Time in Jewish Law 6

Table of Contents

• Messianic Jews, missionary activity, and online views
• Christian missionary activity, Catholics and Protestants, and the Pope
• Christian supporters of Israel, evangelicals, and support for Israel
• An academic look at fundamentalism and rebellion within religions
• Returning to the past in religious society: the hilltop youth and living “like in the old days”
• Sociology of religion, Yitzhak Geiger, and S.D.H.
• Authenticity, Meimad, Uriel Simon, and Rabbi Lichtenstein
• Peace meetings, the Temple Mount, and Haram al-Sharif
• The National Religious Party, the status quo, Ben-Gurion, and Leibowitz
• The Chief Rabbinate, the Supreme Court, and a British-style revolution
• Selection and conditions: opening a halakhic / of Jewish law lecture
• The Rashba: when selection applies
• The question of conditions versus selection
• Rabbi Amiel’s and Rashi’s distinctions: retroactive and retrospective
• The meaning of the dispute and its connection to the logic of “clarification”
• For its own sake in a bill of divorce: name, attribute, and future definition
• A proposed understanding: selection as selecting from within a group, not causality in time

Summary

General Overview

The text presents confusion about missionary activity in Hebrew by young Israelis who identify as “Messianic Jews,” and describes suspicion that the scale of online views comes from tempting headlines or from leveraging Christian audiences abroad. It then moves to comparisons between fundamentalism and rebellion against religious establishments in different religions and within religious society in Israel, including criticism of academic-liberal religious circles and the search for religious authenticity. In the final part there is a halakhic / of Jewish law lecture by Rabbi Michael Abraham on selection, conditions, and “for its own sake” in a bill of divorce, with discussion of the Rashba and Rashi and a proposal to understand selection as identifying an object from within a group rather than as a causal effect of the future on the past. That concludes Rabbi Michael Abraham’s lecture, Thursday, the 12th of Shevat 5777, February 9, 2017.

Messianic Jews, missionary activity, and online views

The speakers describe a confusing situation in which two young Israeli Hebrew speakers present themselves as a stream within Judaism and play off each other as “Messianic Jews,” in contrast to the usual perception that missionary activity comes from abroad. They note that in the past there was “classic” missionary activity in the country by Christians from Europe even before the State of Israel, and now there is online activity by Messianic Jews with videos in Hebrew that get hundreds of thousands of views, and it is claimed that they have influence and that people are persuaded and even take practical steps. They raise the possibility that some of the views are counted because of ads and tempting headlines in the style of “the video that shocks the rabbis,” and people click in and then close it, and also the possibility of a “lobby” that brings clicks from large Christian audiences abroad.

Christian missionary activity, Catholics and Protestants, and the Pope

The speakers argue over whether there is Christian missionary activity today, claiming that the Catholics backed away from it following Vatican decisions and recognition of Judaism as “the older sister,” but on the other hand it is argued that the Protestants are certainly missionary and that even in Catholicism it is not simple to implement the Pope’s decisions. They bring examples of controversies surrounding the Pope, protests against him, and claims about changes in positions regarding abortion and regarding the possibility of returning after Catholic divorce in certain cases, while describing priests who remarried couples and asked forgiveness.

Christian supporters of Israel, evangelicals, and support for Israel

The speakers describe the phenomenon of Christians who support Israel, including masses who come to Jerusalem on Sukkot and institutions in Germany, and ask whether these are Messianic believers or other Christian streams. It is argued that the evangelicals are a fundamentalist Protestant stream and that their approach is that the Jews need to win so that Jesus will come and then everyone will become Christians, and that Protestant support for Israel is based on this. They note political connections between such groups and far-right German evangelicals.

An academic look at fundamentalism and rebellion within religions

The speakers quote a conversation with Ephraim Barak and present the claim that phenomena of fundamentalism and rebellion against the establishment are similar in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They propose a comparison in which the Shiites parallel the “Orthodox,” because they have an oral Torah and the authority of sages, which allows adaptations to a modern state like Iran, while the Sunnis are presented as those who cling to the past to the point of extremism in the style of ISIS. They define fundamentalism in the literal sense as a return to the foundation and to the past, and compare this to Christianity, where the Catholics rely on the authority of the Pope while the Protestants advocate a return to the sources and translating the New Testament into local languages, and in the United States Christian fundamentalism is presented as Protestant.

Returning to the past in religious society: the hilltop youth and living “like in the old days”

The speakers describe a figure named Yehoshafat Tor from Kedumim as a leader of the hilltop youth who speaks about shepherding flocks as the ideal model because the Patriarchs, Moses, and David were shepherds, and they call this “classic Protestantism” in the sense of returning to the sources. They tell stories about newly religious people in Kfar Uriah who lived with a generator based on a tractor engine and “without any of that stuff,” out of an ideology of returning to nature, and about a family that lived in caves in the South Hebron Hills between Carmel and Susiya until the army expelled them, including using a refrigerator as a bookshelf. They present an inversion in which establishment extremism provokes rebellion that creates another kind of extremism in the name of returning to the sources.

Sociology of religion, Yitzhak Geiger, and S.D.H.

The speakers describe a film at the university that distinguishes between an Arab woman and a Jewish woman by the way the headscarf is tied, and they express discomfort with sociological analysis “like in a zoo.” They mention an article by Yitzhak Geiger, a civics teacher at the girls’ religious high school in Ma’ale Adumim, who wrote about “the new Religious Zionism, S.D.H.” in a dry, academic analysis, and the narrator claims that Geiger “held up a mirror to them” for the religious academics by analyzing them in the same way they analyze others. They say the phenomenon exists and is even growing, but it has no significant electoral power, and it has media presence because of education and writing ability.

Authenticity, Meimad, Uriel Simon, and Rabbi Lichtenstein

The speakers explain a feeling that liberal-academic religious circles are perceived as a “toy” and “not real,” as people who “use Judaism” in order to promote universal ideas and do not speak in the name of Judaism committed to commandments, and therefore the public does not believe them even though it agrees with much of what they say. They bring Uriel Simon as someone who fills halls, especially in the field of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), but argue that popularity in one area does not translate into political power. Rabbi Lichtenstein is presented as an example of leadership that has influence because no one doubts his devotion to Torah and his commitment to Jewish law, and therefore when he spoke about pluralism and liberalism, people bought it from him.

Peace meetings, the Temple Mount, and Haram al-Sharif

The speakers tell about Rabbi Moshe Lichtenstein, who went to a meeting with Palestinians and Muslim scholars and sought a joint formulation that would permit prayer for Jews and Muslims at the place the Jews call the Temple Mount and the Muslims call Haram al-Sharif, but the Muslim side would not agree even to the bridging formula, and the talks blew up. They argue that such a clash stems from deep religious belief and not from wickedness, and compare this to unwillingness to compromise on religious matters even in Haredi society. They justify such meetings not as giving legitimacy to the other side, but because the absence of meeting only adds trouble.

The National Religious Party, the status quo, Ben-Gurion, and Leibowitz

The speakers argue that the National Religious Party at the beginning of the state was a religious liberal left, and that Bnei Akiva and the religious kibbutz represented this, and they wonder how the camp moved rightward and turned its own base into something untouchable. They attribute this to a second-generation rebellion against the “Mizrachi types,” who were perceived as political fixers who always folded, and to the feeling that the status quo was a tool used by Ben-Gurion to keep the religious people from “chirping” in exchange for benefits and budgets and for preserving religious arrangements. They quote Leibowitz telling about a conversation in which Ben-Gurion said he would not allow separation of religion and state and wanted to “catch” the religious people, and they also cite Herzl’s statement that the rabbis should remain in the synagogues and not lead.

The Chief Rabbinate, the Supreme Court, and a British-style revolution

The speakers note that the law allows someone who is not a jurist to be a judge if he is an “outstanding legal scholar,” and they talk about figures like Silberg and Rabbi Assaf and their influence, and about how Rabbi Elyashiv imposed a veto in a certain case. They quote David Cheshin, who distinguishes between a Russian revolution that cuts off the Tsar’s head and a British revolution that gives him a palace and neutralizes his influence, and they present the Chief Rabbinate as an example of neutralization through institutionalization. They connect this to the rebellion of the religious public against an attempt to put it into a narrow institutional niche with no real influence.

Selection and conditions: opening a halakhic / of Jewish law lecture

The text states that the lecture completed the topic of conditions and the idea that the future can be a causal factor for the past, and moves to the topic of selection in order to examine the relationship between selection and condition and the place of time in all this. It brings the baraita about one who buys wine from the Kutim and says, “The two log that I will in the future separate shall hereby be terumah,” and according to Rabbi Meir, “he may begin and drink immediately,” while Rabbi Yehuda, Rabbi Yosei, and Rabbi Shimon prohibit it, and it explains that this depends on the question whether “there is selection” or “there is no selection.” It brings further examples from Eruvin about a Sabbath boundary eruv when one does not know from which side the sage will come, and from Gittin about writing a bill of divorce for one of two wives according to whichever one goes out through the doorway first tomorrow, and notes that the practical ruling is that “there is selection in rabbinic cases, and there is no selection in Torah-level cases.”

The Rashba: when selection applies

The text brings a responsum of the Rashba about someone who sells “one of his lands without specification,” and the difficulty of how this works if in Torah-level cases “there is no selection,” and the Rashba rejects the comparison and argues that the law of selection applies only when one must say that “the matter was clarified” in order to give retroactive force to an act that is needed already now. He explains that in cases like the wine of the Kutim, a bill of divorce dependent on death, writing a bill of divorce “for whichever one I choose,” or dividing an inheritance among brothers, retroactivity is required in order to avoid a situation in which the act lacked validity at the time it was done. He determines that in selling a certain parcel out of a general set of lands, there is no need for retroactive clarification, because the acquisition takes effect from the moment the chosen land is taken, and he adds that the application in the laws of acquisition still raises difficulty, but the basis of the distinction in the laws of selection is clear.

