Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel’s Thought – Rational Explanation in Halakha – Lecture 4

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I once thought about running at Bar-Ilan for the student union in order to shut it down. After all, nobody votes there, everyone there is idle, it’s just a pointless institution. So what’s the problem? You take, say, the physics department—there were ten students there, right? Who goes to study physics? So those ten are surely more than the number who vote for the student union in the whole university, because nobody votes there. So the ten of us would go, I’d get elected, and we’d close the institution and that’s it. We’d save at least a few dozen shekels in student-union fees. Okay. Fine, that’s just political amusement, but it seems to me that behind this political phenomenon there’s something more fundamental than a political effect. And that’s a point I think it’s important to understand. Meaning, there’s some built-in inferiority in the struggle against fundamentalism. And I spoke about that in that context from various other angles, but here I think you can see it in a very clean way. Okay, back to our topic. So Hirshensohn began with three sources of Jewish law, right, on page 13. He began with three sources of Jewish law, and he talks about Scripture, reason, and a law given to Moses at Sinai. We said that in fact the very division into three sources is already some kind of modern way of thinking. I mentioned, if you remember, the books on a fortiori reasoning and on the hermeneutical principles—they were all written by Mizrachi rabbis. Meaning, nobody wrote books on these subjects in the classical world, right? That changed, as I said, but that’s how it used to be at least. So here too, this kind of thought, this reflection, where a person looks at himself and asks himself what the sources are from which the system I’m engaged in is nourished—that itself is a kind of thought that is modern thought. In other words, it’s not something characteristic of a traditional learner. I said that Maimonides in this regard is a bit exceptional, but fine, he really wasn’t a traditional learner. So I think that’s not surprising. So now here he begins to deal with the first source, and that is Scripture. In chapter 2 on page 14. After that on page 16 there is reason. Then in chapter 4 there are expositions. The expositions, from the standpoint of these three sources, are apparently part of what he calls Scripture, and we’ll see. Scripture, reason, and a law given to Moses at Sinai. It’s something between Scripture and reason, I don’t know, maybe. That’s the expositions. And then the principles by which the Torah is interpreted—that’s a continuation of exposition—and in the end, for rabbinic law, scriptural support, the authority of the sages, and a law given to Moses at Sinai. That’s chapter 8 on page 31, a law given to Moses at Sinai. So in effect the continuation of the chapter spells out these three sources, these halakhic sources. It’s somewhat parallel to what Elon, I think, calls formal sources. Fine, we said that the first two and primary sources of the laws are Scripture and reason. I’m now reading in chapter 2. We said that the first two and primary sources of the laws are Scripture and reason. Scripture is what we find in the Written Torah. Seemingly, no tradition is needed for this. What is written is written. But that is not so. The Torah is written in a style unlike any other. On the one hand, the Torah is written in a literary form. It speaks in the language of prose, rhetoric, and poetry, as one who conveys beautiful and profound ideas. Again, one could elaborate in various ways on the literary quality of the biblical text. I’m not a great expert in this and I don’t feel I have a clear position on the matter; I’m not sure I go so far as his rhetoric. But one thing I think is very clear, and he’s right about it, is that the Torah is not written in the form of a dry code. In other words, even if you see it as a law book—we spoke, I think, about the first Rashi on the Torah, where he asks why the Torah didn’t begin with “This month shall be for you.” The assumption behind that question is that basically the Torah is commandments. Everything that isn’t a command needs explanation—why, why is it there. Fine? But even the command section, say “This month shall be for you the beginning of months,” isn’t written in a language like: okay, the new month is established this way, from this time to that time, you need observation, two witnesses—it’s not written in the language of an ordinary law book. Right, exactly. So there’s something here: the text has literary dimensions. Again, without getting into the question of whether this is high literature, low literature, what our evaluation of that literature is—but it is literature. It is not a legal code. In that sense I think he’s completely right. To what degree and with what evaluations, I don’t know—each person with his own evaluations. Every person who listens to the Torah reading enjoys the Torah’s style, and feels that there is room to delve more deeply into its ideas. A rhetorical style is suited to conveying ideas, because in rhetoric the words are not the main thing but the content. The rhetoric hints to a person that one must keep deepening the content more and more. Yes, if you write in rhetorical language, that hints to the reader not to take only the linear translation or the simple meaning of what is written, but to think a bit more, with a broader interpretation, about the ideas behind it. The rhetoric hints to a person that one must keep deepening the content more and more. On the other hand, the Torah is a book of Jewish law. Again, you see that in the first Rashi—it’s no accident that the first Rashi is first. It comes to clarify what Torah is. His question may be more important than the answer, because the question clarifies that Torah is basically Jewish law. That’s the gist. Everything else needs explanation as to why it is there. But Torah, in its essence, is Jewish law. And laws, by their very nature, are precise and binding in practice. The idea is infinite, but the human being is a quantitative creature, and Jewish law casts the idea into quantitative patterns. And from the tradition of the Oral Torah we received that if we are very precise with the language of the verse—I’ll come back to this; for now let’s just get the picture—according to the rules of language and modes of expression, we will find in it the details of the commandments’ laws, which are precise and binding. In every word and every letter, in every wrinkle of the Torah’s language, one can find precise laws. On this point there is no disagreement. Not between Maimonides and Nachmanides, and not among other sages. No one disputes that this is the way the Torah teaches us laws. Here we need to be a little careful; we’ll get to this later when we talk about exposition. There is in fact a dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides, because those wrinkles, it seems to me, are often connected more to the world of exposition than to the world of plain meaning. And Maimonides does not see exposition as simply extracting laws from the biblical text. Nachmanides probably sees it as another kind of interpretation. But Maimonides probably sees it as a kind of expansion, not as exposure of what is inside, and therefore he calls it the words of the sages. We’ll talk about that when we get to the words of the sages and expositions. But then I would say I’m not sure he is entirely right when he says there is no dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides on this matter, that every wrinkle is supposed to teach us laws. He is right if we also include what Maimonides calls the words of the sages within this matter—then yes, these fine points are also part of it. And here too, as is well known, there is Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiva—“the Torah spoke in human language.” Heschel made a whole big deal out of this, that according to Rabbi Ishmael it is in fact not true that we scrutinize every wrinkle; rather there is a certain literary mode of expression, and the whole idea of “the Torah spoke in human language” is actually the opposite of what he writes here. That it is not correct to be so exacting with the language of the Torah and derive halakhic details from it. Sometimes things were written for the beauty of the rhetoric, written in order, I don’t know, to be more pleasing to the reader’s eye, and not in order to insert content or add additional content. But really I think the accepted view is indeed his view. Let’s leave aside for the moment what exactly Rabbi Ishmael meant and whether it’s even Rabbi Ishmael—that’s another question—but broadly speaking I think he is right. When we speak of the precision of the laws, we mean the degree of precision possible for a person in practical life; this is not absolute precision but relative precision. Yes, we’re not talking about mathematics. So that’s clear. By contrast, in the world there are law books of gentiles—here he reaches the point I mentioned earlier—such as the Roman code or Napoleon’s code; they are written in a dry and cumbersome style. You can already see that this is not a text written by the head of the Ponevezh yeshiva. This recourse to codes in general, familiarity with such things, is not something characteristic there. They are written in such a style because the law must be precise; the language of laws is heavy and dry, and only lawyers familiar with them can make the effort to read them. Not so the holy Torah, given to Moses our teacher from the mouth of the Almighty. Its style is beautiful, even when it deals with laws and ordinances, and it impresses every person who reads it. And again I say, it seems to me that the heart of his claim is not that it is impressive, or that it has extraordinary literary quality. The claim is that it is not written like a code. Whatever our literary evaluation of the text may be, whether this is a wonderful literary work or a miserable one, doesn’t matter. There is something here that is a literary work and not merely a code, and that is the important point. On the one hand, every commandment has an idea, and according to the idea we can understand the laws. But on the other hand, every idea is infinite, and it does not stop within the binding boundaries of Jewish law. In order to know the precise boundaries of Jewish law, we must examine the language of the verse very carefully and find in it the binding details. No human writer can write like this. Meaning, here he is already saying something else: that the goal of the literary presentation in the end is halakhic details. Notice—even that is not a simple claim. I would say that the literary writing…

