The Relationship Between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah – Lesson 4
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The holiness of the margins and the Yavne dispute
- The putsch in Yavne and the significance of reason in interpreting the Torah
- Rabbi Kook, the Avnei Nezer, and Rabbi Eliezer as a test case for transmission that is not information
- Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and “a law given to Moses at Sinai” as a dynamic
- Two opposite critiques of dynamic tradition and their shared underlying assumption
- The hermeneutical principles: a law given to Moses at Sinai versus historical development
- Lieberman, “Greeks and Greekness in the Land of Israel,” and the polarization between “it descended from Sinai” and “it was invented”
- Formalization: “a law given to Moses at Sinai” as a source, not a rigid manuscript
- Maimonides, Havot Yair, and Nachmanides on verbal analogy and a fortiori reasoning
- Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael: competing interpretive systems and halakhic implications
- The Shulchan Arukh, the Beit Yosef, and Maimonides as a coherent code
- “He would say” in Pirkei Avot and the transition from silent transmission to human speech as Torah
- Pesachim 22b: prohibition of eating and prohibition of benefit, “and the owner of the ox shall be clear,” and interpreting the word “et”
- Shimon HaAmsoni, Rabbi Akiva, “the Torah speaks in human language,” and theories as scientific work
- Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and healthy conservatism versus a counterexample
- Broken telephone, stylistic change in prophecy, and the necessity of human involvement in transmission
- “It is not in heaven,” authenticity and obligation, and the absence of a priori boundaries
- Measurements, “the hand recoils,” and halakhic positivism
- Interpretation of the Mishnah and the Talmud, and pilpul on Maimonides
- Deduction, induction, and analogy as the logical structure of static versus dynamic tradition
Summary
General Overview
The text presents the dispute in Yavne as a confrontation over the very concept of tradition: is a person a “hollow pipe” who transmits Torah from Sinai without any human addition, or is tradition a dynamic process in which the intellect and personality of those transmitting it shape the Oral Torah in a binding way? It argues that two opposite critiques rest on the same mistaken assumption: on one side, an ultra-traditionalist critique that sees every development as “invention,” and on the other side, a critique that concludes that if there is human development, then there is no obligation. It grounds this dynamism through examples from the hermeneutical principles, from the midrash about Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall, and from the passages about “et” and “a law given to Moses at Sinai,” and concludes with a logical presentation of the difference between deduction and induction and analogy as the basis for understanding a tradition that is not mathematics but also not anarchy.
The holiness of the margins and the Yavne dispute
The text opens with a Torah scroll with three margins and the Talmudic statement that holiness applies even to the margins. It presents a dispute in the first generation of Yavne about the status of the margins and the question whether human addition can be considered Torah or whether it is speculation. It attributes to Rabbi Eliezer and his brother-in-law Rabban Gamliel a conception of transmission as a hollow pipe from Mount Sinai, in which people are judged by their faith and righteousness—that is, by the person rather than by the substance of the issue.
The putsch in Yavne and the significance of reason in interpreting the Torah
The text describes an organizing effort by Rabbi Yehoshua and his students Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, who deposed Rabban Gamliel and excommunicated Rabbi Eliezer, until Rabban Gamliel ultimately accepted the ruling and returned in rotation with Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah. It frames the discussion around the question whether human reason has significance when we interpret and expound the Torah, and what “tradition” means if a person is never a hollow pipe. It presents the struggle as determining whether tradition means being careful “not to touch” what was handed down from Sinai, or a developing movement dependent on the transmitters of tradition.
Rabbi Kook, the Avnei Nezer, and Rabbi Eliezer as a test case for transmission that is not information
The text cites the eulogy Rabbi Kook wrote for the Avnei Nezer, the Sochatchover, and presents the contradiction in the Talmud regarding Rabbi Eliezer: on the one hand, “he never said anything he had not heard from his teacher,” and on the other hand, “he said things no ear had ever heard before.” It attributes to Rabbi Kook a solution according to which Rabbi Eliezer heard from his teacher things others could not hear, because the passage from teacher to student depends on the transmitter and the recipient and is not the simple transfer of information. It adds the claim that the teacher himself may not know that certain things are embedded in his words, and the student hears in them something the teacher does not realize is there. It defines this as “plain simple meaning” and a familiar experience in learning from a significant teacher.
Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and “a law given to Moses at Sinai” as a dynamic
The text connects this to the midrash in which Moses our teacher enters Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and does not understand anything until they say, “This is a law given to Moses at Sinai,” and it interprets this as proof that the transmission is preserved but is formulated and realized differently in different periods. It states that Moses hears Torah that truly is contained within his words, but that a different study hall and different people are needed to bring it out into new forms of formulation, thought, and application. It concludes that tradition is fundamentally dynamic, and that this is the foundational point of the series.
Two opposite critiques of dynamic tradition and their shared underlying assumption
The text describes an ultra-traditionalist critique that says, “What are you inventing?” and insists that we have only what we received and may not touch it. It describes the opposite critique, which says that if this is what Torah looks like, then it is a human invention unrelated to what Moses received at Sinai, and therefore not binding. It argues that what the two critiques share is the assumption that tradition cannot be dynamic, and that any deviation from mechanical transmission nullifies the concept of tradition. It seeks to clarify that this assumption feeds both extremes.
The hermeneutical principles: a law given to Moses at Sinai versus historical development
The text gives as an example the tradition of the hermeneutical principles used in legal interpretation, about which the medieval authorities (Rishonim) write that they are a law given to Moses at Sinai, while researchers claim that the principles developed over the course of history. It describes a documented development: seven principles with Hillel the Elder, thirteen with Rabbi Ishmael, a parallel system with Rabbi Akiva of inclusion and exclusion rather than general and particular, and later thirty-two principles with Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili, and in practice even more methods of interpretation in the Talmud. It emphasizes that these are the foundational tools for deriving Jewish laws from the verses, and therefore the dynamism here sharpens the question of the nature of the Oral Torah.
Lieberman, “Greeks and Greekness in the Land of Israel,” and the polarization between “it descended from Sinai” and “it was invented”
The text describes an ultra-conservative approach according to which the entire system descended to Moses at Sinai and was merely “forgotten” until it was revealed, and opposite it a critique that attributes the principles to influences from ancient Near Eastern modes of inference, as described by Lieberman in Greeks and Greekness in the Land of Israel. It presents the opposite critique as claiming that there is no obligation toward what human beings developed, even if there is obligation toward what the Holy One, blessed be He, said. Against both, it places the claim that there is “a law given to Moses at Sinai” in the sense of a Sinaitic source, without full identity between the source and the later formalized shape.
Formalization: “a law given to Moses at Sinai” as a source, not a rigid manuscript
The text proposes that the Sinai experience was a learning process in which the Holy One, blessed be He, read verses and transmitted interpretations, but not necessarily formulations of rules like “general-particular-general” or “an archetype.” It cites the Talmud in Temurah about “1,700 a fortiori arguments and verbal analogies and 3,000 laws” that were forgotten during the mourning for Moses, and “Otniel ben Kenaz restored them through his dialectic” as a model of scientific reconstruction: collecting verses and interpretations that were preserved, identifying patterns, and generating rules such as verbal analogy as a human formalization of a way of reading that had been transmitted at Sinai. It explains that the number of rules grew because additional interpretations were encountered that required explanation, and each rule split into sub-rules at higher resolution.
Maimonides, Havot Yair, and Nachmanides on verbal analogy and a fortiori reasoning
The text raises a difficulty against Maimonides’ statement that there is no dispute regarding a law given to Moses at Sinai, and notes that in the responsum of Havot Yair, siman 192, dozens of laws given to Moses at Sinai are collected about which there is in fact dispute. It cites Nachmanides and his students, as presented in the Talmudic Encyclopedia under the entry on verbal analogy: verbal analogy “a person may not derive on his own” unless he received it from his teacher, whereas a fortiori reasoning “any person may derive on his own.” It notes a dispute between Rashi and Tosafot concerning the other principles. It presents the situation as a “constant crisis” since the giving of the Torah, in which new rules are formed even in general areas of ruling, such as “the law follows the majority” or “the law follows Rava in the cases indicated by the acronym,” as principles created in the Talmud but grounded in Sinai.
Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael: competing interpretive systems and halakhic implications
The text describes disputes between Rabbi Ishmael’s method of general and particular and Rabbi Akiva’s method of inclusion and exclusion, and the emergence of halakhic consequences in new cases depending on which rule is chosen. It mentions disputes in the Talmud that depend on methods of interpretation, especially in tractate Shevuot 3a and 26a around “to do harm or to do good.” It raises the possibility that later study halls developed that combined elements from both methods, and attributes this direction to Heschel’s Torah from Heaven, alongside the note that the book received criticism from Talmud scholars.
