything—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] fits the words, but it’s not true. On the contrary, he says: with the words I could manage whether Aristotle is right or not right, but Aristotle isn’t right, so why should I flip the words around?
[Speaker C] Right, so not only that—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He says it’s heresy to say that? It’s not heresy, but it isn’t true. No—he says his scientific-philosophical conclusion is that it’s not true. And that’s the point. He says—it’s not, or put it this way: Aristotle did not convince me. If Aristotle had convinced me, I would have arranged it for you. The tradition I’d arrange for you, the verses I’d arrange for you. He didn’t convince me, so why do I need to do it? On the contrary, he argues that it isn’t true—that’s exactly the point. Not that it fits the verses less. With the verses he could make it fit either way. Okay, so how could Maimonides have interpreted the verse in a way that would fit the assumption of the eternity of the world, when it explicitly says, “In the beginning God created”? And in chapter 30 there in the Guide, Maimonides explains that the word “beginning” can have two meanings. One is connected to temporal priority: “in the beginning” meaning first in time. The second meaning of “beginning” is beginning in the sense of the cause of the thing, that which sustains the thing, and the cause and the effect can exist together. Meaning, one could say that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” means that God is the cause of the existence of the heavens and the earth, or as the philosophers said, God is the first cause, the cause of causes. And “created” too, which we understand in its plain meaning as from nothing, as Maimonides writes there at the end of the chapter, can be interpreted as “brought into existence.” What is he trying to say here? There’s a subtle point here, I think, and it’s really something I’ve been grappling with for many years. Usually, let’s say, the physico-theological proof for God’s existence, or the cosmological proof for God’s existence, is this: if there is a world, then apparently someone created it, because things like this don’t arise on their own, and therefore there is God. Now Maimonides already noticed this point, that if I adopt the Aristotelian conception that the world is eternal, then of course this proof collapses. There’s always the option of saying: the world was never created, so no one has to create it, it always existed. Okay? This whole argument, this whole proof of God’s existence, is based on the fact that the world came into being at some point in time, that it wasn’t always there. Then the question is, okay, so what made it? Who made it? But if it always existed—that is the threat contained in Aristotle’s eternity of the world. In fact the doctrine of eternity was one of the central things that medieval thinkers, the sages of the Middle Ages, had to deal with, because it was a threat—it was the evolution of that era. Meaning, just as evolution—for example, the physico-theological proof is built on the idea that a complex thing doesn’t arise by accident—evolution offers a scientific explanation of how a complex thing can arise by chance. And therefore you can’t prove God’s existence from the fact that there is a complex world here, because usually the proof is that if there is a complex thing, somebody created it. But if we have a scientific explanation showing how a complex thing can arise on its own, then there is no proof of God’s existence. Right? That’s basically the threat people see in evolution. Exactly the same logic applies to the cosmological proof, which is not a proof from the complexity of the world but from its very existence. Meaning, the very fact that the world exists means that somebody created it, regardless of whether it is complex or not. There is no thing that just exists. There you have the very same refutation from the Aristotelian conception of eternity, because that too pulls the rug out from under the assumption of the proof. The assumption is that a thing does not come into being by itself. But if the thing did not come into being at all—if it always was—then what’s the problem? Then everything is fine, so there’s no need to arrive at the assumption that there is something that created it. Now there is a subtle point there that Leibniz discusses, and he defines a principle called the principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason is something broader than the principle of causality. The principle of causality says that every thing needs a cause. If something happens, there is a cause that brings it about. If something is created, there is something that creates it. Okay? That’s the principle of causality. The principle of sufficient reason is something broader. The principle of sufficient reason says—Richard Taylor, for example, in his book Metaphysics, has a chapter on God’s existence and he begins with a description of the principle of sufficient reason. He says: suppose you were walking in a forest and found a large glass sphere with beautiful images inside it. Okay? You would ask yourself: who made this thing? Then someone comes and says: it was always here. Fine. Now suppose that’s okay, I accept it, it was always here. Does that solve the problem? Not a simple question—I wrestle with it a lot. Does that solve the problem? Or is there still a question here? Okay, it always existed—but why is it so complex and not just some lump of putty? When there is something complex, special, that demands an explanation even if it always existed. That is basically what Leibniz argues. It needs a reason for its existence, not a cause. Maybe the question is not who made it, because it wasn’t made, it always was. The question is: why is it like this? Meaning, why is this thing that always was so complex and not otherwise? It is still something very special, and we still stand before it in wonder.
[Speaker D] Why is the question specifically if it’s complex? What does complexity have to do with whether it needs explanation or not?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, if it isn’t complex, then fine, it always existed.
[Speaker D] I don’t know, it always existed, some kind of thing like that. There’s this thing that always existed. It always existed—how can something always exist?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, how? You assume it always existed. Who made it? Nobody made it—it always existed.
[Speaker D] I mean, why can’t there just always have been something?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly why I say I’m torn about it. I’m saying it again: Leibniz basically argues that if the thing is complex, then not just its existence—even a thing that always existed should have some reason for being special, for being this way and not another way. Meaning, if it is special, then you still need some reason why it is like that.
[Speaker D] And what counts as special?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Special means low entropy. What? Meaning, with structure—there are mathematical measures for this. Meaning, something special, like life, for example. Life is something with low entropy. Meaning, something that contains a lot of order, a lot of information within it. That’s not something that just happens on its own. Now, “doesn’t happen on its own” not in the causal sense, because it always existed. That’s why I’m saying this is something subtler. Rather, it means this still cries out for explanation. Let me give you an example. Right? For example, in other versions that I developed of the physico-theological proof. Basically, the physico-theological proof built from the complexity of the world says: the world is complex, apparently it has a composer. I said, fine, then evolution explains how a complex thing can emerge even without the involvement of a guiding hand. And then my claim was that the evolutionary process takes place within a system of laws of nature. And the laws—right? There is a system of laws of nature that is extremely complex and extremely special. Meaning, laws of nature that take a system that began with a Big Bang, a singular point of matter, and from that came everything we see: people, elephants, I don’t know, everything we see around us. That would not happen in a simple system of laws, right? It’s something special. So instead of the complexity of reality itself, I shift the question—or transfer the question—to the complexity of the laws, to the specialness of the laws. Fine, so the laws explain the complexity of the world—but who made the laws? And then they say to me, well, they always existed. Now does that solve the problem?
[Speaker D] I don’t even understand why “always” is an answer. It’s just a word tossed into the air.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, I think we talked about this once.
