Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel’s Thought: Reasoning in Halakha – Lecture 2

Table of Contents

• The learning framework and entering Rabbi Gedalia’s book
• Global fundamentalism as a point of departure
• Fundamentalism within the Jewish world
• A philosophical definition of fundamentalism and primordiality
• Protestantism, Catholicism, and parallels in Islam
• Fundamentalism, social strata, and the role of Torah scholars
• Charismatic leadership, institutions, and the loss of trust in the public instinct
• Cultural fundamentalism and a return to an ancient way of life
• Two types of fundamentalism: rejecting mediation versus sanctifying mediation
• Infallibility in the Talmud, historical canonization, and disputes
• “Tradition” as a fundamentalist mechanism and the construction of a new canon
• The non-fundamentalist alternative within the Talmud: “It is not in heaven” and “These and those”
• Haredism as a mindset, not just the citing of sources
• The sources of Jewish law as a Haredi challenge and Rabbi Gedalia as a model
• The crisis of modernity, postmodernism, and the rise of fundamentalism
• Truth versus certainty as the crossroads that gives rise to skepticism or fundamentalism

Summary

General Overview

The speaker presents Rabbi Gedalia as a lens for examining Haredism through the concept of fundamentalism, and develops a framework that distinguishes between two types of religious fundamentalism: one that abolishes human mediation and returns to the source, and one that sanctifies human mediation and grants it divine status. He argues that fundamentalism grows out of a suspension of critical thought and a search for supra-rational certainty, and that two modern responses to the failure of rationalism—relativism and fundamentalism—are born from the same crisis. He proposes a third alternative that gives up the identification of truth with certainty and seeks commitment that is not fundamentalist, and he connects this to the opening of Rabbi Gedalia’s book on the sources of Jewish law as a stance that challenges Haredi habits.

The Learning Framework and Entering Rabbi Gedalia’s Book

The speaker asks to make sure everyone has the file of Rabbi Gedalia’s book and suggests printing it out. He states that by the next meeting they will begin from page 13, in the chapter on the sources of Jewish law, through page 40, at a slow pace of a few pages at a time. He says he will move back and forth between reading inside the book and discussions outside it, in order to use Rabbi Gedalia as a way of broadly examining Haredism, separateness, and related concepts.

Global Fundamentalism as a Point of Departure

The speaker describes a sense of growing fundamentalism in the world through examples from extremist Sunni organizations, al-Qaeda, and ISIS, and marvels at the fact that small groups manage to seize territory and defeat regular armies. He sees this as a surprising phenomenon, given the historical timing after the rise of modernity, democracy, and humanism, and asks where it comes from and why it is so hard to deal with. He emphasizes that the focus is not politics itself, but understanding the conceptual root of fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism Within the Jewish World

The speaker argues that there are also fundamentalist phenomena in the Jewish world, without comparing levels of violence, and lists the flourishing of mysticisms, wonder-working rabbis and charlatans, and extreme movements such as the veil women, Lev Tahor, and Berland. He describes the growing self-confidence and influence of these phenomena, including disobedience even to the leading rabbinic authorities of the generation and the creation of local leadership. He presents this as background for understanding Haredism through the question of clinging to the source and the attitude toward authoritative mediation.

A Philosophical Definition of Fundamentalism and Primordiality

The speaker defines fundamentalism as the suspension of thought and critical scrutiny, along with the adoption of a supreme source of certainty and truth beyond the rational. He interprets fundamentalism as a return to the “fundamental” and translates that into primordiality, with two connected meanings: a chronological return to the past, and a search for an original inner authenticity. He describes an identification between returning to the original divine will and uncovering inner truth, and gives as an example statements by Rabbi Kook about returning to inner uprightness and discovering the Holy One, blessed be He, there.

Protestantism, Catholicism, and Parallels in Islam

The speaker says that Christian fundamentalism is identified more with Protestantism than with Catholicism, because Protestants seek to cling to the sacred scriptures and remove human mediations such as popes. He notes that this also appears in the Wikipedia entry on “fundamentalism” and connects it to America’s “Bible Belt.” He adds a reference to the book The Theological Roots of the Third Reich, which argues for a connection between Lutheran Protestantism in Germany and Nazism, and he describes Nazism too as containing pagan elements of returning to roots and stripping away cultural coverings. He presents an Islamic parallel according to which Sunni versus Shiite resembles Protestant versus Catholic, and describes the Sunnis as those who seek to return to the sources and oppose the mediation of the imams.

Fundamentalism, Social Strata, and the Role of Torah Scholars

The speaker argues that the driving force behind fundamentalism often comes from the grassroots and from simple people with charisma, not from the learned religious leadership, which is familiar with interpretive complexity and therefore tends toward moderation. Citing Ephraim, he says that the heads of al-Azhar are moderate and look down on these processes, and that the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood was a simple schoolteacher. He illustrates this through the idea of childlike implementation of a written text without processing it, and compares this to the veil women, who feel they know “what’s right” and do not accept critical rabbinic authority. He presents the role of Torah scholars as one of restraint and processing, preventing immediate implementation of sources, and gives the example of the Chazon Ish, who ruled that today the law of “they are cast down but not raised up” does not apply, thereby creating a framework that prevents violence against “heretics.”

Charismatic Leadership, Institutions, and the Loss of Trust in the Public Instinct

The speaker describes how fundamentalism creates alternative heroes from the grassroots and presents the authenticity of implementation as its “secret of charm,” including the example of the “caliph” al-Baghdadi. He argues that in Jewish society a parallel dynamic appears around wonder-working rabbis and charismatic leaders, and stresses that the establishment—religious and even legal—is seen by followers as the enemy and as “persecution” of authentic truth. He says he has lost faith in the public’s “sense of smell” that supposedly identifies the great leaders of the generation, and gives the example of “the X-ray and the automatic MRI” and the use of the name Abuhatzeira as an industry that is not damaged even by investigations and convictions.

Cultural Fundamentalism and a Return to an Ancient Way of Life

The speaker suggests that fundamentalism sometimes includes a return as well to an ancient way of life and a suspicion of technology and modernity, and illustrates this through the hilltop youth and a return to the image of “shepherds” living in a tent with a generator. He notes the possibility that the similarity in dress and head covering among Christian and Muslim fundamentalist women stems from cultural imitation of an ancient way of life. He argues that ethnic-cultural contents are woven into religion and become fixed as halakhic-social norms, and gives as an example the claim that murder over “family honor” is Arab culture rather than an Islamic source, and a Jewish example of differences in norms of modesty and bodily covering during prayer depending on place and accepted social convention.

Two Types of Fundamentalism: Rejecting Mediation Versus Sanctifying Mediation

The speaker defines the first type of fundamentalism as one that tries to get rid of layers and human mediations in order to return to the source, and places Protestantism and Karaism in that category. He presents the second type of fundamentalism as one that sanctifies the mediation itself and grants it divine status in order to preserve certainty, and places Catholicism, Shiism, and in the Jewish context Haredism in that category. He illustrates this through accepting the authority of the Talmud as a canon that cannot be disputed, and describes how fundamentalism requires turning even a human product into something like the “word of God,” in which “there is no error,” similar to the claim of papal infallibility. He says that in the Haredi sphere a “fabricated” past is also created that makes it possible to feel attached to the source, and gives the example of an uncle who said that Abaye and Rava “surely learned in Yiddish,” and the image that Abraham “was a rosh yeshiva and had a frock coat with two buttons in the back.”

Infallibility in the Talmud, Historical Canonization, and Disputes

The speaker argues against the claim that infallibility is a new concept, and says that in the mainstream Torah world it would be hard to find a simple statement that “there was an error in the Talmud,” including in scientific matters. He mentions examples of insistence on explaining reality so that it fits the Talmud, and refers to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein as someone who would not say that the Talmud made a factual mistake. He agrees that there is a historical process of canonization, and gives examples showing that in the Geonic period there were still complex attitudes toward the Talmudic text, including mention of Rav Achai Gaon, and points out that time-distance is needed in order to turn a figure or text into a canon that cannot be disputed.