The Shulchan Arukh, the Beit Yosef, and Maimonides as a coherent code
The text cites a claim attributed to an article by Avi Sagi or Benjamin Porat, according to which the attempt to reconcile contradictions in the Shulchan Arukh rests on a mistaken assumption, because the Shulchan Arukh is a digest of the Beit Yosef and never claimed a single coherence. It presents this in contrast to Maimonides, who explicitly wrote that he was producing a coherent code of the entire halakhic system and therefore contradictions within it should indeed be reconciled. It notes that in Maimonides’ rulings on disputes between general-and-particular and inclusion-and-exclusion, inconsistency is evident, and proposes as an explanation an ongoing development and integration of methods in the generations after Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael.
“He would say” in Pirkei Avot and the transition from silent transmission to human speech as Torah
The text points out that in Pirkei Avot, the phrase “he would say” begins at the end of the first chapter, after the chain of transmission “Moses received Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua…” and interprets this as a shift in consciousness in which human beings begin “to say,” and human speech enters into Torah. It connects this to the Yavne dispute as a struggle over the legitimacy of human involvement in tradition. It presents this as a novelty in which one does not remove the human element in order to remain with Torah, but rather recognizes that the words of the sages themselves are considered Torah.
Pesachim 22b: prohibition of eating and prohibition of benefit, “and the owner of the ox shall be clear,” and interpreting “et”
The text brings the passage in Pesachim 22b about the dispute between Hizkiyah and Rabbi Avahu whether a prohibition of eating includes a prohibition of benefit or requires a separate source. It cites the stoned ox, “its flesh shall not be eaten,” and the interpretation that “and the owner of the ox shall be clear” comes to prohibit benefit, with Ben Zoma’s explanation: “that person has gone out clean of his property.” It presents Rabbi Avahu’s answer that “and the owner of the ox shall be clear” teaches about benefit from its hide, and the alternative derivation from “its flesh” as including “what is secondary to its flesh,” in contrast to one who holds that the word “et” is not interpreted. It cites the baraita about Shimon HaAmsoni or Nehemiah HaAmsoni, who interpreted every occurrence of “et” until “You shall fear the Lord your God” and then withdrew, and Rabbi Akiva’s interpretation “to include Torah scholars,” understanding that the dispute remains concerning interpretation of “et.”
Shimon HaAmsoni, Rabbi Akiva, “the Torah speaks in human language,” and theories as scientific work
The text interprets Shimon HaAmsoni’s withdrawal as the collapse of an entire method because of one counterexample, rather than leaving the matter as “it requires further analysis.” It presents Rabbi Akiva as someone who holds a theory that succeeds in most places and is therefore willing to press for a solution in an exceptional verse, whereas Shimon HaAmsoni effectively adopts a line close to the study hall of Rabbi Ishmael and the principle that “the Torah speaks in human language.” It describes the creation of rules as work resembling science—identifying patterns from examples—and the argument as a dispute over how to formulate the patterns, not an insistence on rigid transmission from Sinai.
Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and healthy conservatism versus a counterexample
The text presents Karl Popper as holding that a scientific theory cannot be proven, only refuted, and gives the example of “all ravens are black” versus “one pink raven.” It argues that in practice science does not work that way, because a good theory is not discarded because of one anomaly; difficulties are retained until a better alternative theory appears. It mentions Thomas Kuhn, who took this in sociological directions. It parallels this to the dispute between Shimon HaAmsoni and Rabbi Akiva: Popperianism that throws out the theory versus conservatism that continues using it despite a local difficulty.
Broken telephone, stylistic change in prophecy, and the necessity of human involvement in transmission
The text states that an unchanging tradition is an illusion, and brings the game of broken telephone as an example of how even the transmission of a short sentence becomes distorted quickly, all the more so a corpus like the Oral Torah. It cites the Talmudic statement that no two prophets prophesy in the same style, in order to show that even direct reception from the Holy One, blessed be He, passes through a human style. It emphasizes that not only situations change, but also minds and modes of thought, and therefore the rules themselves also undergo change and conceptual reformulation over time.
“It is not in heaven,” authenticity and obligation, and the absence of a priori boundaries
The text argues that it is obvious that the Holy One, blessed be He, and Moses our teacher “never dreamed” of most of the details of Jewish law as they are known today, but this is not troubling because obligation does not depend on the historical authenticity of the formulation. It formulates this as: the Holy One, blessed be He, “intended that we should decide this way,” and that “it is not in heaven” means that human interpretation is part of the binding system. It argues that one cannot determine a priori boundaries for what is legitimate in a dynamic tradition, because every formulation of a boundary is itself an interpretation open to dispute, although it acknowledges that the Great Court, by force of “you shall not deviate,” decides when it exists.
Measurements, “the hand recoils,” and halakhic positivism
The text presents the modern difficulty with sharp boundaries through the phrase “the hand recoils,” which is defined as an experience rather than as a number of degrees, and through the problems that arose when cubits and olive-bulk measures were converted into centimeters and contradictions emerged regarding the ratio between an olive-bulk and an egg-bulk. It attributes this to a modern mindset that seeks numerical criteria and complete mapping of rules, and tells of a yearly course in the kollel at Bar-Ilan with Rabbi Yitzhak Rappaport on halakhic positivism, showing that the attempt to map Jewish law into rigid rules is naive. It argues that even someone who thinks he works with rules actually derives rules from examples and then forgets that he himself formulated them.
Interpretation of the Mishnah and the Talmud, and pilpul on Maimonides
The text cites in the name of the Vilna Gaon that forced interpretations and missing-text reconstructions are “hermeneutical principles” applied to the Mishnah, just as there are hermeneutical principles for the Torah, and from this presents a development of “interpretation of the Talmud” and even “interpretation of Maimonides.” It notes that Maimonides wanted to prevent pilpul on the Talmud and direct learning toward conclusions and subjects “that really matter,” but in practice the world of learning developed into intensive pilpul on Maimonides himself.
Deduction, induction, and analogy as the logical structure of static versus dynamic tradition
The text distinguishes in logic between deduction, induction, and analogy, defining deduction as a necessary inference in which the conclusion is contained within the premises, whereas induction and analogy are non-necessary and speculative forms of inference. It explains this through the hot-air-balloon joke, showing that the certainty of a deductive argument comes from the fact that it adds no new information, and parallels this to the tradition of the “hollow pipe,” where there is no real human input. It presents dynamic tradition as tradition based also on “soft” inferences of induction and analogy, and cites Nachmanides in the introduction to Milhamot Hashem: “The wisdom of our Torah is not like the wisdom of astronomy and mathematics, whose proofs are decisive.” It connects the critiques of dynamic tradition to critiques of the validity of non-necessary inferences, and presents the two opposite critiques as the same move denying the possibility of obligation born from a human process that is not mathematical.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the Torah scroll, with the three margins, what the Talmud says—that holiness applies also to the margins. After that I moved to the dispute that existed in the first generation of Yavne, and I tried to show that basically there was a dispute about this very point—that is, about the margins, about the status of the margins. Because Rabbi Eliezer and his brother-in-law Rabban Gamliel held that we are supposed to be some kind of hollow pipe, transmitting the Torah from Mount Sinai onward, and anything that is a human addition or human added value is basically not Torah—it’s speculation. You have to transmit the Torah you received from Mount Sinai and not add anything of your own. And therefore they judged people there by the question of how believing they were, how righteous they were—that is, by the person and not by the substance of the matter. Against Rabbi Eliezer rose up his colleague Rabbi Yehoshua and his students Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, first and second generation sages of Yavne, and they staged some kind of putsch there. They deposed Rabban Gamliel, excommunicated Rabbi Eliezer. In the end Rabban Gamliel accepted the ruling and returned in rotation with Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, but the discussion there also revolved around this point—around the question whether there is any significance to a person’s intellect when we interpret or expound the Torah. And the struggle was around this issue of what tradition is. Is tradition basically passing on what we received from Sinai—we’re supposed to be careful not to touch it—or is tradition something more dynamic, something that depends on the human beings who transmit it. A person is never a hollow pipe. And at the end I think I mentioned the eulogy Rabbi Kook wrote for the Avnei Nezer, the Sochatchover. So he brought there what the Talmud says, that Rabbi Eliezer never said anything he had not heard from his teacher, and on the other hand it says that he said things no ear had ever heard before. So Rabbi Kook explains that he heard from his teacher things that nobody else heard. Meaning, it’s not a contradiction—it’s two sides of the same coin. Meaning, he actually heard from his teacher things that other people could not hear. Why? Because the passage from teacher to student is not the passage of information; it depends on the transmitter and on the recipient. The person through whom that information passes always contributes something to it, has some kind of added value. And therefore things do not pass in a simple way. And I added there—I think—that not only did nobody else hear this from his teacher, but his teacher himself also didn’t know it was there. Meaning, there are things the student hears in what his teacher says that the teacher himself does not understand to be contained in his own words. And that’s not a homily; it’s plain simple meaning. I mean, completely real. It seems to me that anyone who’s had the chance to study for a significant amount of time with someone—meaning with a person who is significant for him—has experienced this, I think. At least that’s how I see it. You see that in the end you receive an enormous amount from him. I know that I, for example, had a lecturer I really sat with for years, and I really got a tremendous amount from him, and the way I think has nothing to do with the way he thinks. Meaning, he usually doesn’t agree with what I say; it’s not even his direction at all—but I got everything from him. Meaning, he just didn’t know that it was contained in what he was saying. It’s true. I’m telling you, it’s not a joke. It’s there in what he says, and he doesn’t know it. Yes—Kurzweil and S.Y. Agnon, exactly.
