Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel’s Thought – Genesis – Lesson 7
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
- Simple reading versus complex interpretation
- And the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters
- And God said: utterance as will, and speech as a creative force
- Nazirite, vows, and oaths: speech comes and cancels speech, and object-status versus person-status
- Why “saying” means will: Maimonides and “Do you mean to kill me?”
- Let there be light: light as symbol, light as phenomenon, and not knowing what light is
- Ownership in abstract things and copyright
- Meaning, brain, computer, morality, and consciousness
- And God saw that it was good, and separated, and called: human language and names
- Evening and morning, one day, and the time of creation without luminaries
Summary
General Overview
The text expresses discomfort with complex and mystical interpretations and prefers a plain, literal reading, while also criticizing the interpretation of “Rav Dalia” when the plain sense seems forced or childish to the speaker. He goes through verses from Genesis (“and the spirit of God hovered,” “and God said,” “let there be light,” “and He called,” “and there was evening and there was morning”) and tries to understand them in their straightforward sense, while grappling with questions of anthropomorphism, the meaning of divine speech, the timing of creation, and the relationship between physical concepts and spiritual ones. Throughout, he connects matters of faith / belief to halakhic / of Jewish law ideas (Nazirite status, vows, and oaths) and to philosophical discussions of consciousness, meaning, and language, and suggests that creative speech remains present within its products.
Simple reading versus complex interpretation
The speaker says we have become so accustomed to complex interpretations, parables, and colorful explanations that we have lost the ability to read and explain things simply. He describes a feeling that some interpretations are just “not it” and do not sound like the true meaning of the text. He sees the coming passages as examples of that tension, and especially of what he sees as a return to a literal reading of the verses.
And the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters
The text presents an interpretation according to which the Torah is not telling the stages of the formation of primal matter, but rather describing a transition from chaos to a reality of water and spirit, meaning some kind of gas or air hovering in space. “The spirit of God” is interpreted there as an actual wind, air, or gas above the water, and the water and wind fill all of space as tiny droplets and water vapor. That interpretation adds that if a person had felt it, it would have created a pleasant sensation, and therefore it is emphasized as “the spirit of God” as the beginning of the revelation of the good and beneficent God. The speaker challenges this: what does “God” mean if it is only wind, and why stress pleasantness when there is not yet any human being?
And God said: utterance as will, and speech as a creative force
The text brings the claim that “the utterance is the will of God,” that the Holy One, blessed be He, did not actually say anything and does not need speech in order to create; rather, the divine will is described as utterance and divided into ten utterances, as the tanna says in Avot, so that we may know that the perfected world was prepared for us. The speaker expands on “Forever, O Lord, Your word stands firm in heaven” as a distinction between fleeting human speech and divine speech, which creates reality. More than that, the speech itself stands within the phenomenon and sustains beings in their existence. He notes that kabbalists call this the light within the vessels, or the divine element within everything that is the condition for its existence.
Nazirite, vows, and oaths: speech comes and cancels speech, and object-status versus person-status
The speaker cites a Talmudic text in Nazir 10a about canceling Nazirite status and the question whether “speech comes and cancels speech,” and explains that Nazirite status is created by speech, so the question arises whether another act of speech can uproot it. He raises, in the name of Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman (in Kovetz Shiurim), the difficulty that once the speech has vanished there remains a standing legal effect, and he presents a direction according to which a halakhic status created by speech is weaker than one created by action and can therefore still be uprooted by speech, because the speech is “still here” and keeps reapplying the status at every moment. He continues to the distinction at the beginning of Nedarim between vows as law applying to the object and oaths as law applying to the person, gives the example of “This loaf is forbidden to me” as opposed to an oath about an action, and cites Nedarim/Shevuot 16 on the possibility of making a vow concerning a commandment-object versus the impossibility of swearing concerning a commandment because “an oath does not take effect upon an oath” and one is already sworn from Mount Sinai, whereas a vow takes effect because it applies to the object and creates a conflict. He notes a dispute among medieval authorities (Rishonim) such as Rashba, Ritva, and others as to which is the exception: is the oath the exception and the whole Torah applies to objects, or the reverse, that the vow is the exception and the whole Torah applies to persons? He emphasizes the striking point in the less familiar approach: דווקא the prohibition a person creates through speech becomes a reality in the object itself. He adds the law of verbal association, that “one may associate only with something made forbidden by vow, not with something forbidden independently,” and suggests that this distinction teaches that the way a prohibition is created projects onto its present character, fitting the idea that creative speech remains within its product.
Why “saying” means will: Maimonides and “Do you mean to kill me?”
The speaker asks why it should be called speech if what is meant is will, and cites Maimonides’ explanation of the verse “Do you mean to kill me?” where “mean” there signifies desire or thought aimed at carrying out a desire, even though Moses did not actually say anything aloud. He distinguishes this from Rashi’s interpretation that “he killed him with the Explicit Name,” meaning killing through utterance, and from Maimonides’ interpretation that the word “saying” is used to describe will. He suggests that perhaps “utterance” is not only will but the bringing of will into action. From this he strengthens the line that the ten utterances are the realized expression of the divine will, and that the utterance itself remains within what was created.
Let there be light: light as symbol, light as phenomenon, and not knowing what light is
The text brings an interpretation that “light” serves as a symbol for everything good and beautiful, that light is an exclamation arising from a person sitting in darkness and suddenly finding relief, and also the claim that the first light was unrelated to the sun or stars and that light was created in itself, “which to this day no one knows what it is” or whether it is matter. The speaker criticizes the etymological explanation as reversing cause and effect, and proposes a more modern distinction between “concrete light” and the physical phenomenon of light, even formulating it in terms of “the electromagnetic field” or a law of nature, explaining that the first day created the capacity or law and the fourth day the specific luminaries. He mentions attempts to use light as an example of non-material entities, discusses the fact that light has no mass and various quantum paradoxes, but argues that light is not a spiritual entity; it is a physical entity without mass because it has physical interactions described by equations.
Ownership in abstract things and copyright
The speaker raises a discussion of copyright and intellectual property and cites Maimonides in the laws of sale, where there is no ownership over abstract things such as smell or appearance. He argues that the intention is that ownership of the abstract is subordinate to ownership of the object to which the property belongs, so if the apple is yours then the smell of the apple is also yours; but where an abstract thing stands independently, ownership is in principle possible. He uses light as an example of an abstract entity that is not merely a property of a particular object, and from there proposes the conceptual possibility of ownership over ideas and not only over the disk or book that contains them, while addressing the claim that an idea is just “a structure in the brain” and answering that the brain structure is an expression of the idea, not the idea itself.
Meaning, brain, computer, morality, and consciousness
The speaker uses the example of a computer on which is written “one plus one equals two” in order to argue that the computer does not understand “one,” “plus,” “equals,” and “two,” but merely runs physical processes to which we assign meaning. He argues that meanings are not in the material world but in the subject, and concludes that a purely materialist world does not provide a basis for binding moral norms, because “there is nothing to obligate a stone.” He speaks about the interaction problem between mental and physical phenomena and about the difficulties of psychophysics in calibrating subjective sensations such as “twice as bright,” and mentions an email exchange with a brain researcher who claims he is investigating when consciousness emerges in biological systems, while the speaker asks how this can even be scientifically studied with scientific tools.
And God saw that it was good, and separated, and called: human language and names
The text brings an interpretation that “And God saw the light, that it was good” is said in human language, since there was not yet a human being, and that this is “the most impressive expression for us” of the goodness of light. It brings an interpretation that “And God separated between the light and between the darkness” means setting a boundary and transition, like twilight, and that the separation is not abrupt. It also brings an interpretation that “And God called the light Day” does not indicate a duration of time but a quality of time in which there is light, and that “called” means that His act caused human beings to call the thing by that name, because names are a human need and the Holy One, blessed be He, does not need words. The speaker criticizes this as a tendency to flee from a mystical conception of names as having essence, gives an example about changing names and kabbalistic rabbis, and mentions a bit about Yaron London, to whom the name “Adoram” was suggested, and he jokes, “Throat Adoram London.”