“Tradition” as a Fundamentalist Mechanism and the Construction of a New Canon

The speaker argues that the rhetoric of “not moving a millimeter from tradition” often characterizes major innovation that presents itself as ancient tradition. He gives the example of Brisk as an “invention” from the end of the nineteenth century that was retroactively turned into “Mount Sinai.” He also gives an example from the world of students of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and Har Hamor, who talk about tradition while building a canon in which Rabbi Kook is presented as the exclusive continuer of tradition, even though many sages of his generation did not agree with his path. He describes a memorial book by Rabbi Ra’anan in which the “treasures of the ancients” are Rabbi Kook, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, and Rabbi Charlap, and presents this as a chain of tradition that in fact begins in the fairly recent past.

The Non-Fundamentalist Alternative Within the Talmud: “It Is Not in Heaven” and “These and Those”

The speaker describes a third path that neither throws out the human component nor sanctifies it, but rather recognizes that the Torah obligates by way of a human system that can err and lives with criticism. He presents a non-fundamentalist reading of “These and those are the words of the living God” as one that recognizes that both sides are the words of human beings, yet are binding as part of Torah. He presents “It is not in heaven” as an anti-fundamentalist statement in which even if the Holy One, blessed be He, “shouts” that Rabbi Yehoshua is wrong, Jewish law is determined by the human mechanism. He describes how fundamentalists read “It is not in heaven” in the opposite way, as though the Holy One, blessed be He, is speaking through the throat of Rabbi Yehoshua, and mentions the Derashot HaRan on “do not turn aside,” along with the claim that even an authoritative error or falsehood can be binding.

Haredism as a Mindset, Not Just the Citing of Sources

The speaker argues that there is a gap between knowing sources that speak about human fallibility and error, and actual Haredi lived experience, in which “there is no error in the Talmud” is the mindset in the street and in the study hall. He describes a personal experience in Bnei Brak where he was told that “you’re not allowed to read Maimonides” in contexts where Maimonides and Rabbi Abraham son of Maimonides make it possible to understand scientific errors in the words of the Sages. He says that even if Torah scholars know the sources, they do not “live” their non-fundamentalist meaning.

The Sources of Jewish Law as a Haredi Challenge and Rabbi Gedalia as a Model

The speaker connects the discussion back to the book by noting that it opens with the sources of Jewish law and questions such as what a law given to Moses at Sinai is, what a derashah is, and what reasoning is—areas that, in his view, ordinary Haredim almost never engage with. He says that when he searched for literature on the hermeneutical principles and on the a fortiori argument in the Bar-Ilan library, he found mostly authors from the Religious Zionist world rather than Haredim, and notes that in recent years Haredi literature has begun to appear in these areas as well, out of a need to find study niches. He presents Rabbi Gedalia as someone who gave “a lecture on the foundations of Jewish law” in the style of “Introduction to the Talmud,” and identifies the very engagement with the methodological framework as a step that undermines fundamentalism and places him in tension with Haredism.

The Crisis of Modernity, Postmodernism, and the Rise of Fundamentalism

The speaker describes the beginning of the twentieth century as optimistic with respect to the natural sciences, rationality, and humanism, and the middle of the century as a breaking point following the world wars and the failure of rationalism to provide certainty in questions of values and society. He describes postmodernism as a reaction of despair that gives up on objective truth and sanctifies subjectivity and narratives. As an alternative reaction, he presents the turn to supra-rational sources that produces fundamentalism, including turning rationality itself into an evil inclination through sayings such as “where understanding ends, faith begins.” He notes that some ISIS volunteers come from the West and are not even Muslim by birth, and interprets this as a search for authenticity and certainty within a postmodern “vacuum.”

Truth Versus Certainty as the Crossroads That Gives Rise to Skepticism or Fundamentalism

The speaker argues that the root of both reactions—relativism and fundamentalism—is the identification of truth with certainty, and once rational certainty is unavailable, one is left either with skepticism or with fundamentalism. He proposes a third philosophical alternative that separates truth from certainty and allows one to believe in truth, fight for it, and remain open to criticism and to the recognition of possible error. He argues that a skeptical society has difficulty coping with fundamentalism because it lacks a moral “backbone,” and that the root of political and social weakness lies in the philosophy that drives the discourse. He concludes by saying that he is writing a book that tries to build a conception of truth and faith that is not fundamentalist in either of the two senses.

The truth is, I’ve had all kinds of thoughts lately that somehow seem to me to offer a certain perspective on Rav Gedalia, on Haredi society, which are the topics I wanted to touch on. And before I start with the book itself—and for anyone who still hasn’t received it, maybe it’s worth sending it again, or if there’s anyone else to add to the group or… because I sent the file with Rav Gedalia’s book. I sent it twice, one time I sent… you got it? I got it. Did everyone get it? You can print it, read it… no? So I’m saying, I’ll deliberately focus each time on something specific, so I think it should be possible to print it for whoever wants to. So I’m saying already for next time: for next time maybe we’ll start from page 13 and read “Sources of Jewish Law.” On page 14 there’s the section “Sources of Jewish Law,” but the actual text starts on page 13. It goes until page 40. It goes until 40. But again, we’ll go slowly, so you don’t need all of it at once—just the first few pages, and we’ll move forward over time.

As I said, I want to use Rav Gedalia a bit also in order to look more generally at Haredi society, because I think he challenges these concepts somewhat. And I think we’ll do that partly in the book and partly outside the book. I’m not sure there will always be some passage in the book from which it’ll be possible each time to branch out to another topic, so somehow we’ll maneuver between these two tracks.

So what I want to do today—since for next time I already told you where in the book we’ll be dealing with, today I’m still not getting into what’s in the book itself. I want to offer a more general perspective, one that connects for me to a few things that have been on my mind lately. Actually, maybe I’ll start with things that are more distant.

There’s a certain feeling, I think all over the world lately, of a kind of fundamentalism that’s really—I don’t even know what to call it—horrifying. I mean, yes, all sorts of… today people hardly even remember, I think, Hezbollah and Iran and what used to be called the axis of evil. The Shiites are already an old story. Al-Qaeda. Right, exactly—I mean, the Sunnis have opened a fast track. They’re overtaking the Shiites, and over there too every two days some new organization is born that makes all the previous organizations look pale. It’s just… Yesterday, for example, they murdered some man because he cooperated with Hezbollah. Meaning Hezbollah are heretics almost like the Zionists. No, obviously—Hezbollah are Shiites, so they aren’t even really interested in us. And ISIS and those people have no interest in us either; they’re currently murdering all the Muslims, or the Yazidis, or whoever, all sorts of people like that.

But I’m saying, again, without getting into all these politics at all and what it means on the regional level—which of course is interesting, but that’s not our subject—it raises all kinds of thoughts about fundamentalism in general. There’s something in this collection of phenomena that is surprising, maybe also in terms of timing. I mean historical timing. Suddenly now, after the outbreak of modernity and this flourishing of democracy and humanism and so on, somehow there’s a renewed attraction to fundamentalism.

And beyond the timing, the phenomenon itself is interesting. Where does it come from? What is it based on? Why is it so hard to deal with? I mean, even if I just think about this ISIS, it’s a kind of organization that’s pretty—I don’t know, I’m not so expert in the factual details—but my impression is that it’s really not such a big deal. I mean, a collection of a few thousand wild men with not particularly amazing weapons. Not some force that can’t be… and they take over territories on a huge scale and establish there—I don’t know—a state. I understood they now have… what?

The fear is what drives it. Yes. I’m saying, the territory—at least from what I read—the territory they currently control is something like Britain. I mean, some part of Iraq, some part of Syria together. And they defeat regular armies that are around them more or less—again, or at least fight them in a serious way.

So yes, okay, I’m saying, without getting now into the details of the phenomenon, it raises for me quite a lot of thoughts about fundamentalism. We usually naturally associate fundamentalism with Islam, and I think that association is quite justified—from Chechnya and Afghanistan and the Taliban and Pakistan and I don’t know what, and Boko Haram in Africa, and all the organizations we hear about here in Syria and Iraq and Al-Qaeda and all these things—so this really is a very lively Muslim world.

But when I want to talk about this question on the conceptual level, then of course Islam interests me less; what interests me more is what’s happening in our own courtyard. And I think that here too there are phenomena—again, with no comparison intended, there’s no intention to make any comparison, this is just an illustration or an association—but there are also some fundamentalist phenomena within the Jewish world. And this fundamentalism, again, is not violent in that way, it’s not—I’m not talking on the levels I mentioned earlier—but it places this phenomenon in, I think, a somewhat broader context.

