Halakha and Reality – Lesson 3

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hello, first of all, as usual, I’m muting all the microphones.

[Speaker B] Muting all the microphones, and at the end of the lecture I’ll release that, and then you can

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There will be time to ask questions—at first about the lecture, and afterward, if people want to talk about other things, that’s also possible. Okay, in the previous sessions—really, the series is “Jewish Law and Reality.” In the previous sessions we reached the conclusion that beyond the basic distinction between facts and norms—moral norms, halakhic norms, legal norms, whatever, of any kind, even aesthetic ones—there is some gap that cannot be bridged. Meaning, you can’t move from facts to norms, and also not the other way around, from norms to facts. You need some bridge principle that takes us from norms to facts. We talked about how Torah, in its essence, is really those bridge principles; it is neither the facts nor the norms. And in the previous lecture I tried to show that despite this disconnect between norms and facts, the distinction is not quite as sharp as one might get the impression at first glance. Because a halakhic decisor is really supposed to be involved not only, of course, in determining the bridge principles, but also in the question of what the definitions are—both conceptual definitions and sometimes even the facts that are relevant to the halakhic discussion. I brought various examples, yes, like the example our engineering lecturer gave, about transmitting electricity between states in the United States through a third state, the question whether it goes through the wires or around the wires, the Poynting vector, and I tried to show that the question of what the relevant facts are—does it go through the wires or not through the wires—is not a neutral question. It’s not a question for the expert alone. Of course the expert has to be involved, but the expert won’t be able to determine it; the one who determines it will be the judge or the rabbinical decisor. Meaning, he will have to decide what the relevant facts are in his domain. The same thing with the question whether glass is a liquid or a solid. There too I said that physicists sometimes look at glass as a liquid because it has a disordered crystalline structure, but from the standpoint of Jewish law, for example, it’s pretty clear that glass is solid. And again, apparently it’s a factual question—whether glass is a liquid or a solid—but in practice you really can’t treat it as a pure factual question, a question for experts. It’s a question where you may need to consult experts, but in the end the factual decision has to be made by the halakhic decisor. And what I want to do now is take this point one step further and make it into a more systematic generalization. I want to look more fully at this process of making a halakhic decision in light of facts. On the one hand, as I said, halakhic ruling almost always—maybe even always, I don’t know—begins with some factual determinations. Meaning, Jewish law always applies to certain factual circumstances, and you need to determine what the factual circumstances are before you determine what the law is. That’s one side. On the other side, there’s the naturalistic fallacy, which says: facts are one thing and norms are another. Which would seemingly have to bring us to a kind of dichotomy: the expert determines the facts; the rabbi or the judge, whatever, receives from him the relevant facts and applies the norms to them through bridge principles. His expertise is in the bridge principles. That’s the picture that seems to emerge from what we’ve discussed so far. Now I want to show that this isn’t accurate. I’ll start with two examples. Through them maybe we can illustrate the point and see why, even if in retrospect it may seem simple, at first glance it’s far from self-evident, far from trivial. The first example I’ll bring is a ruling by three rabbis issued many years ago—Rabbi Neria, Rabbi Yisraeli, and maybe Rabbi Lior, I don’t remember who the third was—who determined that surrendering territory as part of a peace agreement is a matter of saving life, and therefore it is forbidden to do so. Now, you have to notice carefully: they did not determine that it is forbidden because it is a matter of “be killed rather than transgress.” Meaning, even if we would lose lives by not doing it, it would still be forbidden because it is “be killed rather than transgress.” That would be a halakhic determination. They seemingly made a factual determination: that surrendering territory involves saving life. That is apparently a determination unrelated to Jewish law; it’s a security and political question. Military people or politicians are supposed to tell us what this means in practice—does it really involve danger to life, or on the contrary, maybe it will save lives? This is not, on the face of it, an area of rabbinic expertise, and I think not for nothing this ruling—this is how it was presented there as a halakhic ruling—provoked very sharp criticism. Of course from outside, meaning from circles that are not committed to Jewish law; that’s obvious and expected, that’s always the case. But here there was also criticism from within the world committed to Jewish law. I know students came to me and asked me whether they had to obey such a statement—even assuming, for the sake of argument, that these are their rabbis—but do they have to obey such a statement when they think that as a factual assessment it’s incorrect? If they disagree with them in the factual assessment—they think that making the agreement and surrendering the territory would actually save lives or reduce casualties—then the question is whether the halakhic authority of those rabbis obligates them to obey, because ostensibly this is a halakhic ruling. But on the other hand, it is really based on some factual determination, and on the factual plane the rabbis are not supposed to be greater experts than their followers. On the contrary, maybe one of their followers is some, I don’t know, major general in the army, so ostensibly he should be a greater expert than they are in this matter, and therefore there is no reason in the world for him to accept their ruling. So on the face of it, that’s how it appeared. I remember Rabbi Amital also spoke about this at the