The question of conditions versus selection

The text sharpens the question of why the dispute over whether there is or is not selection does not appear with respect to the section on conditions, since a “from now” condition seems like a case in which a future event determines the situation now. It notes that with conditions everyone agrees to the basic principle learned from the condition of the children of Gad and the children of Reuven, even though there are disputes about details, and therefore one would have expected this to be linked to the dispute about selection. It prepares the ground for reading Rashi and for additional conceptual distinctions.

Rabbi Amiel’s and Rashi’s distinctions: retroactive and retrospective

The text cites Rabbi Amiel’s distinction between retroactive selection and retrospective selection, and illustrates that in Eruvin a person needs selection only because the eruv has to take effect at twilight, even though its use begins only afterward, whereas in the case of the wine of the Kutim the person is already drinking now on the basis of a future definition. It argues that the Talmud does not distinguish this way, and that whoever accepts selection accepts it in both kinds of case. It then presents Rashi’s interpretation, which recurs in several places, that according to those who prohibit, “there is no selection” means that there is a concern that “perhaps he drank terumah,” because the terumah takes effect but it is not clarified which part it falls on, and not that the barrel remains untithed produce with no terumah designation at all; and it notes that other medieval authorities (Rishonim) disagree and hold that according to the one who says there is no selection, he is drinking untithed produce.

The meaning of the dispute and its connection to the logic of “clarification”

The text argues that according to Rashi’s understanding, the dispute is not a local law in the laws of terumah but a general question of clarification and differentiation, and therefore it can apply equally to Eruvin, a bill of divorce, and terumah. It connects this to another discussion about untithed produce and the question whether the prohibition of untithed produce is an independent prohibition or derives from terumah being mixed into it, and explains that a major difficulty with the “mixed terumah” approach is that untithed produce is forbidden even to a priest. It suggests that a practical difference between the approaches is whether this is an ordinary case of doubt or a situation of “certain doubt” that requires stringency even in rabbinic cases.

For its own sake in a bill of divorce: name, attribute, and future definition

The text moves to a discussion of “for its own sake” and distinguishes between “commandments require intention” and “for its own sake” as preparing an object for a commandment, illustrating this with a bill of divorce, a sukkah, and matzah. It brings a discussion of what must be in the scribe’s mind when writing a bill of divorce for the sake of the woman, and argues that “for its own sake” is connected to a name as a way of individuating the person himself and not just his attributes, with a broader philosophical discussion of the meaning of a name as opposed to a description and of pointing to things. It argues that one can individuate a woman in another way as well if she is sufficiently distinguished, and raises the question whether one can individuate a woman through a future attribute such as “the one who will go out through the doorway first tomorrow,” since such a sentence already has a truth value today even if it will only become clear tomorrow.

A proposed understanding: selection as selecting from within a group, not causality in time

The text proposes that according to the direction being explained, “there is selection” is not about influence from the future to the past in a causal sense, but about the legitimacy of individuating an object from within a group by means of an attribute that does not currently distinguish it from the others. It argues that this is a question of selection in the sense of sorting or choosing, similar to selection on the Sabbath, and not a question of timeline and conditions, because this is a matter of discovering a truth and not of creating backward causality in time. It concludes by saying that the question will continue “next time,” and moves on to listeners’ questions about acquaintance with the woman and the definition of “a specific woman.”