[Speaker D] If you keep digging and ask what was before always—but it’s like the problem of what infinity even means.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. That “always” is basically an actual infinity and not a potential infinity, as we discussed once. Because really, to speak about infinity in concrete terms is a very problematic claim. It’s not clear that it’s even well-defined. It leads to lots of contradictions. We talked about Hilbert’s Hotel—maybe not this year, I don’t remember anymore. But we talked about the fact that the assumption of actual infinity leads to many paradoxes, many contradictions. It’s probably an abstraction that you can’t really speak about, that can’t really exist. It’s some sort of limit concept that has to be defined carefully in mathematical terms, but you can’t really talk about something that is actually infinite. That’s why also infinite regress in explanations—where I explain this because of that, and that because of that, and that because of that, ad infinitum—that’s not an explanation. In philosophy that’s considered a failure when you arrive at an infinite regress. Why? Because you have to assume that there really is an infinite number of explanations, but there isn’t really infinity. There is a number as large as you like, but not infinity. So that move is a huge move. But I’m saying, suppose such a thing exists and it always existed, and let’s ignore the paradoxes for the moment. The question is: when you say there is a system of laws that is very, very special overall—meaning, not every—I could define for you infinitely many other systems of laws, and none of them would take the world from a singular point to life or to all the complexity we see. Constants? Yes. The constants are the laws. For me the constants are the laws; everything else is just structures. What am I torn about? I’m torn over the question whether a thing that always existed—so they say the laws always existed, they were not created, nobody created them—does that really solve the problem? Meaning, is there now no difficulty?
[Speaker D] Depends what you believe.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you believe in eternity, the world always—the laws, not the world. I’m talking right now about the laws of nature, the laws of physics. No, I intentionally want to talk about the laws because it’s easier for me there to demonstrate the point. So I’m saying: suppose the laws tell me that the laws of nature always existed, even before the world was created. Physics is physics. There just wasn’t matter behaving according to physics, but the physics always was. Does that solve the problem? My feeling is that it doesn’t. Meaning, even if it always was, since these laws are very special, I still ask the question: why this and not something else? And to that can come the same answer: that’s the Holy One, blessed be He. Now here the Holy One, blessed be He, is not pictured as the one who created the laws from a state in which they were absent and then produced laws and now they exist, but as the one who stands precisely at the base of the laws and causes them to be as they are, and they always existed just as He always existed, but they are emanated from Him and not because at some point they were created. Do you understand? Now here I don’t know. I don’t have a good argument against someone who comes and says to me: listen, if it always was, I’m not bothered by why it’s special. That’s why I’m a bit torn. My feeling is that there is weight to this—that the principle of sufficient reason is a correct principle, and it is broader than the principle of causality. Because the principle of causality requires that a thing come into being, and then I ask who made it, or what made it, or how it was made. But the principle of sufficient reason also speaks about things that were never created, and still, if they are special, that requires some reason. And if I’m right, the proof for the existence of God can be formulated even around an eternal world, if it is special. At that point it is already a physico-theological proof, not a cosmological proof. Meaning, just the bare fact that the world always exists—fine. If there is nothing special here, I don’t know, there was some kind of object that wasn’t special and always existed. But if there is something special like the laws of nature, or like the world we see—suppose it always existed, suppose I accepted Aristotle’s eternity. The claim is that one can still formulate a kind of physico-theological proof, not on the basis of the principle of causality but on the basis of the principle of sufficient reason. If this thing is special, then there is something at the root of the matter that causes it to be special. It always happened—it didn’t begin at some point—but at every single moment, all the time, the Holy One, blessed be He, who stands behind things, causes them to conduct themselves in such a special way. And that always existed together with the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, always existed, and the laws that come from His emanation always existed too—He is the one who causes them, or stands at their foundation, giving them life, okay? And that always was. And one can still argue that there is a proof of the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He, because this is special. So for those who don’t accept that if something always existed then it needs no cause, one can make this claim. Meaning, I don’t know how to attack this claim, even though I feel it isn’t right. Meaning, I think there really is—in short, this is a challenge to the principle of sufficient reason. Things that have no cause need no reason. That is basically the counterclaim. You don’t need—what do you mean by reason? You need a cause. If something was created, I need a cause that created it. If something is special but it always existed, then it always existed—what is there to ask? Now of course behind all this there may be—I don’t know—but maybe there is also that point you raised earlier, that “always” is not a consistent concept. Meaning, I talk about always, but you can’t really seriously mean always in the sense of actual infinity. And then, implicitly, everything that always existed was in fact created. You can’t really say “it always was,” and therefore I do need to look for a cause, and then it’s not sufficient reason but we’re back to the principle of causality, because if it was created then again the question arises: who created it? It may be that this is what lies behind that intuition of the principle of sufficient reason. I don’t know. I’m really torn on this issue. But I think that this version is a version of the proof for God’s existence that stands even against Aristotle’s doctrine of eternity. It’s a solution to the evolution question of the Middle Ages—yes, to eternity. Meaning, if Aristotle says the world is eternal, does that solve the problem? Is there now no proof of the existence of God? So I say no. Even if the world is eternal, the question still remains: what is the reason, why does it look like this rather than otherwise, how did it come to be so special and not some different, random thing? Okay? And therefore I still need to arrive at the conclusion that there is something or someone who brought this about—or who is bringing it about all the time. Not only at one particular point in time. And that is what he is saying here. He says that “in the beginning,” the concept that we usually understand chronologically—at the beginning, at the start of time—may mean the beginning of the causal chain, or maybe we should call it the chain of emanation, not the causal chain. Meaning, the question is “in the beginning” as part of the mechanism of cause and effect but on the horizontal axis. Meaning, on the time axis it always existed. But at each and every point, the fact that it proceeds in such a special way requires someone who is responsible for its proceeding in such a special way. So that is a horizontal axis, not the time axis. It is not that someone was there before the thing existed and created it, but rather parallel to the time axis. Meaning, because this thing is happening, and all along the time axis it is happening, and still there needs to be a cause or reason that makes it proceed in that way. And that too is a proof of God’s existence, and that too is a possible meaning of the term “in the beginning.” So that is what he is saying here: that the concept of “beginning” really works through the mechanism of reason and not through the mechanism of cause, or not on the time axis but on the horizontal axis, right?
[Speaker G] When you say “always,” can’t the question also arise: who causes the “always” to keep continuing, for the always really to persist and persist and persist?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, you can ask that question, but I’m not entirely sure I agree with it. You know, the Sages say, for example, that Abraham our father in the midrash asked, “Who turns the sphere?” That was one of the things that brought him to faith, again in the rabbinic description. Okay. Now today we don’t ask that question. What do you mean, who turns the sphere? That’s Newton’s first law. Meaning, every object on which no force acts continues in uniform motion in a straight line. That’s all. So you don’t need anyone to turn it. On the contrary, if it stopped, I would need to ask who stopped it. Because then the feeling is that motion requires explanation. What?
[Speaker E] “Sun, stand still in Gibeon.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. That was the miracle—not the fact that it keeps going. Exactly, right, good comment. Meaning, the fact that it keeps revolving is obvious, because every body, if you don’t act on it, continues moving in uniform motion in a straight line. So what is the proof here? The fact that something is moving does not require explanation. Explanation is needed when it stops moving or changes its speed.