[Speaker G] Not really that that’s the only goal,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe there is

[Speaker G] an important goal,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] yes, I don’t know, maybe not only that really. But I would say it could be that that isn’t the goal at all; rather the literary presentation is meant to explain to you the idea behind the things, somehow to put into one text both the laws and the ideas underlying them. He at least doesn’t say that entirely. I accept the correction. He doesn’t entirely say that. Meaning, he says that even the literary presentation is overall just a compressed form—rather than writing the details dryly, they insert them into the wrinkles of the language. Okay?

[Speaker H] And in the existing column he explained that the rhetoric is meant to invite the reader to study. Meaning, that this sums up the legal details because the person studies it and grasps and arrives at the legal details.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that is the result of the study,

[Speaker H] But the legal details—otherwise it’s not “the Torah spoke in human language,” but rather “the Torah spoke in the language of abbreviated codes and incidentally it can be read.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fair enough. The Torah spoke in human language, but in the end the interpretation you give to that human language is an interpretation that yields you additional halakhic details, and not—or not only—the rhetoric,

[Speaker H] meaning the rhetoric invites the reader to find more details.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Okay, and not only ideas behind it—that’s what I mean to say. So there are those who want to say that the halakhic details are written this way in order to teach you, in some indirect way, the ideas. He says no—the wrinkles in the language also give you the details. Now true, this is not mathematics, and obviously this is interpretation, we need to study it, and there can also be disputes here. But broadly speaking it is a way of deriving further halakhic details. No human writer can write like this. Legal writers can write in the introduction the idea in clear and beautiful language, and afterward the body of the law and its details in heavy and cumbersome language. Yes, there is always an introduction to the law, and after that the clauses of the law, or the rationale of the law, and after that here are its technical details. The Torah writes the idea and the details together in a sophisticated way. From every word in the Torah one can infer and learn practical laws, all according to the rules of language and modes of expression, and this is the instruction we received from Sinai. I’ll stop here for a moment and talk a bit about the meaning of what he has said so far. The basic question that arises here is of course: why do this? Beyond literary pleasantness perhaps, I don’t know. Meaning, if there is a set of details the Torah wants to convey—as seems to emerge from the plain sense of what he says—and there are two ways to do it: I can give introductory remarks to the law and afterward write its details, or I can put both things together inside the description of the law itself, but do so in a more literary way, not in a heavy way. What is the advantage of the second way over the first? In other words, if both give me the same thing, then what are you saying—that it’s just nicer to read that way? More sophisticated? Is it meant to entertain the reader? What, why?

[Speaker H] You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand what is written.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand what is written—that may be, although I think that to understand what is written in the Torah you need much greater skill than the skill of a lawyer reading a legal text. In my view, without question. Until you reach a sufficient level of skill to extract from the Torah—not to mention even from the Talmud and the medieval authorities (Rishonim)—the Jewish law, that takes many more years than the training of a lawyer.

[Speaker H] To reach final specificity perhaps? Yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But even without specificity, in a law book too you can derive things. Any layman who reads a law book more or less understands it. It’s not only the details he may miss. So the question that arises here… the first question that arises when reading this is: so what exactly is the difference? So why indeed did the Torah choose the second way rather than the first if both give me the same thing?

[Speaker G] Why? It seems he’s claiming that this way allows much, much more. Meaning? He says no book could write out all the details for you—it’s not reasonable.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he didn’t say that it couldn’t write all the details, but rather that it can’t do both things at once. That’s what he writes. You can add something else.