[Speaker C] That connects to what we talked about from Brisker Torah, about what Maimonides really
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] intended.
[Speaker C] Intended or didn’t intend.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. So there too I made the same claim. Because there are things—like that well-known midrash, where Moses our teacher enters Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and doesn’t understand anything and is distressed, until they say, “This is a law given to Moses at Sinai,” and then he calms down. What does that mean? What’s the point of that midrash? It says the same thing. Meaning, they transmitted the Torah they received from Moses, but when Moses our teacher heard it, he didn’t identify it at all as what he had told them. It wasn’t that. And then they said, “A law given to Moses at Sinai,” and what did he understand? He understood that in fact it really was there in his words, but it needed a different study hall, a different period, different people, in order to bring those things out and give them this form—the form of the wording, the form of the thinking, the applications. And that’s true. And therefore tradition is basically a dynamic matter. That’s the basic point I want to talk about in this series, and I’ll say in one sentence what that means. It means things in two opposite directions. There is criticism of tradition from both sides. There is criticism of dynamic tradition from both sides. There is criticism from the ultra-traditional side that says: what are you inventing? We have only what we received from our rabbis, and you mustn’t touch it. We’re supposed to preserve things as we received them. And there is criticism from the opposite side that says: fine, if that’s Torah, then what does it have to do with what Moses our teacher received at Sinai? It’s a human invention, so what is that to me? Why am I obligated by that? And those are two opposite critiques, but they come to the same point. What the two opposite critiques share is the conception that tradition cannot be dynamic—that tradition is the opposite of dynamism. Tradition is something I take, draw and pour, pass from my teacher to my student, that’s all; I mustn’t touch it. That’s what tradition means. Otherwise it’s invention, not tradition. And that gets taken in these two opposite directions: if you don’t do it that way then it isn’t tradition, so one person gets angry at you, and the other says: fine, then it’s worthless, meaning it’s not really the original thing. And I think this idea, which seems simple, is something many people just don’t notice, and both critiques feed off it. And therefore, at least in my view, it’s very, very important to clarify this point. So that’s what I’m going to try to do now a bit. Up to here, that’s the framework. Good. So what does dynamic tradition actually mean? I’ll maybe bring an example—I think we talked about it once—about the tradition of the hermeneutical principles, and I’ll illustrate it through that. The medieval authorities (Rishonim) write—everyone who addresses the issue writes—that the hermeneutical principles are a law given to Moses at Sinai. The system—I’m talking about legal interpretation; aggadic interpretation is a different business. Legal interpretation is a law given to Moses at Sinai. Meaning, Moses our teacher received at Sinai and transmitted onward the entire system of hermeneutical principles: a fortiori, an archetype, one verse, two verses, general and particular, and all the principles we know from the baraita of Rabbi Ishmael. The researchers—almost all of them, really all of them—agree that the principles are not ancient. Meaning, they developed over the course of history, and there are pretty good indications of that. I think it’s hard to ignore that claim, if only because of the number of principles. Meaning, the system of principles went through a process of development documented in the Talmud and in rabbinic sources. The earliest baraita is from the period of Hillel the Elder, where he speaks of seven principles, seven hermeneutical principles. Then you have Rabbi Ishmael with thirteen principles. Rabbi Akiva, parallel to him, interpreted with another system, also thirteen—or I don’t know if thirteen, but different ones. General and particular is Rabbi Ishmael, inclusion and exclusion is Rabbi Akiva. So here there were two parallel systems of principles, and the Talmud says that each one received it from his teacher, Nehunya ben HaKanah, and each one—meaning, there were two traditions here about hermeneutical principles. Later, Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili, who is a student of a student of Rabbi Akiva, already speaks of thirty-two principles. And in fact there are many more than thirty-two. When you look in the Talmud, you see that the methods, the ways we interpret the Torah, are many more than the thirty-two of Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili. Meaning, you can literally see with your eyes how this system develops over time. We started with seven, then thirteen, then thirty-two, and really we reached many more. And there are also disputes, meaning you can see this is not a hollow pipe. If I’m speaking about this now as an example of tradition, then it’s not just tradition—it’s one of the most fundamental things we should have preserved, because these are the tools by which we derive Jewish laws from the verses. So if we didn’t preserve this, if we invented this, then what can be said about the laws themselves? Meaning, these are only the tools by which we derive the laws—so the laws themselves, there’s nothing to talk about. And even with regard to this, we see that there is in fact a certain dynamism in the system. And once again, the criticisms arise from both directions. There are those who say: absolutely not, everything descended to Moses at Sinai. Why, the thirty-two principles of Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili—the Holy One, blessed be He, recited all that to Moses our teacher. For some reason it disappeared until Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili, and then he suddenly brought it out into the world. That’s the ultra-conservative, ultra-traditionalist approach. And the opposite critique says: basically this is all human invention, a development influenced by all sorts of places. In Lieberman’s book, Greeks and Greekness in the Land of Israel, he talks about the influence of inferential forms from the ancient East that created these hermeneutical principles. And that’s the critique in the opposite direction, which basically says: fine, then what is all this to me? It’s a human invention—what does it have to do with Torah? What—even if I’m obligated by what the Holy One, blessed be He, said, I’m not obligated by what human beings say. So why should I act according to it? So those same two critiques arise with respect to the hermeneutical principles because you can see there some degree of dynamism. And therefore I say it’s very important to understand, against both of these critiques—because in my opinion both are wrong—that there is such a thing as dynamic tradition. And it’s not anarchy on the one hand, but it’s also not mathematics on the other. Meaning, it’s a kind of continuation, but a flexible continuation. We once talked about swimsuits at one of the meetings, so there too you basically see a similar idea. And basically the claim is the following: when we say that something is a law given to Moses at Sinai, what that means is that it has a source in Sinai, but that does not necessarily mean that the source looks exactly the way we perceive the thing today—like that midrash of Moses our teacher in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall, when they told him, “This is a law given to Moses at Sinai.” They didn’t just tell him, “Moses received this at Sinai.” The expression “a law given to Moses at Sinai” seems to me to be the most traditional legal category there is—meaning, this thing we did not touch; this is from Moses. Fine, there are interpretations, there are expositions, but there are some laws or some legal principles that we received as-is. Meaning, this comes from Moses our teacher; it is a law given to Moses at Sinai. And about that, the midrash says that Moses our teacher did not recognize at all what they were saying. About that! Meaning, it’s not accidental—there’s a very important statement here for our purposes. And basically the claim is—and again, I did talk about this before, I just don’t remember when—but the claim is that when Moses our teacher went up to receive the Torah, then the Holy One, blessed be He, sat with him as a study partner. They learned together, and the Holy One, blessed be He, read a verse with him: “You shall fear the Lord your God,” and said to him: this includes Torah scholars. Fine, move on. A verse about male servant and maidservant, cattle and flock, wine and strong drink—general and particular and general, yes, redemption of the second tithe, or things of that kind. But He didn’t mention the words “general and particular and general” or “an archetype” or “one verse,” I assume. I’m reconstructing, of course, freely—but I’m trying to show the dynamic. Meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, read him a verse, told him what the verse means, and also told him the exposition that comes out of the verse—or at least some of the expositions. Obviously not all of them, but to understand the language, this whole idea. And then Moses our teacher transmitted that onward. And I mentioned the Talmud—I’m almost sure I mentioned the Talmud in Temurah. The Talmud says that during the days of mourning for Moses, 1,700 a fortiori arguments and verbal analogies and 3,000 laws were forgotten; laws given to Moses at Sinai were lost. And Otniel ben Kenaz restored the expositions—the expositions Otniel ben Kenaz restored through his dialectic. The laws given to Moses at Sinai were lost. So what does it mean that he restored those expositions through his dialectic? The claim is—and I think that’s how it should be understood—as a kind of scientific work. Meaning, basically he gathered the material. During the days of mourning for Moses