[Speaker H] But what is the explanation for why something should move according to Newton’s law?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so actually once in Yeruham—once in Yeruham, I think it was on Simchat Torah—Rabbi Blum was shouting there in the middle of the dancing, he gave some little homiletic point about how they dance in a circle there just like the sphere revolves and things like that, and then I said, that’s Newton’s first law. And then—then he said, yes, but the explanation of Newton’s first law also needs explaining. Newton’s first law itself also requires explanation. Meaning, the fact that we have a scientific explanation doesn’t mean the thing needs no explanation. There has to be someone who causes it to keep turning. So now I return to the question.
[Speaker D] There’s a book by Mario Livio, the astrophysicist—he has several books—one is called Is God a Mathematician? Right. So there he says—how mathematics, which is supposedly—the whole book revolves around the question whether mathematics is something human beings discovered or whether it’s a human creation. Created or discovered? Created, discovered—the whole thing revolves around that. Among other things he brings, for example, this issue of Newton’s law, that every moving thing and so on—he says it’s against intuition. It seems wrong. Human beings’ initial intuition is that it’s not like that. Take an eight-year-old child and ask him what he thinks: if no force is acting on this thing, what happens to it? He’ll tell you: it stands still. Right. That’s the intuition. Why is that our intuition today? Because we’ve already learned physics and so on, we’ve gotten ourselves used to it, we’ve trained ourselves for that to be our physical intuition. But the original intuition is not like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, of course. So actually, maybe one would have to—but if you were to take such a child, I don’t know what the answer would be, and distinguish between the question not of why something started moving but why something keeps moving—
[Speaker D] Ah, maybe.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know whether, once you make that distinction, the answer would be the same. Okay, worth trying. Because I’m not sure. Meaning, it could be that this distinction is important and people don’t make it. Because starting to move is always acceleration. It’s—
[Speaker H] No, even the grandchild’s intuition depends on reality, on something he has learned up to wherever he got.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, he didn’t learn it, he learns it from reality, you just see it. That’s all. Yes, fine, true. But then the question is whether we have intuitions that precede what we experience and see. Who knows.
[Speaker H] There’s some guy—what’s his name—there’s some guy who made a bicycle like that, where when you turn the handlebars right, the wheel turns left.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That must be Vardi’s, no?
[Speaker H] No, no, no. He has that with all kinds of gadgets. No, no, some American guy like that. Ah. And it took him eight—
[Speaker D] Yossi Vardi?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. His brother is like that.
[Speaker H] He wanted to show that what you know is—that what you—that knowledge is not understanding, that you don’t understand what you know. And then it took him eight months to get himself used to riding that bicycle. It just erased his memory.
[Speaker E] There are paralysis surgeries where sometimes they leave the muscle connected to its blood supply and its nerves, but, how should I put it, they change the direction in which it functions. Because in one direction you have too much abundance and in the other direction less, and usually it takes people anywhere from weeks to months to get used to it, and sometimes never, but for most people it’s weeks and months, especially if they don’t know what was done to them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Just yesterday or the day before, I saw something online, some video about a soccer game in Denmark or Norway, I don’t remember where, where they put glasses on people through which they saw the field from above. They didn’t see the field directly—the glasses were closed off—they didn’t see the field, they saw an image projected to them, I don’t know from where, from a satellite or some camera from above, showing them everything but from a bird’s-eye view, and now they had to play soccer. Meaning, you see everything, you see your teammates, you see—but people were completely lost. Meaning, they don’t know what they’re doing, they go here when the ball is there, they kick over there when they want to pass to that guy. You can’t do it, and you see everything, but you have to synchronize it. Now obviously after some time, weeks or months, you’d be able to play soccer fluently. I mean, that’s obvious. It’s just a matter of the brain’s muscles, organizing the brain’s muscles accordingly. Exactly.
[Speaker H] That’s a normal order of things, you don’t play like that.
[Speaker E] Given the achievements of our national soccer team, maybe that’s what’s happening.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe they need to put glasses like that on them and they’ll become World Cup champions. Miri Regev is the Minister of Culture and Sports, she’ll probably make it happen, she’ll do it already. In any case, his claim in this passage is that the interpretation Maimonides proposes—how he would bring the concept of eternity into the interpretation of the verses—he would simply turn the word “in the beginning” into “in the beginning” not in the temporal sense, yes, time, the chronological sense, but “in the beginning” in the emanational sense, if I can call it that. In the world of Kabbalah, the relation between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world is not a relation along the axis of time, it’s a relation along the axis of reason, what’s called cause and effect. Meaning, basically there is a constant flow of light, abundance, energy—call it whatever you want—from the Holy One, blessed be He, through the upper worlds down to our world, and this happens laterally; it’s not that He caused something and therefore now it happens, but rather what happens is like, say, body and soul in us. Body and soul in us—there are descriptions like that, although I’m not entirely sure they’re really correct—but there are descriptions that say certain things happen in parallel. The influence is a lateral influence, not that the soul causes the physical processes, but that it somehow runs in parallel, it emanates them, it doesn’t cause them in the temporal sense. In any case, that’s his interpretive proposal for explaining the verses. By the way, in parentheses, I’m not sufficiently expert in Aristotle’s philosophy, but it seems to me that his proposal of the eternity of the world arose because of this very difficulty. Meaning, because of the difficulty of how something like this could come into being without a cause, so apparently it was always there. There was always time, there was always a world. Now, if you still have the same difficulty even after the claim of eternity, then Aristotle wouldn’t accept that either. Meaning, it wouldn’t solve Aristotle’s problem. What I suggested—what I basically argued here—is that I can preserve the proof for God’s existence, or the role God has in governing creation, even if I say that the world is eternal. But Aristotle would ask the same question about that too, just as he asks on the temporal axis, and there too he would basically deny it, and therefore this interpretation that Maimonides—or that he thinks Maimonides—offers as an alternative reading of the verses, I’m not sure it would have satisfied Aristotle, because Aristotle would pull exactly the same move on it and again there would be the evolution objection, or his version of the evolution objection from another angle. Okay, but as stated, Maimonides holds that this is not so, but rather that the world is created anew. Creation developed in time: first day, second day, and so on, and even time itself once began, was created. Aristotle saw around him the material world. There is matter. When did it begin to exist? Nothing led him to an answer. So he assumed it had always been. There was always time, there was always a world. But we do not say that; the world was renewed, and then time too was renewed. That, by the way, is a very interesting sentence: there was always a world and there was always time. What does it mean, there was always time? The “always” that describes time is not itself dealing with time. When there was time, there was time. Okay, that’s pretty tautological. It’s like when we talk about the question of time travel, right? When physicists like to toy with whether it’s possible to go back in time. Now on the face of it, this whole discussion can’t even get started at the conceptual level. And you’re thinking about whether it’s physically possible. I’m saying: first define what you’re talking about, and then we’ll see. Once it’s defined, we can think about whether physics allows it or doesn’t allow it. But what are you talking about? And look, if you think about it, what is going back in time? Going back in time is being on Wednesday and after some time being on Monday. But what does it mean, after some time being on Monday? Monday is two days earlier. So if you’re on Monday then you’re before, not after. You want to be after on Monday? That’s just a contradiction in terms. I want to be in Australia in Israel. What? Either you’re in Australia or you’re not in Israel; if you’re in Israel, you’re not in Australia. It’s not a question of whether physics allows it; it’s not conceptually defined. So what does it mean to go backward in time? First define the concept. Therefore I think that once people start talking about…
[Speaker D] You can define it not through time but through the physical state, meaning that you’re an adult now and after some time—after some time—you’ll be young.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, after some time?