time. I think—I don’t know whether this was the first time he came out about it—but he came out sharply against these rabbinic statements on political questions. He argued that, in principle, rabbis have nothing to say in this area. They can, of course, express an opinion like anyone else, but rabbinic authority for a halakhic determination has no standing whatsoever in questions of this sort. So that’s one question. And on the face of it, it would seem obvious that Rabbi Amital is right. After all, this is a question of assessing reality: what will happen if we make such-and-such a peace agreement? Will it bring war? Will it prevent war? What will the other security consequences be? It’s a question of assessing reality. In assessing reality, halakhic decisors ostensibly have no added value and also no authority. And so in this question, at first glance, it would seem that those three rabbis exceeded their authority. And again I’m saying: I’m not getting into the question of whether one really has to obey rabbis even on halakhic questions. In my view that’s a more complicated question, and there too, in my opinion, today—when there is no Sanhedrin and no body with recognized halakhic authority—certainly not such-and-such rabbis, whether greater or lesser, each person should form his own view separately. I don’t see where they draw halakhic authority from. But I’m not getting into that. Let’s say these were authorized rabbis, or my own clear personal rabbis whose rulings I accepted upon myself for the sake of discussion, just in order to neutralize the question of authority in principle. The question is: assuming there is such a thing as halakhic authority in this generation and in these people, is this still included within the authority they possess? So the simple view, common sense, says no. I want to argue yes, actually. It is. I’ll try to explain this later, but that’s the first provocation. Meaning, the first example tries to show why this topic is worth discussing, why it is not trivial. The second example is seemingly the opposite, but later I’ll show that it actually rests on the same logical structure. There are statements by quite a few halakhic decisors—I remember Rabbi Nebenzahl spoke about this, and there are others—who say there is a halakhic obligation to obey traffic laws. Someone who does not obey traffic laws is a halakhic offender. It says, “and live by them,” and therefore a person must preserve his life. And if you drive not according to the traffic laws, you are endangering your life, and therefore you are a halakhic offender and not only a legal offender. That was the claim. And again, at first glance it seems obvious. Yes, of course, “and live by them,” and therefore traffic laws—the moment the expert says that driving at such-and-such a speed is dangerous, or driving in such-and-such a way is dangerous—then it falls under “and live by them.” Meaning, then it is forbidden; it is forbidden to endanger life. And because again common sense really seems—or the initial intuition really says—that this indeed is entrusted to the authority of the decisor, I will argue that no. Meaning, I argue that in this matter the decisor cannot lay down the law, and he cannot make that determination. As for laying down the law, we’ll talk about that later. He cannot make the determination I mentioned here, that one must obey traffic laws. Maybe those are the two examples from which I want to proceed and distill, or sharpen, or conceptualize a bit more precisely how this mechanism of determining Jewish law works. And then return to more examples perhaps, and see many implications. And these implications are daily implications; such implications come up every day. Another question we touched on a bit in previous lectures and that I’ll come back to later is: what exactly is halakhic expertise? Ostensibly, questions of security, questions of traffic, what speed is permitted or traffic laws, all kinds of questions of all sorts and varieties—cloning and medical ethics and things of that sort—come to the halakhic decisor, and he is supposed to give… Nobody disputes that all these questions are halakhic questions. Meaning, they need an answer also in the halakhic sense. And the question is: by what authority does the decisor act here? What skill or what expertise does the decisor use to arrive at an answer across such a broad range of questions that ostensibly belong to different fields, and what exactly… how can he even determine an authoritative position, an informed position, perhaps even a binding one, regarding such different and varied fields? This of course brings us to the question of what expertise is in general, not only what halakhic expertise is, and I also want to touch on that question. On the one hand, I present the discussion here as a halakhic discussion, but I want to argue that in fact there is nothing uniquely halakhic about it. As I did in previous lectures, I’ll repeat it here too. What I say in this context about the relationship between Jewish law and facts is also true about the relationship between law and facts, morality and facts, or I don’t know, or the rules of basketball and facts. Any normative system—say the one authorized to determine positions in it, say the rabbi or the Sanhedrin in the halakhic context, the court, the legislature in the legal context, if you like, I don’t know, a committee of ethical experts, an ethics committee in one ethical field or another, the basketball association, it doesn’t matter—every such field has some body that is the authorized body, the expert body, whatever you want to call it, to make decisions in that field. And the question I’m asking does not concern Jewish law specifically. I want to show that there is no difference between the logic of the relationship between Jewish law and facts and the relationship of law, morality, and all the other normative systems to facts, or with respect to facts. There is no difference. The logic is exactly the same logic. And strangely enough, when it comes to rabbis you constantly hear these protests: how can they issue halakhic rulings in all kinds of areas they are not experts in? And somehow when the court needs to deal with all sorts of fields—a no smaller range of fields, I think, maybe a bit larger, but not much larger—there nobody says a word. And that too is a question we’ll have to ask ourselves once we clarify the picture a