Evening and morning, one day, and the time of creation without luminaries
The text brings an interpretation that “evening” is a time when “everything is mixed together” and cannot be distinguished, while “morning” is the appearance of light that makes distinction and examination possible. Thus “and there was evening and there was morning” describes a hidden transition from an unformed state to a consolidated state in which a new creation can already be recognized. It suggests that the process of creation is continuous, but that the “days” are units marking points at which something new can be distinguished, so a day ends when the new product becomes discernible. It brings an interpretation, on page 90 at the bottom, that “day” here means a period of time and not a 24-hour day, and that there is no reason to think the light functioned for twelve hours since the luminaries did not yet exist, and the speaker identifies this as moving toward the question of the age of the universe. He mentions an attempt to argue that the age of the universe has no meaning because before human beings there was no time, and rejects this by saying that even today one can place the past on our time-axis just as one asks when a person’s father was born. He returns to his criticism that the text moves back and forth between describing “light as a field” and “concrete light that was hidden away,” and says it seems to him that “evening and morning” could have been explained as anachronistic language intended for human beings, but he ends at that point.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so all kinds of thoughts came to me along the way. This thought, following this move—a double move—seems to me like a novelty. Meaning, we’re already so used to complex interpretations and parables and I don’t know what, and colorful explanations and all kinds of things like that, that Rav Dalia’s feeling, I think, is that we’ve lost the ability simply to read and explain things in their plain sense. It could be, as I already said, that I’m still stuck in the very problem he’s trying to deal with, but many times my feeling is: this isn’t it. Meaning, it can’t be, this just doesn’t sound to me like that’s really what the words mean. So we saw a bit of that, but here now there are all kinds of passages where I think you can see it. Let’s begin. “And the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters,” page 89. As we said, the Torah does not recount the stages in the consolidation of the primal matter until the familiar matter was formed for us, the transition from chaos into a reality of water and spirit—that is, some kind of gas, maybe air, hovering in space. It seems that at this stage—yes, first of all, already here, “and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters”—so when you read “the spirit of God,” I don’t know, maybe I’m mistaken, but my simple reading would have been that this is something spiritual. What is “the spirit of God”? No—it’s wind. Simply what we call wind today. Wind over the water. Nothing more. There’s air above the water, that’s all. Meaning, he keeps bringing us back to a completely literal reading. Wait, I’ll connect this—sorry. Yes, so “the spirit of God” basically means the wind. Some air, some gas, yes, that is above the water, hovering in space. It seems that at the stage of “and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters,” the water and the wind filled all of space, meaning the space was full of tiny droplets of water, water vapor, and the hovering wind creates—if there had been a person there to feel it—a sensation of pleasantness, and therefore it is emphasized that it is “the spirit of God,” the beginning of the revelation of the good and beneficent God. Now, the feeling—wind, I understand; wind is wind, okay, he interpreted that literally—but it’s the spirit of God. Why is the simple perception that “the spirit of God” isn’t just what we call wind? Because what does “spirit of God” mean? Why God? Fine, wind I understand. So he says no, “the spirit of God” means that if there had been a person there, he would have felt the good and merciful hand of God giving us a nice, pleasant feeling. Therefore it’s called the spirit of God. I already said before—I don’t know—my feeling somehow is that this isn’t just some infinite breeze.
[Speaker B] Yes, exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If there had been a person there, he would have felt very pleasant. Okay—and there wasn’t a person there, so what, nobody felt it pleasantly, so why do it?
[Speaker C] Maybe the angels, maybe?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe the angels. Fine, I don’t know when they were created.
[Speaker C] The angels—they say they were created on the second day, so if—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the second day? No, no, we’re before that. So if they were created on the second day, then that doesn’t work. Fine, so here’s an example of what I said earlier, yes: “if there had been a person there to feel it, then there would have been a sensation of pleasantness, and therefore it is emphasized that it is the spirit of God, the beginning of the revelation of the good and beneficent God.” Fine. “And God said”—the utterance is the will of God. The Holy One, blessed be He, did not say anything, and He does not need speech in order to create; rather, the divine will is what is described as utterance, and it is divided into ten utterances, as the tanna says in Avot, so that we know that the Holy One, blessed be He, prepared the perfected world for us. So people often speak about what is written: “Forever, O Lord, Your word stands firm in heaven.” What does “Your word stands firm in heaven” mean? The claim is that the word of the Holy One, blessed be He—or the products of the word of the Holy One, blessed be He—are entities. Meaning, unlike human speech: when a person speaks, that is some phenomenon that exists for its moment, transmits information, and that’s the end of it. But the word of the Holy One, blessed be He—yes, the word of the Holy One, blessed be He—stands forever in heaven, because the word of the Holy One, blessed be He, was not communicative speech, speech meant to transmit a message to some listener and that’s it; once the message is received, the speech has no further purpose and in fact no longer exists. Rather, first of all, it is creative speech and not communicative speech. Meaning, it is speech that generates reality. And therefore many times, yes, preachers often say that life and death are in the power of the tongue, that with speech one can create many phenomena, and they always bring this idea of the word of the Holy One, blessed be He, which really was creative speech. But those are homilies. Beyond the fact that it is creative speech, even creative speech can be viewed in two ways. You can say that there was speech that created some phenomenon, but it still disappeared, like all speech disappears a moment after it is spoken. And the claim here is that not only did it create phenomena, but it itself is found at the heart of the phenomenon. Meaning, what sustains the phenomena—or the beings, not only the phenomena—as existing until today is that the word of the Holy One, blessed be He, is actually within them. That is what sustains them. So kabbalists will call this the light within the vessels, or the divine part found in everything which is the condition of its existence, meaning that this is what actually keeps it in existence. And that is the meaning of “Forever, O Lord, Your word stands firm in heaven”—those same ten utterances spoken of in Pirkei Avot, “with ten utterances the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world.” These things are still inside the created world. There is a Talmudic text in Nazir 10a about how Nazirite status is effected. Nazirite status is something—it’s a kind of vow. Not exactly a vow; it’s something between a vow and an oath, but it is something brought about by a person’s speech. Like a vow, like an oath—vow, oath, and Nazirite status, these are basically ban-like declarations and valuations. All these are basically types of vows or types of things—what Maimonides calls the Book of Hafla’ah. Hafla’ah means to speak with the mouth. For a vow to take effect, you have to say it aloud. Things that are brought about by the mouth, as opposed to things brought about by an action—that is the content of the Book of Hafla’ah in Maimonides. And regarding Nazirite status, the Talmud discusses there how one cancels Nazirite status. Can one make it conditional? Say, I am a Nazirite on condition that such-and-such happens or does not happen? Can one simply cancel the Nazirite status by saying, okay, I don’t want to be a Nazirite anymore? So the Talmud discusses there whether speech comes and cancels speech. Since Nazirite status is created by speech, can another speech act come and uproot the first one? Something created by action—a speech act cannot uproot that. And even there there is some room for hesitation. Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, I think, asks this in Kovetz Shiurim there: why is this called—why does the Talmud tie it to the question whether speech comes and cancels speech? After all, in Nazirite status, although the speech created the Nazirite status, now there is no longer any speech. The speech is gone. What we have in our hands is a legal effect of Nazirite status, which is basically an existing phenomenon, an existing entity. That thing is now already an actuality. How can speech uproot the product? True, the product was created by speech, but what difference does it make what created it? Right now it already exists. So why does the fact that it was created by speech now allow me to uproot it through speech? There’s Rabbi Akiva Eiger and Shitah Mekubetzet there; there are disputes, I don’t even remember the details—I just thought of it now. And the claim that emerges there is basically that if a certain state—in this case a halakhic state—is created by speech, then even after it has been created and already exists, it is weaker than something created by action. And therefore it can still be uprooted by speech. Or in other words, what that means is that the speech has not disappeared. The speech is still here. Meaning, the thing created by speech—and by the way this is davar and dibbur, thing and speech—the thing created by speech is therefore called a davar, a thing spoken. Yes? So the thing created by speech is actually still sitting on speech. Meaning, the speech is still here and keeps sustaining it again and again. Therefore, to uproot it from the world—in this case the Nazirite status—what you need to do is uproot the speech that is causing it anew at every moment. So your current speech—what is it attacking? It is not attacking the Nazirite status; it is attacking the speech that created the Nazirite status. Meaning that that speech is still here.