[Speaker D] Physically, you’ve returned to that state.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you’re young, then that’s some time ago, not after some time.
[Speaker D] Physically, you returned to that state.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does it mean physically, you returned to that state?
[Speaker D] Today I have gray hair—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And this and that, and in two days suddenly…
[Speaker D] Not in two days—thirty years ago.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, how do you know that it’ll be in two days? In what sense is it in two days? You’re thirty years ago. It’s like saying: two days ago I was on Tuesday and now I’m on Thursday. Can I say, look, now I’m on Thursday, and in two days I was on Tuesday? Those are just words. Two days ago I was there.
[Speaker D] But through the physical state.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But no, that’s exactly what I’m saying. What is a physical state? You’re talking about a temporal relation between physical states, not about the state itself. But the temporal relation is before, not after.
[Speaker F] You say, in a month I’ll have black hair.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then it won’t be in a month, it’ll be before.
[Speaker F] No, in a month I’ll have black hair.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In what sense of “in a month”? Yes. No, if you want to talk about a biological process, meaning can I make hairs turn black instead of turning white? That’s a question in biology. But that’s not time travel, that’s reversing the direction of biological-physical processes along the time axis. That’s not going back in time. In general, when we talk about the movement of the time axis itself, when we say time flows—what does that mean, this feeling that unlike space, time flows and space is static? On the face of it, that’s nonsense. What does it mean that it flows? When you say something flows, along what does it flow? You say along the time axis—but time itself, if you say it flows, along what does it flow? What is the axis that measures that it advanced, that it was here and then became there?
[Speaker D] Along what axis are you talking? If it’s the time axis, then you’re talking about the time axis itself.
[Speaker F] No, space is static.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but time flows relative to what? Relative to what? Relative to time? So if you say that time flows over space, then by the same token space also flows over time.
[Speaker F] Why? If a river flows, over what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The river isn’t time. A river can flow. The question is: along what does time flow, not the river.
[Speaker D] The hours flow along—
[Speaker F] The time axis, that’s—
[Speaker D] okay?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, hours don’t flow. There are markings on the time axis. There’s the six o’clock mark, seven o’clock, eight o’clock. What flows? Nothing flows. Unless you say that I flow along the time axis. When you say that the time axis itself flows, I ask you: flows along what? When you say I change place, move at a certain speed, I say: at a certain time I was in this place, at a later time I’m in this place. That’s called changing place, right? What is it called to change time? That at a certain time I was at this time, and at a later time I’m at that time? Of course at a later time I’m at that time. That’s not motion—that’s the definition of being at that time. You can’t speak in the same sense about spatial changes and temporal changes. By the way, in that same book by Richard Taylor, he has a chapter on relations between time and space, and he argues that every sentence you can formulate about time, you can also formulate about space. There is no asymmetry; this asymmetry is an illusion. Basically, take any sentence—if you formulate it precisely, properly, and switch the roles of place and time, you get a perfectly sensible sentence. Because the feeling is always that you can say things about time that you can’t say about space and vice versa, meaning they don’t behave exactly the same way. He says that’s not true. Take a well-defined sentence.
[Speaker D] Special relativity really does describe it that way, as four axes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Although one of the axes is complex, with a complex coefficient. So there is still some… But the description there is very interesting, because he says that once you formulate it precisely, then you see that you can switch the roles of time and space and you get perfectly sensible sentences. He says, for example: at time t equals one I was at… at x equals two; at x equals five I’ll be at t equals three. What contradiction is there in that? Is there any problem with that? No problem at all. I can describe the motion of space, time over space, or space over time. Those are just forms of description. But you can’t describe motion of time over time. That’s nonsense—it is itself. Okay? Just as you can’t have space over space, you can’t have that either. Therefore there really is not, so he claims, any difference between time and space. It’s an illusion. They really do behave the same way. Now, incidentally, I don’t actually agree with that, but that’s for another time. Wait, how did we get into all this? Right—“it always was.” Meaning, time always was, not just the world always was. Now, what does it mean that time always was? I think that what really should have been formulated, if you want to formulate it more precisely, is that the time axis is infinite. They ask: what is its length? Its length is infinite. That’s the meaning of “the time axis always was.” The expression “the time axis always was” is not really a correct expression. It means that the time axis is infinitely long and did not begin at a particular point, meaning not from a certain moment onward. Okay, that’s the meaning of “always was.” Now beyond that, the claim that the time axis was created is also a very interesting claim, because regarding the concept of time in general there’s a philosophical dispute over whether time and space are things that exist in the world itself, or whether they are just categories that we use to organize our sensations, our experiences of the world. We arrange them along time axes and space axes. But that’s just our way of looking. For example, if there were other creatures, maybe they wouldn’t think in terms of time and space at all but in other terms, and they would describe all of reality not in terms of time and space. Meaning, it’s not something that exists in the world itself, it’s in our mode of perception. In a certain sense, now that I think of it, it’s a bit like what we talked about regarding concepts like colors and sounds. We said that if nobody is in the forest and a tree falls there, does it make a sound? So obviously it does not make a sound; it creates an acoustic wave. But sound is created only when that acoustic wave hits a human eardrum—or an animal’s, doesn’t matter—but that’s what creates sound. Right? And it reaches consciousness. Yes. So I’m saying, basically the concept of sound doesn’t really exist in the world. What exists in the world is an acoustic wave. Sound is the way that physical phenomenon is translated into our awareness. After translation, sound is created. Now, it could be that space and time are in a certain sense the same thing. Meaning, space and time exist only within us. We use them to organize our sensations, our experiences, the world, what we see in the world. But they don’t really exist in the world itself. If there were a creature built differently, it would perceive the whole world just fine but not in terms of space and time. Now Kant, for example, made this claim, that space and time are forms of human intuition, they aren’t really things that exist in the world itself. I think I once mentioned what Rabbi Shem Tov Gefen wrote—the great-grandfather of Yonatan and Aviv Gefen and all of them. He was a very interesting Jew; I think we talked about him once. He was a very interesting Jew, an intellectual in Russia, and he published a book of his which is a collection of three essays, put out by Mossad HaRav Kook, called “Dimensions, Prophecy, and Geology.” And it has three essays: one on dimensions, one on the mathematical nature of prophecy, and one on geology. And at the beginning of the book there’s a kind of diary where he describes his experiences—he grew up in a somewhat conservative home, his father didn’t allow him to read anything, but he was a very curious child, and even before his bar mitzvah he had already started devouring all kinds of books in all sorts of fields, and in the end he became an intellectual—but not an “intellectual,” meaning educated in the sense that he dealt with other fields, but he was a Jew who observed Torah and commandments. His name was Rabbi Shem Tov Gefen; I assume he was also some kind of rabbi in a certain sense. So there in that book he wants to argue that according to the Kantian conception, that space and time are only our forms of intuition and don’t really exist in the world itself, then the problem of the age of the world becomes meaningless. Because the age of the world is a question in terms of time, but before there was a human being there was no basis for speaking in terms of time. The terms of time were born together with humanity. According to that conception, by the way, it also makes no sense to say that time was created. Time was not created, because it does not exist today and never existed; time is only our form of intuition. It was created with us. It’s not really created; it’s just the form of human perception, that’s all. When you talk about time being created, you basically mean that time is something that really exists and that it was created. But according to Kant it makes no sense to talk that way. So his claim that according to the Kantian view the age of the world has no meaning—I think that’s wrong. Because even if time is my form of intuition, I can still look at the past through it as well.