One of the confusing things here is that there are two young Israeli guys who speak Hebrew like you and me, basically. Usually when you think of missionizing, it’s someone who comes from abroad, you know. But they really speak in a way that makes it sound like they’re some kind of stream within Judaism, and they play on that, of course—Messianic Jews. There used to be missionaries here, there was classic missionizing, Christians coming from Europe, Friedlander and Europe and here in the Land of Israel, before the state. Well, okay. There used to be all kinds of jokes—never mind now. But now there are these Messianic Jews, apparently, and it’s a relatively new stream, relatively new. And they’re active here—now they have videos online that apparently get a huge number of views, and the claims that come in like that to the city, and people said there that it has influence. Meaning, people are apparently convinced, I don’t know, maybe they even take practical steps, I don’t know to what extent, but that’s what people there say. I told you, I wasn’t convinced, because there are half a million—over half a million views there for a video that’s, say, twenty-something minutes long, twenty-one, twenty-two minutes of talking, just talking. About all kinds of questions—whether there was an Oral Torah, there wasn’t an Oral Torah, whatever. Half a million views for something like that—how can that be? I mean, you know, hit songs, okay, you told me Yishai Ribo has songs with more views, fine, there are big hits with more views, and people go in and listen to them every day, every other day, on loop. But that video—okay, so maybe someone listened to it once, maybe twice. Fine. But how many times are you going to go back to it? So what, two hundred thousand people in Israel are watching this video in Hebrew? It’s all in Hebrew, so it’s only in Israel, that’s why I said that. So it has an ad—when you enter the ad, you immediately see it, most people see it and close it, and that already gets counted as a view. Because the title is tempting: “The video that shocks the rabbis,” right? In other words, it’s not a title saying “we are missionaries, come join us,” it’s something else. They also have titles where “Jesus is such-and-such” is in the title, but they choose titles that make people say, “Let’s see what this is.” They go in, understand what it is, okay, got it. It could also be that they’re lobbying for themselves. Right, that was my suspicion—maybe they send some email, you know, to Bible Belt people in the United States and say, “Guys, go into our video, we need to show here in Israel that there’s interest.” But they’re not missionaries—the Bible Belt? What are you talking about? Who in the United States? Who in the Christian world today is missionary? No, there are missionaries. The Catholics, no; the Protestants—absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. No, didn’t the Pope acknowledge that Judaism is the older sister and all that? They completely backed off that, no? They’re not missionaries? What are you talking about—in Israel? Missionaries at all—are there Christian missionaries in the world today? The Catholics certainly. According to the latest Vatican decisions, there’s no reason at all for missionizing. Why is there no reason at all for missionizing? Of course they want the Jews to come back and become Christians, what are you talking about? No, no—according to the decisions. Let’s talk about the rest of the world beyond Jews, but with Jews even more so—it’s in their theology that way. No, that used to be in their theology, but not anymore. The Pope today—people are demonstrating against him over various decisions because he’s too liberal. It’s not so simple. Even when the Pope says something, that still doesn’t mean—he makes a decision and now they’re crucifying him, right? He recognized abortions, for example, and now there are all kinds of demonstrations against him, people want him to resign. Since when does a Pope resign? It started in South America and it’s really another thing that, like by us where they held that a divorcee couldn’t remarry—even in Catholic marriage, if you divorced then you can’t go back. And he said it is allowed, after it became clear that previously there wasn’t really a divorce anyway, so it’s retroactively annulled—there’s no divorce there. Right, right, there were many cases, and in certain areas it’s retroactively annulled. Especially in the United States, where the U.S. is very Catholic—there the husband and wife went to other places. Now they want to return to each other, but it’s forbidden. So priests in small towns and villages, I don’t know, remarried them in a renewed ceremony, and now those priests asked forgiveness from the Pope, and that was that. But I’m saying: as of now, aside from the Mormons maybe, there is no target audience that’s some huge bloc wanting to turn Jews into Christians. Jews don’t do missionizing anywhere, right? Who? Jews. Right. Now if you got an email saying, “Guys, I’m here on behalf of promoting Judaism,” I don’t know exactly what. “Click on this video of mine in Portuguese. Click on this video, because I need views, okay? It’ll help me over here.” What, wouldn’t you click? You’d click. Why not? In other words, he’s not sending it as a missionary, but it arrives. And there are millions of Christians, you understand? You only need communities you can send one email to, and you’ll get as many clicks as you want. But is the content serious? No. For example, are they well-versed in Judaism when they come to talk about it? Not especially, but let’s say they’re not any more ignorant than the average person. They understand more than the average guy on the street about these issues. At least—again, maybe someone writes for them, it doesn’t matter—but in terms of content, these aren’t people who are totally ignorant. When you check the arguments, the arguments aren’t serious. And do they want you to convert to Christianity or to Messianic Judaism? Messianic Judaism—but that’s a Christian sect, the Messianic Jews. So they apparently have some theology of their own. I tried reading a bit just to understand what this is about, but you know, the question is also whom to read. If you read on Hidabroot, they also have some page—I came across it first—so I’m not sure how seriously I can really take what’s written there. There are people who are former Messianic Jews—I ran into two pages there at first. Former Messianic Jews explaining what was actually going on there and all that, but that too—I don’t know who wrote it, first of all. It could just be some random guy presenting himself that way. You can’t know. It’s very hard to study a phenomenon like this. I know of some sort of sect like this in Germany that’s very pro-Israel. Very, very pro-Israel. Who? Messianic Jews in Germany. There’s a march in Jerusalem every year on Sukkot. No, they also have institutions. Yes, and they come in masses. But Messianic? A significant portion of them. Lovers of Israel, no? Christians who love Israel. You specifically find Messianics? Some of them there call themselves that, but are they Messianic Jews or are there all kinds of Christian sects that are pro-Israel? There are, but I know their leader is Jewish. Evangelicals who love Israel. No, no, I’m telling you: Messianic. Messianic? No, that’s definitely possible. Meaning, maybe on the political level, let’s say, or however, they’re pro-Israel, but I don’t know, I’m not familiar. Sometimes they also connect with the German evangelicals, who are, after all, extreme right-wing. By the way, the evangelicals don’t want the Jews to become Christians, because with the evangelicals, the Jews have to win so they can defeat the whole world, and then Jesus will come, and then we’ll all become Christians. The whole point is that we should win. Protestant support for Israel is based on that. Ah, the Protestants too, same thing? That’s the Protestants. The evangelicals are the same thing? No, the evangelicals are a Protestant stream. Fine. That’s the Protestant, the fundamentalist one. There’s a very interesting structure there. I spoke with Efraim from here, right? Efraim, the researcher of Arabs or Islam. Ah, Efraim Barak. Efraim Barak. I once talked with him at a wedding. Very interesting—the phenomena we know from here exist in Islam and exist in Christianity; it’s more or less the same thing. When you look at it academically—I’d never looked at it that way. I live inside it, you know, and when you look at it academically, these are the same phenomena. In other words, there’s a very interesting dissonance there. For example, who is more fundamentalist—Haredim or Religious Zionists? What would you say? We said Religious Zionists over there. It’s not simple. On the face of it, Haredim. But actually Haredi Judaism is a very new Judaism, and that doesn’t bother them in the least. If you show them that in the past people didn’t do this, they don’t care. In contrast, Religious Zionists do have some interest in going back to the roots, to life of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), to the life of our forefathers. That’s why the avant-garde there is the hilltop youth, who go back to being like shepherds. That can’t happen among Haredim; it only happens among Religious Zionists. There’s something in… in other words, there are people who move forward backward. They’re changing Judaism from what it was over the last hundred years, but not forward—backward. It’s a kind of rebellion against innovation in Haredi Judaism. Many times that’s how it is. And the same exists in the Christian world and in the Muslim world. For example, the Shiites are the orthodox, that’s how Barak explained it to me. And the Sunnis are… that’s Karaites, right. In other words, the Shiites have an Oral Torah, authority of scholars who change the Jewish law—whatever the scholars say, that’s what counts. That’s why the Shiites managed to establish a modern state. Iran. Iran. That’s because they’re able to create laws that fit a modern state. Maybe less successfully than other countries, but the Sunnis can’t even do that. ISIS is not a state. Right. So on the one hand you see that the Sunnis supposedly don’t believe in scholars and they’re not fanatics, but in certain ways they’re much more fanatical. They’re much more fanatical because they’re fundamentalists in the sense that they cling to the past. That’s also the meaning of fundamentalism. Today we identify fundamentalism with extremism, but in the literal sense fundamentalism is a return to the past, to the base, to the foundation. And that return to the foundations, for example in the Christian world, is actually the Protestants. Not the Catholics. The Catholics are their orthodoxy. Because with the Catholics, the Pope decides, and whatever the Pope decides is the new theology. And don’t tell him from the New Testament that there’s a difficulty against the Pope—the Pope will answer it with a thousand answers—but what he says is the law, not what the New Testament determines. And the Protestants—part of the Protestant protest was against that. To go back to the sources, to stop with the whole “let’s be realistic, let’s translate the New Testament into German.” Yes, because it was important to them to work directly מול the New Testament without the mediation of all the church establishment. The revolt was also against the corruption of the church establishment, of course, but in their theology, the Protestants—who are supposedly more enlightened and less tied to the dark rituals of the Catholics—are much more fundamentalist. All the Christian fundamentalism in the United States is Protestant, not Catholic. The Ku Klux Klan and all those people are Protestant, not Catholic. Yesterday or the day before I saw a program about the leader of the hilltop youth, Yehoshafat Tor, that’s his name. Have you heard of him? Yehoshafat. Yehoshafat Tor. He’s from Kedumim. Yehoshafat. Ten children, each one on a different hilltop. He’s some kind of filmmaker, I think, no? He used to be some kind of filmmaker. Not in Kiryat Arba. His name is Yehoshafat Tor and he lives on some farm. He spoke about his father. In any case, he talks there, and the whole time he talks about—he’s a shepherd, and he says everyone should be shepherds. Why? Because basically all the great figures of the Jewish people were shepherds. The patriarchs, Moses our teacher, King David. That’s classic Protestantism. That’s where you have to go back to. Right. Once we drove to Beit Shemesh; near Beit Shemesh I have a good friend who lives there, and many years ago he took us to Kfar Uriyah. Do you know where that is? The moshav nearby. A few newly religious guys lived there who had decided to live like in the old days. They had a generator that was a tractor engine, and with it they made lighting and all kinds of things like that, and they simply lived there in nature without all the rest because they wanted to go back. We spoke with them. People like you and me, they grew up, got an education, perfectly normal people, but they had this kind of ideology of returning to nature. And at some point there it was amazing—an older German-Jewish woman from Haifa, totally secular, came to visit her son or daughter, I don’t remember anymore, it was many years ago, who had become