[Speaker G] What he writes… you understood him as saying that this is the uniqueness of the Torah? No, no, what he writes,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “No human writer can write like this.” About what? Legal writers can write in an introduction the idea in clear and beautiful language, and afterward the body of the law and its details in heavy and cumbersome language. But the Torah writes the idea and the details together in a sophisticated way. So the claim is, again, it may be that behind his words lies what you are saying, but what he writes is not that. There are two options here, and perhaps only the Torah can—or the Holy One, blessed be He, can—write a text of that kind, and a human writer cannot. But what exactly is the benefit of these wondrous skills of the Holy One, blessed be He? Meaning, if in the end I learn the same thing, then what difference does it make? So it seems pretty clearly that it won’t give me the same thing. In other words, there is a difference.

[Speaker I] The second way in the end is something closed. Closed, totally bounded. Once you have a law book, these are the laws and nothing else. You need skill to understand what is written there, but that’s it. And here it’s something that has potential to develop.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so that’s a point we’ll get to later.

[Speaker I] That’s a significant difference, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that’s a point I’ll get to later. I’m actually not aiming at that point for now. We’ll get to it. It’s connected to what I said earlier, Maimonides and Nachmanides. Because the question is, when you make an exposition, are you developing the system, or merely exposing more things that were actually hidden inside it, a kind of code? Right? That’s basically the question here. But I want to talk about something perhaps a little—maybe it’s related but a bit different. Meaning, the question is whether, even if I am only exposing, right? Suppose I am only exposing the intentions of the Holy One, blessed be He. Still, first, it could be what you said earlier—that there are a huge number of details, and it is impossible to write them in a linear way, and the Torah managed to put them all into the text and somehow I will succeed in exposing them all—again, not expanding, but exposing them. And it couldn’t have been done in the form of a law book.

[Speaker I] It’s a way of shortening?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, a kind of sophisticated shortcut. Let’s say that’s one possibility. I assume that’s not the whole story, but it illustrates one possible way to see the difference. I think there really is something beyond that. After all, you really can’t write out the details and cover everything. That’s the positivist illusion. I think we once spoke about this, I don’t remember, that legal positivism—and philosophical positivism too, but legal positivism is part of it—lives under a certain illusion, yes, this is Kelsen generally, lives under the illusion that one can exhaust a legal system in the form of a deductive logical system. Meaning, I’ll give you a set of principles, and all that remains for the judge is simply to do a calculation, like a computer, right? To derive from those principles what the law should be, what the law says in the situation before him. He is basically a transparent conduit. Maybe he has mathematical skill, but that’s not—it doesn’t add anything of his own. It’s all exposing what is already within things. This positivist conception—again connected to that fundamentalism—this positivist conception got hit with the same blow that rationalism in general got in the middle of the twentieth century. The world wars are the historical-sociological expression of this, but it also took philosophical blows, scientific blows, legal blows—in every sphere. It took blows in many different spheres in parallel. And therefore it basically collapsed. Positivism has been in major retreat ever since, though there have been some partial recoveries. As usual, we of course swung to the opposite pole and completely lost faith in a system of laws and rules, and in the idea that the judge can basically do whatever he wants. Natural justice will guide him and not the engraved law, as it were. So precisely now, I think, there is more of a search around some balance point. To move back. Yes, to move back in some way. Some combination. But it is completely clear that no—not even a computer—will be able to be a judge. That is clear. A computer will not be able to be a judge. It’s not that the judge can do whatever he wants, because otherwise what do you need your law book for? What is the legislator’s role?

[Speaker C] Unless a computer can be a human being.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, yes, you’re right—then it’s a human, not a computer. But I’m saying, if we do accept that the legislator has a role and the judge has a role, then clearly there is no deduction here, but there is some guidance that the law gives to the judge’s decision. That is roughly the mainstream today. There are extremes, but most positions are shades within this middle conception. Now it seems to me that actually in the Talmud there is a very strong expression of this, and it indicates that this is already so in the Torah. That’s interesting—I never thought about it this way. In the Talmud it was always obvious to me that it is so, because the Talmud, which is supposed to be the highest halakhic code, the most basic one—let’s leave the Mishnah aside for the moment; the Mishnah isn’t quite—but let’s speak of the Talmud—it certainly is not built like a code. Now without the abilities of the Holy One, blessed be He—the Talmud was written by human beings. This is not some issue of ability, it’s a conception. Regardless of ability, the conception is that we want to write our canon this way, our code this way. Also canon, but our code this way. We don’t want to write it like Napoleon’s code or the Roman code. So here, beyond the question whether you have the ability to do it in the literary way he’s talking about here, first of all there is the question whether you want to. Is it right to do it this way? Or is there something about this form of writing that is better? Again, independently of the question whether I am enough of a virtuoso to do it. First of all, what would be preferable—suppose I had the full ability to do either one? In the Talmud it seems that you can see that the conception is that it is preferable to do something not written in the form of a code. And it’s give-and-take; almost no passage ends with a bottom-line conclusion. It ends with two opinions. Sometimes there is some refutation or difficulty, but that is rare.