[Speaker B] What does that solve in this whole system? After all, sound is our perception of acoustic waves. Light is our perception of something. We still need something to perceive in every case—something has to be there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s why I’m saying the analogy between sound and light on the one hand and space and time on the other isn’t perfect. Space and time are not properties of things. Sound and light are properties of things. They’re the expression of things in our awareness. Space and time are a coordinate system that exists within us, against which or within which we arrange events. I only brought the analogy to say that within our sensations and cognitions, many dimensions are embedded that are subjective; they don’t really exist in the world itself. In that sense I drew an analogy to color and sound. Obviously it doesn’t function in the same way, and with Kant it also doesn’t function in the same way. Meaning, those are properties of things—sound and light. Space and time are things I was born with. They are not properties of the world. Why are they not properties of the world?
[Speaker I] They’re also properties of things. We perceive space and time as one concept, but location and being in a certain place and at a certain time is a property of things.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t know if it’s a property of things. It’s my form of looking at things. It has no root in the things? What? I didn’t understand.
[Speaker I] That it has no root in the things themselves?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It has some kind of root in the things themselves, but that root is not space. It’s just one way of arranging it. Someone else will come and arrange it differently. So he won’t speak in terms of this being up and that being down, this on the right and that on the left. He’ll speak about it in a language that I wouldn’t even understand.
[Speaker H] But about the things themselves he’ll also speak in a language you don’t understand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course, right, and that’s the analogy I made.
[Speaker H] That’s the analogy I made.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But here again, color is something the object creates as a sensation of color when it hits my retina. Space and time—the object doesn’t create in me a sensation of space and time. I come with them from home. On the contrary, I impose them on the object. I arrange it: you are in this place and at this time, and he is in that place and at that time.
[Speaker I] You arrange it, right. The object doesn’t create in me the sensation of space and time themselves, just as it doesn’t create in me the sensation of color either, because that too is already within me, but it does create in me the sense that it is in a certain place and at a certain time.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, right, I agree. That part is analogous. But still, the way it functions within this comparison—which I myself made—still, there’s also a difference between the things. There’s a difference between the relation of color to a thing and the thing itself, and between its location and the thing itself.
[Speaker B] What’s the difference? It doesn’t make much difference if another being sees an object as vibrating in some dimension and we experience that as existing in time. What difference does it make? Whatever name we give it, it’s still an attribute of the thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but they’re not—it’s not—I want to argue that it won’t even be a one-to-one translation. Meaning, it’s not that what I perceive as time perception he will perceive as music. I want to argue that he won’t have any concept at all parallel to my concept of time; rather, time and space and all my categories together that organize the world—in him they’ll be organized in a completely different way. Not that time is translated for him into one thing and space into another, but that the whole…
[Speaker B] But he’ll have some set of attributes that organize in his consciousness the thing-in-itself, which neither I nor he can talk about. Right, right. But that’s all fine, but there are still some attributes, and then you’ll ask about his attributes: when did they begin?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I completely agree. No—“when did they begin” is already a question.
[Speaker B] When did they begin, but I—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, that’s exactly what I don’t know. I don’t know how that would be expressed in his language. Would there be a question there in his language, or maybe in his language there wouldn’t be such a question? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know that language, so it’s hard for me to answer. But it could be that this question is an artifact of our way of looking. But I’m saying that Rabbi Shem Tov Gefen’s claim is incorrect because even if time is a form in which we view reality, we can use those temporal glasses to look at the past as well. Because I can, with my temporal glasses, ask when my father was born even though I wasn’t there then. Why? Because I also arrange past events along the time axis, which is my pair of glasses—time and space, okay? Now I can also ask when the world was created or how long it has existed, even though at the time it was created there were no human beings, and certainly I myself wasn’t there. Fine, but that doesn’t matter. With my temporal glasses I can look at the past too, and then the question of how old the world is is a perfectly well-defined question and requires an answer. It doesn’t matter that time is only my form of intuition. Translated into my form of intuition, I ask how long the world has existed.
[Speaker B] What’s the difference between that and asking what exists outside the universe?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?
[Speaker B] You can’t ask that—there’s no meaning to outside the universe.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, because who said there is such a thing as outside the universe? That’s just the simple answer.
[Speaker B] Who said there is such a thing as before, if time is in our categories?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Really, I don’t know—there is no “before”; before there was time doesn’t apply at all. Therefore, that’s what I said: you can’t say that time always was, and you can’t say that something was before time, because the concept of before exists only given a time axis. What you can say is: what is the length of the time axis? Is time infinite? Is time finite? You can talk about the length of the time axis, not about where you plant time itself, as something outside time, understand? So with space too, I can ask whether space is infinite or finite. I can’t ask what is outside space, because “outside” is already a spatial term. Fine. Yes, in any case, he argues that the world was renewed, and then time too was renewed. Maybe I said this once, I don’t remember anymore—I think that in Jewish law one can see certain conceptions that treated time as an existing object and not only as a form of intuition. There is a Talmud in tractate Nedarim and in tractate Shevuot, two parallel passages that try to illustrate associative designation in a vow. When you make such an association—meaning, there are two ways to vow. You can say, this thing is forbidden to me, “konam,” and you can make an associative designation. You can say: this thing is forbidden, and the prohibition of that will also pass onto this. That’s what’s called associative designation. Okay? Now the Talmud brings several examples of associative designation. One example is: this thing is forbidden to me like the day on which Gedaliah son of Ahikam died, or like the day on which my father died, because one fasts on the day one’s father died, or on the day Gedaliah son of Ahikam died, and so the foods are forbidden to me. So I want to forbid something like the day on which Gedaliah son of Ahikam died. Okay? Now how can you make an associative designation with a day? The standard conception of the medieval authorities is that associative designation means taking a halakhic status that exists on a certain object and transferring it to another object. Now the day is also an object. There is some conception, at least in Jewish law, that a day is some sort of object. That there is such a thing; it’s not just our form of intuition, it’s something. And when there is a prohibition on a day, it’s like an object that is bound up with prohibition. Okay? So I don’t know, maybe that actually implies that time really exists. And then the question arises whether it was created or whether it always was—or whether “always was” means that the time axis is infinite. Yes, that’s the more precise phrasing. So he argues that time was created and the world too was created, contrary to what Aristotle thought.