they didn’t study Torah—the leading sage had died, everyone was in mourning, and when you are in mourning you don’t study Torah. Torah was oral; the Oral Torah was not written down. So once the entire Jewish people didn’t study Torah for forty days, it’s no wonder that quite a few laws and expositions and elements of the Oral Torah were forgotten. So what happens then? Otniel ben Kenaz gathers all the expositions that were preserved, and these expositions, once again, are verses with interpretations next to them. Meaning: “You shall fear the Lord your God”—to include Torah scholars. “To her, to the woman…” all the examples I gave earlier. And then he asks himself: what is the connection between the interpretation and the law derived from the verse? He has no idea, because the rules had not yet been formulated. They just said: this is the verse and this is how it is to be learned from it. So he begins to think: wait a minute, I see that in various places where there is a similar word, we make a verbal analogy. So that probably means there is a rule that says we make verbal analogies. Meaning, when there is a similar word in different places, there is a verbal analogy. And that is how the rule of verbal analogy was created. Now, on the one hand this is a law given to Moses at Sinai, because this mode of reading Moses our teacher received at Sinai. On the other hand, the way it underwent formalization and reached us is of course the result of human work. And not only is it the result of human work, but it is quite possible that it does not fit the source completely; it is even likely that it does not fit the source completely, because it passed through a process of conceptualization, processing, an attempt to understand what was going on, and then of course it was applied to other verses as well. That is why he was able to reconstruct this, because he could reconstruct laws that had been lost once he was already equipped with these rules. And these rules are slowly created over the generations, and that is what I described earlier, that their number keeps growing. Why does their number keep growing? Fine, so Otniel ben Kenaz created verbal analogy and a fortiori, okay, we understood that—but then what happens afterward? People suddenly get stuck on more expositions, more things they don’t understand, they don’t understand how the exposition is connected to the verse. Then more rules are created. Not only are more rules created, but every single rule gets broken down into several smaller sub-rules, because suddenly we understand at a higher resolution that there are several different ways of applying each such rule. And the number of rules keeps swelling. Now all these things are, apparently, human creations on the one hand. On the other hand, they are nothing but a deciphering of what we received from Sinai. That’s what I call a dynamic law given to Moses at Sinai. I want to… yes.
[Speaker C] How does all this fit with what Maimonides says, that there is no dispute about a law given to Moses at Sinai?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a good question. In the responsum of Havot Yair, siman 192, he gathers all the laws given to Moses at Sinai, and there are dozens—very many dozens—about which disputes arose. And he tries to explain Maimonides, and doesn’t really succeed with a large part of them. So I don’t know what to say, unless you say that no dispute arose on the basic point that this is a law given to Moses at Sinai. But within these laws given to Moses at Sinai there is Nachmanides. Nachmanides says—and all his students repeat this afterward; you can look in the Talmudic Encyclopedia under the entry on verbal analogy—he gathers a few such sources there. Nachmanides says that a verbal analogy a person does not derive on his own unless he received it from his teacher, whereas a fortiori reasoning any person can derive on his own. Verbal analogy is only if he received it from his teacher. As for the other principles, by the way, that’s a dispute between Rashi and Tosafot, but most of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) say that the other principles too a person can derive on his own. Meaning, verbal analogy is the exception, not a fortiori reasoning. That’s the contrast between Rashi and Tosafot.
[Speaker B] So was Otniel ben Kenaz a precedent? Right? Meaning, not only that there was some crisis and then he reconstructed things?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We are in a constant crisis. We are in a crisis that hasn’t stopped from the giving of the Torah until today. We are constantly dealing with it in the same way. We do formalization and refinement and formulation and try to understand what is going on. And that’s how rules are produced. And indeed, today too, independently of the hermeneutical principles, in Jewish law generally, in the form of learning, we have lots of rules. From where did the rule come down from Sinai that in a dispute between Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Yehuda the law follows Rabbi Yehuda? At Sinai? Of course not. That’s a rule formed in the Talmud. Where did it come from that the law follows Rava in the cases indicated by the acronym? Where did the rule that the law follows the majority come from? All kinds of things like that. These are rules formed over the generations, but they have a basis in Sinai, and they went through a process of refinement, formalization, formulation, conceptualization, so it’s obvious that human beings have some kind of influence on this matter. And therefore disputes also arise. Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael—one expounds by general and particular, the other by inclusion and exclusion. Why? Because when you formulate the material you received and try to generate rules from it, there is disagreement over what system of rules actually fits what we see here. And this disagreement has consequences, halakhic consequences. Because if this is the rule, then in a new case that we did not receive, the result will be one thing. But if that is the rule, then in a new case the result will be something else. And that is how there arise in the Talmud quite a few disputes between Rabbi Akiva’s forms of exposition and Rabbi Ishmael’s forms of exposition. The most famous is in Shevuot 3a, in Shevuot 26 there—“to do harm or to do good.” And there are quite a few legal disputes that come out of the fact that the modes of exposition are such and such. By the way, parenthetically, when you check Maimonides’ rulings for example—as opposed to the Shulchan Arukh, which maybe I also mentioned once—with the Shulchan Arukh I once saw an interesting article by Avi Sagi or Benjamin Porat, I don’t remember exactly which, where he argues that the fact that we try to reconcile contradictions in the Shulchan Arukh is based on a mistaken assumption. The Shulchan Arukh did not claim to be coherent. Meaning, it’s not a code of rulings in the sense we think of it today; it’s a summary of the Beit Yosef. And once it’s a summary, the digest of the Beit Yosef, then the existence of contradictions is simply because it brings different opinions. There’s no point in trying to produce coherence there. That’s unlike Maimonides, for example. Maimonides explicitly writes that his aim was to produce a code—we talked about Maimonides—his aim was to produce a coherent, complete, full code of all Jewish law. So there you can, and need to, reconcile Maimonides’ different rulings. And precisely against this background, when you look at how Maimonides rules in all these disputes connected to expositions of general and particular or inclusion and exclusion, you see that it’s not consistent. There are places where he rules like those who expound by general and particular, and places where he rules like inclusion and exclusion. He doesn’t say it in that language; he just states the law. But when you look in the Talmud, you see that the dispute regarding that law depends on the question of which system of exposition we used—Rabbi Akiva’s or Rabbi Ishmael’s. And then the question is how to explain such a thing. So it seems to me that Heschel already starts this in his book Torah from Heaven. Those volumes of Torah from Heaven, something like that, I don’t remember the exact title anymore, something with Torah from Heaven. And it’s a very interesting book, even though it received a lot of criticism from Talmud scholars. And I think his claim there is that the development continues. Meaning, after Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, study halls were formed that took elements from here and elements from there. Then the system of exposition becomes much more ramified, and the shades are already less sharp than they were for Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael. So in fact a certain exposition was interpreted with both general and particular and inclusion and exclusion, but in some way that created a new system from this. And this whole business continued developing all the time. Today we hardly deal with the hermeneutical principles anymore, but on the principled level this kept developing as long as people dealt with it. So this basically means that the process of conceptualization is clearly a human process. But that does not mean that the material we are kneading or conceptualizing did not descend from Sinai. Our grasp of a thing is always also a result of our modes of thought. There is no perception—a person cannot perceive something objectively; even if he tries, he won’t succeed. Meaning, even those who live by this ultra-conservative ethos—I spoke earlier about the ultra-conservative critique—this ethos that they are basically just transmitting, they don’t touch anything, that is naive. Obviously that’s not true. I told you about my uncle who said that Abaye and Rava learned in Yiddish. If they knew how to learn, then obviously they learned in Yiddish. And this is exactly that ethos which says that of course nothing changed, we are only transmitting as-is. They also didn’t wear shtreimels, right? It’s obvious.
[Speaker B] Situations do change.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Yes, situations change, and forms of thought change too, yes, right.