[Speaker D] That is still creating.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. That means that the assumption is that this speech that creates the Nazirite status is still here. I’m no longer moving my lips, meaning even the acoustic wave is no longer here. But in the Nazirite status that was created from that speech, there is still something of that speech that brought it about. And in your new speech, which comes to uproot the Nazirite status, you attack that speech that is inside it. And therefore this is called speech comes and cancels speech. Even though the result is no longer speech; it is a practical result, a result in reality. So in that sense, yes, these matters of vow and oath are very interesting. Actually, maybe one more word on this. The Talmud at the beginning of tractate Nedarim says that there is a distinction between vows and oaths: vows are law in the object, and oaths are law in the person. This is the source in the Talmud itself for Rabbi Chaim’s distinctions between object-status and person-status. In the accepted understanding—and there is some debate about this—the accepted understanding is that law in the object means that there is some kind of spiritual reality, I don’t know what exactly, but some kind of reality, a status of prohibition on the thing, and as a result I am forbidden to benefit from it. Suppose I forbade myself to benefit from some loaf of bread: “This loaf is forbidden to me.” Konam—that’s a vow. So there is a status of prohibition on this bread. This bread itself is a reality of prohibition, and therefore I am forbidden to eat it. By contrast, an oath—again, I’m speaking for the moment in the usual interpretation—an oath speaks about actions, not about objects. I do not swear that this loaf will be forbidden to me; that is not a correct sentence in halakhic language. I vow that this loaf will be forbidden to me, or “This loaf is forbidden to me.” An oath always speaks about me. I can swear that I will not eat this loaf, because an oath addresses what actions I will or will not do. Therefore an oath addresses the person. A vow creates something in the world. This is called law in the object and law in the person, which Rabbi Chaim later developed extensively.
[Speaker E] Also, what gets created in the world is only with respect to that person, not with respect to everyone.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but the claim is still that there is something in the world itself because of which I am forbidden to eat the thing.
[Speaker C] The accepted claim is that it really is a reality in the world itself, because the Talmudic text could be understood—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, what do you mean by reality? In some sense, yes, in the object itself, yes. Not physical reality necessarily, of course, but yes. Something in the world. It is not just prohibition in the normative sense. Meaning, I am forbidden to eat the loaf—that is the consequence. But that consequence has a root, unlike in oaths, where that’s all there is. In an oath, I am forbidden to eat the loaf, if I swore not to eat a loaf of bread.
[Speaker E] And there’s also a practical halakhic implication to this distinction.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is, yes. In Shevuot and Nedarim 16, for example, the Talmud says there—as most of the medieval authorities explain—that this is how they explain the difference between a vow and an oath, between object-status and person-status: that you can make a vow regarding a commandment-object, but you cannot swear regarding a commandment. Meaning, I can forbid the sukkah to myself for benefit, even though I am already sworn and standing to sit in the sukkah—that is one of the commandments—I am already under oath from Mount Sinai. So to swear to sit or not sit in the sukkah—you can’t do that. An oath does not take effect upon an oath; I am already sworn and standing from Mount Sinai to sit in this sukkah. There is already an oath on the matter; there is no room for another oath. But if I vow to forbid the sukkah to myself, that takes effect. Why? Because the vow speaks about the sukkah, not about me. I am already sworn and standing from Mount Sinai to sit in the sukkah; the vow says no problem, do whatever you want—the sukkah is forbidden. And once that applies to the sukkah, now I’m in conflict, because I am forbidden to sit in it because the sukkah is forbidden, but I also have a commandment to sit in it, the commandment of sukkah.
[Speaker B] A particular sukkah—you can go to another sukkah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, of course. You can forbid all the sukkahs in the world to yourself if you want.
[Speaker B] But if you forbid use—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but to forbid all the sukkahs in the world to yourself— theoretically that too may be possible. I don’t remember right now; maybe someone would say it isn’t, because then it necessarily clashes with the oath—I don’t know. On the face of the Talmud it seems yes, because this is object-status and that is person-status.
[Speaker C] Wait—if I swear not to sit in one specific sukkah, I also can’t? Why not? What—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, to swear concerning one specific sukkah? Yes. Meaning, the whole question only arises when this means all sukkahs.
[Speaker C] Presumably. I don’t know, I don’t remember the passage.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Interesting question, I don’t know. Because it seems to me that maybe even with one sukkah—really, that’s an interesting question. Because to swear concerning a particular sukkah—I am not already sworn and standing from Mount Sinai about that particular sukkah, so why shouldn’t it take effect? Only to swear not to sit in any sukkah at all—that I can’t do. And then you’d have to say that the vow presumably would also take effect even on all the sukkahs in the world. Yes. I assume that’s what should come out; you’re right. Or if I’m on a desert island and I only have one sukkah—there are no other sukkahs in the world, doesn’t matter. And I forbid that sukkah to myself. Then with an oath I wouldn’t be able to, and with a vow I would. And that is an implication of the fact that a vow speaks about the object and an oath speaks about me. Now what’s interesting here? The medieval authorities discuss which of the two is the exception, the oath or the vow. There are medieval authorities—the accepted view in the later authorities is that Torah law is law in the object. For example, when pork is forbidden, that means there is something, some prohibition, on the pig itself; not only that I am forbidden to eat pork, but there is something in the pig itself that is forbidden to me. By contrast, rabbinic law, for example, or places where we see laws dependent on time—those are subjective laws, laws on the person, laws that have no anchor in reality itself. But that’s not precise, because the medieval authorities disagree there—Rashba and Ritva and others. He asks which is the exception: is the oath, which is law in the person, the exception, and the vow is like the rest of Torah law, all of which is law in the object? And the novelty is that an oath is law in the person, that is the exception, while a vow, which is law in the object, is like all the rest of Torah law? Or the opposite: the vow is the exception, as law in the object, and all the rest of Torah law is like oaths, namely laws in the person. In other words, which is the outlier? What about the rest of Torah law—is it in the object or in the person? Now let’s talk for a moment about the less popular side among the later authorities, or the less familiar one among them, and that is the side that says that all Torah laws are laws in the person, except for a vow. That’s very interesting. Because precisely the thing created by the human being, not by the Holy One, blessed be He—a vow is a prohibition that I created. There is no prohibition on this loaf of bread. Precisely the prohibition that I created, and could have refrained from creating—precisely that is reality.
[Speaker F] Right—precisely that is object-status.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, precisely that is something in reality itself. And all the things that the Holy One, blessed be He, did, that the Torah did, are subjective. Meaning, a person is forbidden to eat, but there is nothing in reality. It is exactly the opposite of the logic with which, I think, the later authorities usually think about these matters of object-status and person-status. But precisely the thing that I create with speech is the only thing that truly creates a reality of prohibition, and not merely some norm that forbids me to do something. Okay, like a contract I make with myself, as it were—yes, I decided not to do something. Not in reality itself. So it’s interesting that speech specifically has the power, according to that school among the medieval authorities, specifically speech has the power to create something in the world, unlike various other things. By the way, that is one of the reasons why, for example—as they explain it, those who follow that approach—a vow can be applied in two ways. You can vow, “This loaf is forbidden to me,” and you can also do hatfasah, verbal association. Hatfasah means to take something that is forbidden and say: this is like that. Yes? Meaning, this will be forbidden like that one. From the medieval authorities it sounds like this means drawing the prohibition from the place where it is found—not drawing it away in the sense that it will no longer remain there, but extending it also to the new thing that I want to forbid. Now the Talmud says that one associates only with something forbidden by vow, not with something otherwise forbidden. Now what does that mean? Suppose I want to forbid this loaf of bread to myself and here there is pork. I say, this is like that. Doesn’t work. You can’t do that. Because pork is something forbidden, not something made forbidden by vow. It is a regular Torah prohibition; you cannot associate with something forbidden. You need to associate with something made forbidden by vow. Meaning, if you have something from which you vowed prohibition, then it has a vow-prohibition on it, and you can say, this is like that.