[Speaker H] But the Talmud goes around the code of the Mishnah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but the Mishnah too is not exactly a code. This one says such-and-such and that one says such-and-such—that too is not exactly a code. And there too you have the cases, “an incident occurred with this” and “an incident occurred with that.” True, I told you, I said the Mishnah is less what I’m talking about. I’m talking more about the Talmud. Our basic code is certainly the Talmud. In other words, the Mishnah is not—it’s only certain kernels of the Talmud in general. So I think you see it in the Talmud. In the Torah it’s not such a proof, because the Holy One, blessed be He, wrote it. He does whatever He wants. It may be that He has virtuosic abilities that others don’t have; maybe—He does. But the Talmud was written by human beings. They could have written the Shulchan Arukh and they could have written the Talmud. Again, maybe I’m being anachronistic and they didn’t think that way, I don’t know. But I’m saying, at least the way I look at it, in my anachronistic way, they had two ways to write it, and still they chose this way. They chose this way because they understood that it gives something that a code would not give. In other words, there is an important point here. And what he notices is that already in the Torah itself it is this way. The Torah itself already writes laws not in the form of a code. So the sages in the Talmud didn’t invent this; they simply followed the tradition that already began in the Torah. What lies behind this? In other words, why—what advantage is there to this type of writing? A more open kind, of course—very dangerous, by the way, because everyone interprets differently, you cannot close things off. It seems very illogical, on the face of it, to write a code this way. If you want to tell people what to do, this is the least successful form for doing it. What? Orally? Yes, but when they wrote, they wrote. And even orally, to transmit the texts orally—

[Speaker J] That was the intention.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, but there is something here—

[Speaker J] I think so, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] and there is here—

[Speaker J] something else. I think that in his description of Scripture there is a lot of love for Scripture. That’s clear. And he mixes in a kind of emotional element. For example, later he talks about “and two brothers dwell together,” and then he analyzes the law of levirate marriage, which all sounds very dry. Right. And Scripture begins in a narrative way: “and two brothers dwell together,” as though because they dwell, yes. Meaning, there is also an element here of connection.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I understand, but that’s why I said earlier that it seems to me the main thrust of his thesis is not admiration for the quality of the biblical text. Even if you were someone who was not at all impressed by its literary quality, there is still a claim here that even someone unimpressed would agree with: that this text is literature and not a code. That is—and I think that’s the important point for him. He is also impressed, of course, fine, but I think that is less important to the core of his argument. I spoke about this, I think, last year, or certainly I’ve spoken about it more than once in previous years. There is something in the decision to write the canon—and this time I am indeed speaking about the Talmudic canon—in this form and not in the form of a code, which to me is really a stroke of genius. Again, I have no idea whether they really saw it in advance that way, or whether this is an interpretation I’m making today.

[Speaker C] But according to Wikipedia at least, everything was written at roughly the same time, from around 500 BCE to 500 CE.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Which code? The Roman code. You’re saying they had such an option. Okay. Fine.

[Speaker H] There was the Code of Justinian in the fifth century.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Justinian, yes. Justinian? Yes. In any case, that’s why I think it’s true that both options were before them; I don’t think it was so far-fetched that they might also have considered that option. So why did they really make this decision? So look, let’s try for a moment to think what would have happened if they had written Maimonides instead of the Talmud.

[Speaker H] It would have been very clear, but only up to a certain point. Meaning, reality keeps going, and at some point it would no longer suffice.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It would no longer suffice, and they would have to break it somewhere. Meaning, there really is—to our surprise—Jewish law is, overall, a very ancient system, a very ancient normative system. Throughout the whole history of Jewish law only a single code was written. Only Maimonides. He is the only code in the history of Jewish law. That is, there is the Arukh HaShulchan—no, the Shulchan Arukh is partial, and it also brings several opinions, but it is partial, only for laws practiced in our time. Maimonides collected everything up to his time, rearranged it in his own classification, rearranged it and organized it. That’s a job usually done by teams of dozens of people over dozens of years.

[Speaker E] And Arukh HaShulchan also rearranged it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, I said Arukh HaShulchan, I mentioned it earlier. Arukh HaShulchan followed Maimonides, and it also isn’t written exactly—what?

[Speaker E] He didn’t include everything.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How? He omitted some things.

[Speaker E] In Arukh HaShulchan HeAtid he added, he completed. No, no, in the regular Arukh HaShulchan. The whole laws of interest don’t appear there. He didn’t manage to write that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. And nevertheless he followed Maimonides.

[Speaker G] Well, he followed an already paved path, you could say.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, he followed a paved path, and it also isn’t really written in the form of a code; there too it has give-and-take, so it’s not exactly—it’s a looser book, less rigid than Maimonides. Maimonides too, again, doesn’t write in terms of rules; he writes cases. So even that still isn’t completely modern writing; he doesn’t write the halakhic rules, he writes cases.

[Speaker E] But in form he didn’t write,

[Speaker H] he didn’t write much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. In any case, that is the only code, and that is very surprising. And when that code was written, he got hit over the head for it. He got hit over the head for that very thing.

[Speaker H] Meaning, who excommunicated Torah study in Spain before him?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, fine, I’m not judging him historically right now. I’m trying to show how sages throughout the generations understood how Torah should be transmitted. He may have been right; he certainly brought enormous benefit, no question. But I’m saying, the fact is that even when it was done, he got hit over the head, and that means the sages probably understood that Torah should not be transmitted that way. What would we do in the yeshivot today if there were no Maimonides? Right? So Torah is not supposed to be transmitted that way.