[Speaker B] No, but that’s much
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] More than situations—but I’m saying—even the forms of thinking, even the mindset changes. Meaning, it’s not only that I apply the same rules in different circumstances; the rules themselves actually undergo change, because we’re influenced by lots of things, and there’s culture, and there are ways of thinking. What seems logical to one person doesn’t seem logical to someone else. There are places where the thinking is of one kind, and so things will take shape one way, and in other places they’ll take shape differently. Human beings are built in, inherently, into the Oral Torah. That was exactly the discussion I finished with last time. That was the argument there in Yavneh: whether a human being really can be involved. We talked about Pirkei Avot, where “he would say” begins at the end of chapter one. Until then, nobody “would say.” Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly. Then Shimon the Righteous was among the remnants of the Men of the Great Assembly—he would say three things. Right? So before him nobody said anything? The answer is no. Up to him—again, in the ethos—nobody said. Up to him, the conception was that we pass it on through a hollow pipe, and suddenly human beings begin to say things. And what they say counts as Torah, which is an enormous innovation. Meaning, we thought that Torah is only what the Holy One, blessed be He, gives. And what human beings say—that you have to remove, meaning you have to clean it away in order to remain only with Torah. Not at all. “He would say”—and that enters Pirkei Avot. And I showed how this reaches all the way to the dispute in Yavneh, in effect. That exact point was what they argued about.
Now I want to show you an example of this process, of the actual occurrence of this process. The Talmud in Temurah that I mentioned earlier, and the Talmud in Pesachim 22b—there are parallels there—the Talmud discusses the relationship between the prohibition of eating and the prohibition of deriving benefit. And the Talmud says there, it brings a dispute between Hezekiah and Rabbi Abbahu on the question whether everywhere the Torah says there is a prohibition of eating, that also includes a prohibition of deriving benefit. That’s Rabbi Abbahu’s view, and Hezekiah says no: if there’s a prohibition of deriving benefit, you need a separate source. So the Talmud brings several difficulties in both directions, to show whether you do need a separate source for a prohibition of deriving benefit or you don’t need one.
One of the objections is: but what about the ox that is stoned, concerning which the Merciful One said, “its flesh shall not be eaten”? And it was taught: from the fact that it says, “the ox shall surely be stoned,” don’t I already know that it is a carcass, and a carcass is forbidden for eating? It says the ox shall be stoned, so why do I need to prohibit it for eating? It was stoned, not slaughtered properly. So if it’s a carcass, then it’s forbidden to eat anyway—why do I need a verse forbidding its consumption? So what does “it shall not be eaten” teach? It tells you that if one slaughtered it after its sentence was finalized, it is forbidden. Right? If its sentence was finalized but I didn’t stone it—I slaughtered it—it is still forbidden to eat. The moment its sentence is finalized, it becomes forbidden to eat regardless of whether it was slaughtered or not.
The Talmud asks: I only know this regarding eating; from where do we know regarding deriving benefit? The verse says: “and the owner of the ox shall be clear.” So here you already see that you need a separate source in order to prohibit deriving benefit; it’s not enough that it says “shall not be eaten” to teach me both eating and benefit. What does that mean? Shimon ben Zoma says: like a person who says to his fellow, “So-and-so has gone out clean of his property,” meaning he has no benefit from it whatsoever. He’s forbidden to derive benefit, forbidden to eat—clean of his property. Fine, that’s “and the owner of the ox shall be clear.”
Anyway, you need a separate source to prohibit deriving benefit; it’s not enough that it says it’s forbidden for eating. The reason is that it wrote “and the owner of the ox shall be clear,” because if it only had “shall not be eaten,” that would imply a prohibition of eating; a prohibition of benefit would not be implied. So what do we see? That you need a source for a prohibition of benefit. Meaning, “shall not be eaten” by itself teaches me only a prohibition of eating and does not teach a prohibition of benefit.
The Talmud says: no, actually “shall not be eaten” implies both a prohibition of eating and a prohibition of benefit. That’s Rabbi Abbahu answering. According to his view, when it says “shall not be eaten,” that means both a prohibition of eating and of benefit. So why do I need another source for prohibition of benefit? He says: “and the owner of the ox shall be clear” comes to teach the benefit of its hide. Right? You might have thought it’s permitted to derive benefit from its hide. The meat is forbidden to eat, but the hide—you’re allowed to benefit from. So this comes to teach that even the hide is forbidden for benefit. Because if it entered your mind to think that “its flesh shall not be eaten” is what is written, then its flesh yes, its hide no. So it teaches us otherwise.
And according to those other tanna’im who derive that verse for a different exposition—for half-ransom and compensation for fetuses, right, the question whether one may benefit from half-ransom or compensation for fetuses—then from where do they derive the benefit of its hide? From “its flesh”—the word “with” its flesh, that which is secondary to its flesh. Meaning, that is an inclusion. “Et” comes to include. And here I get to our point: it comes to include the hide as well, that it is forbidden for benefit.
And the other one? What does the second one do with the word “et”? After all, the second one says that from the prohibition of eating we already get the prohibition of benefit, so the “et” remains superfluous. So it says: he does not expound “et.” Meaning: and the other one does not expound “et.” He does not derive laws from occurrences of “et.” And then they bring the well-known baraita: as it was taught, Shimon HaAmsuni—or Nehemiah HaAmsuni, there are different versions—yes, Shimon HaAmsuni, and some say Nehemiah HaAmsuni, would expound every “et” in the Torah. Once he reached “the Lord your God shall you fear,” he stopped. His students said to him: Rabbi, what will become of all the “ets” that you expounded? He said to them: just as I received reward for the exposition, so too I receive reward for the withdrawal. Until Rabbi Akiva came and expounded: “the Lord your God shall you fear”—to include Torah scholars.
Meaning, he struggled with it, and Rabbi Akiva came and taught him that “the Lord your God shall you fear” comes to include Torah scholars. What remains in the end? He did not accept Rabbi Akiva’s words. It doesn’t say so explicitly—but the baraita doesn’t say it, though the Talmud certainly understood that the dispute remained. Otherwise, what does it say above? Above it says that the other one does not expound “et,” as it was taught. Meaning, Shimon HaAmsuni remained in his position that one does not expound “ets.” Rabbi Akiva had a solution, but he remained with the view that one does not expound “ets.” So this remains as a dispute.
What is the dispute here? This is the example I want to show of what I said earlier. Rabbi Akiva includes extra cases from “ets”—a little more, inclusions are Rabbi Akiva’s territory. He would derive from an extra word, from the thorn of a yod; he was meticulous about every detail. Rabbi Ishmael—by the way, another thing that Eshel sharpened in his book—is the father of the approach that “the Torah speaks in human language.” Meaning, you don’t take every extra word and create all kinds of Jewish laws from it. Fine—if it’s phrased reasonably, then it’s phrased reasonably. Only things that are really blatantly extra can begin to raise the question what they’re saying. But Rabbi Akiva expounded everything, including the word “et.”
Now Shimon HaAmsuni sat and studied with him—so it says in the Jerusalem Talmud—and here he was his student. What? Shimon HaAmsuni, the one brought here. Now he would expound every “et” in the Torah. He learned from Rabbi Akiva; he expounded every “et” in the Torah, until he reached one verse: “the Lord your God shall you fear.” Rashi explains in Kiddushin that it is impossible to include anything. Not only did he fail to find something—apriori there cannot be an “et” here. Whom could you include to make him similar to the Holy One, blessed be He, such that just as one fears the Holy One, blessed be He, one should also fear him? And the Jerusalem Talmud brings not only Me but also My Torah—that’s what they expound there in “the Lord your God shall you fear.” But he got stuck. He says: I don’t understand—whom is it possible, “to whom will you liken Me, that I should be equal?” Right? Whom can one include beyond the Holy One, blessed be He?
And then what? His conclusion is very surprising. It’s worth noticing this. He doesn’t just stop there; rather he says: just as I received reward for the exposition, so too I receive reward for the withdrawal. Rashi here explains what that means: he retracted all the inclusions he had expounded. Meaning, he gave up all the inclusions he had made until now. It’s not just that here he says, fine, I’ll leave this as needing further analysis. You know the yeshiva joke: a student comes to the rabbi and asks, I have a question. He says, look in Rabbi Akiva Eiger in such-and-such tractate on such-and-such page. So he goes there and sees that Rabbi Akiva Eiger indeed asks something on Tosafot, but it has nothing to do with what he asked. He comes back to the rabbi and says, did you see there are two consecutive Tosafot, and Rabbi Akiva Eiger says “needs further analysis” on both of them? Meaning, he asked “needs further analysis” on the first Tosafot and went on to learn the second Tosafot—he wasn’t alarmed by it. So Shimon HaAmsuni could have done that too. He could have remained with “needs further analysis” on “the Lord your God shall you fear.” But instead he decided that this difficulty undermines the whole method of deriving inclusions from “ets.”