religious and turned into some kind of Gibeonite there. Not Gibeonite and settler, but in the sense of returning to Gibeon, yes, exactly. And she arrived—a proper German-Jewish lady, and with all due respect to everyone, a German-Jewish lady is a German-Jewish lady, she respects everyone. So her grandson and granddaughter decided to live this way, and she came with a cane, got out of her Mercedes—there wasn’t even a road there—and started walking on those stones to visit the person in some kind of hut, I don’t know where he lived there. And that was a phenomenon. In the South Hebron Hills, between Carmel and Susya, there was a family living in caves. I knew some of them a little, friends of Moish. The refrigerator they got as a wedding gift, in one of the caves, served as a bookshelf—until the army expelled them. They lived there for about a year in caves with a baby. Right. No, there really is a very interesting reversal here. Meaning, the Haredi extremism—or, in a different context, the Catholic or Shiite one—arouses a revolt, a protest, that produces an even more extreme extremism from the other side. In other words, the extremism of rebellion, the extreme rebellion, the rebellion against the present establishment in the name of returning to the sources. But it’s no less extreme. So there’s this whole game of who is more extreme and who is more fundamentalist, and it exists in all the sources, the phenomena are very… very similar, very similar. We’re not used to looking at ourselves through the glasses of a researcher. And when you look from the side like that and observe—it always bothers me when they analyze me like some animal in a zoo, these sociologists. “They do this because of such-and-such, and they have these and those influences,” and when you tie your headscarf this way, and women who tie it that way, and that whole difference. There was once some film at the university—you see girls with headscarves, and when you get close you know who’s Arab and who’s Jewish based on where she ties the knot. That’s the whole difference. Arabs also get involved sometimes and so on, but there was once an article by someone named Yitzhak Geiger, he’s some civics teacher at the girls’ ulpana in Ma’ale Adumim. He’s a very impressive guy, knows a lot and writes well. I read a few things by him. Once he wrote in Hakdamot, years ago, an article about the new Religious Zionism, Sadach. He started explaining that it was then basically a new movement in formation—the educated religious left, sort of, the Jerusalem type, this phenomenon mainly exists in Jerusalem. And they have criticism—usually academics—of rabbinic conduct or religious conduct in general and so on. But what was beautiful there was that he was dry as a bone—he wrote like an academic, he analyzed the phenomenon like a sociologist, you know, comparisons, analyses. At some point I called him—we had some connection, doesn’t matter—and I said to him, “Tell me, you were laughing when you wrote that, right?” Because it looked like some kind of… He said yes. People read it in utter seriousness, it’s a good article, but it was clear to me that he was joking. Why? Because he did to them what they do to everyone. In other words, these religious academics, so to speak, they sit on the chair of the UN Secretary-General and analyze this religious stream and that religious stream and what their ideology is. You’re not in the game, you’re the UN, as if. There are all kinds of streams, and these ones have certain tendencies and those ones have other approaches. They put everyone in his cage. And then he came and simply held up a mirror to them. He just did an analysis and said, “Look, they do this, they have these customs, they’re influenced by this.” He did exactly the same thing to them, and you can read it completely seriously, until suddenly the penny dropped for me and I understood that I was laughing, and I think he was laughing too. And I really enjoyed that article and complimented him on it. Do they still exist? What? These religious academic left-religious people—sure, they exist. It’s even growing. It’s even growing? Yes, I think so. Again, in percentages of the religious population, fine, I don’t think it’s a significant percentage. But the phenomenon is a phenomenon, meaning you can’t ignore it. They exist. Meimad and all those people—that’s more or less, as a generalization. They have absolutely no say in anything. No, they have no electorate. When you run for the Knesset they can’t mobilize twenty thousand voters to bring in one seat, or forty thousand, I don’t know how many are needed, something like that. Numerically they’re not a significant percentage. But they have a presence because most of them are educated people, academics, they know how to write, they’re present in various places. They’re the journalists in different places. Once they were the only ones; today it’s no longer like that. And can this phenomenon be explained—how such people are unable to gain a foothold within contemporary religious Judaism? To me it’s a total mystery, not at all explained. I don’t know, I can actually understand it. Did Uriel Simon belong to those people? Not exactly. But the fact is he gets huge crowds, packed halls. What? Uriel Simon? Yes, and he’s certainly in that direction, let’s say religious left or okay. But at the Bible study days in Alon Shevut, if you didn’t register the very day they announced the conference opening, forget it—you wouldn’t get into his lecture. And then there are screens outside and loudspeakers outside and still not enough room. Meaning he’s very popular. If all those people voted for him… But in that field, that specific field, Bible, there’s no doubt he attracts huge numbers of people. It’s not… I think I can understand why they have no influence. I can understand. I myself, for example, saw myself that way once, years ago—I strongly identified with Meimad, and I would never vote for them. Never. Why? Because they’re not real, they’re a toy. Meaning, they’re not… I didn’t feel then—today I know, there are such people and such people, depends who—but I can’t stand the… their music isn’t authentic. They’re not identified, they’re not inside, they’re not really part of the religious world. They’re sociologists of religious people. And they wear kippot and they’re ordinary, they grew up that way, they didn’t become secular. Religious in a sociological sense. Yes, but again, it’s a feeling. It’s an accusation and a generalization like all academic generalizations there, which always miss the truth—generalization. But most of those academics are yeshiva graduates, no question. Being a yeshiva graduate doesn’t mean… And if he goes every morning to prayer and studies Talmudic text, then would you still assume his intentions—that it’s still not authentic fear of Heaven? Again, I’m saying, that’s the feeling. I don’t know—none of us knows whether Yishai in Ofra really has authentic fear of Heaven, do we? Let’s say that if you ask me as a generalization, then more so. Fine, a generalization is always a generalization, but more so, yes. I believe him more. My feeling, for example, is that these people are talking, they use Judaism, they don’t speak in the name of Judaism. They use Judaism to promote ordinary universalist ideas, what any non-Jew does. You will never hear from them something non-consensual, something that won’t be pleasing to people outside. In the religious world they’re often non-consensual, on the contrary. I mean non-consensual in the sense of something that won’t be pleasing to people outside. I don’t buy someone who never says anything that displeases someone on the outside. I myself am very much in favor, I think, of opening one’s mind and really being engaged with outside values and outside thinking and all that. I very much hope I haven’t reached and won’t reach the point where I speak in the name of the outside, just using religious language to promote those things. It’s like all those people who say “My Zionism is social justice.” Do you believe those people? “Zionism is social justice”—he’s a socialist, that’s all. Fine, be a socialist; why confuse me with Zionism? What does that have to do with Zionism? Say you’re a socialist. He uses Zionism to promote his socialism; it’s a synonym. Someone else says, “My Judaism is pluralism and broadening horizons.” I don’t buy that. My Judaism is commitment to commandments. Right, one should also be pluralistic, one should broaden horizons, all true—but that’s not my Judaism. Those are values I think should be present in me. For him, that’s his Judaism; the commandments are just decoration, just the language they use, the way people in that world speak. So one person goes in the morning to play tennis and the other goes to prayer. Yes. Again, I’m saying, it’s obvious this is a generalization, and it’s obvious there are many who are not like that. I’m only saying—that’s the tune, that’s the music. And today it’s changing to some extent. It’s changing today, even in the sense that the world today is much more complex. For example, those people all used to be on the left politically, for example. Fine? Today not so much. There are many people today who can be far-right and religiously liberal. There are such things today too. There are all kinds today. And in that sense I actually think it’s more welcome, more correct, because then it doesn’t become a movement for something else, because in terms of the other things there are all kinds there. But there is religious liberalism there, and it’s not some arm to promote the political left inside the religious world too, which was often the feeling. It seems authentic to me—what can I say? A feeling. It’s hard to defend feelings, but that was my feeling, and therefore I think it didn’t take root, it didn’t gain traction with the public. The public doesn’t believe them, doesn’t believe them. And that’s a shame in my view, because I agree with them on almost everything. But I don’t know, there’s some music there that I just… things that are too right, too proper, too… and it’s hard for me. It’s very interesting, because the question is whether the liberal element itself is what gets in the way. Meaning, once you present religious Judaism as liberal Judaism, the liberalism goes further. Let’s take Rabbi Lichtenstein—earlier Yossi gave his example. Rabbi Lichtenstein did have standing in the religious world, no one can ignore him, because with Rabbi Lichtenstein no one doubts that the man devoted himself to the religious world proper, not to pluralism and broadening horizons. He sat and studied Torah at night without going to sleep, you understand? You can’t ignore a personality like that. Now true, he was also liberal and he also was all those things, all true, and he was more of a doctor than all of them, besides that—but he was also a real Jew. And therefore that’s the secret of his influence, that there’s something… yes, more in the sense of sincerity, more in him than in the others. He really devoted himself to Judaism. So when he says, “In my view Judaism should be pluralistic,” you buy it. You can disagree, you can agree, but no one doubts that personality. Amazing personality, you understand? And very unique, and that’s one of the problems. How many such people are there? Why? Because there are many doctors, many educated religious people, everything. There’s hardly any Rabbi Lichtenstein. Because Rabbi Lichtenstein was a Torah scholar in the classic sense; he devoted his soul to Torah, he knew everything, and it mattered to him, he was shocked by every deviation and departure from Jewish law. And at the same time he spoke about left, peace and brotherhood and unity and all those mantras that I can’t stand—but it came from a real place, so you can’t help but appreciate a person like that. And it’s clear he belongs in the gallery of great Jews. Fine, so he thinks that way. But leftism isn’t his… Right, no less than Rabbi Amital. Right. Though his son is, Rabbi Moshe Lichtenstein. His son is a leftist. I don’t know him well enough… What? I know him a bit, I don’t know his political worldview well enough. He just went now to a meeting. What’s that? A meeting with Palestinians, a peace meeting. They decided, of course, that he would make peace. I’m in favor, by the way, that’s not connected to left and right, it’s right to do that. But students—the meeting unfortunately blew up. Why? Over what dispute? He came, from his point of view, innocently, really thinking that everyone should be allowed—it was during a period when things were a bit tense on the Temple Mount. “Let’s issue a call that everyone may pray on the Temple Mount. Let’s issue the call together.” So they sat with Muslim scholars and so on. Then the Muslim side says to him: no, we’ll issue a call saying that prayer is permitted on Haram al-Sharif. So he says: let’s bridge it. Jews should be allowed, Jews and Muslims—let’s reach agreed wording, that Jews and Muslims are allowed to pray in the place that Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call Haram al-Sharif. The Muslim wouldn’t agree, they wouldn’t even agree to that. The talks blew up. Well, but do you understand? Now look at the other side of the coin. Fine? When people look not at a meeting with Palestinians, but a meeting with, I don’t know, the