[Speaker G] What, we’d listen to Maimonides and study only Maimonides? Only Maimonides.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Today you already can, after we have developed everything else; now from Maimonides too you can derive everything. But this conception is interesting, because following the Talmud, it continues in the later generations. It’s not only that codes aren’t produced; there is opposition to codes. Meaning, there is a kind of antagonism toward someone who tries to put things in order. Maimonides was an enormous organizer; there was opposition to the attempt to put things in order. And this is a continuation of the phenomenon he is speaking about here. And I think that really the redaction of the Talmud—even if no matter how it happened—but in the end, the fact that this became the canon accompanying us throughout history, that is an amazing, truly brilliant decision. In other words, if they had produced Maimonides, it would have shattered after not very long. It would have shattered first of all because it is too rigid and does not allow conclusions to be drawn for different situations. Give-and-take allows much more. From the give-and-take you can apply it, see it, basically continue that give-and-take to other situations. But if what binds you is a bottom line, the bottom line will break. Not only will it break—disputes and differing circumstances will arise, and Torah will become a thousand Torahs. In other words, no trace of Torah would remain if the Talmud had been written in the form of Maimonides. Fine? Now if they had written nothing—if instead of the Talmud they had left it completely open—again the whole thing would have broken. The Jewish people after Babylonia—the Talmud was more or less written in Babylonia when the Jewish people were more or less concentrated there, with a more or less national structure and legal autonomy—there perhaps it could live even without being written and fixed as a canon. But afterward, when they begin to scatter throughout the world, and every ten Jews settle in some fishing village where one of them knows how to read and he is their rabbi—what would come out of all this? In the end everyone would do whatever he wanted. There would be no framework to which everyone was committed, and again it would fall apart. This is the only way that succeeded in preserving a people so dispersed in such different places, and still allowing some kind of discourse among the different parts, and to feel bound within the same—not only feel, but actually be—bound to the same system, with the possibility of discourse and argument between parts of the world completely different from one another. That is only possible because of the redaction in the form of Talmudic give-and-take. And that redaction is something brilliant. Now I think that this, as I said earlier, really continues what Rabbi Dalia describes here regarding Scripture. And here is another point I think is worth noticing. There is “Write for yourselves this song.” For in the plain sense there in the verses it is talking about the Song of Ha’azinu. But the sages already interpret that the Torah is called a song. “Write for yourselves this song”—there are commentators who say that this means writing the—not commentators, it’s the Talmud—writing the Torah. Fine? Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch writes that perhaps the law is to write Ha’azinu, only the Torah is not written in separate sections, so one writes the whole Torah. Fine, I don’t know, that’s a bit of pilpul, but the plain meaning is that the Torah itself is called a song. And if you look there at the plain meaning of the verses, it is clear that this is the intention. In other words, from the plain meaning of the verses it is clear that the intention is that the Torah itself is what is meant by “Write for yourselves the Torah,” and then “song,” and then—there is a kind of interchange there between the word Torah and the word song. Why is the Torah called a song? Here I think it is connected to what he is talking about. We spoke about this. What actually defines poetry? Once I had to speak in Munkatch here on the Sabbath of Beshalach, the Sabbath of Song. So in order to speak about it I looked for a definition: what is poetry? That’s the point worth starting from. So I opened the Hebrew Encyclopedia and discovered that there is no entry for poetry. None. Unbelievable. I don’t know what they do there in the humanities—there isn’t even an entry for poetry in the Hebrew Encyclopedia. In any case, that’s surprising.

[Speaker J] There is something good about the fact that it isn’t written.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, following what we are talking about here.

[Speaker J] Right away with you people everything has to be defined. And it’s good that it doesn’t have to be defined. I think that’s good.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] She feels excellent, but what does she have—fine. Everyone, I also feel excellent when I lie on the beach; why do they pay me? I think that’s a mistake.

[Speaker G] No, no, that there’s no entry for poetry—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that is going to an extreme which, in my view, is far from—I think they probably just didn’t have enough, I don’t know, of a crystallized picture; that’s how I understand it. I don’t know, that’s just a conjecture of course. Pure logic. Here we’ve arrived—

[Speaker H] at page 79, yes, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that’s from the Talmudic Encyclopedia—that’s where it ends.

[Speaker G] So in any case there wasn’t a cross-reference to another entry or something like that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, nothing. It isn’t there. It doesn’t appear. So I started looking around a bit at what people say. Usually you find poets writing what is called ars poetica. Ars poetica means poems that themselves try to define the concept of poetry, or the work of the poet, whatever. So you hear poets saying a poem is like sea foam and a cloud, I built a white city, or I don’t know, all kinds of metaphors like that, where it isn’t clear how much they add to understanding the matter. Maybe they have some value, but I’m saying: an academic field is still supposed to move toward some kind of definition. Now obviously there are things that are hard to define, things that cannot be defined. Fine—make progress, do some narrowing, try to define, try to explain why it can’t be defined—that too is something. In other words, there has to be some systematic work. I don’t know—I found almost nothing; I didn’t do enormous searches, but in Hebrew there is almost nothing. There is one book called, I think, On Poetry by some famous literary critic—I forgot his name. A small booklet. Even there I didn’t really find systematic work. In any case, I began to think a bit about this issue—how one might define the concept of poetry. And when I look at it, or when I want to contrast it with something opposite to it, usually poetry is the opposite of prose. But prose too is something that, in my opinion—well, maybe some methodological introduction is needed here. There is a book by Gideon Ofrat called What Is Art. And there he tries to define what art is. No less of a minefield. So what is art? He goes through it chapter by chapter. And he does systematic work. Each time he tries to define it by proposing one new definition, and he takes examples from the history of art in various fields: poetry, sculpture, whatever, and shows that no definition stands the test. And in the end the book concludes that art is what is displayed in a museum, as with Duchamp, right? With the urinals. Meaning, basically it’s the same principle. So the way he proceeded led him to a kind of despair, because no definition really holds water. And I think that many times the inability to define a complex phenomenon—and in life the phenomena are usually complex—can somehow be overcome, or we can make progress, if we try to do what is usually called theoretical work. And theoretical work means trying to define concepts that are theoretical; they are not from life itself, but those I know how to define well. And then to see that the phenomena in life are some combination or mixture in varying proportions of those theoretical concepts. Yes, it’s like scientific work in physics. Yes, scientific work in physics: so there are Newton’s laws. Fine, Newton’s laws: a moving body—we spoke about this when we spoke about the ukimtot—a body moving with constant motion and on which no force acts moves in constant motion in a straight line. No one has ever seen such a body, ever. There has never been such a body and there never will be. Why? Because some force acts on every body, some friction, some gravitation even from afar, something, a little electromagnetic field. There is no body living in an absolute vacuum in infinity, in infinite space. That’s what would have to be the case for no force to act on that body. Right? So what do we actually do? Reality itself is a reality that is always complex. What do we do in order to deal with it? We define pure, theoretical realities, which do not appear in reality itself, but which we know how to analyze, define, and understand fully. Afterward we take them and use them in analyzing our complex reality. So let’s say I know that in my world every body moves under the influence of gravitation and an electromagnetic field and friction and whatever you want. So I define the law of gravitation by itself, as though there were nothing else. No friction, no electromagnetism, no temperature, nothing. In a hypothetical world where there are only two bodies and nothing else, okay? What would happen there? That will give me the law of gravitation, okay? The attraction between bodies. After that I make another hypothetical world, and there I test what happens when there are two point charges, each charged with one unit of charge. What happens there? Fine? Regardless of gravitation. No gravitation, no mass. Point bodies—they have no mass, nothing. The question is what happens there. Then I make a world where there is friction. After that I try to take all these Platonic worlds and connect them together to our reality, and then I can understand how these things work together. Now, a complete explanation of our reality usually won’t exist. There is no problem in physics for which we can give a fully precise exact solution in real-world physics. There is no such thing. We can make approximations, better or worse, more intelligent or less, but never an exact solution. No physical problem can be solved exactly. These are the exact sciences? Exact in the Platonic worlds, not here. Here there are always approximations. But you need to know how to make approximations, how to analyze a complex situation intelligently. So you need to make assumptions, you need to use the right abstractions, and so on, and then you can analyze a complex reality in which there will always be some friction, some—it won’t be completely exact, but the theoretical abstractions help you understand the complex reality. So here too I think what is missing is a pure conceptual world—in the context of poetry, I’m returning to poetry, or to art, whatever—a pure conceptual world whose concepts I can define in a Platonic way. They do not appear in our world in their purity. But after I understand them, I can see, in different proportions, how to analyze the real concepts, the concepts I know. Now, what happens in poetry? It seems to me that the pole opposed to poetry is really not exactly prose. When we speak of prose, many times we mean literature, a literary work. And in a literary work there is a poetic dimension, as connected to what he says. There is a poetic dimension. What?