bit. The model—if I return to Jewish law—the accepted model in Jewish law, which has also been discussed, perhaps the oldest type of expertise we know, is medical expertise. Meaning, physicians are the prototype of an expert in the halakhic context, and the dilemmas of Jewish law and facts, or Jewish law and experts, are often drawn from discussions of Jewish law and medicine. But that’s only because medicine is an ancient field of expertise. In the past, many other fields were not regarded as being entrusted to experts; there were not so many disciplines, and they weren’t as detailed as they are today. Most things were a matter of common sense and a bit of general education, except for medicine. Medicine was already considered then some field entrusted to experts—not only, but it was a very central field—and therefore discussions of Jewish law and reality usually rely on precedents dealing with Jewish law and medicine. Jewish law and reality, Jewish law and expertise—I’m dealing now with these two interfaces. So this really talks about Jewish law and medicine. And again, what is the simple model generally accepted in the halakhic world? The medical expert supplies the facts, the expert opinion; he determines what the facts are. And the decisor is supposed to say which norms apply to those facts. Permitted, forbidden, obligatory—that is what the decisor determines. There is some very clear division here: the facts are entrusted to the expert, when it’s a field of expertise; otherwise I don’t really care who it is, but whoever is responsible for determining the facts. And Jewish law is entrusted to the halakhic body—the Sanhedrin, the rabbinic decisor, whoever it may be. That doesn’t matter to me right now. I’m not entering the complicated question of halakhic authority—who has authority. Assuming there is a body halakhically authorized, what is entrusted to it? And again, although I present this as a question of Jewish law and facts, from my point of view I’m now going to use a broader and more abstract concept and say: the expert versus the value-decider. I’ll call it that. Not Jewish law and facts, but norms and facts. You see how we are returning to the naturalistic connection. I’m now talking about the authorized factor, or the value-decider. For me this can be a court, a legislator, a police officer, a rabbi, a Sanhedrin—I don’t care—or a referee in basketball or soccer. And the facts are the facts, the bare facts, which are dealt with either by experts or by whoever knows the facts, whoever saw them. So at the moment I’m comparing the facts dealt with by the expert—for the sake of discussion we’ll talk about an expert, though again I don’t care right now whether it has to be a formally defined field of expertise—but whoever is supposed to determine the facts, and the norms determined by the value-decider. That is the body responsible for determining the norms. And now the question I’m asking is not the question of Jewish law versus facts, but the question of the expert—in this context, a factual expert—versus the value-decider of whatever kind. Okay? So let’s begin with the second question, the second example I gave. The supposed obligation on every Jew faithful to Jewish law to drive according to traffic laws, because of “and live by them” and the need to act carefully with regard to life. The picture that seems to be demanded—and I began the lecture with this because it’s what emerged from the previous lectures—is that there is here some factual determination entrusted to the expert, and on the facts, after the expert provides them, the value-decider comes and determines the relevant norm: forbidden, permitted, or obligatory. So in the context of fasting on Yom Kippur, the doctor says: it is dangerous if he doesn’t eat, if he fasts. And the rabbi says: okay, Yom Kippur is not one of the three severe transgressions, and therefore you are obligated to eat so as not to endanger life. Or the expert says: driving 120 on a certain road is dangerous, and the value-decider says: okay, if it’s dangerous, then it’s forbidden. Okay? Why do we need the value expert, ostensibly what’s the problem? If it’s dangerous, then surely it’s forbidden. The answer is: not true, because not everything dangerous is forbidden. Or alternatively, not every time something is dangerous am I allowed to transgress a prohibition. For example, with the three severe transgressions, no. The value expert is supposed to determine what the relevant norm is here. Sometimes perhaps this is a simple determination and one can skip over it, but in principle it is always built in these two stages: the factual determination, and on top of it the normative determination. But this matter is very far from simple. Let’s take the second example I mentioned at the beginning, the example of the legal speed limit on the road. And I want to discuss it specifically not in the halakhic context but in the legal context. How does the legislator determine that, say, on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road you may not go above—I don’t know—ninety? So how does he determine that? Ostensibly, according to the model I described until now, he goes to the Faculty of Transportation Engineering at the Technion and commissions an expert report. The experts tell him: look, up to this speed it’s reasonable; beyond that it’s dangerous. And now the legislator comes and says: okay, then from the threshold—from ninety kilometers per hour and up—it is forbidden to drive on this road. That is the picture emerging from the accepted model, this sharp division like a sharp knife between the facts—the expert—and the value-decider. But of course it doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t work like that and it cannot work like that. It does work like that, by the way, but it’s a mistake that it works like that. It cannot work like that. Why? Because the expert at the Technion cannot determine which speed is dangerous. He has no tools whatsoever to determine such a thing. And I’m not talking about the professional complexity of the matter. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that on the professional level he is equipped with all relevant information. He lacks no information whatsoever; he knows everything for this specific discussion. Let’s say the Haifa-Tel Aviv road: he can be there, do statistics, determine, see exactly from what speeds accidents occurred, what happens, take into account the average wind speed there, the slipperiness of the road, the weather—I don’t care—and determine more or less what he determines with professional tools. I’m ignoring for now the built-in professional problems in such determinations, because obviously there are also professional problems. But again, I’m trying to clean the discussion of things that are less important, things that are merely technical. I want to distill the essence, yes, the essential point. How does this thing work? I now go to the Technion and commission a study on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road. Please tell me: up to what speed is it reasonable to drive there? When does this become a tangible danger to life? A responsible expert at the Technion—and by the way, I’m not sure they all would, in fact I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t—but a responsible expert at the Technion would have to answer: I don’t know how to answer that. Even before I conducted the study, I don’t know how to answer that. Because you need to explain to me what counts as reasonable. Meaning, let’s say for the sake of discussion that driving fifty km/h gives you a one-percent risk of being injured, killed, I don’t care—for the sake of discussion, of dying, okay? Fifty km/h, one percent chance you die. Sixty km/h, three-quarters of a percent. Seventy km/h, 0.7 percent. Eighty km/h, I don’t know, 0.6 percent. And ninety maybe it starts rising again, depending on how the graph is structured; it doesn’t matter. But it’s some graph structured in a certain way. It tells me what the chance of being harmed is at every given speed. And let’s say for the sake of discussion that the expert at the Technion can determine this. Of course he can’t, but let’s assume for the sake of discussion that he can, on average, according to some assumptions or other, and let’s assume it doesn’t depend on weather and doesn’t depend on the type of car and doesn’t depend on the driver and doesn’t depend on anything. Maybe he can give me the exact graph of the probability at every speed. For the sake of discussion, I’m just assuming that. But the question is: what counts as a reasonable risk? The expert at the Technion can give me the graph, at most the graph—assuming he has all the information and there are no problems—of what the risk of being harmed is at every speed. Okay, now I ask: what risk of being harmed is a risk that one is permitted to take, or forbidden to take? 0.7 percent? One percent? Two percent? Half a percent? What? What level of risk is reasonable to take? Is that determination a factual determination? Does the expert have tools to answer it? The answer is of course no. He has no tools whatsoever to answer that. Why? Because this is a value question. It is not a professional factual question at all. It’s not a question for an expert. It’s a question that… you don’t determine what is true about it; rather, you need to decide it. And to decide means: to decide that a half-percent risk is a reasonable risk. Anything beyond that is unreasonable risk. How does one decide that? I have no idea. I don’t know whether there is any systematic way or rational way to decide such a thing. But it is clear that this decision is not a professional decision; it is a value judgment. Even if we say we make it by flipping a coin, it doesn’t matter—but that coin flip has to be done by what I called earlier the value-decider, not the expert. Therefore, the process of determining the legal speed on a road—and notice, Jewish law hasn’t even entered here at all, I’m talking only about the legal determination—the process of determining a speed limit is composed not of two stages, as I described earlier, as people usually think, but of three stages. The expert does the first stage. The value-decider does the next two stages, not just one. It’s not one against one; it’s three stages. The expert does the first, and the decider does the next two. How does it work? The expert presents the value-decider with a graph, a graph of risks. He tells him, at every speed, what the risk of being harmed is. Of course everything is very simplistic, but in principle that is the mechanism. He presents the graph: at every speed, what the chance of being harmed is. The value-decider is supposed to determine what he considers a reasonable risk. What is a reasonable risk? Well, let’s say half a percent for the sake of discussion. By the way, how does one determine this consideration? First of all, there is some kind of intuition about what is reasonable and what is not—I don’t know, a kind of feeling, however you want to call it. Beyond that, of course—and I think there is no issue more relevant today than this issue in our own time—the whole question of coronavirus and this interface between experts and value judgments, halakhic judgments, legal judgments, governmental judgments. This decision is of course not determined only by the degree of risk, because the question is what economic and social price we will pay for limiting speed. Suppose we don’t allow anyone to drive more than twenty km/h on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road—almost nobody will drive from Haifa to Tel Aviv. Or the opposite. Now, this has all sorts of implications that the deciding factor has to take into account. Economic implications, implications for family relationships, relations among family members, implications for helping one another, social connections. It can affect a huge number of things. And all that has to be taken into account when deciding what percentage of risk I allow. So there is some very complex balancing here—if it is a balancing, it doesn’t matter—a mechanism of decision that is very, very complex, which in the end has to give me a number. That number is how many percent. Half a percent? 