LGBT community, fine? Would anyone in the Haredi world or in the classic rabbinic religious world reach some kind of agreed formulation with them? Never. “Everyone has rights” and all that—what’s the problem? Let’s do something. Except that those Muslims are Haredi, so they’re not willing to recognize it, because from their standpoint this is a core matter of faith, they won’t give it up. But that’s true of every religious person, every religious world. It’s true. In that sense, I don’t like this whole thing—I do think one should—but I’m not all that impressed by the collapse of the matter, because it’s clear to me the Muslims really believe these things. It’s not wickedness; they truly believe that if you go up there as a Jew, you desecrate the mount. Just like the Haredim are certain that if you hold a pride parade in Jerusalem, it wounds the deepest core of their soul. Now, the street also belongs to someone else, right? So what? Fine. And still they will never compromise with you on it; there’s no such thing. They’ll compromise on the Western Wall arrangement—so what? Now they’re retracting that too. So what? It’s the same thing. So I’m actually in favor of such meetings, not because they mean the other side is righteous and all that, but because it seems to me worthwhile to meet, regardless of left or right. And you can refuse to compromise and all the rest, but it’s worth meeting, because if we go on not meeting, that only adds to the troubles. How do these meetings hurt? Fine, I don’t know Rabbi Moshe Lichtenstein’s political views well enough, but let’s talk about his father because that’s easier—he already passed away and everyone accepted him, and I think he was accepted before too, not only among those who become accepted after they die. So for me he was really the example of this point: a person can have those same worldviews, and nobody will doubt his standing and his specific weight. But the whole phenomenon actually went the other way. In the years, at the beginning of the State of Israel, the classic National Religious Party of then was actually a certain kind of liberal religious left. That’s what the National Religious Party was, that’s what Bnei Akiva was, and that’s what the religious kibbutz movement was. Mizrachi supported the Uganda proposal. So I’m puzzled why that whole camp, which was a very clear camp with its own views, shifted entirely to the right and turned its whole base into something repulsive. Because there was a rebellion of the second generation. Right, but the rebellion didn’t go in directions inside religion, but also in religion, and it became more extreme. Of course—but it went completely nationalist. HaMafdal leaders like Hamer and Ben-Meir—today Hamer would be considered moderate. Of course. No, they marked it. And it was a rebellion in the sense of being against those old Mizrachi people, those sort of nobodies who say nothing, little operators—that’s more or less what they were in our eyes. Sort of political fixers who manage with the money, like today’s Haredim in a certain sense. That’s not precise—they were like the Haredim of the old days: give them their money and let them be quiet. Meaning, with all the criticism of them, they really were a bridge. They really were a bridge, and that bridge no longer exists today. I don’t know, I’m not sure. I think people identified some lack of authenticity in their religiosity. These weren’t people who would dig in their heels over something that was really important to them. They folded on everything. That was the feeling. Again, I’m not… maybe that’s not true. They created the status quo, they preserved the status quo, and the status quo was preserved also with mutual respect, not by force. That was in a situation where the religious world, when the state was founded in ’48, the standing of the religious sector in the public was stronger, because after all originally everyone came from there. Right. But slowly, when it became some little sidecar on the Zionist motorcycle, some kind of sidecar, then people felt we have nothing to say. Nobody ever counted the National Religious Party for anything. They gave them the status quo as part of the price. That was part of the price. “Don’t bother us, take your money, there will be a status quo, they won’t sell pork and they won’t sell leavened food,” and I assume Ben-Gurion himself also wanted that they not sell pork and that they sell matzah on Passover, “and keep quiet and don’t bother us.” That’s what Leibowitz tells, after all, that he had a conversation with Ben-Gurion. His daughter is studying with me now in Jerusalem, Mira Ofran. So that’s exactly what we were talking about just now. What? Daughter, daughter, grown daughter. His granddaughter? No, daughter, daughter, daughter—already older. So we were just having this exact conversation—that Leibowitz says he met with Ben-Gurion and Ben-Gurion said to him, “Listen, Leibowitz, I know what you want—you want separation of religion and state. I will never give that to you. I want to hold you like this.” You understand? That’s how Leibowitz tells it. That’s the status quo. The status quo was Ben-Gurion’s initiative, to keep the religious people from chirping too much. And against that, those young people in the National Religious Party rebelled, and afterward they too became the establishment, and the rebellion continued—Gush Emunim and all the later phenomena. The rebellion continued because people felt it wasn’t authentic. Not authentic—you conduct yourself like in exile, you know, the local lord throws you a bone and you don’t interfere. I don’t know, the National Religious Party was the one that established Kfar Chabad, Bnei Akiva, the rabbinate—and that not-so-successful rabbinate, you want to say. But look, you could say the same thing about Shas, that it established all El Hama’ayan and all… You know what impressive achievements it has. It’s the same achievement, understand—it’s the same thing. They throw them a bone in the financial sense: establish whatever you want, just don’t interfere with the central process, don’t interfere with our economic decisions, don’t interfere with our diplomatic and security decisions. And by the way, that’s not so terrible. Herzl said something very important, yes? Herzl said with regard to Zionism: the rabbis must remain in the synagogues. There they can exercise all the influence they want, but they must not begin leading. And that’s what people rebelled against. Exactly, fine. Exactly against that. But I’m not sure the old Mizrachi simply accepted that as a package deal. Meaning, Herzl was willing to give them a magnificent synagogue—just let them sit inside it. And that’s what Ben-Gurion did. Yes, that’s all true. Just that they shouldn’t bother, shouldn’t bother, shouldn’t endanger—“shouldn’t endanger” meaning they shouldn’t try to decide for me; let them leave me to decide what to do, they shouldn’t interfere. That’s what I mean by “shouldn’t interfere.” And people didn’t buy it. Now you understand why they didn’t buy it. People don’t like being told to sit in the synagogue, study, and not interfere; they also want influence. But a religious person has different facets, right? So through his other facets he’ll influence; he doesn’t have to be in the religious element and influence the state. They gave you one seat on the Supreme Court—you have one religious seat and that’s it. Now tell me—but you know how much influence he had, much more than today—Justice Silberg had tremendous influence on the rulings, tremendous. There’s Rubinstein and Solberg… What? There are more. No, there’s also Hendel, religious. But a figure like Silberg had an extraordinary impact—not that he changed much, the Supreme Court in the end doesn’t go for big changes—it was different, it was a phenomenon that today you wouldn’t even imagine. Asaf. Yes. Rabbi Asaf who sat there on the Supreme Court. Fine—why wouldn’t you imagine it? After all, he was proposed by Cheshin. Right. But who didn’t want it? In the end, apparently Cheshin didn’t want it. Apparently Cheshin didn’t want it. Ben-Gurion’s environment, and maybe Elyashiv vetoed it. Rabbi Elyashiv vetoed it. The law allows someone who is not a jurist to be a judge, that’s inherited from the British, but the definition is that he be an outstanding legal mind. So Cheshin was an outstanding legal mind, and what he didn’t know, lawyers know, and he would have no problem learning it. David Cheshin once said—you know, when he spoke about the Chief Rabbinate—he said there are two kinds of revolutions. There’s a revolution like in Russia, where they take the tsar and cut off his head. And there’s a revolution like in Britain, where they take the tsar, put him in a magnificent palace, make him the richest man in the world, and neutralize his influence. And that’s the Chief Rabbinate. Brilliant. So apparently not everyone liked that kind of revolution. I agree. No, as someone who wrote about it, I accept that. The Chief Rabbinate as a model, the Chief Rabbinate and religious society in general—not only the Chief Rabbinate. They shut them up there from the start, but the religious public as well—they wanted to put them in that niche, and against that there was the rebellion. They weren’t willing to accept that secondary status anymore, and I can understand it. Okay, today we drifted. Okay, so we talked a bit about—while waiting for you, we talked a bit about conditions and from now on versus retroactively, and about the meaning of those things, that basically the future is a causal factor for the past. Now I want to move to the topic of bereirah, to see what the relation is between bereirah and a condition, and how time enters in, if at all, in the context of bereirah. So what is bereirah, first of all? There are several cases throughout the Talmud brought as examples of this principle of bereirah. I’ll only bring a few, so we get the idea. As it was taught in a baraita: one who buys wine from the Kutim says, “Two logs that I will in the future separate are terumah, ten are the first tithe, nine are the second tithe,” and he may begin and drink immediately—these are the words of Rabbi Meir. Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Yosei and Rabbi Shimon forbid it. Meaning, someone takes a barrel of wine from which tithes have not been taken, now let’s say it’s Sabbath or a Jewish holiday and he wants to tithe it, but you can’t tithe then. So what he says is, “I’ll start drinking, and what remains after the Sabbath will be the terumah.” Fine? So the question is whether he can drink. Meaning, the two logs—say one out of fifty is terumah, so two logs out of the hundred logs in the jar—and the final two logs, those will be the terumah. So now he wants to start drinking. No problem to start drinking, because by definition he won’t drink the two logs that remain at the end, right? What remains at the end will be the terumah, so you don’t have to worry that you’re drinking the terumah, because the terumah is what will remain at the end. But you want that to be terumah from now, because otherwise it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help if it becomes terumah tomorrow. You want it to correct the untithed produce now. So here there’s a dispute: “he may begin”—Rabbi Meir says he may begin and drink immediately, meaning it takes effect immediately and he can drink right away, and Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Yosei and Rabbi Shimon forbid it. And the Talmud explains—later it rejects this in various ways—but the Talmud explains that this depends on the question whether there is or isn’t bereirah. What does that mean? Usually “there is bereirah” is understood to mean that something becomes clarified retroactively. Meaning, if specific two logs remain after the Sabbath—I drank the ninety-eight logs and I’m still sober—and after the Sabbath the final two logs remain, then it was clarified retroactively that those two logs, even when they were mixed in the barrel, were actually terumah. Therefore I already separated terumah from the moment I said it, and everything else that I drank was ordinary wine, which was permitted to drink. Otherwise, if it doesn’t take effect, then it’s untithed produce and forbidden to drink. So the view that says there is bereirah says that things are clarified retroactively: the two logs that remain after the Sabbath are clarified retroactively as having already been terumah now, and therefore I can drink. And the view that says there is no bereirah says no—let’s wait until after the Sabbath; when there are two logs, there are two logs. Meanwhile there’s no such thing. It doesn’t happen backward from the future, like what we said about conditions. So the future cannot affect the past, and therefore the two logs that remain at the end cannot be considered terumah already now. That’s the case of bereirah. Now the Talmud brings several more such cases. For example, in Eruvin there are two big discussions—one in tithes, one in Gittin at the beginning of chapter three, and one in Eruvin on page 36. The Talmud there brings, for example, a sage who is supposed to arrive in town, and someone wants to go hear his lecture. Now he doesn’t know whether the sage will arrive from the west side of the city or the east side of the city, and this is on