[Speaker H] And that—yes, that makes sense.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That this is person-status and that is object-status—then yes, exactly, exactly. Or consecrated property or things of that kind; all those are things made forbidden by vow. Again, “something made forbidden by vow” means prohibitions brought about by speech. And what is interesting here is that precisely prohibitions brought about by speech—you can take that prohibition and extend it here. Now that is strange. Because it is exactly the same thing we were talking about here. Because if—what difference does it make how it came about? The question is what exists now. Right now the pork and the vowed prohibition are the same thing. The way they were created was different. The pork was created by the Holy One, blessed be He—I mean the prohibition of pork was created by the Holy One, blessed be He—and the prohibition of the vow by me. I spoke, and the Torah says that if I speak then I have created a prohibition. But right now both are prohibited. Why do I care how it was created? We see that even its present state, not only how it was created, projects onto the question of what it is now. And it turns out that hatfasah—what does hatfasah do? In vows—well, this is already really a class on the laws of vows—but in a vow you need hafla’ah. I told you, that’s why in Maimonides it’s called the Book of Hafla’ah. You have to speak it with your mouth. Now with hatfasah, people usually understand it to mean that saying “this is like that” is a speech act whose meaning is simply to say that this is forbidden, and so here I created a new prohibition. But according to those medieval authorities I mentioned earlier, hatfasah means taking the prohibition from here and transferring it here. So where is the speech that created the prohibition on this new object? It is not the speech I say now—“this is like that.” It is the speech that created the prohibition on that other one. Hatfasah takes the product—that earlier speech itself, not just its product—and generates from it a halakhic prohibition or a new or additional reality of prohibition. And the speech that created it is that earlier speech. It is not the associating speech, the “this is like that.” There are medieval authorities from whom it sounds like specifically the associating speech is what creates the new prohibition. But then the question really is: why does it matter whether it is something made forbidden by vow or something otherwise forbidden? It’s just not clear. Maybe the meaning is that you need to understand the significance of the prohibition. You need to understand that it’s not like pork, and therefore it doesn’t take hold—not because there is some metaphysical barrier to transferring the thing, but because of the meaning of it. But in the mechanistic description, things stand exactly on the same point as “Forever, O Lord, Your word stands firm in heaven.” When you speak of speech that generates some reality, within that reality the speech that created it remains there all the time. Meaning, there is still a speech that stands and keeps generating this product all the time. It did not happen back then so that now I have only the product.
[Speaker E] Then I can’t cancel it with speech.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—actually yes, the opposite. The opposite: since this is something created by speech, then by speech—speech comes and cancels speech. It doesn’t matter that a result has already been created, because that result was created by speech. Only you are right in what you’re—
[Speaker E] saying, that if it’s a different kind of prohibition—if I said it is forbidden like pork—then with pork I can’t, I can’t cancel the prohibition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But in fact there is no hatfasah with pork. You can’t associate with something otherwise forbidden. What’s interesting—what I thought you were saying—is that suppose I now make a speech act that cancels the speech of the vow. Would that cancel also the source of the prohibition, not only the prohibition now? Because if the speech that generates the prohibition here is the speech that created the prohibition there, not the speech of “this is like that,” then when I cancel, I am essentially canceling both this prohibition and that one, because I am canceling the speech that created it. Okay? Interesting. That needs checking. Okay, in any case, here there are two things. First, the speech of the Holy One, blessed be He, or the ten utterances of the Holy One, blessed be He, are still—“Forever, O Lord, Your word stands firm in heaven.” They are still what establish reality here at every moment. And second, what he says is that the speech being discussed is not speech in the sense in which we use the term, but will. The divine will is what is called speech. The question, of course, is then why it is called speech. Say ten wills—why ten utterances?
[Speaker I] On that Maimonides explains, when Moses said to the Egyptian—not the Hebrew—the Hebrew said to him, “Do you mean to kill me?”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With the Explicit Name. That the Egyptian didn’t actually say anything, but rather—
[Speaker I] what you’re thinking.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The narrator describes what passed in the hero’s mind.
[Speaker I] It’s what you want to do, as you did to that one.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Do you mean to kill me?” I thought you meant on the word “mean,” because Rashi there says that he killed him with the Explicit Name.
[Speaker I] “Do you mean to kill me?” Moses didn’t say—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] him anything? Of course—
[Speaker F] Moses didn’t say anything to him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Hebrew—
[Speaker I] said to Moses, “Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” So Maimonides says: he didn’t say that to him, after all, Moses.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How did he know Moses wanted to kill him? No, it uses the word “mean”—that’s what you think, what he wants.
[Speaker I] The meaning of the word “saying” is will.
[Speaker E] He wants to.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Moses, after all, didn’t say anything to him. Rashi there brings that he killed him with the Explicit Name. “Do you mean to kill me” means that you killed there by utterance, not by action. That’s what Rashi says.
[Speaker I] So Maimonides says no—it means that’s what you want to do.
[Speaker D] He uses the word “say” in order to express will.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I see. Okay. In any case, here Maimonides is basically using—the Talmudic sages, or the sages in Pirkei Avot, use the term utterances, but what he says here the meaning really is, is will. Why is it called an utterance? It seems to me that there too this is the meaning.
[Speaker I] On that Maimonides brings it in Pirkei Avot.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He—
[Speaker I] brings it from the Guide for the Perplexed, but he explains it in his commentary on the Mishnah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I see. Because I think that really the meaning of why one uses the word “say” in relation to will is, I assume, that at least it refers not to the will itself but to its realization. When you say something, you bring out into action something that is within you—you bring it outward, right? “Do you mean to kill me?” means you are going to realize your will. It’s not just will; it is already one stage beyond that. If in theory you think you want to kill, that means nothing. The question is whether you are going to realize it. “Do you mean to kill me?” means you are about to actualize what you want. Now perhaps if that is correct, then also with the ten utterances of the Holy One, blessed be He—why were they not called ten wills, but utterances?
[Speaker J] Because the will—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] of the Holy One, blessed be He, is only what is, so to speak, within Him, but here it was realized. Meaning, something happened as a result of it, so it became utterances. But the utterances—the product of the will—is still here. Meaning, this expression of the divine will—not only what it created is here, but the creating thing itself, meaning the utterance itself that created these things, is also inside them.
[Speaker I] Where did the rabbi get this idea earlier that speech means will? Is that what Maimonides—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He writes it. He says: “The utterance is the will of God. The Holy One, blessed be He, did not say anything; He does not need speech in order to create. Rather, the divine will is what is described as utterance, and divided into ten utterances,” and so on.
[Speaker K] Also in Yevamot there is ma’amar.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, with a yevamah. With a yevamah—it’s the betrothal of a yevamah. But there too, is it actually by speech?
[Speaker I] Yes, he says one must betroth—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] her, like betrothal, rabbinically speaking.
[Speaker K] There too it’s some kind of intention, it’s not—not—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, ma’amar there is like betrothal with a yevamah. It’s a rabbinic law that with a yevamah too one performs betrothal. There was something else. Blessed be He. Fine. “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” Light serves here again—light serves in language as a symbol for everything good and beautiful. The prophets often use light in that sense. What is the origin of the word “light”? The sound of the word teaches its content. Let us imagine a person immersed in the darkness he described, the darkness over the deep, as he said above—and suddenly light appears, changing his whole feeling and removing his oppression. What cry bursts from his mouth? “Light!” Like that. “Light” is an exclamation. The first light was not connected to the sun or to the stars. Light in itself was created, which to this day no one knows what it is. The first light—first of all, just in general, this is reversing cause and effect, in my opinion. The connotation of light comes after light has been created and you understand what it is; then you have some connotation that it is something good—light out of darkness. It’s a very strange explanation, like—you could say, and the light—why is it called light? Because I like light, so the cry of delight I’ll call “light.” It’s not called light because someone sitting in darkness and then light comes up for him would have cried “light” even if it hadn’t been called that, because that would be the word that came out of him. I don’t know—very strange explanations. I said, sometimes he takes us back to kindergarten—that’s the feeling. Sometimes it’s nice, it’s refreshing, but sometimes it seems to me a bit—I don’t know. “Light” is… “The first light was not connected to the sun or to the stars. Light in itself was created, which to this day no one knows what it is. Is it matter or is it not matter? In any case, a new creation came into being that could not have developed from the wind and the water that existed before.” Here there is an interesting point. Actually light is used in two senses. That’s what he says. There is concrete light—here there is light—and there is the concept of light, this force in the world called light. Maybe in more modern language we would say the electromagnetic field. Not a particular electromagnetic field, but the concept of an electromagnetic field, this physical phenomenon called the electromagnetic field, at least in the visible range. That is what is called light.
[Speaker C] Or the mental phenomenon of—what? Or the phenomenon—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but here the description, plainly, is a description of what happened in the world, not what happened in them. That’s how I think.