There’s a kind of return to all kinds of mysticism and wonder-workers and I don’t know what, all kinds of charlatans of one sort or another. There’s a flourishing of this phenomenon. All kinds of extreme movements within the Haredi world too—I don’t know, from the women in shawls and then onward to Lev Tahor, those people who wander from place to place, or Berland, I don’t know, all kinds of strange creatures who have some degree of influence, again, each one on his own scale.

But these are phenomena that somehow seem—maybe I’m mistaken, I don’t know, I haven’t done a systematic study—but they seem to be emerging in recent years more than we used to hear before, at least that’s my impression. There’s a greater self-confidence in these phenomena, and maybe also greater influence. I mean, the women in shawls, out of such a desire to be meticulous about every minor and major commandment, don’t listen to any of the Haredi leaders, all the great Torah sages, who come out against this phenomenon, and it doesn’t help them at all. It doesn’t help at all, because they know better—or they—and they also have some local leadership, there’s some rabbi, I think, who stands at the head of that gang.

There’s a kind of fundamentalist attitude, obviously much softer, but also inside our own camp. And this question of fundamentalism will perhaps serve me to illuminate some point of view from which we can move a little into our subject of Haredi society and separation and so on, which in the end is where I want to get.

So first of all, in order to understand this phenomenon, we have to define a bit what fundamentalism is. Fundamentalism, it seems to me—if I wanted to—it’s connected to many things: extremism, violence, unwillingness to take the surroundings into account. It has all kinds of practical expressions. But what is the philosophical root? Where does it begin?

It seems to me that fundamentalism, at its root, is a suspension of critical thinking. That, basically, is fundamentalism, at least as far as I understand this phenomenon. It’s a group of people who are not prepared to take criticism into account, or to notice critical thought and criticism—I mean some kind of check, not necessarily criticism from outside, I’m also talking about internal checking that a person applies to what he thinks and what he does—something that somewhat suspends the usual mechanisms of control that we generally employ.

But even that, it seems to me, is still not the root. There’s something deeper here, something at the base of this whole thing. When you suspend the human mechanisms of control, you’re supposed to adopt some other source or some other standards. Things that are beyond. Something that is beyond the rational, beyond critical thinking. We have some higher source of certainty, of great truth, that basically enables us to rise above and ignore human, logical checks. A kind of alienation even from critical thinking or rational thought.

Now, if we look at fundamentalism literally, fundamentalism is a return to the source. That’s why it’s called fundamentalism: a return to the foundation, the fundamental. Maybe in Hebrew you could translate it as primality. And primality has two meanings that somehow connect with each other in this context. One meaning is chronological primality—that is, to go back in time, to return backward in time. And the second meaning is primariness not in the temporal sense but a kind of authenticity—that is, to reach my interior, the most inward, most authentic part within me. Not to let the external garments disguise it or prevent it from being expressed.

And of course these two connect, because fundamentalist thought often ties these two things together. That is, what is earlier, what is more connected in the religious context to the original divine will—not with the wrappings it underwent, with interpretation and expansion over the years, but rather returning to the source without the human additions that were added to it—this also reveals my inner truth.

By the way, there are such expressions in Rabbi Kook. When a person returns to his inner integrity, he discovers there the Holy One, blessed be He. Meaning this identity between the lofty, distant, supposedly non-human thing, the unregulated thing, this kind of higher source of certainty, and the thing that ultimately also reveals to me what I really think, or what I really understand and want, and so forth.

So these two meanings of primality, or of fundamentalism, seem to me to come together here. In the religious context, fundamentalism basically—when I looked a bit, for example, in Wikipedia at the entry for fundamentalism—now, I’ve always had something… let me ask you a question. If you had to say, in Christian terms, to distance ourselves from our own testimony—not in the Jewish context, okay? What is more fundamentalist, Protestantism or Catholicism? In general? Catholicism. Protestantism. Obviously Protestantism. They rely only on the source. Right. Obviously Protestantism. And this is a very interesting point; I think it’s very interesting.

Right, and that’s why I’m going outward first. But clearly these phenomena also exist in Islam and in Judaism—there are very interesting parallels. I also spoke with… right. Things even further back. Certainly—they erase even historically Sykes-Picot, not only going back in the sense of interpreting sacred sources. They try to erase the fingerprints of human history, to restore creation to its Creator, to the original divine will.

But if I return for a moment to Christianity: there, a lot of people I spoke to were very surprised. I said this as if it were self-evident to me—obviously Christian fundamentalism is Protestantism, not Catholicism. Then I looked at Wikipedia at the entry “fundamentalism,” unrelated to that. It’s simply a description of Protestantism. It says there that fundamentalism is simply Protestantism. That’s the definition. That’s what they’re talking about. I didn’t realize it was quite that strong. It was clear to me that on the philosophical level, when you understand what fundamentalism is, then ostensibly Catholicism looks more like idolatry, more… after all even among halakhic decisors who view Christianity as idolatry—which is itself a dispute—even, say, Maimonides, who saw Christianity as idolatry, there are decisors who say he’s talking about Catholicism, not Protestantism. Meaning maybe Maimonides too—yes, obviously—the standard of Maimonides, when you apply it to Protestantism, doesn’t… even Maimonides would agree, if he had known this phenomenon, that it’s not idolatry.

That’s why we somehow tend to think the opposite: that Catholicism is something darker, older, more… but that’s not true. It really isn’t true. The opposite. The whole Protestant revolt—Calvin and Luther—was a revolt against the human wrappings. “We want to return to the source. We want to return to clinging to the holy scriptures, to doing what the Holy One, blessed be He, really wants, not what human beings translate, or what human beings—the popes and people like that—say.” It’s a reversal of—yes, of course—against intermediaries, against additions and all sorts of wrappings.

And therefore, you know, the American Bible Belt, all kinds of places where you really see fundamentalism also in behavior—that’s usually Protestant, not Catholic. It’s an interesting point, because I think many of us aren’t used to looking at it that way. That’s why I asked the question, and you saw the answers here were somewhat split.

Yes. There’s a researcher, a book called The Theological Roots of the Third Reich, that argues that Protestantism and the Lutheran style as it developed in Germany were the basis—the basis—for Nazism. Okay. In any case, yes—with Nazism, for example, there were also many, many pagan elements involved in the conceptions of the Nazi leadership, say. In Nazi ideology too there was something of this. But the leadership certainly had a very deep connection to a kind of paganism. Because they wanted, again, to return to certain roots, to get rid of all human culture that had somehow wrapped the source, the authenticity.

Yes, and I’m not even talking yet about Nietzsche, who talks about following your authenticity, and morality as a matter for slaves—it’s a slave mentality—and all the human sublimations we’ve collected over the years conceal the original, authentic truth. We need to return there. A great many of these wild phenomena are rooted in some kind of return to the past—partly imagined, no matter—but a return to some past that is truer, closer to the source, and an attempt to shed the human wrappings, all the things that human beings added, the control, the human thinking and oversight that were added to these original ideas.

By the way, the same thing happens in the Muslim context. In the Muslim context too—again in a very rough way, and I’m really even less expert in this than in Protestant and Catholic Christianity—but there too someone once told me that one of the characteristics distinguishing Sunni and Shiite is like Protestantism and Catholicism. Meaning the Shiites are the Catholics and the Sunnis are the Protestants. The Sunnis want to return to the sources. The Shiites are the rabbis and the Sunnis are the Karaites. Exactly. The Sunnis are more like the Karaites: they want to return to the sources, to the holy scriptures, and they aren’t willing to accept the imams and the human interpretation that has been added to these things over the years. They want to return to the source.

By the way, the less of a Torah scholar you are—Ephraim once told me this, I had a fascinating conversation with him about it—the more of a Torah scholar you are, the more you tend to scorn these phenomena. For example, the heads of Al-Azhar, the global Sunni center in Cairo, are moderate people—or so he claimed at least. These are people who overall despise these processes. They’re led by ignoramuses. These processes are led by simple people who have some charisma, and the secret of their appeal is that they’re going to do the real thing. Because Torah scholars are usually more moderate; they know things are not so simple. You can’t take a verse and immediately apply it. Like with us. You can’t take—there’s some interpretive context, there’s a certain refinement that things undergo. The written ideas are not directly implementable. I mean, you can’t take something written and implement it immediately. That’s a childish conception. You can’t do such a thing. You need to interact with it before you decide what to do here.