[Speaker C] Yes, that Maimonides says that time and the world—completely against the plain meaning—after all, it’s forbidden, just as it’s forbidden for me to eat on the Fast of Gedaliah son of Ahikam, but clearly Israel sanctifies the times, and Israel can—the Sanhedrin can—postpone the Fast of Gedaliah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, but once they sanctified it, then they sanctified it, so this day has a prohibition on it.
[Speaker C] The fast, not the day.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The fast, not the day. Fasts are not an object-status prohibition. With a temporary prohibition in general, many later authorities say that with a temporary prohibition there is no object-status prohibition. Because the day exists today and not tomorrow, so it can’t be in the object; it’s in the person. So I’m saying, if you say there is an object-status prohibition on the day when Gedaliah son of Ahikam died, that is a prohibition on the day and not a prohibition on the loaf of bread on that day.
[Speaker C] It’s a prohibition in the sense that it was forbidden for me to eat.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then it’s not associative designation. Associative designation—that’s a vow, but I’m talking about the fact that there it is presented as associative designation. A vow, I can say not “like the mouth of,” but “konam, this thing is forbidden to me,” no problem, you can vow that way. But associative designation means taking an existing prohibition that rests on one thing, like substitution, yes, not making a substitution with sacrifices. I’m saying, you take a prohibition on something existing—it has to be something vow-generated and not something inherently prohibited, meaning only prohibitions of the kind of vow or sacrifice or holiness and the like, not every prohibition, not pork, yes, not prohibitions the Torah forbade—and transfer the prohibition from there to here, almost like a physical act, as it were, or a metaphysical one. Fine. So I ask: what is the physical thing bound up with prohibition on the day Gedaliah son of Ahikam died? Well, maybe that’s right and maybe not. However, the matter of creation anew is not simple at all. Everyone agrees that the Holy One, blessed be He, possesses all perfections and does not change. We will not pause here over the proofs for this, but both Torah scholars and philosophers agree on it. Well, these are very general statements and it’s a bit hard to deal with them. If so—yes, the philosophers who believe this believe it, okay. If so, the question exists: if the world is created anew, why was it created when it was created? Until then, did the Creator not want to create and then want to? If so, there was a change in His will, and that contradicts our saying that He is unchanging. Yes, this is an ancient and famous philosophical question: how can it be—this is an argument in favor of the eternity of the world. Because if the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world at a particular moment in time, then apparently one moment before He did not want to create it, and one moment after—He wanted precisely now. And now the question is: that means there was a change in the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. What changed now? There wasn’t…
[Speaker H] He wanted earlier to build it now.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? So I—
[Speaker H] I mean,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that’s one of the explanations, but that means the time axis is infinite.
[Speaker B] That forces the time axis… No, why? Because there wasn’t any “before.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You mean before He… no, that only means the time axis existed before the world was created. I don’t know if it’s infinite, but it existed before the world was created. Yes, right, agreed.
[Speaker B] So this question is simply pushed back to the starting point of time. Why did He decide to create time at that point?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, He didn’t decide to create time at that point. Time began. Time began suddenly? That’s exactly the point. You can’t answer that, because along the time axis… it doesn’t happen along the time axis at some point. The time axis began. That’s all. It’s not… there you can’t ask that question. There was no earlier time. Time came into existence now, and that’s it. You can’t talk about it in those terms.
[Speaker B] Why did time suddenly come into existence then?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why what? Why not before then? But there is no before then.
[Speaker B] You—
[Speaker H] You can’t define the question.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The truth is, this problem exists only with time.
[Speaker H] This problem of that t-minus, it’s always only with time that you have this problem.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Outside space there’s no space either. What do you mean? It’s the same thing. Like you asked earlier, what is outside space? There’s no such thing as outside space. The concept “outside” is a spatial concept. Okay? So here there’s a question; I think maybe the simple answer to this philosophical question that greatly troubled the medieval philosophers, right, is what you said just now—that it’s the viewpoint of relativity. You know that Einstein sent a famous letter to the family of his friend who died, and he sent them a letter of condolence. So he says: look, let’s say he died in, I don’t know, the year 1951. So he says to them: look, we always knew that it had always been true that in the year 1951 so-and-so would die. It’s just that now what happened is that we reached that point, the year 1951. So what? It was always true. Even in 1900 it was true that so-and-so would die in 1951. So in fact nothing changed in 1951. It had always been true that he would die.
[Speaker D] And that’s the fourth dimension in relativity, that it’s fixed.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What’s called a worldline. And in relativity they don’t relate to temporal processes in the classical way, the way Newton does, where you describe x as a function of t, you describe position as a function of time. In relativity you speak about a worldline. A worldline means your entire history from minus infinity to infinity in one line. That’s the object you’re talking about. You’re not talking about a point on that axis. You’re talking about the entire axis. Okay? So basically this outlook of relativity says that nothing really happens. I look at the temporal axis as though it were a spatial axis. It simply is—there is a whole space here… what? Yes, exactly. It always exists, and therefore basically nothing happens. At most I move along it, but it… nothing happens. It was always true that he died in ’51; it was true before that, true after that, I just happened now to encounter that point. That’s all, but there’s no new truth in that, and then nothing happens. So here too one can say, like… this reminds me of the Sha’agat Aryeh, I don’t know whether it’s the same thing or not; maybe it is. The Kesef Mishneh asks why reciting the Shema is a positive time-bound commandment. After all, there is reciting Shema by day and reciting Shema by night. Twice. According to the Kesef Mishneh, those time limits are not Torah-level. Until three hours, until four hours, what the Talmud says—that’s not Torah-level. It’s only rabbinic. From the Torah’s perspective, the whole day is the proper time for Shema. And also the whole night. So it comes out that it is not a positive time-bound commandment. So the Sha’agat Aryeh answers: it is a positive time-bound commandment, because there are two commandments. One applies only in the daytime, and the other only at night. So the daytime one is time-bound because it does not apply at night, and the nighttime one is time-bound because it does not apply in the day. Fine? Meaning, throughout the entire twenty-four hours there is one commandment to recite only by day, and throughout the entire twenty-four hours there is another commandment to recite only by night. The fact that throughout the whole twenty-four hours there is a commandment to recite—it’s somewhat similar, I don’t know, one could make pilpul over it. But here too, the claim is that nothing changed for the Holy One, blessed be He. He had always wanted to create the world in… I don’t know, such-and-such a year. Okay? If we’re speaking now on the assumption that, say, we’re talking about an infinite time axis, or one that existed beforehand. So nothing changed there. From the outset that was the plan: for two thousand years there would be no world, and after that there would be a world. And that’s it. Nothing changed. That’s God’s static state. Therefore questions of this kind don’t trouble me all that much, at least. I don’t know—there are all sorts of strange assumptions that afterward I’m supposed to explain. Who said He also can’t change? I don’t know why He can’t change. There’s some assumption here that He cannot change. Maybe He cannot improve, if He is the best, the most perfect possible, but change—why can’t He? I don’t know where that assumption comes from. Fine, let us consider the issue of time.