What does that mean? This is a law given to Moses at Sinai, isn’t it? Inclusion from “et” is a law given to Moses at Sinai. If you don’t know what to include, leave it as unresolved. What can you do? No. Shimon HaAmsuni did the same process that Otniel ben Kenaz did. Nobody knows whether one really derives inclusions from “et.” It was one such proposal—that one of the rules by which the Torah is expounded is inclusion from every occurrence of “et.” Fine. So Shimon HaAmsuni heard this from Rabbi Akiva, his teacher, and that’s what he did all along. Until he got stuck and said, wait, excuse me, but here it doesn’t work. And since it doesn’t work, apparently this proposal is not correct; we need to look for a different rule.
[Speaker B] You’re not saying that he just didn’t grasp it? Right? He’s not saying that maybe he just didn’t understand it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He didn’t say that? More than that. Right. You said even more. Even after Rabbi Akiva explained it to him, he didn’t accept it. Right. And he remained with the position that one does not expound “ets.” It’s not… it’s not only that he himself didn’t think of it and then Rabbi Akiva came and explained it to him. After Rabbi Akiva said it, he still didn’t accept it. Why? Because the formulation of these rules—like including from “et” and all sorts of things like that—is a human formulation. We did not receive from Sinai that one must derive inclusions from “et.” There was a proposal like that. We see that many Jewish laws that we received from Moses emerge from verses that contain the word “et.” So if I assume that “et” comes to include, that would explain a lot of laws. So Otniel ben Kenaz—or I don’t know, somebody along the way there—decided that there is such a rule, that one should derive inclusions from “ets.” But of course that is only Rabbi Akiva’s rule. Rabbi Ishmael would not include. Rabbi Ishmael held that the Torah speaks in human language. Shimon HaAmsuni became convinced that Rabbi Ishmael was right. Because the fact is that in this verse there cannot possibly be an exposition. Not that I didn’t think of one—there cannot be one. Whom can I compare to the Holy One, blessed be He? Then Rabbi Akiva comes and what does he say to him? He comes to include Torah scholars.
[Speaker B] Meaning, Shimon HaAmsuni shelved expounding “ets.” He expounded “the Lord your God shall you fear,” and from that he reached the conclusion that the whole rule is wrong.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Meaning, this rule goes in the trash, that’s it—don’t expound. This… you remind me of a responsum of the Rosh: can one cancel a cancellation? Say I canceled an agent. Fine? Can I cancel the cancellation, and then the agent becomes my agent again without my appointing him מחדש—without my appointing him again? I just cancel the cancellation. Or not? Say I canceled him, then that’s it, he’s now like any other person. In order to make him an agent again I have to appoint him again. Right? The question is whether canceling these expositions is itself an exposition, or not. Maybe I’m simply saying the first exposition was incorrect. It’s like with conditions, for example, right, there one can cancel a cancellation. Rabbi Elchanan argues that with conditions yes, and with agency no. In any event—what does Rabbi Akiva say to him? Rabbi Akiva says, look, since “et” comes to include, it’s clear to me that it comes to include. I understand your difficulty. I don’t have a great solution… I don’t have a good solution. This is the least bad thing I found: to include Torah scholars. We have to include something—what can we do? So nothing really works, so I’ll take what’s least bad, what’s as close as possible to the Holy One, blessed be He, and I’ll say: Torah scholars. Clearly this is a fallback position. It’s a fallback position for Rabbi Akiva, who claims that this rule is a good rule, and I’m not going to throw it out because of one counterexample. Since I became convinced that this rule is good, I’m willing to force the reading. By contrast, Shimon HaAmsuni says no: I have a counterexample, so apparently this rule is not correct.
So here we see how the whole thing works—how the rules are created. Rabbi Akiva took several examples and created a rule from them. He became convinced that it is a good rule; in the other places he’ll already force things a bit if necessary. Someone else says no, I’m not convinced, so apparently there is no such rule, and I’m going to Rabbi Ishmael’s study hall. So we see here that systems of interpretation are taking shape, and they are the result of human interpretation. Meaning: how do we decide how to formulate the rule of interpretation, the interpretive rule? Yes.
[Speaker B] But what… you’re comparing kal va-chomer and limitation and inclusion, but they’re completely different, because the rule of limitation and inclusion, that measure, right, maybe it’s a rule. But the specific case—where do they get the exposition itself from? In kal va-chomer there’s some logical element there, or at least a regulatory one. Right? This thing was pulled out of nowhere.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t remember if I already talked about this, but I’ll repeat it—I’ll say it later on. Within the system of interpretive measures there’s a division into two kinds. There are the logical measures—kal va-chomer and the two forms of binyan av. Maybe also the case of two verses that contradict one another; there’s some room to discuss that a bit. And the rest are textual measures. And there’s a difference between them… gezera shava is the most… the most extreme. Right. That’s why they always say kal va-chomer and gezera shava—to tell you that these are the two types of interpretive measures. Those are the archetypes of the two kinds.
[Speaker B] But there there’s much more personal invention. Right, though kal va-chomer is completely logical. And also…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll talk about kal va-chomer too, but I’ll get to that.
[Speaker B] Maybe it’s connected to unifying exposition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes. In that context, if I remember correctly, I spoke about it a bit, and of course it’s connected to human involvement in the tradition, the dynamism of the tradition. I’ll return to it.
So what we actually see here is that there is a kind of work here like scientific work. We take examples, create some rule from them, and of course there can now be an argument about which rule fits which examples, how to formulate the rule, and that has many halakhic implications in other examples to which we’ll apply the rule. In that context it’s interesting to note the parallel dispute in philosophy of science. Karl Popper argues that a scientific theory cannot be proven—not argues; that’s obvious—it cannot be proven, only refuted. Meaning, if I say all ravens are black—that’s my scientific theory—I will never be able to prove it, because every time I see a black raven I still can’t be sure there isn’t some other raven somewhere that is pink. So I can never know with certainty, or prove, the theory that all ravens are black. But if I see one pink raven, then the theory collapses. So refuting the theory—I can certainly do that. More than that: a scientific theory that cannot be refuted is not a scientific theory. Right, that’s the next stage: what makes a theory scientific is the ability to refute it, or its being refutable.
But basically Popper says that a scientific theory can only be refuted, not proven. Now after him there were all kinds of critiques of his thesis, because the fact is—Thomas Kuhn, for example, who took this in sociological directions—but the critique is a correct critique, though sociology always means it’s wrong, so taking it in sociological directions obviously meant he was mistaken. But the reason he took it there was based on correct considerations. The objection is a good objection; the solutions were less good. The claim is that at least factually, when you examine how the dynamics of the development of theories and the replacement of scientific theories actually work, it is not true that every time you find a counterexample you throw out the theory and look for a new theory the way Popper described it. If there is a theory that works well for a great many cases, then even if I have one or two or five cases where it doesn’t work…
[Speaker D] You stay with the difficulties.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. You remain—as with Rabbi Akiva Eiger—precisely, you leave it as needing further analysis and move on. Meaning, you need some threshold, some minimum amount of problems, before we throw away a good theory. And in the first place, for a good theory we won’t adopt a theory that we know already has problems.
[Speaker E] But that’s not true. Quantum theory had some problem they couldn’t solve for a year and a half.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That specific problem was a very specific problem. It wasn’t just some case they didn’t understand. And the fact that afterward they found a theory that solved it while leaving everything else intact and that stood the test—they didn’t throw out the old one before they found the other one. It works the other way around. First you find the alternative, and only afterward do you throw out the earlier one. You don’t decide that the old one is wrong and then, “Oops, now let’s look for a new theory.” It simply never works that way. We find a new theory and then we say, ah, if we found one, fine, then let’s throw out the old one. If not, then not. And that’s exactly the point: there is a kind of conservatism—but conservatism in a positive sense, healthy conservatism—which says that not with every difficulty do we throw out the theory so long as it worked well. If a theory didn’t work, then it’s uninteresting. But a theory that works well for
[Speaker B] a great many cases—even if you have one difficulty or
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] two—you don’t throw it away. Is a theory something that works, or is a theory something that is true? That’s a question we talked about once. I claim that a theory is something that is true, and still you don’t need to throw it away if there’s a counterexample. And that is exactly what I’m talking about here when I speak of dynamic truth.