Now, Torah scholars understand this. I’m talking now about Torah scholars in the Islamic context. They understand this, he says. Those who lead the Muslim Brotherhood—not to mention Al-Qaeda and ISIS and all that—are simple people. The person who founded the Muslim Brotherhood was some simple schoolteacher—I don’t even remember his name now—he was the leader of that movement, its leader, he’s no longer alive, and the Muslim intellectual Torah scholars despise him. In other words, often the return to the source is not led by the intellectual religious leadership but the opposite: people on the ground feel the leadership is betraying the true idea. Because the simple person says, “Wait a second, Muhammad said this, so what are you making calculations for? We need to kill these people and be done with it. All the heretics have no right to live, that’s it.”

Now, a person who lives in the world and understands, and also has some acquaintance with complex thinking, says okay—he maneuvers somewhat between what’s written and reality. But the child, or the person with childish thinking, the simple man who really seeks authenticity—he really wants to do what Muhammad said, not what his interpreters tell him. So he’ll return to the source and be wiser than them.

Doesn’t this remind you of the women in shawls I mentioned earlier, who refuse to take instructions from anyone? Now I assume they usually can’t really read and write. It’s not that they’re some great learned scholars. We’re not talking about feminists who went back and learned all Torah themselves with the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim). They don’t make the effort to learn. It’s obvious to them what is right. How is it obvious? From the same place it’s obvious to everyone. They know—they learned in the Shulchan Arukh, or learned, I don’t know, in women’s classes. Usually they probably never saw a Shulchan Arukh. And that’s what they know. But they will really do it. The translation between the lesson and what is actually done is the function of a simple person. A more complex person understands: okay, the lesson is this, that’s the theory, that’s correct, everything is fine—but in practice, on the way to practice, it requires some processing. It’s not something that passes immediately into action.

And fundamentalism is the thing of someone who isn’t willing to accept that dissonance. What is written is what should be implemented. We need to return to the source, forget all the human additions, we want to return to the Holy One, blessed be He. And in that sense I do think there is a common root in the three great religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, let’s say. There are differences in the phenomena, in their intensity, in their practical expressions—differences of heaven and earth. But the philosophical root is very similar. The philosophical root is some kind of attempt to return to the source, to reconnect to some source of supreme certainty, to shed the wrappings somehow added to it over the years, and to be more righteous than the pope—literally this time. That’s what the Protestants wanted: to be more righteous than the pope. Because the pope is the one responsible, of course, for mediation, like the scholars of Al-Azhar among the Muslims, like with us—Torah scholars who process these things.

And yes, it says that one should lower them into a pit and not raise them out, and then the Chazon Ish writes that today there is no law of lowering and not raising. Why isn’t there? He has such explanations, other explanations—everyone doesn’t really know what to do with that. I actually think it makes a lot of sense. But a lot of people don’t really identify with the fact that it makes so much sense today, that it really doesn’t apply. But the Chazon Ish already said it; he did the work, so thank God we don’t have to kill all the heretics. Meaning, there are Torah scholars, and part of their role is to take the fundamentals, the primary sources, and do this processing and stop the simple people from direct implementation, immediate implementation, of what is written.

And sometimes, when the simple person loses trust in that intermediary—that is, he says, “Wait, you educated me to do God’s will without calculations, without sophistication, without fences—this is the absolute truth, these are not things you can play with. Who are you to tell the Holy One, blessed be He, what yes and what no?”—then he goes and does it. And the more the religious leadership loses the reins, loses control in all these places, the more zealotry will arise.

There is some identification in the world between religiosity and fanaticism—an identification that has something to it, yes?—between religiosity and fanaticism. But I think fanaticism usually characterizes the less educated layers of the religious world. Precisely the religious leadership, those who lead the religious worldview, are usually more moderate. Usually. It’s not always true; there are exceptions. Usually they are more moderate. Part of this is of course simply because they have to manage the whole thing—they’ll be held responsible if something happens there. When you stand at the head of a state, even Khomeini or whoever, when you stand at the head of a state there are limitations. It’s not like operating in your neighborhood and killing whoever you want. There are prices to pay; you have to maneuver against the world.

So part of it is that you’re more educated—I have no idea whether Khomeini was particularly educated, I simply don’t know—and part of it is just the very position of leadership, which forces you to be more controlled, less instinctive, less a straight line from source to implementation. And therefore religious extremism often actually comes from the field, from the lower parts of the scholarly or religious hierarchy or something like that, who sometimes create for themselves substitute heroes. Then simple people suddenly become spiritual leaders, but when you examine what’s really in them, they are simple people.

The public suddenly sees them as some—I don’t know—who is this al-Baghdadi of ISIS, the new caliph of ISIS. I have no idea to what extent he’s really a spiritual or intellectual figure. I don’t know, though there is in Islam… that he is not one of the great intellectual luminaries of Islam. I can bet on that without knowing him and without checking. And of course today he is declared the caliph who is going to establish the Muslim state over the whole world. And in the end he’s just a man from the field, charismatic enough, and the people in the field, who don’t really understand, turn him into a leader because he really is authentic. He moves directly from the Qur’an to action. If a hand has to be cut off, then cut off a hand. If heretics have to be killed, then kill. Fine. He’s very authentic. That’s the secret charm of fundamentalism: this authenticity, this attachment to the source, this unwillingness to compromise. And that is true with us as well.

Now if I return to our own courtyard—also in our courtyard there is a feeling among people that the interpretation over the generations and the human mediation of the word of God somehow conceals it, or replaces it. We worship the Shulchan Arukh and not the Holy One, blessed be He—an expression that is very common today. People who are tired of worshipping the Shulchan Arukh want to worship the Holy One, blessed be He. Among us this may be perceived as rebellion, but they understand themselves as the source. Those who follow the Shulchan Arukh—that is the deviation from the source, from religious authenticity.

And then leadership emerges from the field in exactly the same way among us. The whole leadership of the women in shawls or Lev Tahor or, I don’t know, all kinds of miracle-workers of one kind or another, who receive boundless admiration—I have no idea, I assume usually they’re not worth much in the intellectual and spiritual sense, but they have—I don’t know—they have some kind of charisma, and they know how to project some kind of religious authenticity, I don’t know exactly what, a connection with the upper worlds, and they succeed in creating around themselves courts like the greatest rabbis—maybe even more.

Again, this is a kind of leadership created by the field. We are very used to having been educated with the idea that the public has some sort of sense of smell—that if the public decides someone is the leading sage of the generation, then he must be the leading sage of the generation. I’ve somewhat lost my faith in the public’s sense of smell lately, at least. I don’t know. It doesn’t do it for me. I’m not convinced the public really has a sense of smell. Maybe over long periods, yes, but in the phenomena I see around me it really doesn’t look that way. There are not-small publics at all, and people who are overall fairly intelligent, some of them—not only people who are swept away by, I don’t know, by someone who at least in my eyes looks like a nobody. Simply a nobody.

The X-ray and the automatic MRI. Have you ever heard lessons by the Abuhatzeira rabbis? I don’t know. Yes, I think among them there really were Torah scholars, from what I understand. Again, I don’t know enough. But the whole industry around it—and it’s not at all clear that the Torah scholars are really the ones with status. Does that really go together, or is it the opposite? There are those who exploit the name Abuhatzeira—once there were apparently learned people there, and today they’ve turned it into a business. But that doesn’t disturb the followers. They receive admiration, and it won’t help if the police investigate them, if a court convicts them—it doesn’t matter at all. It’s all persecution. It’s the Antichrist fighting against the authentic truth. Again the human wrapping is trying to struggle against the truth that we carry with us. The establishment—the religious establishment—is the enemy of the fundamentalists, because the religious establishment is what represents the human mediation, among other things the deviation from religious authenticity.

So that’s a few words about fundamentalism, and about the fact that despite the differences in extremity and in the various appearances of the phenomena, it seems to me that at the root, the principal, logical, philosophical processes are similar. Both among us, and in Islam, and in Christianity, the processes on the philosophical plane are similar. Their practical manifestations are of course different because the background is also different—that is, the authentic sources also say different things in the three religions, so of course it comes out differently.