[Speaker H] There is also prose in rhyme.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rhymed prose. Following that, I went there—some people here think, from that forum I participated in, around that time, after that Torah portion. That one, Beshalach. So I started giving a series of talks there about what poetry is. And I wrote a whole series of posts there, with all kinds of things—I think it was very interesting, at least in my opinion. The first question I asked, when I asked what poetry is—after all, you can have poetry without rhyme and prose with rhyme and all that—immediately one of the participants there took the text I had written, added vowelization, broke it into lines, and presented it in the form of a poem. In other words, he showed that the dry prose text I had written—even that can be turned into a poem, with just a light edit, right? Meaning, you actually can’t really define the difference. And then, in the course of the discussion, I think several very important insights clicked for me—very interesting ones, and ones that really can advance our understanding of this issue. And my claim is basically this: the opposite pole of poetry is not prose, in the sense of a literary work. It’s simply what he was talking about here: a code, the Napoleonic Code. A code is really the classic example. Meaning, it’s something that has nothing but its linear meaning. That is, what’s written, the meaning of the words, that’s it. In other words, what’s written—you interpret the words, interpret the sentences. Again, that too is of course an abstraction, because a sentence always contains something more than just a collection of words; it depends on context. Fine, I’m ignoring those side issues. On the principled level, this abstract concept—which again, doesn’t really exist anywhere—but the abstract Platonic concept I want to put first on the board is dry prose, meaning the code, the pure code, meaning you just translate the words, that’s what’s written, that’s it. Nothing beyond that. No interpretation needed, nothing. Okay? That’s one pole. The opposite pole to that—again, it also exists nowhere—but at least now we can begin to think about what it is. The opposite pole is something that contains nothing at all from the linear interpretation of the words. Meaning, it’s a text—I’m talking only about texts right now, of course—it’s a text whose interpretation is not found at all in its literal meaning. Now that really is poetry. That’s the definition of poetry, actually—a definition by negation.

[Speaker H] Which is more abstract? There are simpler kinds of poetry.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, wait, just a second, I’ll get to that. Those are already the combinations. Exactly the point. I want to show the methodology of how you move toward the issue. Right now we’re calling everything poetry because we don’t have a sharp Platonic conceptual system, but now I want to do that and then produce the combinations.

[Speaker B] You can also take a code and write it in a way that at the same time conveys the precise meaning and also has something beyond it. For example, sometimes people argue—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —that the ultimate form of something that contains only what is inside it is computer code, because there’s nothing beyond the language itself. And yet there are those online examples of writing computer code that, beyond the fact that it runs and works, when you read it it’s actually a poem.

[Speaker B] But that’s exactly what I’m saying.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You worked hard on that here. That doesn’t matter.

[Speaker C] But it shows that you can write something that has only its apparent meaning and still give it meaning.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly what I said before. The concept I’m talking about when I speak of the code is an abstract concept; it doesn’t exist in the world. Once there’s a concrete code in the world, there will always be someone who can turn it into a poem. That’s exactly the point. But I think the concept can be defined as a Platonic concept. Computer code with people reading it who are themselves computers. Meaning, they don’t have interpretive and creative abilities, theoretically. There’s no such thing—that’s exactly the point. I’m putting concepts on the board here that don’t really exist in our world, but I think they help decode the complicated phenomena that do appear in our world. So I’m saying: the first theoretical concept is that theoretical dry prose, yes, where there’s nothing—computer code is an excellent example of this. Pure computer code. Okay? Now opposite that—and this is the definition of poetry in a nutshell—the pole called poetry, not what we ordinarily call poetry, but the theoretical pole called poetry, is a text—think of a poem, I don’t know, “I walked beneath—”