the Sabbath. So he has to make an eruv techumin so he’ll be able to go out and hear the sage. But he doesn’t know whether the sage will come here or there. Now he can’t make two eruvin; he has to decide where he chooses his two thousand cubits. So he makes two eruvin, on the two sides of the city, one to the east and one to the west, and says: if the sage comes to the east, then let my eruv be acquired to the east; if the sage comes to the west, then let my eruv be acquired to the west. Now the eruv has to take effect at twilight on Friday evening. At that point you still don’t know where the sage will come from, so you stipulate: if he comes from the east, I want the eastern eruv to take effect already now; if he comes from the west, I want the western eruv to take effect now. So that too depends on whether there is bereirah or not. Someone who writes a bill of divorce for one of his two wives and says, “Write a bill of divorce”—the bill of divorce has to be written for its own sake, for the sake of the woman being divorced. Now he has two wives; he hasn’t decided whom to divorce, or he doesn’t care whom to divorce, so he says: write this bill of divorce for whichever one will tomorrow go out first through the doorway, the first one to leave the house tomorrow—like Jephthah’s daughter, sort of. The first one to go out tomorrow through the doorway, the bill of divorce is written for her. Now that is of course a future event—whichever one leaves first through the doorway—and I want already now for the bill of divorce to be written for her. That too depends on bereirah, and so on. There are all kinds of such cases, and they depend on bereirah, and on this tannaim disagree: some say there is bereirah, some say there is no bereirah. In Jewish law, the Talmud in Beitzah says—and that’s how most medieval authorities (Rishonim) understand it, though some waver a little—most medieval authorities accept the Talmud in Beitzah, at the end of Beitzah, which says that there is bereirah in rabbinic matters, and there is no bereirah in Torah-level matters. In rabbinic law, like eruv—eruv is rabbinic—in rabbinic law there is bereirah. Meaning, you can do this kind of retroactive clarification. In Torah-level matters, like terumah or writing a bill of divorce, there is no bereirah. That is the legal ruling. Now the question is: what is the meaning of this concept of bereirah, this retroactive clarification? And why does the dispute we saw regarding bereirah not appear with respect to conditions? If there is a dispute over whether things can be clarified retroactively from the future to the past, then why doesn’t that dispute appear in the context of conditions? With conditions, everyone agrees that you can make conditions; we learn it from the condition of the tribes of Gad and Reuben. In other words, the whole topic of conditions is agreed upon. They disagree about details, doesn’t matter, but the basic principle—that you can stipulate a condition of “from now,” a condition that does not take effect at the moment the condition is fulfilled, but if the condition is fulfilled then it takes effect from now, everything we discussed the last two times—that’s agreed by everyone. Now why? Seemingly, this should depend on whether there is or isn’t bereirah. Can something affect the past from the future or not? Before I get into that, there is a responsum of the Rashba that they always bring in order to define when one uses the topic of bereirah. The Rashba writes as follows: If a person sold his fellow one of his fields in an unspecified manner, and we hold that he may give him whichever one he wants, how does the acquisition work? For after all, we hold that there is no bereirah. This is the questioner asking the Rashba: I sold someone one of my fields. Fine? The law says that he may give him whichever field he wants. The questioner asks the Rashba: how does that fit? After all, acquisition is Torah-level, not rabbinic, and in Torah-level law there is no bereirah. So how can you decide afterward which field you sold him today? You choose one of the fields later, and then it becomes clarified that this is the field you sold him. So how can that be? It depends on whether there is or isn’t bereirah, and legally in Torah-level matters there is no bereirah. So how can one rule this way? The Rashba says—I’m reading a passage from the responsum: “But the way you compared the matters under the laws of bereirah and raised a difficulty from one to the other does not seem correct. For the law of there is bereirah and there is no bereirah applies only where we need to say that the matter was clarified—that what is now already was or already took effect from the outset; for if we do not say that the matter was clarified, it has no validity, because we need that for the validity of the matter.” Like that case of buying wine from the Kutim, what I brought before, the barrel of wine: he separates after he drank, and if there is no bereirah, it turns out retroactively that he drank untithed produce. The Rashba says: bereirah applies only where you need the future event to affect the present, and then there is a discussion whether there is or isn’t bereirah, but legally in Torah-level matters we rule there is no bereirah. But if you don’t need that retroactivity—if you don’t care that it doesn’t happen backward, but only from that point on—then there is no problem of bereirah. “And similarly in ‘This is your bill of divorce from now if I die,’ for if there is no bereirah, it would be a bill of divorce after death, since it is not a bill of divorce except after he dies.” Because if he says, “This is your bill of divorce if I die,” then clearly he means to divorce her before he dies, because if he waits until after he dies, he can no longer divorce her—she is already a widow. Therefore it is clear that the death only clarifies that he divorced her an hour earlier, or from now—there are various cases there. So there too, says the Rashba, one can connect it to the concepts of bereirah, because you want some retroactive action here. “And similarly in one who says to the husband, write a bill of divorce for whichever one I wish to divorce with it,” what I brought before, “for we need it to take effect at the essential point, namely at the time of writing, because we require writing for its own sake; and similarly with brothers who divided an inheritance, we need clarification,” and so on. But in this case, says the Rashba to the questioner, it has nothing to do with bereirah at all. Why? Because I transfer to you one of the fields. When you take the field, nothing was clarified retroactively. That field becomes yours from the moment you take it, and that’s it. You don’t need some kind of action backward in time. Therefore this does not belong to the topic of bereirah, says the Rashba. It’s unrelated. The topic of bereirah is always where you need the future event to affect the past. If you only take it from the future event onward, then it’s not relevant, it doesn’t belong to the topic. When does the acquisition of the field take effect? The moment you take the field. There is a question here why the Rashba calls it that, because after all I performed an act of acquisition now, and if this act of acquisition doesn’t make anything happen, then the force of the acquisition has expired. So there’s a question in the laws of acquisitions that needs discussion. This Rashba is difficult in the laws of acquisitions, but the principle regarding bereirah is clear. He says that regarding the laws of bereirah, if you don’t need retroactive clarification, it doesn’t belong to the dispute of whether there is or isn’t bereirah. The question why that’s really the case here is a question in the laws of acquisitions. He apparently understands it like the “attached to a brick,” what the Talmud says about “You are betrothed to me from now and after thirty days.” The Talmud says the betrothal is built gradually—it starts now and finishes at the end of the thirty days. He probably understands that that’s the case here too. You started the process now and it finishes when he chooses that one; the force of the acquisition hasn’t expired. In any case, that is the Rashba’s claim. Now this obviously sharpens the question even more—so why does the dispute over whether there is or isn’t bereirah not appear regarding conditions? Because in a condition that is exactly what we do: the future condition, the condition of “from now,” the future condition determines the situation of now. Right? So we would expect this to depend on the dispute over whether there is or isn’t bereirah. I wanted to read you maybe a few comments in Rashi. Maybe before that I’ll make a certain distinction. Rabbi Amiel, certainly in his writings—there are several interesting books here, Darkhei Moshe and HaMiddot LeCheker HaHalakhah—a student of Rabbi Shimon Shkop, the rabbi of Tel Aviv, who wrote works on conceptual principles. HaMiddot LeCheker HaHalakhah—each “measure” there is some conceptual principle, and he brings all kinds of examples. A very interesting book. I devoured it, even though some people say sometimes his distinctions are a bit too crude, meaning not precise enough in my opinion. He wants to make a distinction in bereirah between what in legal language are called retroactive and retrospective. Retroactive is something that takes effect backward, and retrospective is something that takes effect from now on while looking backward, in Rabbi Shimon Shkop’s language. What does that mean? Take the example of eruv. In the eruv case, it’s retrospective, not retroactive. Because when will I need the eastern eruv? Only from the moment the sage arrives; then I know I need to go there, so I go there, okay? And only then do I actually need the eruv. The only problem is that there is a law in eruv that it has to take effect at twilight. I’m already in Sabbath morning, but an eruv has to take effect at twilight, so whether I like it or not, I need bereirah. Okay? But in fact I only use that clarification after it has already been clarified, and therefore it is retrospective. In contrast, there is a retroactive case: one who buys wine from the Kutim. There I say, “the two logs that remain at the end will be terumah,” and I start drinking now. No, I’m not starting to drink when those two logs remain and I already know which logs are the terumah. I’m already drinking now. That’s truly retroactive: I want it to be terumah already now, not only that after they remain I’ll look back and say that it had been terumah. Fine. So he wants to argue there’s a difference between those things, and there are opinions that one is possible and the other isn’t in the Talmud. In the Talmud itself it doesn’t seem that way. In the Talmud itself there’s no distinction between the two. Whoever accepts bereirah accepts retroactive and retrospective bereirah alike, and whoever doesn’t, then neither. No distinction is made. Now there is an interesting dispute among the medieval authorities. Rashi, quite systematically in almost every place, explains like this. Rashi explains—Rashi in Me’ilah, on a discussion that appears in many places throughout the Talmud, one who buys wine from the Kutim—Rashi in Me’ilah 22 writes like this: Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Yosei and Rabbi Shimon forbid it in the case of buying wine from the Kutim, because they hold there is no bereirah. Right? So basically you can’t drink because it isn’t clarified. So he says: Rabbi Yosei and Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Yehuda forbid it until he actually separates, because they hold there is no bereirah. “And with each cup and cup one can say that it is terumah and tithe”—even from the first cup. Very puzzling words. After all, if there is no bereirah, then no cup is terumah; rather everything is untithed produce. If there is no bereirah, then the meaning is that there is no terumah here at all in the wine. Yes—he didn’t separate anything at all. Rashi understands that it is permitted to drink this in the sense that it’s ordinary, not untithed produce. The whole prohibition according to the view that there is no bereirah is only because maybe you are drinking terumah. Since we are not willing to say that the two logs that remain at the end are already now the terumah, what is the situation? That there is some terumah here that could be any pair of logs within this barrel, and that will be the terumah. So when you now take a cup of wine and drink, maybe that is terumah. Not only maybe—when liquid mixes with liquid, it’s all mixed. So in liquid mixed with liquid, it is certainly terumah, not maybe terumah. One might have said that if this were rabbinic there would be room to be lenient because it’s doubtful terumah, but no—even in rabbinic law they’d have to be stringent, because it is certain terumah, not doubtful terumah. So Rashi basically understands that the position of “there is no bereirah” does not mean there is no terumah here, but that there is terumah here on two unspecified logs. Meaning, we do accept the fact that I can impose the designation of terumah on those two logs—two logs. We just do not accept that these will be the two logs that remain at the end. Because that’s impossible? What? Because it’s impossible in reality. Meaning, Rashi, I think, is