But now let’s take one step further. There is another kind of fundamentalism beyond what I’ve described up to now, and that is Catholic, Shiite, and Orthodox—and especially Haredi—fundamentalism. That is another kind of fundamentalism. Because out of the desire to hit upon God’s true will, you either throw away the human mediations, or you turn the human mediations themselves into something divine. That too is a possible route. That is the difference between the two kinds of fundamentalism. Protestantism throws away the human wrapping. Karaism wants to throw away the human wrapping. I don’t know, the hilltop youth, all sorts of things, all the first kind of fundamentalism I’ve discussed until now.

But there is an alternative fundamentalism. Let’s start directly with us, because here it’s easier to see. When we accept upon ourselves the Talmud—not the Torah that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave at Mount Sinai—the Talmud, where in Jewish law it is accepted that we do not argue with the Talmud, the Talmud has status… “The Holy One, blessed be He, has in His world only the four cubits of Jewish law”—meaning not the Torah but the Shulchan Arukh? Yes, exactly.

Now, when we accept upon ourselves the Talmud, which is after all just a product of flesh-and-blood human beings, something here is problematic. So if you are a fundamentalist, that demands an explanation. Either you throw that away too and return to the Torah and become a Karaite. If you still cling to it, then that too has to receive some kind of divine status. There too there can no longer be error, because it can’t be—we worship God, we cling to the divine will. We need to know that what we are doing is what the Holy One, blessed be He, says.

And then it turns out that the intermediary people, against whom the first type of fundamentalist rebels, become the gods of the second type. In other words, they receive some kind of pseudo-divine status. They too cannot err. The Divine Presence speaks from their throats. There is no possibility of criticizing them. Now it’s no longer only the Holy One, blessed be He—we’re not throwing away the wrapping, we are attaching it to the source. Meaning the wrapping too is sanctified. It cannot…

The pope cannot err, right? That’s Catholic fundamentalism. Catholic fundamentalism basically says: look, we accept the mediation of the pope, but we are not accepting mere human beings. We accept the pope’s mediation because the pope too is apparently part of the divine source. Okay? That’s Catholic fundamentalism. Shiism is the same. Exactly the same. These are really the same processes. Shiism accepts interpretations, imams, and so on, that were added over the years beyond the holy scriptures themselves, but they receive some again binding status that cannot err, and so on. And we also are not willing to accept merely human additions because that’s the mechanism, that’s the process. No, not at all. If we accept human mediation, then it too must somehow ascend to some higher place.

And in our Jewish world—again I return here—the same thing. Haredi society in a certain sense appears fundamentalist to us, but it is not fundamentalist in the sense I defined earlier. Not at all. Again, if one of us had to bet who Abraham our father or Moses our teacher—I don’t know, whoever you choose—or the first settlers in the land with Joshua son of Nun, who were they closer to: a kollel student in Bnei Brak, or the hilltop youth? I would bet on the second option. Okay? So the hilltop youth are actually going back there. And the kollel student in Bnei Brak repaints the reality that existed there and also clings to the ancient reality. Only not the real one—the fabricated one. Meaning he creates for himself an invented past that he can cling to.

Basically—yes, like my uncle said, I’ve mentioned this here more than once—my uncle once said that Abaye and Rava certainly learned in Yiddish. They knew how to learn, after all, and whoever knows how to learn learns in Yiddish, not whoever knows Hebrew. No. Whoever learns in Hebrew doesn’t know how to learn. So of course they learned in Yiddish. And their wives, of course, wore forty-denier stockings. Obviously. And who knows what else. “And Abraham was old and sat in a yeshiva”—the sages already told us. He was a rosh yeshiva and had a frock coat with two buttons in the back.

And the concept of infallibility—that one cannot err—this too, in Christianity, in Catholicism, is a new thing. About the last hundred and fifty years. And it certainly wasn’t always that way, and in Judaism certainly not. Maimonides in Hilkhot Mamrim chapter 2… I completely agree. I’m speaking now about phenomena in our own time. The phenomenon that one cannot err, that there is a concept of infallibility among us—I don’t think even Haredim… practically, there is. Today there is. You can say it has no source, that it wasn’t this way in the past; I don’t think you’re entirely right. I think that… I don’t think the medieval authorities (Rishonim) or later authorities (Acharonim) would simply tell you that a mistake fell into the Talmud. You may find it in one way or another, but that won’t happen there. They’d say to themselves… No, no, no. Globally, I mean. I don’t think you’ll find some sort of… Heaven forbid. There is no mistake there. I don’t think—it would be hard to find. You’ll find it here and there; again, we have a rich literature. But overall, I think the mainstream was always one of infallibility with regard to the Talmud. When you read now the Kesef Mishneh at the beginning of Hilkhot Mamrim, where he says that we accepted it upon ourselves—you can understand from that that yes, it could…

The Talmud cannot err. Yes, right. Because around Maimonides, Maimonides opened up some channel. But when you read Torah literature of medieval authorities (Rishonim), later authorities (Acharonim), halakhic decisors, it seems to me also to this day certainly—but it was also always the mainstream. There are no mistakes in the Talmud. “Both these and those are the words of the living God.” There are no mistakes, not even scientific ones. Even to this day modern decisors, like Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who overall was a modern decisor, I don’t think you’ll find in him a statement that the Talmud erred factually. I saw in several places in Rabbi Moshe’s responsa a kind of insistence on saying the opposite, and explaining reality. Fine, it doesn’t matter—but that is infallibility. Still. And again, maybe he does this for educational reasons and didn’t really think… maybe, I don’t know. But the discourse is a discourse in which there is no error. I don’t think that’s… It’s true that it is much stronger today, and in a moment I’ll try to explain why, but I don’t think it’s a new invention.

Regarding later authorities arguing with medieval authorities, and certainly… many later authorities already claimed they could disagree with medieval authorities. Yes, okay. Fine, but you understand that there too it’s also a question of time. Even with the Talmud—the Savoraim disagreed with the Talmud. Codification… yes, codification always happens, you know, in retrospect. That is, a few hundred years later suddenly they decide you don’t disagree with the Talmud. In the 200th, 300th, 500th years after what is today called the sealing of the Talmud, they also disagreed with the Talmud. Some of the Geonim did. Tosafot says there are Geonic sections that entered into the Talmud we have before us. Rav Acha—that’s Rav Achai Gaon. Rav Achai Gaon is one of the later Geonim. These are not things that happened… what was accepted from that period—if it’s plausible and you connect it, then you accept it; if not, then… from the Geonim. Yes, right. But that disappears with time, because the codification and canonization of the Talmud too was created through a process of several hundred years.

So here too I don’t know whether this is a change of approach or whether it’s simply that time has to pass. You don’t codify or canonize—sorry—someone in whose study hall you once sat. He has to be some two hundred years back, I don’t know, three hundred years back, and then you can turn him into some kind of canon. That’s the nature of a historical process, I think.

So I’m trying to point out that there is another type of fundamentalism, one that does accept these wrappings that the first fundamentalist tries to get rid of, but it accepts them only because it manages to give them a status like the status of the source. Meaning, they too are the word of God. Anyone mentioned in the Talmud can revive the dead. That’s kindergarten-level obviousness in Bnei Brak—walk around there, it probably has some source somewhere, I don’t remember where, but in Bnei Brak it’s an accepted first principle. Anyone who… I was there, it’s obvious. Anyone mentioned in the Talmud—I hope also, I don’t know, maybe even the gentiles mentioned there incidentally. There’s some story about Dama ben Netina—maybe he too could revive the dead, I don’t know. But everyone who appears there in the Talmud suddenly receives a status that is basically also a kind of “cannot err,” a kind of expression of the word of God.

And the clinging to the relatively later interpretation—that’s no longer the source—is because that interpretation too is part of the source, simply because the source continues to speak to us at that later stage. And in addition, as I said earlier, they paint the ancient periods and the source in colors that fit what we think today is right to be, and then we can continue to feel attached to the source and not move right or left. “The tradition of our fathers is in our hands; we don’t move a millimeter from the tradition.” I already mentioned this, that usually the one who talks about not moving a millimeter from tradition is usually the greatest innovator. Usually that’s how it is.

Where do you find this? You find it in Brisk, right? That’s one place where it’s always “tradition, tradition,” all the others are deviating from the tradition, they have no tradition, only Brisk has tradition. The whole thing is an invention from aleph to tav. The whole Brisker thing is an invention of the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century—late nineteenth century. That’s where they invented this business, and from there it became Mount Sinai. Meaning this is the tradition and there is none besides it.