[Speaker H] Did they accept the condolences?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. After they killed Einstein afterward, I need condolences for him too. Let us consider the matter of the creation of time. There are two ways to understand it. One: time is an independent reality. The second: time is nothing but a form of human thought. That’s what we discussed earlier. A person arranges events in a certain order and calls this earlier and that later. Is there indeed a real existence of time? The same question exists regarding space. Is it an independent reality or is it only the way a person arranges objects in his mind? There were important sages who held the second possibility—yes, that’s Kant. And according to their view, there is no point in speaking about time before the existence of humanity. If with the creation of the human being this mode of thought called time came into being, then one cannot speak of time that passed before the creation of humanity. Here this is basically Rabbi Shem Tov Gefen’s very argument; it’s quite possible he read it there, and I completely disagree. There definitely is meaning, and one certainly can speak about time even before humanity was created, and certainly before I was born. I can speak about when my father was born, because once I have glasses of a certain kind I can also look through them at the past.
[Speaker H] Doesn’t he mean here something like Adam, the first man in creation—that before he was created this had no meaning?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that’s not true, it did have meaning.
[Speaker H] Where did it have meaning there?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not then—now. Now there is meaning to the time of then.
[Speaker H] But not before man.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter—no, also before man. I can now ask how long the world existed before Adam was created. There’s no problem with that question at all, because that question is a translation of some abstract question into my conceptual language, into concepts of time. In those time concepts that I use, I can also relate to the past in those terms. There’s no problem with that. What’s wrong with it? What’s inconsistent about it?
[Speaker H] Like if I ask what exists outside the universe. No, it’s not the same thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because outside the universe, the concept of outside doesn’t exist when you are beyond space. The concept of outside is a spatial concept. I’m not asking what happened before the creation of time. I’m asking what happened before the creation of man. Time existed. Time, again, as far as I can see, did not exist except as my form of intuition—that is time. But I can also look at the past that way. What’s the problem? Just as I can think about the future, I can think about the past, I can think about the present. It’s my form of intuition, but no one is going to tell me what I’m allowed to look at. I can also look at what happened before Adam and ask questions. What’s the problem? It’s true that these are questions formulated in a language relevant to me, in my conceptual system. So what? Why can’t that be said? In contrast, according to the first possibility—that time is an existing entity, and that is what Maimonides held—time is a reality in itself that existed even before humanity. Therefore he says that time was created. But it was created before humanity existed. Meaning, time is not a characteristic of the human form of intuition; it is an entity. And even if it is an entity, there is still room to discuss whether it always was or whether it was created. Fine? So Maimonides’ claim is that it is an entity, not a human form of intuition, but that this entity was created, not that it always was. I don’t know on what basis one can determine such things at all, but that’s what Maimonides thought.
[Speaker C] Where does he write that time was created?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We already saw it above.
[Speaker C] That time was created?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Here it is. But as stated, on the previous page, in the paragraph before the end: but as stated, Maimonides holds that this is not so; rather, the world is created anew, creation developed in time, and time itself began at some point—it was created. In contrast, according to the first possibility—and this is how Maimonides understood it—time is a reality in its own right that existed even before human beings came to be, and a person can reconstruct backward how much time passed from the creation of the vegetation until man was created. According to this approach, time is a real reality. I claim that even if time is a form of my perspective, I can still ask how much time passed from the creation of the vegetation until the creation of man. There’s no problem here at all, so I don’t agree with him. And even though we cannot touch it—time—or grasp it with the senses, we do grasp it with an inner sense. This reality was created, just as matter was created and just as the separate intellects were created—the angels—which we also do not perceive through the senses. And in truth, when we think more deeply, we can also find that even what we grasp through the senses is not truly concrete; rather, the senses create in us the thought about the meaning of tangible reality. The whole sensory world exists only in our thought, and there are ways to prove this. I’m not going to read out a proof for this; it’s obvious—what is there to prove here? This is Descartes’ cogito claim; maybe we also talked about this once. Descartes’ cogito says: I think, therefore I exist. People don’t notice that there’s a very significant point there beyond the argument itself—whether it’s valid or not, and whether it’s really true that I can prove my very existence without observation and all the kinds of things he wanted to do. What does he prove exists there? I think, therefore I exist. What exists? His thinking. His thinking—not his body, right? The existence of the thinking object. He proves the existence of the thinking object. So what does that actually mean? That the existence of thought precedes the existence of the objects perceived by it, or thought by it. Right? We usually understand that matter, that tangible things—it’s obvious that that exists. Now as for abstract things—soul, thought, mental processes—about that there are debates between materialists and non-materialists. Right, the question is whether these are things that really exist or do not exist. So it actually goes exactly the other way. Meaning, if they didn’t exist, matter wouldn’t exist either. Everything you know about matter existing is because you have an image in your consciousness and in your thought, an image of matter. Therefore, from your point of view, it is much clearer that this mental image exists than that the thing itself exists. But you say, fine—if I have a mental image, apparently something is generating it. So there is something out there producing this image. But how can you say that material existence is clearer and more solid and more certain than mental existence, than mental events? The mental events are the things that decide that there is something existing outside. Through them I arrive at the thought that this thing outside really exists. So to deny the existence of thought and arrive at the conclusion that matter exists is simply absurd. Materialism is absurd. Okay? Meaning, the materialist conclusion itself is a mental conclusion. It is a conclusion that you arrive at in your thought. Otherwise, what is a conclusion? Conclusions are conceptual-thought categories. Meaning, what is a conclusion? In a materialist world, what does it mean to arrive at a conclusion? How can you say I arrived at the conclusion that matter exists, or that matter does not exist? Who arrived at a conclusion? Okay. It may be understood that with regard to the Creator, who created time and space and matter, the question “what was before He created?” does not apply, because He and His wisdom and His will are one. And they exist in His reality both potentially and actually, except that the distinction between potential and actual supposedly does not apply to His reality; rather, everything exists actually. There is no transition—there cannot be, with the Holy One, blessed be He, a transition from potential to actual—that is his claim. Because a transition from potential to actual basically means that there was a change in Him, as he said above: before, it was potential; afterward, it emerged into actuality. Although I think—again—the answer Itzik gave earlier, I would say it here too. Meaning, there was always a state in which things were supposed to emerge from potential to actual. That was always the case, and it simply became realized at some stage. I don’t think that has to be problematic. From his perspective, creation always existed, because