[Speaker E] Waiting for Godot?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Waiting for Godot isn’t exactly a poem, but yes—it’s exactly that. A play also has a poetic dimension; that’s exactly the complexity I’m trying to overcome here. Now take just some poem, I don’t know, “The streetlamp with precious light and the green tree,” I don’t know what, it doesn’t matter right now, even without rhyme, that’s not important. When you read such a thing, it’s obvious that its meaning—if one can even speak of such a thing; some people say that’s a dirty word, the “meaning” of a poem—but its meaning, if one can speak of such a thing, has nothing to do with either the light or the lamp or the tree or the color green. No connection whatsoever. The words and their meanings in the literal, linear sense are only the medium through which something passes. It conveys to you something completely abstract. That is, it’s not…

[Speaker E] Maybe a code? A code?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but again, code is a description of content in language. In that sense it actually belongs to the first pole. Here I’m not talking about a code in the sense that I can decode it one-to-one, because it’s a translation of language. I’m talking about something that is almost the antithesis of a code. Meaning, you take the thing—and every child reading it understands: there’s light, and the lamp shines with precious light, everything is fine, wonderful, and the tree and all that. But the context of the thing, if you relate to it as a poem, means that what it conveys to you is not connected to the literal meaning. It’s connected neither to lamps nor even to the situation itself, but through the situation, through the literal meaning, you enter and try to feel something that is not described in words but through the words—or, if you like, in the spaces between the words. Okay? Or I’ll formulate it now more precisely: the meaning of a poem lies in the structure more than in the meaning of the words themselves. That’s also why in a poem, very often, structure and the way it is printed matter more than in prose. Not necessarily—a poem can also have nothing to do with that—but that expresses it; those correlations are the practical appearances of the matter. When I try to define the Platonic, theoretical phenomenon, I say that a poem is basically a kind of abstract form. Now, a form that is not attached to matter exists in the world of ideas, and according to Aristotle doesn’t exist at all—there’s no such thing. For a form to appear, it has to cling to matter; there is no “bookness.” There are concrete books from which we can abstract and talk about “bookness,” yes, like “horseness,” okay? Something detached from the thing itself, from the object—a pure abstract form. There’s no such thing in our world; again, this is a theoretical abstraction. Okay? So here too it’s the same. In the end, of course a poem is made of words, but the words are only the medium on which a form is clothed, and the form is the poem. The words are just the medium. Now it seems to me that this is basically the definition, as close as one can get, to the concept of a poem. It’s a definition by negation, by the way. I didn’t say what the forms are and so on; I said what it is not—it’s not the literal meaning—but still I think that…

[Speaker J] I think it’s when you say in three words what you would write in a whole novel.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But why? Why? Because it’s not the words.

[Speaker J] The intensity of the appeal to your emotions, the intensity of the emotions the poem arouses in you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but that’s because it’s—

[Speaker J] Just—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —an expression of the fact that it’s not the words.