basically saying here—he explains why there can’t be why there is no bereirah. Even if in principle you wanted to say there is bereirah, in practice you can’t maintain it. Why? Because when you drink, it could really be that you’re already drinking some of the terumah now. Why? But you can’t separate out two logs inside a barrel of wine like that. But I can—look, I drink everything except what will remain as the final two logs, and what remains—that’s how I separated it. No, but that terumah is mixed together. So what? But everything I drank is by definition not terumah, because I defined the final two logs as the terumah. So by definition, everything I drink doesn’t belong to those two logs. What’s the problem? That’s exactly the way to make this clarification. What’s the problem? It’s true that it’s mixed from the start, but all the same, in fact I never took the molecules of the terumah, by definition. Because what I took are not the molecules that remain. So what’s the problem? So the problem isn’t impossibility. One could say according to Rashi that every untithed produce of a kosher Jew is presumed to be ninety-eight percent ordinary and two percent terumah. That’s an interesting point. You remind me that in Shev Shema’tata he brings a dispute between Rashi and Tosafot in Yevamot on the question of what the prohibition of untithed produce is. Is the prohibition of untithed produce a prohibition in itself, or is it really because the terumah is mixed into the untithed produce? One of the big difficulties for the one who says that it’s terumah mixed into untithed produce is: why is untithed produce forbidden even to a priest? After all, a priest could drink it regardless. If it’s terumah, a priest is permitted to drink terumah, and everything else is ordinary produce, so what’s the problem? So it’s clear that even according to the view that the prohibition of untithed produce is nothing but mixed-in terumah, he doesn’t mean literally that terumah is mixed in here, because otherwise a priest would be allowed to eat untithed produce. Rather he means that the Torah forbade it because there is some portion of terumah inside, and it wants you to separate it first. But once the Torah forbids it, there is a prohibition of untithed produce. Otherwise you can’t say it; otherwise it simply can’t be. It’s against explicit Talmudic statements, certainly. A priest is forbidden to eat untithed produce. Okay? So I don’t think there is such a view in a fully literal sense. There is a long discussion there about this issue. So in Rashi there is a great novelty. Usually the medieval authorities understand—most medieval authorities, at least from the plain sense of their wording, and some say it explicitly—that if there is no bereirah, the meaning is: the barrel remains untithed produce. The designation of terumah cannot take effect on any molecule of liquid in this barrel, because as long as you have not defined for me who those two logs are, the designation of terumah does not take effect. So everything remains untithed produce. But Rashi says no, no. There is terumah here inside the barrel, and in principle, if all that happened was that you drank the rest, everything would be fine. Everything would be fine; we just are not willing to accept that you drank the rest, because there is no such thing as retroactive clarification that the two logs that remain at the end will be clarified retroactively as having been the terumah. Rather what there is, is some state of terumah mixed over any pair of logs, and therefore every time you drink something there is also terumah in it. It’s similar to “the condition is void but the act stands.” What? It’s similar to “the condition is void but the act stands.” Right, there’s a certain similarity. I hadn’t thought of that. There is a certain similarity. Basically, you succeeded in imposing the terumah, but the condition that it be on the last two logs is void. That’s an interesting point—I hadn’t thought of it. Because then it really does connect bereirah with conditions, and there are disputes among the medieval authorities over whether bereirah is connected to conditions, and seemingly this is really the expression of a condition. Learned what? There is no bereirah, okay? What kind of condition is of this sort is not a legally valid condition. Once it is not a legally valid condition, then the rule is that the condition is void but the act stands. Okay. In any case, Rashi says this in other places too. Rashi, for example, says in Chullin 14: “They forbid it, proving that Rabbi Yehuda does not hold of bereirah, and he fears lest he drank terumah.” Again the same thing. Also in Bava Kamma 69: “They forbid it because they do not hold of bereirah, to say that he drinks from the ordinary wine and terumah and first tithe remain in the flask.” In several places he says that basically “there is no bereirah” means, say I sold you a field in the Rashba’s responsum, or something like that—then there is one field here that is yours, it’s just mixed up. You can’t take any particular one; it’s mixed. Or in the case of the woman for whom the bill of divorce was written, there is really a woman for whose sake the bill of divorce was written, only not the one who will go out tomorrow first through the doorway, but one of the two. And that clarification we are not prepared to accept. It is true that there is a certain logic to Rashi’s approach, because if we understand that according to the view that there is no bereirah it is all untithed produce, then this is not a question of bereirah at all. It is a law in the laws of terumah. After all, if the Talmud says there is a broad dispute throughout the Talmud about whether there is or isn’t bereirah, the Talmud is saying there is a common principle in all these places, right? That things cannot be clarified retroactively. But if we were to understand that according to the view that there is no bereirah, the designation of terumah doesn’t take effect at all on any of the wine in this barrel, then what we’re saying is that you cannot impose the designation of terumah on unspecified logs. That is a law in the laws of terumah; it has nothing to do with clarification. That’s a law in the laws of terumah. And maybe for eruv you can do it—who says terumah and eruv are the same thing? If you understand that there’s something about the clarification itself, that it cannot be clarified, then I understand that it is the same everywhere. What difference does it make whether here it’s terumah and there it’s eruv and there it’s writing a bill of divorce? It’s a law, it’s logic, it doesn’t belong to the particular legal area being discussed. These two logs are not clarified logs. But if Rashi says those two logs are not clarified, that’s fine, but I don’t care that they’re not clarified. I can impose terumah on that. “There is no bereirah” only says that they won’t be the two logs that remain at the end. But there is no obstacle to imposing the designation of terumah on those two logs even though they are unspecified. Why? Because what we are discussing under “there is no bereirah” is not a law in the laws of terumah. In the laws of terumah you can impose terumah on that. This is a law in the laws of clarification, and retroactive clarification will not happen. And that is really common to eruv, terumah, and everything else. It’s a more general logic. Maybe that’s what causes Rashi to explain the matter this way. But other medieval authorities disagree and claim that according to the view that there is no bereirah, you are drinking untithed produce. The Tur and other medieval authorities say that: that you are drinking untithed produce according to the view that there is no bereirah. Now what exactly is the difference between these two approaches? It seems to me there’s also evidence in the opposite direction, that if they said, “I’ll separate as terumah the first two logs that I drink,” then according to the view that there is no bereirah they would say that this is only doubtful terumah and not certain terumah. And if it’s something rabbinic, then they’d say that because it’s doubtful—but in a borrowed sense. It’s a doubt in the same sense I spoke about in the previous lecture, when I talked about salt and sugar. Right? About a woman who is divorced and not divorced, or one who betroths one out of five women without specifying which one. It’s not really a doubt—rather there is a weak betrothal on each one of them. It’s not that one of them might be betrothed. It’s what Rabbi Shimon Shkop calls a “certain doubt.” So in a case like that one has to be stringent even in rabbinic law. That was one of the practical implications I brought there. Because there is a certain side of betrothal here. It’s not just that I don’t know whether yes or no. I know—it’s both yes and no. Basically, it seems to me that what Rashi is saying here is connected to everything we discussed in previous lectures. What Rashi is really saying here is—let’s ask the question: which is more intuitive, there is bereirah or there is no bereirah? Which makes more sense? There is bereirah. What do you mean, how could the future clarify something about the past? So actually “there is bereirah” is the view that requires explanation. And I actually agree with what you said, if we go with Rashi. What do I mean? Look—there is, you know, the book Michtavei Torah. It’s a correspondence between the Rogatchover and Rabbi Mordechai Klina. Fascinating really, though a bit hard to follow—the Rogatchover writes “look there, look there, look there,” and “in the aspect of this,” all in one word, he doesn’t elaborate. But these are really fascinating things. And in one or two of the responsa there they discuss: when a scribe has to write a bill of divorce for its own sake, what must be in his mind when he writes the bill of divorce for the sake of the woman being divorced? What has to be in his consciousness? The name of the woman? Does he have to think of the woman’s name? What does it mean that he wrote the bill of divorce for her sake? He has to think that it is for that woman, but what concretely does he have to think? That it is for the woman whose name is Yael daughter of Mordechai? Or does he have to hold her image in his mind, to see her in his head? Does he have to know her? What is called that the scribe wrote for the sake of the woman? By what will you define for him the woman for whose sake the bill of divorce was written? For the sake of the woman or for the sake of the commandment? For the sake of the woman. In many contexts of “for its own sake,” the “for its own sake” is not for the sake of Heaven. In most contexts, by the way. In most contexts of “for its own sake.” Making a sukkah “for its own sake” means for the sake of shade. Spinning fringes “for its own sake” means for the sake of fringes. Not for the sake of Heaven. To designate it for fringes, for the sake of the commandment of fringes, for the sake of the commandment of sukkah. Not for the sake of Heaven. Wait—fine, for the sake of the commandment of sukkah, but the Rosh writes that it means the commandment of sukkah, the commandment of sukkah. No—for the sake of shade. With sukkah it’s not for the sake of the commandment of sukkah, it’s for the sake of shade. A sukkah has to be made for the sake of shade, otherwise it is invalid. Not for the sake of the commandment—you don’t need it for the sake of the commandment. A “sukkah of gentiles, women, animals” is valid; it was not made for the sake of a commandment, but as long as it was made for the sake of shade—fine. In Torah study for its own sake, the accepted view is that it means for the sake of Heaven, but I’m saying the Rosh in Nedarim writes that even there it does not. “For its own sake” means for the sake of Torah. Not for the sake of Heaven. Meaning that it is a value in itself. It is not a means to something outside itself. So every time you hear “for its own sake,” it means something else. Yes. I once told this—I don’t remember where. One of my hobbies is to look through secondhand bookstores for interesting books to pass the boredom. So I saw there some book that had an approbation by Rabbi Shimon Shkop. And he wrote that the whole book was wonderful and everything was excellent, but there is one mistake there that he has to point out, and because of it maybe the whole book wasn’t worth writing: the author confuses “for its own sake” with intention. “Commandments require intention” versus “for its own sake.” “Commandments require intention” is the dispute whether commandments require intention or do not require intention. Legally too there is a dispute how we rule. But “for its own sake” is a completely different principle. By the way, this is a lecture of Rabbi Lichtenstein as well, here in Zevachim, page 60 of Zevachim I think—he defines it most precisely. “Commandments require intention” means that when you fulfill the commandment, you need to intend it as a commandment, for the sake of Heaven, to fulfill your obligation basically. But “for its own sake” is a thought that accompanies not the performance of a commandment, but the preparation of an object for its use as a commandment. Writing the bill of divorce for its own sake, making a sukkah for the sake of shade, making matzah for its own sake—all these are acts