[Speaker C] We grasp it like this, and that’s also the parable from light. This concept, this idea, had to be created in the world before it…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, the idea, yes—but there’s no source for the sensation of light from the world? Isn’t there an electromagnetic wave? There is an electromagnetic wave. Why assume that that’s not the light that was created? That is the light that was created. The light that was created is the thing we experience as light. We talked about this once: in the world itself there is no light; in the world itself there is an electromagnetic wave. Within us, when an electromagnetic wave hits our retina, a sensation of light is generated in us. But never mind—I think here the intention is the electromagnetic wave itself. And in more modern physical terminology, it’s easier to make the distinction he’s making. You’re talking about “In the beginning God created,” yes—how would that go? “And God said: Let there be Maxwell’s equations.” But that’s what he means: let there be an electromagnetic wave. He didn’t create some particular light; He created the physical phenomenon that generates electromagnetic waves in various places and is perceived by us as light. But first of all you have to create the equation, the law that is described—the equation is at Maxwell’s level—but the phenomenon the equation describes, that physical phenomenon, is not some specific phenomenon; it’s a universal phenomenon. It’s a law, a law of nature. All right? That law He created. “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” And then, because on the fourth day the Holy One, blessed be He, hangs the luminaries. So when did He create the light? Did He create the light on the first day or on the fourth day? So it seems to me that what he basically means to say is that He created the electromagnetic force, the capacity to illuminate, the phenomenon, on the first day. But on the fourth day these are specific luminaries. The sun and the moon are like a lamp here—much bigger—but in principle it’s a particular luminary that produces concrete, specific light. Okay?
[Speaker E] But did He also create language at the same time? What? After all, there was no light before that, so He also created the…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The word that describes it, yes—but that’s creation in a different sense, because to create a word there’s nothing really to create; it’s just to establish the dictionary.
[Speaker E] He said, “Let there be an electromagnetic field,” because He also wanted them to call it light.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] From the standpoint of our language, that’s not important. But the distinction he’s making here is between the light of the first day and the light of the fourth day, because the Sages talk about how He hid away the light for the future to come and all kinds of things like that. The question is: what does it mean that He hid away the light for the future to come? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about some particular light that is only more powerful than ordinary light, or are we not talking about a particular light at all, but about the phenomenon of an electromagnetic field? To this day we still don’t know what it is—whether it is matter or not matter. That’s what he’s saying here. This too is an interesting phenomenon, because many times people try to bring examples for the existence of non-material entities—souls, angels, maybe even the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself—from this concept of light. Because light too is in fact some kind of reality that is hard to deny exists—there is such a thing in the world, again, electromagnetic waves, not the light as we perceive it. And on the other hand it has no mass. And according to quantum theory it also has no place; a photon with a certain wavelength is found throughout the world—there are all kinds of paradoxes here. But it has no mass, so in what sense does it exist? Why do I treat it as something, as an object? Maybe it’s just, I don’t know what, I don’t even know what to call it—a phenomenon and not an entity and not an object. Rather a phenomenon, or a property of things—but light doesn’t look like a property of things. The color brown is a property of this table, speed is a property of a car, but light is a property of what? It isn’t attached to another material object; it is an entity that stands on its own—that’s what is unique about light. Light is an entity that is abstract. There are other abstract things that are properties of other things. If someone is kind-hearted, then the kindness is not an entity; the kindness is a property of the person, okay? But light is an abstract thing that is not a property of something else. I once wrote an article on copyright—today I’m in halakhic contexts for some reason, I don’t know why. In copyright there is a big discussion about how to ground it from the standpoint of Jewish law. Maimonides writes in the laws of sale that there is no ownership of abstract things. You can’t own the smell of the apple, the appearance of the honey, the look of something, the smell of something—these abstract things. And what I wanted to argue, and I think I have not-bad evidence for it, is that it’s true that you can’t own abstract things—but that’s not what Maimonides meant. Rather, ownership of abstract things is subordinate to ownership of the object of which those abstract things are the property. Meaning: if I own the apple, then the smell of the apple is also mine. You can’t own the smell of the apple if the apple is mine. But if there is something that is abstract in itself, not a property of something else—you can see this in the Talmud too, by the way—when the Talmud speaks about something that has no substance, it brings the airspace of a courtyard. And it says the airspace of the courtyard belongs to the owner of the courtyard; ownership of land rises all the way to the heavens. It does not speak about air that is not above a courtyard. Air that is not above a courtyard is a totally different question; I don’t know whether ownership cannot exist over that.
[Speaker E] But air is just gas, because air isn’t something abstract.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in the Talmud you can see that air is viewed like light, meaning as something abstract; the molecules are irrelevant right now. Space, space—that’s what is called the airspace of a courtyard.
[Speaker C] But say if you left it there…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, doesn’t matter. If you left it there, then yes—you could own it. We’re talking about the space. Where was I? Right, copyright. So my claim, my claim basically was that there can be ownership of ideas. Which is basically… intellectual property. Right? There can be ownership of ideas, and it’s not only ownership of the disk that contains the ideas or the book that contains the ideas or the film or whatever it may be. Rather, if you… I can define ownership of ideas, where an idea too is a kind of—again, I don’t know whether to call it an entity—but it is something abstract that is not a property of a tangible thing. It is not necessarily attached to a tangible thing. The fact that the disk contains the idea… patents. What? Yes, patents. Obviously. The question is whether in Jewish law you can ground intellectual property. So my argument was yes. I wrote some article in this area, that there are several proofs for it. And the whole argument revolves around this question. Because people usually understand Maimonides to mean that you can’t own… you can’t own an abstract thing, and I argued that you can own an abstract thing. You just can’t separately own an abstract thing when someone else owns the tangible thing of which the abstract thing is the property. All right? Okay, so we return to light. So light is basically an abstract entity. Not an abstract property of an existing entity.
[Speaker M] Just a second, Rabbi—one second, I wanted to ask something about the idea. Maybe it actually isn’t an abstract thing, because in a certain sense it’s something very tangible sitting in your brain. I mean, everyone now who has that idea… what is it? The idea. The… whatever it is. It sits in the brain of the person who conceived it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And if I forgot it? What? If I forgot the idea, then I don’t own it? It’s circulating in the world. It’s on disks or in books. Here—I already forgot it. It’s not in my head anymore.
[Speaker M] Doesn’t matter. So that person who creates… that ownership is ownership connected to…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I… I’m the creator—I have ownership over it. Not someone else who happens to remember it now. I claim I own it. Whoever uses it should pay me.
[Speaker M] He remembers it now because you transferred to him through a disk some kind of structure in his head. So that tangible thing, which is the structure in your head, is really the non-spiritual thing. It’s not abstract. It’s something…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s some structure in your brain. Maybe… maybe with light too we’ll see something like that. Let me say one more sentence in a moment about light, and maybe it will also relate to this point. Obviously, if abstract things have absolutely no interaction with our world, then no discussion would arise as to whether they can be owned. It’s obvious that the moment we discuss ownership of an abstract thing, that means the abstract thing creates some interaction with us. Otherwise what are you talking about? You’re talking about something nobody experiences, nobody feels, nobody knows…
[Speaker M] Not just interaction—I’m saying that is the thing itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The moment there is interaction… no, that’s what I’m saying. The moment there is interaction, you can always make the move you just made. Meaning, then nothing is abstract. Because the interaction… what is interaction? Interaction means that something happens in the brain, in consciousness, in awareness… why? Aren’t will and consciousness also… also a structure in the brain?
[Speaker M] They have a neural expression.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. If I want something, that means my brain is in a different state than when I don’t want it. So there too you can say that the will is really the neural structure that expresses it. And there too I want to claim that that is not correct.
[Speaker M] You want to claim that’s not correct. Why?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The source of it is…
[Speaker M] Here too I’m saying the same thing. Here too the neural structure is not the source.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The neural structure is an expression of the idea. The idea is not a neural structure. The idea is the idea. The neural structure is a certain expression of the idea, or an instantiation of the idea if you like. Right? The bits on the disk, the magnetic bits on the disk—that’s not the idea. Leibowitz once said, I think, that… take a computer, all right? Written on the computer is “one plus one equals two.” The computer doesn’t know what one is, what plus is, what equals is, or what two is.