0.7 percent? Two percent? I don’t know. What percentage counts as a reasonable risk under the given circumstances? That is stage two. In stage three—the first stage, drawing the graph, is done by the expert. The second stage is done by the value-decider, because this is a value judgment: which level of risk one takes and which one doesn’t. In the case of the law, this is the government or the Knesset or I don’t know, a police officer authorized by the authorities, it doesn’t matter, but it comes from the government. The government is the value-deciding factor in this context. And after that there is the third stage. The third stage says: okay, if there is a speed that is an unreasonable risk, the law forbids it. That is of course a value determination, a determination of the legislator or whoever is authorized on his behalf. Right? So in fact there are three stages here. One of them is entrusted to the expert, and it is purely factual: the graph. The next two—determining the cutoff, determining the percentage of risk, the probability of being harmed, and determining whether it is forbidden to drive at a speed with a certain probability of being harmed, which is a normative determination—those too, of course, are entrusted to the value-decider. One has to understand: very often we tend to connect the second and third determinations. It’s not entirely simple. In many cases it really is so, but it’s not so simple. Because many times I can say: look, this is dangerous. From this percentage onward it’s dangerous, but I cannot forbid it. I recommend that everyone not drive beyond a half-percent risk, but I can’t forbid it because of the implications or for other reasons; I only forbid beyond a 0.8 percent risk. Or ambulances may take a higher level of risk, or something like that. Meaning, the move from stage two to stage three is not entirely mechanical. Therefore, for me this is three stages. Many times the move from stage two to stage three is made quickly and without even noticing, but it is really three stages. I’ll say more than that: stage two, even though in essence it is a value stage, belongs to the factual determination. If I want to compare the three-stage mechanism I described here to the two-stage procedure that people usually think governs the relation between the expert and the value-decider, then determining the cutoff belongs to stage one and not to stage two—it belongs to the expert. After all, if I say the expert should tell me what is dangerous, and then the rabbi will tell me whether it is allowed to fast on the Sabbath, or the legislator will tell me whether it is allowed to drive this speed on the road, right? In order to determine what is dangerous he needs to make the graph, but he also needs to determine what level of risk counts as dangerous for this purpose. So the determination of what speed is dangerous, or what medical condition—I don’t know, not eating, fasting—counts as dangerous, which ostensibly is a factual determination, actually contains a value component. And the expert cannot determine that value component; he has neither the skill to determine it nor the authority to determine it. And therefore, if I try to map the three-stage mechanism onto the accepted two-stage mechanism—this is generally accepted in the world, the relation between an expert and a value-decider—you have to notice carefully that the middle stage is a sensitive stage that everyone misses. And why? Because ostensibly it is entrusted to the expert, because he determines the fact: when it is dangerous and when it is not dangerous, which is apparently a factual determination, not a normative one. But the stage-two determination is a determination that in essence is normative. And therefore it cannot really be made by an expert, but by the value-decider. So the value-decider is involved in determining the relevant facts in this case. And that is why it is so easy for people to miss this middle stage. They sense that there is a factual determination made by an expert, and they sense that on top of the facts there is a normative determination made by the value-decider, but they do not notice that at the seam there is another stage, which in essence belongs to determining the facts but in its nature has a normative character. And whoever makes that decision—or whoever is supposed to make that decision—is the normative decider. Now see why this picture has implications for the two examples I began with. I started with—or let’s start with the second example because that is what I just discussed. The example of the legal speed. I said that ostensibly every reasonable person agrees that the traffic expert says what is dangerous and what is not dangerous, and the rabbi determines that it is forbidden to do it because it is dangerous—“and live by them.” And there I said I disagree; that is not true. Why? Now I can explain why. Because the expert cannot determine that it is dangerous. The expert can determine what percentage of risk exists in each situation. But the rabbi needs to determine—or the value-decider, it doesn’t matter, the legislator—what level of risk it is forbidden to take. By the way, even the basketball association, in the end, may say: there are certain risks—injury to a player, okay? When do you stop the game? That will depend on how severe the injury is as against the price to be paid in the game. That is a value judgment that perhaps doesn’t seem so fateful, but still in essence it is a value judgment; it is a judgment not entrusted to the doctor but to the basketball association. Therefore this schema is correct for any value-based decision-making. And this is actually why I said I do not agree with the determination that every Jew faithful to Jewish law must drive according to traffic laws. Why not? Because in principle traffic laws say, for example, that on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road one may not drive over 90. Who determined that 90—say, hypothetically, that’s a 0.7 percent risk just for illustration—who determined this value threshold? The legislator. But Jewish law can determine a different value threshold. Maybe from its point of view it is forbidden to take a risk of half a percent. Or maybe two percent. It can be more lenient and it can also be more stringent. There is no reason in the world to assume that the value threshold of the legislator and the value threshold of Jewish law have to be the same threshold. They may happen to coincide, but there is no a priori reason to assume that. When the legislator determined something, that is also the binding threshold on the halakhic plane? Simply not true. There is no reason in the world to assume such a thing. And therefore in this context, in fact, if there were a Sanhedrin or some institution with halakhic authority, it would have to determine what speed one may drive on each road on the halakhic level. So suppose that in Jewish law they determined that on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road one may