[Speaker J] “My world to me is like the world of an ant.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, yes. I said, for that you’d need to write several paragraphs in prose. So I’m saying: that’s exactly the point. I think that also expresses this fact, that the poem is not in the meaning of its words. That’s exactly the point. It’s something beyond that—you can talk about emotions, you can talk about structures, you can talk about many things, you can take it in many directions. But the point is that what’s there goes beyond the simple literal meaning of the words. That’s the point, and that’s the difference between this and prose. So if I now want to place the two extreme poles—not the things we call poems here, which are made up of many different mixtures of the two poles—first of all I need to place the two extreme poles, because that’s the beginning of the work. The two extreme poles are: words in the sense of computer code, words where all you have is their literal meaning and that’s it, as against a collection of words where what you have in them has nothing at all to do with their literal meaning—not in a linear way, that is—but rather the words convey to you some kind of, I don’t know, idea, form, something abstract. Bialik once wrote that if I could write it in prose, I wouldn’t write a poem about it. Meaning, when something cannot be conveyed in a prosaic way, you write a poem about it. Now what happens is that once we understand this, suddenly we can see that many of the things we call poems—we call all of them poems—but those are practical objects, concrete objects. None of them is really a poem. Because the real poem doesn’t exist in our world; there’s no such thing as a real poem. What exists in our world are increasing degrees of poeticity in a given text. Okay? Now, it could be a play, which looks quite a bit like prose. But it’s clear that a play also doesn’t just come to describe situations and that’s it, so you understand the meaning of the words. There’s something in it that tries to use the situation as a medium through which it conveys something beyond. So that means a play is a little bit of a poem. The same with a literary work—maybe it’s a little less of a poem than a play, maybe a little more; you can argue about that. But all these things that have a poetic dimension really confuse us when we come to define them. And the methodological way to deal with this is not to try to define the realistic phenomena in front of us—that’s a mistake, we won’t succeed—but rather to try to find an intelligent conceptual system of concepts that do not exist in our world, that appear in different proportions and spread out across the entire space of the realistic phenomena, with different combinations of them—like two axes, x and y, that span a whole two-dimensional space, so that every point in that two-dimensional space has different proportions of x and y. Okay? So here too, you need to find a conceptual system that somehow spans all the phenomena belonging to the field I’m dealing with: plays, ballads, the songs in the Torah, for example—I don’t think they are all that poetic, the songs in the Torah, because they do contain some statement that touches the meaning of the words; they are not poems, not really close to the poetic pole, in my opinion. The poetry that exists in the Torah, yes, and so on. When we say poetry, in the Song at the Sea we mean what it says: “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously,” okay, expressed in a literary way, expressing emotion—but it’s pretty close to the literal meaning of the words; it’s close to prose. In that sense it’s not all that poetic. Okay? So one can talk about various types of phenomena located at different points on this axis between those two poles. I can, by the way, bring other examples of these kinds of analyses, and in my humble opinion this is a methodological question worth writing a book about—maybe one day I will. Because many fields in the humanities fail precisely at this point. That is, people despair of art or poetry, or whatever—you know, intelligence. Yes, I spoke about that once too: what is intelligence? There too, this despair that says everyone is intelligent because intelligence can’t be defined, and there are multiple intelligences and all sorts of things of that kind—that too is a very convenient despair, as is well known, because it leads to everyone having the same status, which is egalitarian and wonderful. But all these things stem from the fact that you take complex phenomena, and the complexity causes you to give up on defining them, and then you turn that into an ideology that says it can’t be defined. And on the contrary, anyone who tries to define it is just, I don’t know, some square natural scientist. Instead of trying to do orderly, systematic theoretical work that gets you as close as possible—not always possible, but as close as possible—to a definition, or at least to one by negation. I think I may have once told you about—I see I have to finish already. There was a Jew at Tel Aviv University named Tomas Kulka. Some café-sitting type, they told me, in philosophy. He wrote a series of articles on aesthetics. He worked in philosophy there and dealt with aesthetics, and he wrote a series of articles on kitsch. What is kitsch? It’s really fascinating. He tried to define in a systematic way what kitsch is. If you try to define it through the artistic level of the painting, you won’t succeed, because there are kitsch paintings of a very high artistic level—meaning complexity, artistry, everything—nothing works, nothing fits any definition. In the end, his bottom-line definition was that kitsch is a painting—or not necessarily a painting, also a poem, or whatever, even a photograph—the crying child at sunset or something like that, where the emotion it causes in you does not stem from the painting but from the situation depicted in it. When you get moved seeing that crying child at sunset, you would be moved if you saw the child itself. Meaning, there is no added value from the painter. The painting hasn’t done anything here. In photography, by the way, it’s more subtle, because the role of photography is to capture situations. There’s a book by Roland Barthes on photography; I think it’s very interesting with regard to photography, but leave that aside. So in kitsch, the claim is that it can be something requiring very high technical skill and all the dimensions and it’s moving and everything needed for good art—but there is no added value here from the artwork. It’s simply a property of the situation itself. Or in a poem, for example, the poem will be kitsch when you’re sobbing because of what is described in it, not because of the way the poem is written. It describes the crisis a person went through when he parted from his beloved, or I don’t know, his whole family was killed—whatever you like. So why are you moved? You’re moved because of what the poem describes, because of the literal meaning of the words, because of the situation—not because of the added value. Now art is the added value that passes through the medium of the situations, but the situations are only the medium through which it passes. This is exactly the same as the definition of the difference between a poem and computer code, or between a poem and prose, in the sense of prose in the theoretical sense. Okay? It’s the same thing. Poetry is simply a kind of art. So of course the same definition I spoke about with regard to poetry also applies to art. And I’ll just finish, because I want to conclude this point of Shadal: when he says that the Torah is not written in the form of a code, what he really means is what the Sages said—that the Torah is called poetry. The Torah being called poetry means that even the parts—look, it says “an eye for an eye,” and the Sages interpret it as monetary compensation. Fine? It’s not just something beyond what is written; it’s the opposite of what is written. Meaning, there is some conception here that we are not bound at all to the simple literal meaning of the text. Now that doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want. That’s not true. There are controls; there is right and wrong also in interpretation and exegesis of the Torah, without getting into the question now of how that works—but there is such a thing; the proof is that people argue. But the fact that we can reach a situation in which the interpretive outcome has nothing at all to do with the words—it is the opposite of the words—what does that mean? It means that these words are merely a medium for conveying to us forms of thinking, or ideas, or I don’t know, more abstract things that cannot be written. “If I could write it in prose, I wouldn’t write a poem about it.” Those are the two possibilities he describes here for writing the book of laws: whether to give an introduction of the ideas and afterward the collection of details, or to write it all together. I think that’s the point. These are not two forms, both possible, both expressing the same content and containing the same content. They are totally different things. There are things that cannot be written in prosaic form. You must write them in this kind of form, because what you want to convey is something that cannot be formulated as prose, but only as… a kind of form of thought. Now what this means is that when we receive the Torah, in the end the Torah—Rabbi Tzadok writes this somewhere—in the end the Torah is a way of looking, not a collection of rulings or bottom lines. It is a way of looking. It may be that I arrive at a completely opposite conclusion from the one people reached in earlier generations or in different situations, and yet I am their true continuation. Because the conceptual framework or this way of looking, which in those circumstances and at that time led to conclusion x, in these circumstances and in our time leads to conclusion not-x. And that is continuity; it is not a contradiction. It’s the same thing. Because what has to be preserved is not the bottom line, not the literal meaning, but the way of looking. And the way of looking can be preserved even if the medium that carries it can reverse itself. Yes? When I say that a person does not repay a debt before its due date, if there were a situation in which people did repay before the due date, then the Jewish law would be that if someone claimed, “I paid it after the due date,” he would not be believed. Right? Because people do pay before the due date. Let’s say—just for the sake of the example. Have I changed the Jewish law? Of course not. The Jewish law used the medium of the reality that prevailed in the time of the Talmud—when the reality was that a person did not repay before the due date—in order to convey to me the idea that presumptive status can extract money. The presumption there was that a person does not repay before the due date. But that doesn’t matter. If in my world the presumption is the opposite, then the same Torah idea—that presumptive status can extract money—will lead me to the opposite practical halakhic conclusion. But that is the continuation and the correct application of the Torah for the present time. It is not something else. It is the same thing. Because the Torah is not the presumption that a person does not repay before the due date. That presumption is a description of reality, and that can change too; it has no holiness at all. The idea conveyed through that medium of reality—that presumptive status can extract money—that idea remains forever. And the reality under discussion can change, even reverse completely. Okay? So I think that’s what he means when he speaks about the poetic or literary structure.