that are not commandments at all. They are preparations of objects for later use as commandments. It has nothing to do with whether commandments require intention. “Commandments require intention” is when I do the commandment, I need the act to be done in order to fulfill my obligation. So if a baker of matzah bakes that matzah for some non-Jew, for example, that’s not “for its own sake.” Why? If you say not for the sake of the commandment. Ah—for the sake of matzah of the commandment. There, with matzah, it has to be for the sake of matzah of the commandment. For the sake of matzah, yes. Something else is not matzah. It’s the same thing; we talked about this once in sukkah. I think I mentioned this, right, about that Oneg Yom Tov. But Chullin and the Shach ask: why does the Shulchan Arukh write that one who sits in a sukkah when rain is falling is a fool, because one who is exempt from a matter and does it anyway is called a fool. So the Oneg Yom Tov asks: why a fool? He is violating a prohibition. There is a prohibition against using the wood of a sukkah, and he is effectively using the sukkah not for a commandment, so it is prohibited. So Rabbi Elchanan says about this that it is not prohibited because when rain is falling, it is not a sukkah. A sukkah is like a pergola that serves for the commandment—it is a sukkah. If it doesn’t, then after the festival is it permitted to use the sukkah? The festival is over, that’s it, Sukkot is gone, now it’s Hanukkah. Are you allowed to sit in the sukkah? Use of sukkah wood? No—it’s not a sukkah, it’s a pergola. Only during Sukkot is it a sukkah. Meaning, a sukkah is not a material object; it is a material object serving for the commandment. So if you look at matzah that way too, then matzot sold all year round aren’t really matzot at all. It’s just a common term, an imprecise usage. Matzah is matzah of the commandment by definition; that is what is called matzah. Something not for the commandment is not matzah at all. So when you say “for the sake of matzah of the commandment” and “for the sake of matzah,” it’s the same thing, there is no difference. In any event, I got to all this—intention and “for its own sake,” yes. So “for its own sake” is a thought that accompanies you when you prepare the object for use as a commandment, not an intention that accompanies the performance of the commandment itself. Fine? In contrast, “commandments require intention” is the dispute whether, when I perform the commandment itself, I need to intend it, or whether I fulfill my obligation even without intending. After the fact; ideally you should intend, but the dispute is whether after the fact one has fulfilled the obligation. Now when the scribe writes the bill of divorce for the sake of the woman—not for the sake of Heaven, yes, I’m closing that parenthesis from your earlier question—so it’s not for the sake of Heaven, but for the sake of the woman. Now what does “for the sake of the woman” mean? To think about her name? Yael daughter of Mordechai? Or to see her image, so to speak? Which would mean he has to know her, to see the woman before his eyes—her likeness is before me and conquers all my battles. Alexander the Great said that about Shimon HaTzaddik. So what is “for its own sake”? The claim there was that “for its own sake” means her name. “For her sake” means name. That’s the plain meaning. Explicitly. But this specific name. Yes, the woman’s name. The wife of the man who came to write this. No—Yael daughter of Mordechai. Not every Yael daughter of Mordechai in the world. If there are two Joseph son of Simon in one city, then Yael daughter of Mordechai daughter of Joseph—son of Joseph, sorry. Meaning, until you identify her as one specific woman. By face you already identified her. Yes, not “name” in the sense of the word itself, but that unique identification. Okay. Now the word that the Sages use, “for its own sake,” is like this. In the verse it says “for her.” Where does this definition come from? The definition—how do you define the woman? What does “for her” mean? The verse says you have to do it for the sake of the woman, right? The verse says “for her.” No, it says “for her.” But you have to do it for the woman, for the sake of the woman, right? Now what is “the woman”? How do you identify a woman? So the Sages claim this is through a name. That’s why they call it “for its own sake.” It’s always like slander where people talk about someone without knowing who it is. Yes. Then they ask: what does it mean if I speak about someone and say about him… It’s a question. If you know his name, then it’s as if… I mentioned this elsewhere. If you don’t know the name, is there no problem speaking? Saying “that guy there is righteous”? Sometimes there are embarrassing situations. You meet former students, someone who studied with you, knows you really well, and you don’t remember. You barely maybe remember that he studied with you, if at all, but you don’t remember who this is. Now it’s awkward—what will you say to him? “Of course I remember everything, you were my outstanding student.” And it happens to everyone. So you just play some game, try to maneuver without remembering, without saying his name, somehow smoothing things over and getting out safely. Then at some point you suddenly discover what his name is. Through a story he told, or you suddenly remember, or whatever. Now you know him. That is the moment when you know him, when you remember him. Now why should that matter? After all, a name is arbitrary. In the end, you remember that he studied with you together with this person and that person, and he did such-and-such, and he was a good student or a less good student. You remember everything about him except that you don’t remember that his name was Yossi. Okay? And now suddenly you remember his name is Yossi. “Ah, now I remember you.” There is such an effect. It’s very interesting in our psychology, and it is actually the least relevant thing. I remember where I spoke about this—in Parashat Va’era. Yes, at the beginning of Parashat Va’era, in a talk I gave in Lod. At the beginning of Va’era: “I appeared to your forefathers as El Shaddai, but by My name Y-H-V-H I was not known to them.” “God spoke to Moses: I am Y-H-V-H. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but by My name Y-H-V-H I was not known to them.” Right? In other words, God changes names. Nice to meet you. “I am Y-H-V-H; your forefathers knew Me as El Shaddai. But I have another name.” So what difference does the name make? You—the object—is what matters. Why should I care what your name is? Call you Yankele—what difference does it make? What is the significance of this change of names? And there I spoke a bit about the meaning of a name. There is a classic article by Bertrand Russell from Einstein’s miracle year, 1905. In that year Einstein published his three great papers. What he did in that year people don’t do in two thousand years. And in that same year there also came out a magnificent article by Bertrand Russell, which is considered almost the opening of analytic philosophy. And that article deals with reference—how you point to things. It’s a magnificent article. It’s difficult. I tried to crack it; I succeeded with most of it, but it’s really a hard article. He distinguishes there between two ways of pointing to things. One is by description, and the second is by name. What’s the difference? David Ben-Gurion—that’s by name. When you say “the first prime minister of the State of Israel,” that’s by description. A description can be true and can be false. A name is arbitrary. Whatever is decided is his name. What difference does it make? The parents gave it, or it’s the accepted name, okay? Whatever is accepted as his name, that’s his name. There is no true or false here. In descriptions there is true and false. If you didn’t describe him correctly, then it isn’t him. Okay? So those are two ways to point to a thing. Yes? So if I now look at it in that sense, understand that when I describe someone, I identify him through his properties. When I say his name, then I’m not relating to any property; I’m relating to him himself, the bearer of the properties. Therefore I think the Sages say that writing for its own sake, the basic thing—I’m not saying that’s the only way “for its own sake” works, in a moment we’ll see—but “for its own sake” means “for the sake of the name.” Meaning, you need to hold in your head the person’s name. And once you hold the person’s name in your head, you’re actually intending the person himself. Because a property is usually shared by many people. If you say this person is tall, there are many tall people. You say he is athletic, kindhearted, and all his properties. Many people share those. If you want to speak about the person himself and not his properties, you need to give his name. Name, all the way—so there aren’t two Joseph son of Simon, give the full lineage. That’s how you identify the person. Now—but clearly you can also identify a person in another way. Say, if I see him, then after all his appearance is also only a property. It’s not him himself. Clearly it’s a property. We see him; he appears before us in that way. Obviously that too would work. True, it’s called “for its own sake,” and in origin that has to be by the woman’s name. But obviously if I identify the woman completely even without using her name, that’s also fine. If the husband comes to me and says, “Write a bill of divorce for my one and only wife,” fine? Then even if the scribe doesn’t know the woman’s name, if that woman is uniquely identified—this man has only one wife—and I write for the sake of that woman, then that’s fine. There is the law of “for its own sake” here. Now I ask—and here I have to finish, so I’ll just connect this to us—what happens if I identify the woman by means of a property? Say I have two wives, and I say to the scribe: write the bill of divorce for the kinder one. One of them is kinder. Is that problematic? No—why? What’s the problem? There is one who is kinder, I am writing the bill of divorce for her. No, suppose we can identify who is kinder. And even if not, that’s only our problem, then maybe we enter the laws of doubts, but in principle there is one who is kinder. The Holy One knows who that is, right? I’d be in the laws of doubts because I don’t know which of the two is kinder. That’s only a technical issue. Let’s say the taller one. What? The sentence… The sentence is true, but the question is whether the thing itself already has the property now? Yes, at least according to the view that there is bereirah. Because its truth-value… after all, it’s true to say that this is the woman who will go out tomorrow first through the doorway, right? If tomorrow she goes out first through the doorway, then wasn’t it already true today to say that she is the woman who will go out tomorrow first through the doorway? If I said it, and that’s what happened, then the sentence described correctly what happened. What’s the problem? It is a true sentence. Right, no one yet knows whether the sentence is true or not, but it was true. It becomes clarified to me tomorrow that today it was true, but that’s not “clarified retroactively” in a causal sense. And therefore, if you remember, I said that the clarification of a sentence’s logical truth-value is not causal retroactive clarification. That’s what logical determinists get wrong—we discussed that—because they think it’s backward influence in time, and therefore they don’t accept it. But it’s not backward influence in time, because it’s not a causal relation. It’s not that the future causes the past. The future only reveals to me what the past was. It’s revelation after the fact, not causality. It’s like I don’t know whether a son or daughter was born to me, then I enter the delivery room and see it’s a son. But it was a son before too, even when I didn’t know. What was there from future to past? Nothing. There was something true here, I didn’t know it, now I do know it, but it was always true. There was no causal influence backward in time. And if that’s so, then the one who says there is or isn’t bereirah is not connected to the question of conditions according to this. Conditions are retroactive clarification. The future condition, as we saw in Rabbi Shimon, generates a result in the present. But bereirah has nothing to do with that at all. Bereirah is the question of how I identify objects within a group. On that there is a dispute: is such a thing considered clarified or not clarified? There is Rashi’s view, but we’ll continue that next time. But he wrote “for her” to someone—the writer made a stipulation? No, then I can define her through a property that identifies her. No, but that’s not the plain meaning—it is the plain meaning. This concludes the lecture of Rabbi Michael Abraham, Thursday, the 12th of Shevat 5777, February 9, 2017. And if I don’t know her and I didn’t say her name, then what made it so I don’t know her? And if I don’t know her at all and I know her name? Then I also don’t know her. No, but you’re saying “for her,” you’re saying a specific woman. So? A specific woman. A specific woman? What are you talking about? A specific woman that you have the possibility of investigating. At least investigating. No, that someone should fall from the-.