drive up to 120. Then maybe it would still be forbidden to drive above 90, because we are also supposed to obey the law as citizens of the state. But religiously, I’m not a halakhic offender until I get to 120. Okay? I’m not… this is not an anarchistic claim that I’m making here. I leave anarchism for each person to decide for himself. I’m not an anarchist, and I won’t become an anarchist here either, but this isn’t specifically connected to anarchism. Meaning, it is entirely possible that I obey the law in every minor and major detail, and still I will not claim that someone driving over 90 is a halakhic offender—not in the laws of “the law of the kingdom is law,” but in the laws of preserving life, yes? He is not a halakhic offender, because on the halakhic threshold, I don’t know, maybe the halakhic threshold is 120 on this road, not 90. Or the opposite; maybe 70. It may be that Jewish law is stricter, and it may be that Jewish law is more lenient, but there is no necessity to identify the halakhic threshold with the legal threshold. Still, of course there is a lot of sense in identifying them. Why? In order not to confuse people. After all, from whatever angle you take it, it is hard to point to any sharp criterion for how to determine the relevant normative threshold, whether legal or halakhic, right? It’s some feeling of more reasonable or less reasonable. So clearly there is no reason that two systems operating in parallel, with the same people obligated to both, should diverge—unless you have some very clear sense that the legislator is mistaken here. There is no reason to deviate from the legislator’s determination. And therefore you can say: I also adopt in Jewish law the legal threshold, the statutory threshold. Which is perfectly fine. As long as you understand that this is a determination within your authority to make. You could also have determined otherwise. If the authorized halakhic factor said: I now decide that the determining threshold is the legal threshold set by the state—fine. From that point on, it will also be a religious offense for someone to drive over 90. But in order to define him as a religious offender, you need a determination by a legal factor… by a halakhic factor, sorry. The mere fact that the state set a certain threshold is not by itself enough to turn me into a religious offender. It is simply a mistake… a conceptual mistake. Now of course the question of authority also enters here. Because once that is really the case, then if a certain decisor tells me that in his opinion the halakhic threshold should be identified with the legal threshold… okay, and I think it should not be identified—why should I accept that? If he were an authorized factor, here the question of authority comes in, the one I tried to avoid… If he were an authorized factor, then he could determine this as a binding procedure. But if he has no authority to determine, and he is merely telling me what Jewish law says… Jewish law says nothing, because all these and those… as long as no one has determined what it says. And in order to determine, there has to be an authorized factor. Therefore, through the back door the question of authority comes in here too, the one I tried to escape from. But I’m just saying this in passing. Maybe a few more comments before I move to the first example, to the applications in the first example. The first comment is that of course there may be other problems. Suppose I’m driving… Rabbi Zalman Nechemia Goldberg responded… I wrote an article about this in Tzohar, about what I’m telling you today. Rabbi Zalman Nechemia Goldberg responded there, and he argued—that is, from the overall tenor of his words I understand that he actually agrees with what I’m saying—but he argued that there is another issue, another problem, namely that if someone drives above the speed limit, then he did not receive permission to use the road on that basis. Meaning, alternatively, on that basis the other drivers on the road are not willing for him to set the risk threshold for himself. Because that risk threshold also affects other drivers, and with regard to them he is not the one who can determine the relevant risk threshold. Therefore he argued that yes, this should be determined according to the law. In this matter I can agree with that principled claim, though again this is in the sense of consideration for others and not in the sense that I violate “and live by them.” Therefore it is still not the same thing. It only means that perhaps I am a thief if I drive like that, or perhaps I endanger someone in his view. Maybe it is problematic—perhaps a case of “do not place a stumbling block,” or something… “do not place a stumbling block” in the physical sense, that you cause him harm, not in the sense of causing him to sin. “Do not place a stumbling block before the blind”—making a blind person fall into a pit. So perhaps that is the problem, but not the problem that I violated “and live by them.” That I do not agree with. Meaning, that is not present here. And another thing… it seems to me this depends on the formulation, and I used two different formulations earlier, if you noticed, but at least according to one of the formulations it seems to me that the determining threshold is not the legal threshold but the accepted threshold. If the legal threshold is 90, but people generally drive 110 on this road, then one may drive 110. Halakhically, I mean now, not legally. Why? Because if the whole question is on what basis people get onto the road, and they did not permit you to endanger them according to a threshold they themselves do not agree to—if that is what the reasonable person drives there, then anyone who doesn’t want to drive on a road where people drive 110 shouldn’t get onto that road. Because people drive 110 there. Yes, admittedly you can say to him, “People like you took over,” but that is the fact now. It’s like something washed away by the sea; there is nothing to do, this is already an established route. And once that route has been established, somebody cannot come and say: I’m not willing for you to drive 110 when quite a lot, indeed most reasonable people drive 110 there. Or many of them, a considerable portion of reasonable people, not talking about offenders—the normative people drive 110. Therefore, at least in the consideration of not endangering others according to my own personal standards, something I