Very similarly—for example, I think I once mentioned some memorial volume for Rabbi Ra’anan, who was murdered in Hebron. I once saw a memorial volume that came out in his memory. You know how a memorial volume is built: there are essays by students, say, relatives, his rabbis, all sorts of things. And there are “treasures of the ancients.” That’s the section with, say, manuscripts, articles by halakhic decisors, important Torah scholars from previous generations that are being published for the first time, things that hadn’t been published—it’s an opportunity. Memorial books always serve as a kind of platform for bringing out unpublished manuscripts, essays of great Torah figures that are unknown.

Now who were the “treasures of the ancients” there? There was a little Rabbi Kook—that was the most ancient one. After him there was Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda and Rabbi Charlap. Those are the treasures of the ancients. There’s nothing. Before Rabbi Kook there was nothing. The Holy One, blessed be He, transmitted Torah to Moses, Moses to Rabbi Kook, and Rabbi Kook to Rabbi Charlap and Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda. That’s all. And you can see Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook’s students—students, by the way, on both sides, meaning both Har Hamor and Mercaz in this sense are quite similar, I think. They constantly talk about clinging to tradition and not deviating from tradition, and whoever doesn’t go their way simply did not serve true Torah scholars. Meaning he has no real tradition for what he does.

Now what tradition? To relate to Rabbi Kook as the true continuator of the tradition is a bit exaggerated. A man whom after all many of the sages of his generation—many of whom perhaps appreciated him personally—but many of the sages of his generation really did not agree with his path. Okay? And by the way, that doesn’t disqualify him. It’s not true, not at all—but I’m saying he was a giant Jew. But to say that your criterion is only continuation of tradition—usually that’s someone sitting on nothing, someone suspended in the air, and he usually always talks about the need to cling to tradition.

And therefore this too is part of the same phenomenon of the second type of fundamentalism. You invent a new tradition, you invent an ancient reality to which you can return and cling, and you become fundamentalist like the Protestant. No problem, only the Holy One, blessed be He, is here in Rome. He doesn’t need to go back to Mount Sinai or to Jesus on the water or wherever. He is here with us, and we are still attached to Him exactly like you Protestants. The same thing. He is here. That’s all.

So often you portray the ancient sources in a different way, but then cling to them in the same manner. And therefore this is another kind of fundamentalism: Shiite, Catholic, and in our context Haredi, let’s call it. Maybe a bit of Orthodoxy—mainly Haredi, yes. Whoever doesn’t go by this fundamentalist path, what is he really saying? Exactly: how far does the word of God extend? And who is authorized from that point on to come and pass it on to us? It’s a big question. And part of the charm of this fundamentalist map is that it is very hard to answer that question.

And it’s dangerous not to be in one of these two very clearly defined camps, because you can get to all kinds of places—to Reform, to various movements—and dismantle the whole system. If you are too autonomist, too much of a believer in the human being and his ability to intervene—but not his ability to intervene as someone personally authorized by the Holy One, blessed be He, but as a human being who brings with him all his human baggage, his context, and with that he is part of the Torah, he is part of the process—this is a problematic, dangerous conception. It’s hard to give it criteria. So when is it right, when not? To what extent are we bound by it? If it is a human invention, then why am I obligated to it at all? Why should I cling to the Talmud? Fine, let’s say we accepted it upon ourselves. What does “we accepted it upon ourselves” mean? Some Jews decided that one doesn’t disagree with the Talmud. Okay, and who decided that they cannot be disagreed with? Why should I accept that?

The simplest way to make sure that you will not disagree with the Talmud is to portray the Talmud as Mount Sinai. That solves the problems. And therefore the alternative approach—if you want to be neither Catholic nor Protestant—is an approach that falls between the chairs. It has a hard time surviving. That’s part of the reason why it’s impossible to deal with fundamentalism, because in truth such a conception is very hard to create—a conception that will endure, that has staying power, that can be transmitted to sons, to children, and preserve this commitment with all its costs. That is, with the awareness that after all human beings are involved here, mistakes can happen, and not everything is aligned and faithful to the source. But fine, the Torah was given on that basis.

And the sages in the Talmud, by the way, make a not-insignificant effort to create such a conception. We usually ignore this crudely, but the sages made a great effort to create this kind of approach. Sometimes they use Catholic language. For instance, take “both these and those are the words of the living God.” What does that mean? You can read it in two ways. “Both these and those are the words of the living God” means both sides are right because both are saying what the Holy One, blessed be He, said. That’s fundamentalism of the second kind. But you can read “both these and those are the words of the living God” as meaning: no, these are human words, but human beings too are part of the Torah that is binding upon us. That’s another reading. You can read it this way or that way.

But “it is not in heaven”—that already seems to me hard to read in the first way. “It is not in heaven” is a statement that says: the Holy One, blessed be He, can stand and shout until tomorrow, “That’s not what I meant!” We are not interested. That is a distinctly anti-fundamentalist statement, “it is not in heaven.” And therefore it seems to me that in the Talmud there are several very strong places—take Rabbah bar Nachmani there in the laws of leprosy, with the white hair that preceded the bright spot, where in the heavenly academy they go down to ask him what the Jewish law is. There too there is some statement—again, this is aggadah, and there are those who portray it as though this is what actually happened, as a historical description. I think these aggadot come to tell us this message, to build some kind of more balanced relation to a Torah of human beings.

On the one hand, we know this is a Torah of human beings. It is not what heaven says. It is not necessarily what the Holy One, blessed be He, said. Maybe yes—we try to say what the Holy One, blessed be He, intends. But we know: it doesn’t come directly from Him; we can err; we are human beings. But this is what we have. This is the Torah. It is not in heaven. Meaning: we go with this.

Now such a statement sometimes—in Derashot HaRan it says, there is the concept of “do not turn aside,” and in Derashot HaRan he says there could be error, even if they are lying, exactly—that too is what… also “do not turn aside” dulls the soul like eating forbidden foods, yes, right, exactly, exactly. Meaning you see this in many places. Now some of the fundamentalists can also quote these sayings. They all know them; these Talmudic passages are no secret. But they don’t take part in their worldview. They don’t understand their significance.

Tell such a person, and he’ll say “it is not in heaven,” and immediately imagine the Holy One, blessed be He, speaking from Rabbi Yehoshua’s throat. Therefore it is not in heaven. “It is not in heaven” means don’t be swept away by voices from above. The Holy One, blessed be He, speaks from Rabbi Yehoshua’s throat, not from heaven above. That is of course another reading of “it is not in heaven.” “It is not in heaven” means that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not speak from Rabbi Yehoshua’s throat. The Holy One, blessed be He, is shouting that Rabbi Yehoshua is wrong, but we go with Rabbi Yehoshua. That is what “it is not in heaven” means.

But in the fundamentalist reading, “it is not in heaven” means that the Holy One, blessed be He, speaks from Rabbi Yehoshua’s throat. That is where the truth is. The voices and thunder are just there to confuse us. They are attempts at diversion. We must not follow them, because that is not what the Holy One, blessed be He, really wants or really thinks. So all the prior worldviews, the a priori assumptions, are sometimes much stronger than the sources. Fundamentalists too—as is known, perhaps not “too” but mainly—use fairly creative interpretation of the sources. But they do so in order to create the appearance that we are not deviating from the sources. That is, it’s a very creative interpretation in order to create the situation that we are the simple, authentic continuation of the sources.

By contrast, דווקא those who are not fundamentalist may allow themselves to intervene in the formulation of Jewish law and its interpretation, but they do not have to force what was there in order to paint a picture in which they are the authentic continuation of Mount Sinai. “Everything that a seasoned student will one day innovate was shown by the Holy One, blessed be He, to Moses at Sinai.” There are rabbinic statements that are very easy to interpret in a fundamentalist way. And maybe that was really there—I don’t know. It is even likely that such conceptions also existed among the sages. But as I understand it today, that is meant as a metaphorical description. That is, “the Holy One, blessed be He, showed Moses at Sinai” means: treat this like the Torah given to Moses at Sinai. Not that this is really a historical statement. To me it means that the fact that a seasoned student innovates this, and did not receive it by tradition from the Holy One, blessed be He—fine, so what? It is part of the Torah. The Torah was given to human beings. “The Torah was not given to ministering angels.” And we are bound to this system, including its human components.