[Speaker B] Maybe relative truth?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—dynamic truth, not relative truth. Maybe I’ll clarify that point better later on. So here too Shimon HaAmsuni sees a counterexample—“the Lord your God shall you fear”—and there’s nothing to include, so he throws out the theory. He’s a Popperian, right? He throws out the theory: there’s a counterexample, so the theory is wrong. Rabbi Akiva says to him: look, fine, you can force one example. If we need to force every example, then the theory is worthless. But if the theory works well in most places, in many places, and you have one or two or three places where you have to squeeze it a bit, you don’t throw out the theory. Then the theory is good.
Rabbi Akiva too does not claim that he received something from Sinai. It’s not that he insists on forcing this one case because it was clear to him that it was from Sinai. Rather, he understands that this is a theory that works well, and a theory that works well is not thrown out because of one counterexample. So the argument between Shimon HaAmsuni and Rabbi Akiva is not really an essential disagreement. Both agree that theories are built by human beings and were not received from Sinai—here, the interpretive rules.
[Speaker B] So these are basically examples of pattern matching.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, exactly. Some attempt to produce, to find patterns within a collection of examples, a collection of cases we know—exactly like scientific work. That’s why I said this is a good example. Scientific work is really the paradigm within which this whole thing operates. And this example basically shows us how the tradition really develops.
Here I now leave interpretive rules and say something more general. Tradition is not something that gets passed on as is. That’s simply an illusion. Meaning, it cannot be true. You play telephone among ten people as a children’s game—by the third child it’s already not what the first child said. One says it to the next and he says it to the next—it’s one word. I’m not talking about Oral Torah, some whole corpus. You’re passing along a word, or a short sentence, or something like that. Once it passes through ten children, you don’t recognize the sentence that came from the first child.
[Speaker B] Right, but that’s the intellect of a person, not a child. What? But it’s the intellect of a person, not a child.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t matter. It’s not a child—it’s human beings. Human beings, when they pass things from one to another, always color things with some shade of their own. The Talmud says that even two prophets do not prophesy in the same style. We’re talking about prophecy—they receive it directly from the Holy One, blessed be He. I’m not even talking about a student learning from a teacher, or one person from another. There is no such thing. It cannot pass as is. That’s simply naive. There’s no such thing.
So clearly, “a law given to Moses at Sinai” does not mean something that is transmitted in a rigid fashion. On the other hand, the opposite critique is also incorrect. Because the fact that there is human involvement does not mean that the outcome is unrelated to the source, or that the outcome is not the correct or binding processing of the source. There is meaning to dynamic tradition. It is wrong to take this in the direction that everybody just does whatever he wants. It’s not anarchy.
[Speaker B] The same cloak, the same thing. What? If it remains the same thing, the same coat. That’s what it is, right? Only the wrappings, the wrappings,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the interpretations, the forms
[Speaker B] of application and everything, but these are developments that uncover what is in the Torah itself. Meaning, it’s not that you can develop it on just any basis.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, obviously. But what you discover won’t be what I discover, so it’s not really in the Torah. Because the fact is that the two of us approach the same Torah; you’ll draw one conclusion and I’ll draw another. So is what I drew really in the Torah? If so, then how can it be that we drew different things? The claim is that there is a substantial human component here. It’s wrong to belittle that. Meaning, there is a substantial component that is input the person contributes. And still—and this is the innovation of the concept of dynamic tradition—still, the Torah was not given to ministering angels. Meaning, the Torah is given to human beings, and human beings by definition will always have their own input in the matter. And that changes nothing, because in the end this is the form the Torah takes when it reaches us. When I spoke about this once, people—what—
[Speaker F] The problem of broken telephone, I’d say after two thousand years, if in every generation there’s some small change, then what there is between Moses our teacher and Rabbi Akiva has no connection.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right? Right, and most likely you’re right about that too. I once wrote—there was some interview with me in Makor Rishon, and afterward angry responses came in—I once wrote that it seems to me that the Holy One, blessed be He, and Moses our teacher didn’t even dream of ninety-nine percent of what we do today. It’s obvious that that’s the case. So what? On the other hand, I also wrote that it doesn’t trouble me. That is exactly these two critiques. Meaning, on the one hand I’m saying: don’t think everything came from Sinai—that’s naivete. On the other hand, don’t think that if it didn’t come from Sinai then it’s worthless, then it isn’t binding. That is the meaning of tradition. Tradition means that what we do with these things, from the standpoint of the Holy One, blessed be He, is the binding Torah. That’s what we are supposed to do.
When the Sages said in Yavneh, “It is not in heaven,” that’s what they were saying. Human interpretation is part of the matter. We are not waiting for the Holy One, blessed be He, to reveal to us what is written there. We are not trying through archaeology to discover what was said to Moses at Sinai. Of course we try to understand it—but even if we went beyond it, fine, as long as we are operating within the systems as we understand them, then that’s what there is. And if the Holy One, blessed be He, had wanted to spell it out more, then He would have spelled it out more. He didn’t do that. So if He didn’t do that, He apparently assumed that our interpretations are part of the matter.
And therefore many people who come to me, when I talk with them, ask this question as though—what kind of thing is this—why does any of this bind me at all? It’s all human inventions. It’s obvious that the Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t mean this. And that is unequivocally true—of course He didn’t mean this. So what? The question is whether authenticity is a condition for obligation.
[Speaker B] He didn’t mean this, but He meant that we would decide this way.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Authenticity is not a condition for obligation. Meaning, the fact that I am obligated in some halakhic clause or another is not dependent on whether, if I could somehow project a film of what happened there with Moses our teacher on Mount Sinai, I would hear from him that… a custom of one day forbids the vessel, right? It makes no difference. The Holy One, blessed be He, never dreamed of this, and neither did Moses our teacher, and they did not speak in that language and did not think in those terms at all. It doesn’t matter.
[Speaker D] You can’t make such boundaries. You can’t.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can’t—whatever comes out, comes out. There are no boundaries. That’s exactly the point. And that’s what people, especially modern people, find hard to digest. What do you mean, without boundaries? So in that case there’s no right and wrong, because whatever comes out comes out. So what do you mean? Are we observing Torah, or are we just doing whatever we want? First of all, we are not doing whatever we want—we are doing what we think.
[Speaker D] There were groups within the Jewish people that did try to make boundaries.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They went outside the boundaries—it depends whom you ask. And I think it’s impossible to set boundaries a priori. You can say, look, what he’s doing already seems to me outside the legitimate range; I don’t pray with him in the same minyan, I don’t associate with that circle. Fine. But you can’t determine boundaries a priori. How will you determine boundaries a priori? He claims that these aren’t the boundaries. What will you tell him? He too is offering an interpretation of the tradition we received. By the way, Christians too offer some interpretation of the tradition we received, and about them too I say the same thing. Who decides? Not that I’ll count them for a minyan. But that only means that I cannot determine the boundaries a priori—who is right and who is wrong. You can’t. It’s impossible to determine such a thing.
And that is the meaning—the meaning of dynamic tradition. And that is what so threatens people, who say: wait, then it can’t be—so there’s no truth? So what are the boundaries? So what is there? And this… these polemics of yours on Facebook, and…
[Speaker B] What? But there is your coded interpretation, there are many interpretations…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now listen: if there is a Great Court, then the Great Court has authority, it has “do not deviate,” and whatever the Great Court determines, determines. If this is a problem not discussed in the Great Court, then what you understand is what you are supposed to do. And if you understand—and I’m not talking about ignoramuses, but about people who are competent, who know how to work—what they understand is what they need to do. And that’s obvious. I don’t… how can one set boundaries in advance? After all, the one who sets the boundaries has himself set them. If the Holy One, blessed be He, set the boundaries, I understand. But if you formulate boundaries, then why shouldn’t I argue with your formulation? After all, that itself is what we’re talking about—I’m arguing with you, I disagree. So you’ll set boundaries and now you’ve solved the problem? I’m now arguing with you about your boundaries. That too is your determination. You can’t avoid it. It’s built into a dynamic system; it’s not… it cannot be otherwise.
And there’s no need to panic about this. That’s exactly the point. With a modern mindset we are very used to things working by rules. There is right and wrong. “Yad soledet”—is that forty-three degrees or forty-four degrees? And people make calculations, right, about the duck’s backside, what the blood temperature is there and all these things, because we have to arrive at a number. What is yad soledet? Is it forty-two or forty-three? And that’s it. It’s a Torah prohibition in certain cases. Yad soledet means you put your hand in and it feels hot to you. That’s all. And for some people it feels hot at forty-two, and for others at forty-five; it depends on the sensitivity of your skin. That’s it, there’s no… But today we work with a cubit and an olive-bulk and everything.