[Speaker J] Just gates… what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m saying even the electrical phenomenon. I mean on the screen, yes? After all, all the meaning of “one plus one equals two”—the computer is just running electrons; it doesn’t care about anything. What do you mean it doesn’t care? The computer doesn’t think, it doesn’t understand what one is, it doesn’t perform an act of addition. It performs electrical operations. It’s just convenient for us to use it because we manage to create an analogy between those electrical operations and calculations we want to perform, and it does it very quickly and indeed much better than we do, so we use it. But it doesn’t really calculate; the calculations happen only in us, not in the computer. We attribute to all that electron movement the one, the addition, the equals, the two, and everything. If there were some other creature and you asked it, “What is the computer doing?”—we usually say it is now doing an addition, one plus one, and it reaches this conclusion. It is doing nothing of the kind; it is running electrons. That is a physical phenomenon. A physical phenomenon does not do anything that is an idea; ideas are always in our heads. Meaning, this is an interpretation we give to that physical phenomenon. Basically, you can describe a computer’s operation on several levels of integration. You can talk about the computer as a physical system, describing all its electrons—where each one is and at what speed, at every moment and in every place, okay? Now give that description, some crazy encyclopedia, yes? Of every single electron, what it is doing at each moment and where it is, its speed and place at each moment, assuming you can know both. Give that to a person and now he is supposed to understand from it what a computer is. He obviously won’t understand—not because it’s complicated; that’s a common mistake. He won’t understand because it really isn’t there. This collection of physical phenomena is not “one plus one equals two”—not because it’s so complex that he won’t be able to derive from it the meaning of what the computer is doing, but because the meaning of what the computer is doing exists only in us; it does not exist in the description of the electrons. It’s not the complexity.
[Speaker I] Why with us is it not the same thing? In your head too, when you see on the screen the computer, electrons are running and making one plus one equal two in the brain. Obviously.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “One plus one equals two” is not in the brain; it is in the intellect. In our brains too electrons run, exactly as in the computer. The intellect, which uses the brain in order to formulate things, understand things, and so on—there it takes on the meaning of “one plus one equals two,” only there. Meanings in general do not exist in the material world; the material world is raw matter. There are no meanings and no non-meanings there; things happen there. Meanings are only given by human beings to things—there is no such thing otherwise. Therefore, I think we already talked about this, that many times principles about the full wagon and the empty wagon, yes? People are willing to live with a materialist worldview and still be committed to morality and demand moral behavior from people and so on. There are many such people, and also people who are very good in their everyday conduct—but it’s not consistent, that’s all. I mean, after all, you cannot claim that there are binding moral norms in a world of lumps, in a world of stones. If we are lumps, meaning chunks of matter, then what does it even mean? Not what obligates us—I’m not even there yet, at the question of what obligates. What does “obligate” even mean? What does it mean to obligate a stone? Or obligate, I don’t know, another lump, a plant? There is nothing to obligate a physical or biological creature to do. Binding norms are a concept that belongs entirely to entities that give meaning to things—not to the things themselves, not to the lumps themselves. Meaning is never in the things; it is always in the subject that observes the things, that relates to the things. But for that there has to be a subject. If we are only objects and not subjects, then the concepts of morality and moral norms have no meaning whatsoever.
[Speaker N] Does this go back to the sciences of freedom?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes. I’m saying that in this case light—why does light nevertheless belong to physics? Why does light belong specifically to physics? Because light is an abstract entity. People will tell you it’s a spiritual entity—which is a big mistake. Light is not a spiritual entity. Why? Because light in fact has interaction with physical systems. Interaction that we describe with the equations of physics. Our will also has interaction with physical systems, but there that is not the domain of physics; we do not know how to describe that interaction. Okay? But light—what’s the problem? Light ionizes electrons, transfers energies, creates movements of objects—meaning it is an inseparable part of physics. So what if it has no mass? It’s matter with no mass—what does that have to do with anything? You can call it matter—that’s semantics—call it matter or don’t call it an entity. But it is a physical entity, in any case. It is not a non-physical entity. Light is a fully physical entity. There is a field called electromagnetism in physics that deals with light. That’s the field. Abstract?
[Speaker M] From the standpoint of the definition, include that too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Abstract because it has no mass.
[Speaker F] So okay, only in that sense.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, exactly. That’s why I’m saying people misinterpret the concept of light. People think light is a spiritual thing. Light is not a spiritual thing; light is a physical entity. That’s what I’m talking about. An angel is not a physical entity.
[Speaker C] But an angel also interacts with matter, no? That’s true. A soul too, or an angel.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Big question. As I said, the will too, which is a spiritual thing, has interaction with the body—but that interaction is not described by physical equations or laws of physics. Now you can say, fine, because we still don’t know; we haven’t yet reached that knowledge. That may be true—you can’t know until you know. But the feeling is that there is something different here. Meaning, it’s not that physics simply hasn’t yet reached that knowledge; rather it doesn’t belong to its domain at all—it’s another domain.
[Speaker H] More than that: if you get to it, then again you go back to the final sensation and again there is no meaning.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the same assumption. No, more than that, I’d also ask: the moment you arrive at that understanding, another gap will be created that you won’t understand. And the question is whether in the end there is some basic gap that physics is not supposed to handle at all, or not—whether it’s all just a matter of lack of information, but once we know more then we’ll know everything, meaning if we advance further then we’ll know everything. My sense somehow is that, let’s say at least according to what is known today, despite the excessive self-confidence of everyone dealing with this field, today there is not even a language to deal with it, never mind knowledge. About the interaction between mental phenomena and corporeal or physical phenomena. Many people hang everything on this; they say it’s really the same thing, or that it too is some kind of physical interaction. How do you translate that? Even at the level of, yes, the classic psychophysical problems of how, for example, do you know that a certain light is twice as bright as another light? Just a simple question. There is no way to know that. There is no way to calibrate the subjective sensation. You can calibrate intensities of an electromagnetic field—there are units and you can calibrate them. But the subjective sensation—how loud is this sound? Is it twice as loud or five times as loud? Or e to the power of—I don’t know what. There’s no way to know; it’s just not… Now there are some very interesting hypotheses among psychophysicists. Once there was a logarithmic hypothesis that ruled the roost. The logarithmic hypothesis says that the ratio between the intensity of the stimulus and the intensity of the response is logarithmic. Meaning, if you increased the stimulus by a factor of two, then your sensation increased by something.
[Speaker B] According to what base?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter. The ratio is logarithmic—that’s not important, because there are coefficients. So that’s one hypothesis. Today they think more in terms of some kind of power law. They know—power one, power two, something like that—thus is the sensation. But there is a basic philosophical problem here that calls into question the meaning of this whole discussion altogether. Because in order to make a ratio between two things, you need to measure this independently, measure that independently, and then see whether there is a relation between them. There is no way to independently measure intensity ratios of sensations. What psychophysicists usually do is question people. They say: tell me, does this light look to you twice as bright or five times? And on that basis they supposedly try to create a scale of subjective sensations, and then compare that to the intensity of the wave that generates that light. So if the intensity of the wave is doubled and they also feel it as doubled, then it’s linear, all right? And so on. But their report that it is doubled—what is that based on? How can you know that you experience it as twice the intensity?
[Speaker G] You can do it—take the same person and do it with the same intensities; he doesn’t know that each time they’re the same intensities, and each time he’ll say twice.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So they do some kind of—I think, look—the more sophisticated ones among them, who do this more carefully, try to test the person’s consistency. If he really reports “twice” in the same way, then we can check it through the question of what change there is in the wave intensity. We see whether a twofold change is reported as twofold. We’ll take him into an experiment a week later in another context, make a threefold change; if he still says twice, then that means he isn’t calibrated. Right? But if he is calibrated, then you get some sense that after all you can create a subjective scale. Just yesterday I had an email exchange with someone who got very annoyed by things I wrote about somebody from the Technion, about free choice and all sorts of things. And among other things, it came up there that what he researches is when consciousness arises in biological systems. I’m still waiting for an answer. I told him I want to know how one researches that. How can a scientist say, “Now consciousness has arisen here”? That is not accessible to scientific tools. It fascinates me. I don’t understand; in my opinion you can’t, but I don’t know—maybe they can do something I haven’t thought of. I’m still waiting for an answer.
[Speaker G] What’s his field?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Super—no, he’s in neuroscience, a brain researcher.