His wisdom or His will, which decreed that it should exist, always exist actually. And again, these are statements that I completely disagree with. These are the kinds of statements that say that with the Holy One, blessed be He, things happen differently—they are beyond logic—they are not. Maybe for the Holy One, blessed be He, that’s how it is, but when I think about the Holy One, blessed be He, that is my thought about the Holy One, blessed be He. My thought is supposed to operate with my tools, according to my logic, according to my rules—otherwise these are just words. Otherwise it doesn’t say anything. So what does it mean that with the Holy One—this is also how they explain divine foreknowledge and free choice—that with the Holy One, blessed be He, there is no time; before and after have no meaning for Him, there is no significance to future versus past. That’s just empty verbiage, just nonsense. In the end, when I look at the Holy One, blessed be He, the Holy One, blessed be He, exists in time. And at a certain moment I can ask whether the Holy One, blessed be He, knows what will happen now, whether He knows what will happen tomorrow or not. That question is perfectly well-defined. And to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time and future and past—you can say that He can obtain information from the future into the past, I don’t know how, maybe let’s say. But you cannot say that because He is above time, you can’t ask whether He knows the information now. That is a perfectly well-defined question. The question is whether He can now pass that information on to me. That’s a fair question, that’s all. That is basically the meaning of the question whether He knows now what will happen tomorrow. So you can’t—the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time and all sorts of statements of that kind—that solves nothing at all; they are just meaningless words. The Creator is not situated in time, in quotation marks, and even when time was created, from His perspective there is no past, present, and future; rather, everything is present. Therefore here too, that’s really not correct at all—it’s simply just a mistake. It’s obvious that when I look at the Creator and at creation, I look at them in terms of time. And when I look at the Creator—not the Creator in Himself, I have no idea how to speak about the Creator in Himself—I’m speaking about how I perceive the Creator, and I certainly perceive Him in terms of time; I have no other way to perceive Him. So all my questions still remain in place; you can’t solve them like this. We say the same thing in the question of foreknowledge and free choice.
[Speaker C] Maybe—how do you perceive Him in the spatial sense? It’s in time and in—okay, I understand how you perceive Him in the spatial sense.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?
[Speaker C] After all, you say that He fills the whole earth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, fine, so what do you see? After all—
[Speaker C] You don’t grasp Him, you don’t see Him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so what?
[Speaker C] There are lots of things I don’t see.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So you say that He is in space? Yes. What does it mean that He is in space? You know, “is located” is a very problematic question in relation to Him, because the question is what exactly “located” means. He has an effect. It’s like: where is my soul located? Today someone asked me exactly that—where is my soul located? My soul is here. A soul is a spiritual entity. Spiritual entities don’t have coordinates. They are not located at this point or at that point. So in what sense is this soul mine and not someone else’s? And your soul is yours and not mine?
[Speaker C] And all the time you’re drawing a parallel between the space of time and the space of—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, I’m not committed to that parallel. I said that people make analogies like that; I also said that I don’t agree with those analogies all the way through. Taylor, in my opinion, is bluffing a bit there. Meaning, I think it is possible to formulate statements about the Holy One, blessed be He—
[Speaker C] Him, that’s exactly it—you say, I am in time, yes, and now He knows—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in that sense I can also say it in space. Meaning, I can say that when something happens here, then the Holy One, blessed be He, knows that it happened here—“here” in the spatial sense, and “here” in the temporal sense. And don’t tell me that He is above time and space, because this thing happened here. And even when the Holy One, blessed be He, looks at it, it happened here. Why? Because when I—when the Holy One, blessed be He, looks at it, from my point of view that is my description of how the Holy One, blessed be He, looks at it. It is not how He Himself looks at it. And all my questions are formulated in this language. So they also need to receive an answer in this language. You can’t say, no, for Him there is no time and no space. In that sense, I think it still could be the same thing. It doesn’t—it doesn’t matter, in my opinion at least. And that’s also what he says regarding the question of foreknowledge and free choice. Well, people say this: “My thoughts are not your thoughts”; the Holy One, blessed be He’s, perception of reality is not like ours. We think about the past and plan the future, we feel that we have free choice to do this or that in the future, whereas the Holy One, blessed be He, knows all at once everything that was and everything that will be. For Him, even the future is past. That’s all nonsense, sorry—with all due respect. It’s simply nonsense. The moment I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows the future and the past, the question of foreknowledge and free choice arises in full force. It doesn’t solve any question. Now I ask whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can also pass along to me this information about what Itzik will do tomorrow. So what difference does it make to me that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time, and now I know it—today—what he will do tomorrow? So does he have free choice tomorrow or not? What does it solve that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time and can know in the past the future and everything? These are just words. In the end, the Holy One, blessed be He, knows today what will happen tomorrow. That sentence I can say about Him too—in my language. Time is my language. In my language I also think about the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Holy One, blessed be He, is also the Holy One, blessed be He, as I perceive Him. And in that sense I absolutely do speak about Him in temporal and spatial terms. You can’t solve any problem in that way; it just smears the problem over. Yes, so from His perspective everything is foreseen; from our perspective permission is given. And so it is said: from the perspective of the Holy One, blessed be He, the world is eternal, and from our perspective the world is created anew. These are all words that I simply do not understand; in my opinion, he didn’t understand them either. The Torah was written for us, and for us “In the beginning” is also the beginning of time. From there on, one can speak about past, present, and future and about the counting of years. But from His blessed perspective, “In the beginning” is the cause. The world exists in His thought and in His will, as it were, and it exists in actuality all at once. This whole move is a completion of what he proposed at the beginning. Meaning, to turn the word “In the beginning” from a word with a temporal meaning—that is, at the beginning of time or at the beginning of creation—into a causal meaning. Meaning that the Holy One, blessed be He, is indeed the rationale, really, and not the cause, as I said before. And now he basically wants to claim that what from our point of view is perceived as “In the beginning” in the temporal sense, from the point of view of the Holy One, blessed be He, is an “In the beginning” that is unrelated to time, a causal “In the beginning.” But again I say: I don’t think that solves anything, because if really “In the beginning” for us is a temporal beginning, then now all the questions remain. All the questions Aristotle asked, all the modern questions too—about the Big Bang and so on—all the questions remain. What difference does it make to me that the Holy One, blessed be He, sees things differently, if at all? I don’t know how you can say such a thing, because after all you don’t see it. This you do know how to say about Him? How do you know? After all, you are trapped within concepts of time and space. So in short, all these words—I never understood these expressions. They solve nothing. They are just an attempt somehow to smear over the problem. Okay, we’ll stop here.