Now by the way, that is one of the reasons all the problems with measurements were created. Why? Because once a cubit was a cubit and an olive-bulk was an olive, simple enough, more or less, okay? The moment we turned them into centimeters, contradictions were created. Because we didn’t convert everything into centimeters consistently, but once we converted to centimeters and compared the olive-bulk and the egg-bulk, it didn’t come out as a two-to-one ratio, but the Talmud says it is two-to-one. So the olives got smaller and the eggs got bigger, and all kinds of theories of that sort begin, which of course have no basis. Rather, this is the result of the fact that our minds are built in such a way that we need sharp definitions, we need sharp rules, boundaries, what’s right and what’s not right, how one fulfills one’s obligation and how one doesn’t fulfill one’s obligation.
What? It shows a certain lack of confidence. Yes, but you know, it’s also a modern mindset beyond lack of confidence, and it has its advantages. Science could not have developed with the old mindset. Science does need sharp criteria and to test things and to be… meaning, there are also advantages to this way of thinking. I’m not disparaging it. I’m just saying that one has to understand that some of the problems we deal with are the result of the way our minds are built, for better and for worse. It has advantages and it has disadvantages. That’s what we are, by the way. I don’t recommend going backward, because we can’t go back… I recommend going back, but it’s impossible. No, it’s impossible because we’re not built that way. Meaning, we have to work with some sort of rules. We can no longer work with intuitions. Right now in the kollel at Bar-Ilan, Rabbi Yitzchak Rappoport is head of the beit midrash, and we’re giving a year-long course on halakhic positivism. And there we’re trying to show people that this way of thinking, which thinks that one can map everything onto rules, is naive. Nowhere does it work like that. Nowhere in Jewish law—and not just in Jewish law—it doesn’t work like that. Meaning, it’s simply an illusion.
Even someone who thinks it works that way doesn’t really work that way. Sometimes he invents a rule for himself, and then he works with the rule he invented, and then he works with the rule—fine, he’s organized. But he doesn’t notice that he himself invented the rule. Meaning, he has no source for that rule. He took examples and formulated a rule from them, which is exactly what Shimon HaAmsuni does, what Rabbi Akiva does. Meaning, you’re not going to eliminate human input. It won’t help. At most, you can take what the previous generation did, pour it into the mold of a rule, and now you have a rule—you can continue from here onward. But that is simply the way things work. It’s not that this rule descended from Sinai. You take the intuitions of the previous generation and turn them… turn them into a rule.
[Speaker B] A method of ruling? Do you really want to expose that as measures?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Yes, in a certain sense. These are the measures by which the Talmud is expounded, not the Torah. But yes. The Vilna Gaon writes that the ukimtot and the “something is missing and this is what it means” are interpretive measures applied to the Mishnah. Just as there are interpretive measures on the Torah, he says there are also expositions on the Mishnah, and the Talmud expounds the Mishnah. So we expound the Talmud. And Maimonides. And Maimonides. We spoke about the fact that Maimonides wrote his book so that we would not debate the Talmud too much, but would know directly what the conclusions are and occupy ourselves with the Account of Creation and the Account of the Chariot and the things that really matter. And of course, what happened? We spend all day debating Maimonides. So okay, you can’t take the Jew out of the Jew—there’s no helping it.
In any event, the point is that what happens in dynamic tradition is that the person himself is involved in the process of transmission. Now I want to explain the meaning of these things, to begin explaining the meaning of these things on the logical plane, and from there I’ll continue next time.
In logic we distinguish among three kinds of inference: deduction, induction, and analogy. Deduction is moving from the general to the particular: all human beings are mortal, Socrates is a human being, therefore the conclusion is that Socrates is mortal. Induction is moving from the particular to the general—the opposite direction, right? Socrates is mortal, Moyshele is mortal, therefore all human beings are mortal—from particulars to the general. And analogy is staying on the same level of integration, right? Meaning from particular to particular or from general to general—that’s analogy.
What’s the difference among these three modes of inference? Deduction—right, going from the general to the particular—is a necessary inference. It is a necessary inference, meaning if I say that all human beings are mortal and Socrates is a human being, then the conclusion is that Socrates is mortal. Anyone who accepts the premises cannot argue with the conclusion. The conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.
By contrast, induction and analogy are non-necessary inferences. Right? You said Socrates is mortal, Moyshele is mortal, therefore all human beings are mortal. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe only those in Asia. Maybe—I don’t know—only those in those particular centuries. Not certain, right? You can never be sure. And the same with analogies, right? I make an analogy: this donkey has four legs, so another donkey has four legs. So if this donkey has no head, then the other donkey also has no head? Who says? It could be a donkey with four legs and a head. Analogy is speculative. Meaning, analogy and induction are non-necessary forms of inference, unlike deduction.
What’s the difference? Why is deduction necessary, while analogy and induction are not? Deduction is necessary—this is the hot-air balloon joke that I’ve been using since my first book—about people who lost their way. Two people lost their way and they’re flying in a hot-air balloon and they don’t know where they are. So they ask the man plowing in the field below, tell us, where are we? He says to them, above my field. So the fellow up in the hot-air balloon says to his friend, that guy down there in the field is definitely a mathematician. Two characteristics: first, what he says is precise and absolutely certain. And second, it doesn’t help us at all. Those two characteristics of the mathematician—my apologies to all mathematicians—those two characteristics are related to each other. Because what does it mean that it is precise and absolutely certain? It means that the conclusion is really already inside the premises. Meaning, someone who accepts the premises has in some implicit way already accepted the conclusion. And that means it’s absolutely certain simply because it hasn’t told us anything new. The conclusion really contains nothing new beyond what is in the premises. Therefore it is certain, because someone who accepts the premises, in some sense, already accepted the conclusion within them.
So the certainty of the deductive logical-mathematical claim stems from the fact that it doesn’t help us at all. More precisely: it doesn’t introduce anything substantially new. At most it reveals to us more and more things that are already inside our premises, but it does not discover new information for us. Okay?
So what this basically means is that deduction—when I talk about all necessary arguments—these are arguments that do not add information. So say, if I return to tradition just to connect this to what I said earlier, if Moses our teacher told us that all human beings are mortal and that Socrates is a human being, and we inferred that Socrates is mortal—that’s not our inference. That is Rabbi Eliezer’s kind of tradition, the tradition of a hollow pipe. True, there is a conclusion here that we drew, but that conclusion was really embedded in what Moses our teacher said. There is nothing we really added of our own. At most we decoded what was there.
Okay? So a tradition of Rabbi Eliezer’s type—a tradition that is unwilling to innovate—is not a tradition with no inferences. It has inferences. But the inferences it has are only necessary inferences. Meaning, only inferences that do not add information, in which there is no human input. But that’s mathematics. A computer could also do that, basically. It’s just understanding what lies folded inside what Moses our teacher said.
Dynamic tradition is a tradition that uses softer inferences. Not only deduction, but also analogy and induction. In analogy and induction, of course, there is some human input. And about this Nachmanides writes in the introduction to Milhamot Hashem that the wisdom of our Torah is not like astronomy and mathematics—in our language today, astronomy, physics, and mathematics—whose demonstrations are decisive. Which is of course also not true—in physics the demonstrations are not decisive; in mathematics they are. But what does he want to say? That the ways of inference in Jewish law, in Torah, are not rigid logical inferences. They are not deductions. They are analogies and inductions. And that is really the logical expression of what I said earlier: that this is a dynamic tradition and not a static tradition.
Because you have to understand: those same people who attack induction and analogy, also in the general logical context and not only in the context of tradition, claim that analogy and induction are invention. They are not really interpretation of the principles from which you begin when you use analogy and induction; it’s invention. And that is the critique from the opposite side. Meaning, there is a critique that says you may not do such a thing because it is unrelated to the explicit principle; your result is unrelated to the explicit principle, it is arbitrary, you have basically inserted your own input. And someone else says: do whatever you want, but I am not obligated by the result, because it is unrelated to what was written in the source. Sorry—that’s the same side. It’s unrelated to the source, and that’s the same side. The opposite side says: if that’s what you’re doing, then apparently nothing here has any value, so I’m not obligated to anything. Fine? These are the two critiques I spoke about, and on the logical level they emerge from a logical critique of analogy and induction. That’s where it begins. Meaning, the question is: what is the status of inferences that are not necessary? Inferences that are not valid logical inferences? That is really the question that both the ultra-conservatives and the totally uncommitted, the heretics, struggle with and attack. Both sides have a position on this.