[Speaker G] Neuroscience? Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, which department he sits in, I don’t know. It was just through a student of mine who is there now, also doing a doctorate, so he started arguing with him, referred him to me, and we exchanged a few emails, yes. Anyway—so light too, returning here to light, is not a spiritual entity. Light is a physical massless entity. All right? Anything that has interaction with physics—an interaction that can be described. Maybe really I should have formulated it more carefully. The will also has interaction with matter. Our will does things in the world. But that is not an interaction that physics handles, at least not one it knows how to handle. I’ll be more careful.
[Speaker M] Describable mathematically, maybe? What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Describable mathematically, yes. But again, maybe it is describable and you still don’t know it.
[Speaker M] No, but I’m trying to find really where the line in the definition is, because “describable”…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, really don’t know. It’s some kind of interaction that, say, doesn’t preserve—I don’t know—doesn’t preserve energy. Meaning, when the will moves my body or my hand, then the energy for the movement of the hand comes from my biology, not from the will. The will only converts energy that I ate or slept and accumulated—it converts that into movement of the hand. But it’s not that the will transfers energy to the hand and thus moves it. That’s why I say the will is not—it is not an entity on the physical playing field. When you measure conservation of energy, it will be conserved. Meaning, when the hand moves it takes energy from somewhere else. Calculate all the energy in the body and you will discover it is conserved. Meaning, no—no energy was created here. I think no energy was created ex nihilo.
[Speaker I] Actually with the will it seems the opposite. What? With the will it seems the opposite. Why? When you want something, suddenly there are energies that you don’t have if you just make a plain integration over the energy.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, energies in the psychological sense. But the physical energies you take from somewhere. So that’s not—at least that’s how I think. Again, this is… Fine. “And God saw the light, that it was good.” Man did not yet exist, and the Torah, which was written for man, uses human expressions. As it were, the Creator Himself saw this light and how good it was. Why he has to come to that, I don’t know. This is the most impressive expression for us of the goodness of the light. “And God divided between the light and the darkness.” After some time during which the light functioned—which, as will be explained later, we do not know the length of—again the light withdrew and there was darkness. Here again I don’t understand why he has to get to that, because in one of the previous paragraphs he said that when it says “And God said, Let there be light,” the meaning is the electromagnetic field, not some particular light. So what does it mean that the light withdrew, and we don’t know how long it was withdrawn, and afterwards it returned? I don’t assume it was withdrawn. It’s not that a light was created, withdrawn, and then created again. Rather, the electromagnetic field was created, and at some stage it began to shine—that is, concrete lamps or luminaries came into being. Fine. “The matter did not happen suddenly; ‘And God divided’ means that God placed a boundary and a transition between the light and the darkness, something like what we call twilight.” Yes, “And God divided between the light and the darkness”—again, the kindergarten reading says: here there was light, here there was darkness, and in the middle there’s some twilight like this. But a distinction between light and darkness means He created this concept: there is light and there is darkness, and He defined them. That’s all. I don’t… okay. “And God called the light Day”—I’m skipping quickly now. Clearly, the word “day” in this part of the verse does not denote a certain duration of time; rather, it denotes the quality of time in which there is light. When we speak of day, we do not mean light. It is the segment of time in which, in our world, there is light. That is what is called day. And night is the segment on the time axis in which darkness prevails in our world. Night and darkness are not synonyms. At night there is darkness, or darkness exists at night. All right? Night is a segment of the time axis; darkness is a physical phenomenon.
[Speaker M] And that’s speaking, as it were, about the earth. What? What about places where it’s not relevant?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Light and darkness—say, day and night are on earth.
[Speaker M] No, at the pole day can be all…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …the time darkness in certain places.
[Speaker M] Day and night are concepts of the earth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the description of creation is specifically for the earth? Yes, that’s also what he says—in human terms and so on, yes. Day and night exist only on earth; day and night have no meaning in principle. There may be other planets that rotate and have a different day and night, it doesn’t matter, but you need some astronomical system in order to have day and night. Light and darkness do not require that. This connection we make between these two things—in the world of the Sages, for example, sometimes there is some identification between time and astronomical phenomena, between time and phenomena. The feeling is somehow that for the Sages time is not something; it is the movement of astronomical factors. Meaning, the movement of a star or of the sun or the earth—a complete revolution is what is called a day. This abstract concept of a day as twenty-four hours, as a segment of time, is a certain abstraction, and it is a big question whether there is such a thing at all. Kant and others spoke about this: whether time is an existing entity or not. There is some identification between time and astronomical factors or events or astronomical occurrences. Okay, so “And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night”—the intention is not that these are literally the names of light and darkness. They are the names of the time-segments in which light and darkness prevail. Okay? Day and night are parts of the time axis. “‘And God called’ means that His act caused human beings to call the thing that was created by that name.” Again, the Holy One, blessed be He, did not call names, because names are a human need. We need to communicate with one another; we need words. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not need words. So the mystics of various kinds here will feel some essential meaning in words—that calling it “day” points to the essence of the thing, light, or something like that, and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, gives things names; or when man gave names to the animals, it was through divine inspiration—right, the Sages even say so. Through divine inspiration. What is divine inspiration? A name is arbitrary. You call this a table and that a lectern. What divine inspiration is there in that? You could call it ikomforkan if you want. What difference does it make? The main thing is that we agree that this is the word that describes this object.
[Speaker H] There was that whole story about names for people.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. And all this mysticism where people go to all kinds of sorcerers in order to get names that fit and will heal you, and you change your name in order to be healed—all kinds of things. There is a wonderful series of programs by Yaron London; he really is wonderful, Yaron London. He has a series of programs on the Hebrew language. Several series, really nice. And in one segment of one of the programs he goes in to some sorcerer—they call him a kabbalist rabbi, I don’t know, just a charlatan in my opinion. He goes in to him and asks him what he thinks about his name and so on. So in the end, that fellow suggests to Yaron London—first of all he says to Yaron London: I can see from your name and also from how you seem to me that you are a very modest and humble man. You can see he has penetrating human insight. Yes, so that’s just perfect. Anyway, after that he says to him: I think you should change your name to Adoram. You know why? Where did he pull that from? That’s just what he told him. So Yaron London leaves his house and then says to the camera: “Garon Adoram London.” That’s the name of a parade. Wonderful. With the rolled r—wonderful. Really terrific programs.
[Speaker F] Did he tell him to add a name or to replace it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Replace it or add one—I don’t remember exactly. I saw it years ago. But it was beautiful, really. So these are those name-sorcerers. As far as he is concerned, no way—the Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t create names or anything of the kind. Rather, “And God called the light Day” means He caused it so that when people would see the light, they would call it day. Meaning—I don’t know exactly—so in what sense did He cause that? Then they called it yoma. There is something problematic in these banal interpretations. I don’t know—even on the plain sense level, what does “And God called the light Day” mean? It’s not accurate to say He caused people so that when they encountered the light they would call it day. What did He cause them? They decided they needed to give it some name, and decided on the name day. So in what sense is this “And God called the light Day”? Human beings called the light day.
[Speaker M] The intuition human beings had—it comes from the fact that it already existed.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But intuition means He did in fact already call it that. But he doesn’t want to say that. He claims there is nothing essential in the word. He’s escaping. All these interpretations are evasions. They’re all evasions from the interpretations we’re used to—that the Holy One, blessed be He, uses names and they have essential meaning and so on. He doesn’t bring all that, but of course the whole story is really an attempt to escape that approach. And then what he wants to say is no, the Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t call anything or do anything of the kind. It’s when—this is “the Torah speaks in human language”—that His act caused human beings…
[Speaker M] What about Abraham, where the name was really changed, and with Sarah they didn’t add a name?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, we’ll get there.