have no authority to do—if that is the consideration, then the determining threshold is what is accepted on the road and not what the law permits. If the consideration is a consideration of theft—meaning, you may not use the road unless you use it according to the regulations set by the authorities, since they are after all the ones authorized to determine use of the road—then yes, that is true. Then the threshold will be the legal threshold and not the threshold of what is accepted among people. That’s the first comment. The second comment: I said earlier that I suspect—not from knowledge, but I suspect—that in practice things do not work this way. In practice they do indeed go to the Transportation Faculty at the Technion, and in the end they say what speed is reasonable on each road. Afterward a police officer or senior police officer or I don’t know exactly has to sign off on it, but in the end the transportation faculty also determines the speed, not only provides graphs. I assume some of the people who are supposed to determine this don’t know how to read a graph, so I very much hope they don’t give them graphs there. How does this fit with the three-stage model I described here? Ostensibly the determination—the second stage in this determination—should be given to the value-decider, not to the expert. The answer is a technical answer: since there is no expertise in value judgment—at least that is what I’m assuming at the moment—this is a judgment of common sense, I don’t know exactly, decide what seems more or less reasonable to you. Then obviously the professor at the Technion is no worse than the police officer or than me or you or the legislator or the transportation minister. He too is a human being with common sense like everyone else. And if only for reasons of efficiency, there is a lot of sense in saying: okay, you’re already providing the graph, so you also decide where to cut it, and you also decide what level of risk is reasonable to take. You’re already on this committee because we need you to bring the graphs, so let you also be the one who decides where to draw the line. Procedurally it is simply much more efficient. So there is certainly logic in doing it that way, but one must understand that at least on the essential level there is no truly binding determination of expertise here. And it is incorrect; one must not treat it as an expert determination. It is the legal determination, because if the legislator authorized the professor from the Technion also to draw the line, then that is perfectly fine; now this is the legally binding line as well. But still that is only because the legislator authorized him. Meaning, in the end this is a value determination, even if by chance the expert was also authorized to make it, which is perfectly fine. He is no worse than anyone else, and no better than anyone else. Some would even say perhaps he is a bit better—he has a better feel for what is reasonable and what is not; there is room for such claims. I’m saying that at the principled level this is a value determination, not a professional determination. That’s what matters to me. How they do it in practice—that in practice they give it to the expert—in many cases they certainly do that, and there is procedural logic in it. But on the logical level, on the essential, philosophical level, it is clear that this determination is a value determination; it is not an expert determination. That is perfectly clear. Good. Now I return to the example with which I opened, the example of the halakhic ruling about returning territories, that it falls under saving life. And there I argued—yes, there I actually agreed with the rabbis. In the second example, the one I just discussed about the speed limit, I did not agree with the rabbinic determinations. Here I actually do agree with the rabbinic determination. Yes, it’s the famous story about the rabbi from Brisk, who once asked Sheinfeld—the Haredi columnist and writer. Haredi, the father-in-law of Sorotzkin. So he once asked him: tell me, how is it that you always manage to align with Da’at Torah? And Sheinfeld told him: what’s the problem? I go out into the street, ask the average person what he thinks, and say the opposite. So if you want to know what is correct, ask what more or less comes to people in their initial intuition and do the opposite; there’s a decent chance you’ll come closer to the paths of truth. So in these two examples too, the initial intuition says that in the context of danger to life the rabbis exceeded their authority, and therefore there I actually think they did not exceed it. And in the context of driving at the legal speed, the initial intuition says that this is a perfectly reasonable halakhic determination, and therefore there I disagree; that determination is not entrusted to the halakhic decisor. The halakhic decisor cannot determine such a thing. In any event, what do I want to argue regarding danger to life and peace agreements? There too, my claim is that the model is a three-stage model and not a two-stage one. It’s not, as people always say—this is what Rabbi Amital always argued: what do you mean? Take military experts, politicians, assess the situation in diplomatic and security terms and so on; let them decide whether it is danger to life or not, and then the rabbi can speak. He can of course say that there is “be killed rather than transgress,” and that even for danger to life it is forbidden to surrender a meter. He can argue that, he can agree—it is a legitimate halakhic determination. That was his claim: that on the halakhic level the halakhah here does not depend on the facts; whether there is danger to life or whether there isn’t, it is forbidden to surrender the territory. That is a fully halakhic determination, it is within the decisor’s authority. And again I say: one can argue, one can reject what he said, but in principle it is a halakhic determination, a normative determination. But to determine that such-and-such an agreement is danger to life—that is a determination which is basically an assessment of reality. In that context we would expect it not to be entrusted to the authority of a decisor, but to be stated by the politician or the military person. And then the decisor would express an opinion as to whether in a situation of danger to life it is permitted to surrender the territory or forbidden to surrender the territory. That is