This is against fundamentalism that tries either to throw away the human components or to sanctify them—that is, to turn them divine. No. There are human components, and we go with them. But “it is not in heaven” basically—it’s not that they come and say that God speaks from Rabbi Yehoshua’s throat. I don’t think so either. No. “It is not in heaven” means that from the moment He brought the Torah down to Moses at Sinai, it was His will that from now on the Torah sages would interpret it. And that doesn’t mean that that is what He intended, because He removed from Himself the continuation of interpretation. Right, I completely agree. I think that’s the straightforward reading. Rabbi Yehoshua is not speaking for Him at all. Clearly not. I think that’s the message. The message is that he is not saying what the Holy One, blessed be He, intends.

I’m only saying that when fundamentalists read this Talmudic passage, they naturally immediately read it as: no, the Holy One, blessed be He, apparently speaks from Rabbi Yehoshua’s throat, not from heaven. Again, does this remind you of Catholicism? It’s interesting. Very interesting parallels. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Again, a somewhat external resemblance, but there is something in this business where you are trying to turn even the human being, the one below, the authority figure, into someone who is part of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose throat God speaks through. This is necessary in order to create the second kind of fundamentalism.

Now the alternative, as I said earlier, is truly an alternative that says we are not returning to Sinai. We do not need to return to Sinai, nor to Abraham our father nor to Moses our teacher nor to Joshua’s conquest and settlement. We need to live the Torah in our world, with all the baggage we have accumulated over history. Critically, one can filter, one can intervene; there are halakhic modes of conduct that were formed over the generations. But in the end there is also a third way: not to be a fundamentalist of the first kind and not to be a fundamentalist of the second kind, and still be committed. That is, both kinds of fundamentalists threaten you that if you are not either with us or with them, nothing will remain of you. And let’s say there is something to that. It is hard to create such a resilient system. Hard to create a system that continues to be committed, that passes from father to son, with all this modern sobriety that says: friends, this did not descend from Sinai. These are things added over the generations. They have a context. We know where they came from, why they were created. Human beings were involved in them. Human beings have inclinations, desires, tendencies, ideologies, one influence and another influence. Now after all that, go and say: okay, and to all this we must cling—note that the Shakh’s method on this matter is such and such. Fine, so the Shakh thought so—so what? It is hard to generate commitment in a non-fundamentalist worldview. And that is the secret charm of fundamentalism in its religious sense.

But I still want to return to the plane—you can already see why this roughly sketches the map on which I want to proceed. But today I think the Haredi world, at least the rabbis, also think this way. I don’t think they think—I’m pretty sure—the Chatam Sofer, the Noda B’Yehuda, all of them thought this way. I do, yes, but I still think one has to distinguish between what people say and how deeply they internalize the meaning of what they say. Because there are plenty of statements—the introduction to Ketzot HaChoshen, everyone always quotes it. There are many statements that say yes, we are human beings. But in your daily life, in your consciousness, beyond this source or that one—everyone knows the sources, they know them better than I do—but your religious consciousness, I think, yes, is different. Different.

That is, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky knows everything I just said. But he doesn’t live that way. That’s not how he perceives things, it seems to me. I don’t know him, but it seems to me that’s not how he perceives things—unless he’s really acting out some very impressive play, to project such an atmosphere onto his surroundings when inside it’s not at all what he thinks. I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know him. But there is very often a difference, a certain dissonance, between the theory that we all know and the way we live.

And just look and see how people relate to the Talmud. People relate to the Talmud—simply, go to the street, any kollel student, any rabbi, anyone, all of them, small and great alike—there is no mistake in the Talmud. No mistake in the Talmud. Not even a scientific mistake. When Maimonides, of course, and Rabbi Avraham son of Maimonides write this—okay, so the first time I found that in Bnei Brak, I got yelled at. They told me, “Maimonides is forbidden to read. We do not rule that way, and what are you talking about? The Talmud is holy, and no one there was mistaken about anything. It is all divine inspiration.” That’s how they live. Again, they know this source, they know that source. They know the sources. Some don’t even know the sources because it’s forbidden to study them. But this is not their consciousness. This is not their religious experience. That’s not how they live.

And in that sense I do think this is an accurate description of Haredi thinking. Beyond the discourse and the glorification of the human being—certainly the Lithuanian type, yes? The Lithuanian world after all values human intellect, the human being, the… clearly, that’s part of the Lithuanian infrastructure. And still, the attitude has something fundamentalist in it. The Talmudic passages they quote do not establish such a religious consciousness. It is something else. And I think this is an interesting way to grasp Haredi society. This is something one has to understand in order to understand whether there is another third way, or where the underlying assumptions are, what exactly is going on here.

Maybe before I continue, I just want to connect this after all to the book here. The book opens with a discussion of the sources of Jewish law. And that is what we’ll deal with in the first part of our path through the book. Sources of Jewish law—meaning: what is a law given to Moses at Sinai, what is an exposition, what is logical reasoning. Okay? Things that usually, let’s say, average Haredi rabbis or kollel students don’t really deal with. Usually.

You know, once I started dealing with the hermeneutical principles, I wrote an article on an a fortiori argument. Many years ago already. I wrote an article on an a fortiori argument. It was the first time I dealt with this subject. I went to the Bar-Ilan library to look for a book that deals with the principles—the principles by which the Torah is expounded, among them an a fortiori argument. I got to the relevant shelf and found there a collection of knitted-kippah people. All of them, to the last one. Everyone who dealt with this field was not Haredi politically, in the political sense. It was fascinating. Rabbi Ostrovsky has a book on it, Hirschensohn has a book on it, Rabbi Amiel—not on hermeneutical principles, doesn’t matter, but something similar. All these people were not Haredi. And that’s very interesting. Almost. Almost—here and there there are some—but almost no books on the principles of exposition are by Haredi rabbis.

Now by the way, this is changing a little, and there are so many learners there, they have to find a livelihood, something to occupy themselves with, so people are looking for fields that haven’t yet been dealt with. And this is a phenomenon, because there are many learners. So now they are already spreading into areas that traditionally they did not deal with. There is a book on an a fortiori argument that came out, very detailed, although written terribly—someone from Jerusalem put it out a few years ago. There is some engagement with these things now. The Schreibers—Yosel and Bunim Schreiber, if anyone knows—also dealt with these things, very… there are interesting things there, because these are Jews who know their stuff. So it’s interesting.

But it’s interesting that they don’t deal with these subjects. And Rav Gedalia gave a lesson on this, gave a lesson on the foundations of Jewish law: what is a law given to Moses at Sinai, what is an exposition, what is its meaning—like a university lecturer really. I mean, what is this, an introduction to Talmud? Who does things like this in a yeshiva? This willingness to go back to the conceptual framework within which I operate, to try—I don’t know whether to undermine it, but at least to explain it. Once you try to explain it, you usually also undermine it a little. Because then you say: okay, then they probably didn’t understand correctly if they work in this way. Because now I already have tools to know what logical reasoning is, what a law given to Moses at Sinai is, what an exposition is, so I can also criticize. I no longer accept everything. The moment you begin to touch the framework within which you operate, the conceptual framework, your methodology, you are already modern. Then you are no longer fundamentalist.

And in that sense I think that even this purely scholarly subject—not any ideological statement—already itself tells us something about the relation between Rav Gedalia and Haredi society. And it also says something about what Haredi society is, of course. I mean, the discussion is always one side through the other. But I still want to return and finish this introduction with a broader perspective. Not in the context of faith and religious fundamentalism, but in the context of the more general philosophical move.

Why did I ask why these things are growing in recent years? What happened now? Why this flowering of fundamentalism just when people already thought it was dead? Hegel? With thesis and antithesis? Yes, but on the micro level—what is happening there? I think it’s exactly that. But look: the twentieth century opened with enormous hope or optimism. What today is called modernism began earlier, but I’m saying up to about the middle of the twentieth century there was a hope that science and rational thought and empirical observation and systematic, logical treatment would solve all problems. That was the new messiah. And that messiah pushed the old messiahs aside. Religious faith retreated, went underground in certain senses, and ideologies took its place—democracy, values, modes of thought, science. There was a kind of blossoming optimism.