[Speaker M] Maybe it will cause people who see them to call them Sarah, I don’t know.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So he says yes, the meaning is: His act caused people to call the thing created by that name. Fine, I don’t know. Like later, “And God called the firmament Heaven,” and so on. Fine, I’m skipping again. “And there was evening and there was morning.” Evening is a time in which everything is mixed together, meaning darkness prevails and there is no distinction. And morning is the thing in which light appears. You can distinguish and examine. To examine means to be able to distinguish one thing from another. So that’s a nice distinction. Meaning, evening is something mixed, and morning is something in which you can distinguish. Right, in the dark it’s hard to see; in the daytime you can see. So “And there was evening and there was morning” means there was something mixed and something new was created. Entropy did decrease, yes. Meaning, in the evening the transition occurs in secret. By the way, this is “to visit in His sanctuary”—“One thing I have asked of the Lord, that will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the pleasantness of the Lord and to visit in His sanctuary.” There are lots of little homiletic readings on this, that “to visit in His sanctuary” means that every day you should feel like a visitor who has just arrived, that every day things should be in your eyes as new, all kinds of sermons by spiritual supervisors. I once heard Rabbi Moshe Shapira of Jerusalem say that “to visit in His sanctuary” means exactly the opposite of what Ben-Yehuda calls visiting. He was anti-Zionist too, so for him it was also ideology to go against Ben-Yehuda. But “to visit” as something incidental, you come for a moment and go, a momentary guest, some tourist—that’s the opposite. The meaning of “to visit” is something orderly, systematic, not accidental, not occasional, but planned—to be a permanent resident in His sanctuary. That is what “to visit in His sanctuary” means; that is the biblical meaning of the word. That is his claim. An interesting claim. I haven’t checked it thoroughly, but if that is the claim, then it does cast an amusing light on all the sermons we constantly hear that “to visit in His sanctuary” means it should be in your eyes as if you come only for a moment, and every day things should be in your eyes as new, and all sorts of things like that. That is all, of course, in the name of modern Hebrew. Very often modern Hebrew is a hindrance, because we are captive to it when we come to read the Torah, and therefore many times the Torah also seems very strange to us in its phrasing. But we always need to remember—maybe it really was strange, I don’t know—but we need to remember that we are captives of a Hebrew created in these hundred and fifty years, these hundred years. Meaning, it’s not certain that this is—or certainly not—this is not the original biblical language, and many times when something seems to us unsuitable or wrong, it is simply because our language is a bit different from the biblical language.
[Speaker D] Sometimes it’s even opposite meanings, like in this case.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There was once some thread on Atzcham that surveyed the meanings of a whole lot of concepts; you can look there too, there are more interesting things there. Right, so he says that in the evening, the transition from an amorphous state to a state of formation takes place secretly. In the morning, you can already discern the new state, the new creation that has emerged. Therefore, on each of the days of Creation, the phrase “and there was evening and there was morning” appears, because on each day of the six days of Creation, something essentially new was created. So there has to be some kind of transition here from evening to morning; that’s why each such day ends with “and there was evening and there was morning.” Clearly, the process is really a continuous process—that’s basically what he wants to say. The process is a continuous process. When do we call it a “day” in Creation? He’ll get to this later too. It becomes defined as a separate unit in the process of Creation when something new happened here. Therefore, for example, there is a day on which the plants were created and a day on which the animals were created. Why? Because a plant is something new compared to inanimate matter; an animal is something new compared to a plant. Even though the transition from inanimate to plant to animal may have been continuous, the markings on the timeline that define when it is “and there was evening and there was morning,” one day ends and the second day begins—that is when you can already discern that something new has been created here. Okay? Bottom of page 90: “and there was evening and there was morning, one day.” Here, “day” means a period of time, as distinct from a full day-night cycle. And apparently, from the plain use of the language, the intention is one full day. But from the standpoint of the content, there is as yet no reason to think that the light created on the first day functioned for twelve hours. Again, he goes back to this, that the light created on the first day was concrete light, not the electromagnetic field. I don’t know—over there he wrote otherwise, so it’s not clear to me. For some reason he doesn’t make that abstraction. But he says: fine, light was created on the first day, then hidden away or whatever, and afterward created again, and this is light in the same sense that we talk about it. Then he says: fine, but “and there was evening and there was morning, one day”—to say that about the first day is very strange. After all, on the first day the luminaries had not yet been hung in the sky, the earth was not yet rotating, there was no sun, there was nothing—so what is day and night, what is “and there was evening and there was morning”? There is no evening and morning yet. Evening and morning exist when there is a sun and the earth rotates. So what is “and there was evening and there was morning”? So he gave an explanation. He said that evening is when things are mixed together, and morning is when you can distinguish things. In other words, when the process is chaotic, that is evening; and when some new form or some new phenomenon begins to emerge, that is called morning. Not evening and morning in the astronomical sense we know today. And that is what he says here: as yet there is no reason to think that the light created on the first day served for twelve hours, and likewise the darkness before it, and together made one full day, since the luminaries did not yet exist. By the way, in several places he plants comments like this that are supposed to add up at the end to a solution regarding the amount of time that passed. After all, the problem—one of the basic problems that concerns him, and he’s already sent a few comments in that direction along the way—is the question of the age of the world. Right? Is the world 15 billion years old? So already here he inserts a comment in that direction. He says, “and there was evening and there was morning, one day”—you can’t explain that as 24 hours, because 24 hours, evening and morning in the astronomical sense, didn’t yet exist, since there was not yet a sun and there was not yet an earth. So maybe it was a billion years? I don’t know, I don’t know exactly what was there, how long it was, how long it took. Now of course, according to his approach, the obvious interpretation is not that, but rather that it was called evening and morning based on what would happen when there would be human beings and a sun and the earth rotating, and it really was 12 hours and 12 hours, or 24 hours total. Only then, true, it did not yet find expression in the form of day and night, because the astronomical events did not yet exist—they did not yet exist—so it is spoken of in language that would become relevant later. I think we once talked about Rabbi Shem Tov Gefen, yes, the grandfather of Yonatan Gefen’s grandfather. So he wants to argue that according to Kant, space and time are only forms of our perception and not things that exist in the world itself, and therefore he wants to claim that the question of the age of the world has no meaning. Because before there was a human being, there was no time. So what does it mean to say that man has existed for, say, I don’t know, fifty thousand years, depending on from when we define man as our kind of man today. That’s a question of definition. And let’s say fifty thousand years. Before that there was no time, because time is only a form in which a person looks.
[Speaker D] There was no one to recognize it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, chronological man, let’s say, temporal man—however long he has existed, that’s how long time has existed. And there is no “before,” just as there is no before the Big Bang, because the time axis was created with the Big Bang. When people ask what was before the Big Bang, the term “before” can’t be used in that context. So there too he says the same thing. If so, then there is no problem with the age of the world; it is a pseudo-problem. And he’s mistaken. Why is he mistaken?
[Speaker D] First of all, it’s not a pseudo-problem, because fifty thousand years is not six thousand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, obviously, but he’s talking about the billions. It could be that modern man really is only six thousand. The question is where you put the marker. Obviously not. It could be—I’m not sure. Exactly. The question is where you put the marker for when this is called modern man. That’s a somewhat abstract definition.
[Speaker C] Yes, the human being who is capable of understanding, of abstracting the concept of time, if I understand correctly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be, I don’t know, but “knows”—that’s a question of definition, I don’t know. And there are also calculations according to which it really isn’t all that far from six thousand—ten thousand, eight thousand, I don’t know—not so terrible, if of course you define man in a very particular way. Doesn’t matter. Why is he mistaken?
[Speaker M] From the Industrial Revolution? What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why is he mistaken? Because the fact is—understand—according to him, basically I can’t ask when my father was born. Because when my father was born, I didn’t exist. And after all, for me the time axis is only the way I perceive things. So as long as I didn’t exist, there was no time for me, at least not my personal time. Okay? But clearly I can ask. Why? Because now I’m wearing glasses—or equipped with glasses, armed with chronological glasses, meaning glasses that describe things in terms of time. So with those glasses I can also look at the past. What difference does it make? Just as I arrange the present on a timeline, I also arrange the past; as long as I am arranging, I use the timeline in order to arrange. And I still ask on what date my father was born in terms of my timeline. In exactly the same way I can of course ask how old the world is. Before there was a human being and the earth, that makes no difference at all. Through my glasses today, when I look backward in this description, how much time has passed? There’s no problem describing it that way. So if I come back to this too, there is no reason to assume that it functioned for 12 hours and 12 hours, but even according to his own approach there is certainly also no reason to assume that it did not. In our terms today this is called “and there was evening and there was morning,” or day and night—what we would call it if it were already in our period.
[Speaker M] It’s very strange to describe it in terms of evening and morning when there isn’t even any evening yet.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s what he says, and the term is very—and that’s what he said above—it is very strange to describe things as pleasant when there is no one to feel the pleasantness. He uses this in anachronistic language, meaning, in order to describe things to those people—after all, in the end this is meant to describe things to us. And we do already use that language; that is his claim. So if that’s the case, then here too, with evening and morning, you can say the same thing. I don’t see why not. Okay? Fine, I think we’ll stop here.