And somehow in the middle of the twentieth century this whole thing broke. There are historical and sociological explanations for this—what? Yes, world wars, right, the world wars. But I also think there are philosophical explanations. And the philosophical explanations, it seems to me, are that when you examine the rational or rationalist toolbox, you discover that it doesn’t really succeed in giving you certainties, in bringing you closer to truth in the naive sense, I would say—the sense of getting closer to the real truth, finally reaching the real thing. The intellect did not do what people expected of it.

In the end, in the wake of the world wars too, we are left with the fact that for all the really important questions, we have no systematic way to deal with them. Not questions of values, not questions of ideology, not questions of the right social structure. The social sciences and political science and so on can describe different approaches, can describe different structures; they cannot tell you what is right and what is not right. It is descriptive. You move—precisely because you stop pretending to claim that science can solve it all—science can progress because it focuses on describing and not on making determinations or saying what is right. That is, the progress of science and the progress of understanding come at the price of understanding that we will not be able by this means to reach a decision, to determine what is right and what is not.

And then a very great break was created, because the rational messiah did not bring redemption, and there was created some kind of vacuum, some kind of despair, which later came to be called postmodernism, which says: fine, if rationality did not bring us the hoped-for certainty, then we have no choice but to get used to the fact that there is no such thing as truth. Each person has his own truth, his own narrative; return to subjectivity and turn it into an ideal. And on the contrary, whoever talks about objective things is arrogant, paternalistic, not up to date. In other words, internalize the failure of the modern project. The modern project failed. Failed in the sense of bringing humanity to its purpose, to truth, to the great correction. There really was a messianism there, in the full sense of the word, and this god disappointed. It gave many achievements—there is scientific progress, there is medical understanding, of course we got to space, to the moon, all true. But the problems with which we deal in society, in the human being—it solved nothing for us. Psychology too—everyone has long known that there is no scientific solution there for anything.

So what happens in such a situation? In such a situation there are two options, not one. One option is to become a relativist skeptic: yes, each person with his own narrative and discourse and assumptions and so on, because we have truly despaired of the great truths. The shattering of ideologies. The second alternative is to say: fine, if rationality doesn’t bring me to the hoped-for certainty, then we will need supra-rational sources. We will look for some—I don’t know—another exit, something beyond the intellect, beyond understanding, that will give us certainty. There’s no choice. We see rational certainties disappointed us, so we’ll go to what lies beyond the intellect.

And then all kinds of sayings are born, like: where reason or understanding ends, faith begins—or Kabbalah begins, whatever; there are different versions of these sayings—which basically turn rationality into something contemptible, a kind of evil inclination. If you are rational, then you don’t truly believe. Because to believe means to be attached to the higher sources, not to the human. You see how this connects to fundamentalism. The break of modernism, in the end of modernism, creates the two phenomena that look ostensibly opposite to each other, but they sit on exactly the same philosophical infrastructure. Exactly the same thing. Skepticism or relativism on one side—postmodernism—and fundamentalism on the other.

And by the way, there are very interesting connections between them too. There is a very great blurring. Ostensibly they are opposites. One says everything is subjective, everything is relative, everyone is right. The other says, what do you mean—the whole truth is mine, it comes from above, everything is from outside, everything is given to me from the higher, certain source. The subjectivist says, no, everything is me, it is how I am built. Even neuroscience helps us with that, right? After all we already know that we are captive to our brain structures. So it all goes in a subjective direction, and even science already leads us in subjective directions. And on the other hand, fundamentalism is the opposite: everything from outside, everything objective, everything absolute truth, not open to criticism, not subject to criticism, and so on.

But both come from the same place. Both come from exactly the same philosophical platform: despair of rationality. Despair of rationality says: okay, then everything is subjective, so there is no truth. And someone else says: no, there is a higher truth—not by rational means, but by supra-rational means. There is a higher truth. But most of the Western world remains rational. Fine—I’m not sure it remains rational. It remains living as it lives without being too troubled by philosophical problems, which is always true. Most people are not troubled by philosophical problems. The avant-garde, the fundamentalism, is actually on the side that wasn’t rational and suddenly became… so I said there is a certain charm in precisely this period that reawakens fundamentalism.

And you know, there are thousands of volunteers who go to join ISIS, who come from the West—from Europe, from Australia, from Britain. The West is worried about what will happen when they return there. All these people are arch-terrorists, cruel, insane. And some of them converted—not all of them are Muslim, by the way, absolutely not. Not a small number of them, I heard figures some time ago—it was some old survey, admittedly not entirely well-founded—but very high percentages are people born in Europe, not Muslim immigrants. Really Europeans. There is something in the postmodern vacuum that seeks an alternative source. There is a kind of religious authenticity that offers you a way out of this sense of emptiness. Rationality isn’t delivering the goods.

And so what happens is that skepticism and fundamentalism, which ostensibly are two opposites that clash with each other, come from the same source. And that source is one thing: the identification between truth and certainty. Whoever identifies truth with certainty must in the end choose one of two things: either you are a skeptic or you are a fundamentalist. There is no other option, because the rational path does not give you certainty. That’s just the way it is. So either you give up truth, or you become a fundamentalist.

Now, the way to propose an alternative to these two views—an alternative that is not skeptical to fundamentalism—is to give up the identification between truth and certainty. Not to seek certainty. There is no certainty; we are human beings. None of us can be certain of anything. But we live with that, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s what we are, also in the context of faith, but also in the philosophical context. We are human beings; we can err. Okay, but that’s what there is, and we go with it.

Now I’m speaking not only on the plane of a faith-based alternative, as I said before, an alternative to the two types of fundamentalism. Now I’m speaking on the totally general philosophical plane, unrelated to religion and faith. Also on the philosophical plane there are people who are not willing to compromise on certainty. Anything that isn’t certain isn’t true. So what happens in such a case? Either you are a skeptic or you are a fundamentalist—in the philosophical sense now, leave faith aside. So I say: on the philosophical plane one must create a third alternative. On the philosophical plane one must create a situation or worldview in which truth is not identified with certainty. Yes, there can be a truth that I believe in and fight for and think is correct and think that someone who thinks otherwise is mistaken—and I am not certain of it. I am a human being. A human being can err. And I will be willing to listen to someone who says otherwise. I do submit it to criticism. I do not want to get rid of human criticism. On the contrary, human criticism is part of me. You see how this connects to our discussion of fundamentalism.

If we succeed in creating such a third alternative, then there is some chance of coping with fundamentalism. What happens today is that the philosophical infrastructure of dealing with fundamentalism is skepticism, relativism. And relativism cannot really cope with fundamentalism. It cannot. It has no such backbone. It comes from the same source. It understands that the fundamentalist is right, because after all it has no truth. So how exactly will anyone go out to wage jihad in the name of non-truth? Dawkins writes this: I’ve never seen anyone kill on the altar of atheism. Although I have actually seen many such people, but he claims he hasn’t. Why? Because he says: if you have nothing to kill for, then of course you won’t kill for it. Right. But it’s true that you won’t kill for it—but you also won’t be able to cope with those who do kill for it.

And therefore I think the political, social, ideological problems we are experiencing have, it seems to me—maybe this is just a personal tendency—a philosophical root. And at the philosophical root it stems from the fact that those confronting fundamentalism are a society living within a skeptical ethos. And a skeptical ethos comes from the same source. These are two sides of the same coin. It cannot cope with such a thing. You cannot produce backbone. You can defend yourself; once it gets to you and threatens your life, yes, you do go out to war. Fine, obviously—we haven’t completely lost the instinct to survive. We’ve somewhat lost even that, but not completely.

But a war for your truth, a war against fundamentalism because it is wrong, not because it threatens me—the problem with fundamentalism is not that it behaves in an extreme way. That is a problem, but that’s not where it begins; it’s a symptom. The problem is that it suspends criticism, critical thought. That’s where it starts. And the question is whether I have some alternative that can cope with that. Can I create a non-fundamentalist philosophy and of course afterward a non-fundamentalist faith?

Okay, here I’m already going beyond Aviad Nadler; I just added my own. I’m now writing a book about this, almost finishing, on this very issue: to create a conception of truth on the philosophical level and, as a result, a conception of faith that is not fundamentalist in either of these two senses. And I think the solution to the philosophical problem is very necessary for the practical consequences that we are experiencing today. Because it seems to me that the root of the weakness lies in philosophy, and only afterward is translated into politics and wars. Okay.