the halakhic determination. But whether this is danger to life—that is a factual question, a question that should be entrusted to experts, not to the value-decider in any event. Why do I claim this is not correct? For the same reason that the previous determination was correct—the mirror image of the same thing. Think now in terms of the three-stage model. Here of course it is more complex than driving on a road, though even there it was a very schematic and simplistic description, but here it is clear that one cannot even describe it simplistically. Why? Because obviously—let’s go through the three stages. How is this thing supposed to be carried out? So let’s say the military and diplomatic experts give us a graph. What will that graph do? This graph is of course a very complex multidimensional graph that will tell us, in every situation, in every policy decision, in every circumstance, what the expected risks are. What is the chance that war will break out, to what extent we will win or lose, what the number of casualties will be, what the diplomatic price will be, what the economic impact will be—many, many, many such implications. But in principle, let’s say they have all the expertise—and they don’t, but let’s say they do—then they can tell me for every policy-security step I choose what the expected costs are. That is what I call here what I called there the graph. Only in this case it is of course an enormous graph, meaning a very complex one, not the simple graph of speed limits on a road. Fine, but at the level of principle it is still a graph. A graph over a multidimensional space, a sort of surface over a multidimensional space. Now the question that arises is of course: what level of risk counts as dangerous? Again, stage two, as we saw in the previous example. It is exactly the same thing here. Although the problem is more complicated on what we might call the mathematical level, the logic is exactly the same logic. Here too one now has to draw a threshold. What is dangerous? Is dangerous when three soldiers are killed? Ten civilians? A thousand soldiers? I don’t know, that we lose a war and I don’t know what will happen, consequences of this kind or that kind… What counts as dangerous in this context? Dangerous means that the state will be destroyed? What is dangerous? What does it even mean for the state to be destroyed? That too is a question. But the question is so complicated that it is perfectly clear that no expert has the tools to answer it. But again, not because it is complicated, but because it is not a question for an expert. It is not a factual question at all. Because what counts as dangerous in this context? Exactly like what counts as dangerous in relation to the speed limit on a road, this is a value question. Because I can say that holding onto a territory in the Land of Israel is worth a hundred casualties over ten years. I know that sounds like hideous arithmetic, but never mind, let’s make a banal calculation just to illustrate, okay? Or a thousand dead, or ten dead, or maybe not even one. Is the expert going to determine that? Is a general in the army going to determine that? On what basis would he determine it? It is clearly a value determination. The value determination is: how many casualties is this particular territory worth to me. Even that simple question—even that question is not entrusted to the expert. Never mind the fact that we are not talking only about casualties but economic and political and long-term implications, and it is much more complicated than how many casualties there will be per year or per month or per ten years. But even if we say that only the question of number of casualties is involved, it is still perfectly clear that the judgment here is a value judgment. So notice what happens here. In fact the question whether it is dangerous—whether surrendering the territory is danger to life—is also a question for the value-decider, not a question for the expert. Now of course in the policy context, the one who is supposed to decide is the government or the Knesset—the government according to law. In the halakhic context, the one who is supposed to decide is the halakhic decider. In the moral context, I don’t know, each person decides for himself, or accepts someone else as the value-decider in the moral context, it doesn’t matter. But this is a question that should be directed to the value-decider and not to the expert. Therefore, in this context I do actually agree in principle with those three rabbis who issued the ruling. They claimed that this is danger to life—assuming, of course, that they checked all the facts and the data and everything, that doesn’t matter. But in principle, on the principled level, this question is a question for the value-decider and not for the expert. And therefore all those who objected, including Rabbi Amital and including everyone who was there—almost everyone I spoke to—who claimed, what do you mean, this is not their area of expertise at all, this is for generals or politicians or statesmen or experts in political science, I don’t know exactly what—it’s a mistake. Rabbis have no authority to determine that. That is not correct. They do not have the knowledge to determine it, but the authority belongs only to them. The halakhic authority. The legal authority is entrusted to the government, but again, it is entrusted to the government not because the government is expert in statesmanship. The government can be led by Benny Gantz, who doesn’t know what… I don’t know if he even knows how to spell statesmanship. So what? It doesn’t matter. If he was elected prime minister, the authority is his. It is not because of expertise, but because of authority. Legal authority. He is the person in charge; he received the mandate, he is the person responsible for making that decision. Therefore I am not talking about the government here as an expert body. On the contrary: in this context the government is the value-decider. In the legal and judicial context, the value-decider is the government or the Knesset, depending on the decision. Yes, in the halakhic context the value-decider is the Sanhedrin, the rabbi, the religious court, whatever, all according to the context. But this is a question entrusted to the value-decider. Therefore, the determination whether a certain peace agreement is dangerous or not dangerous is not a factual determination. That is simply a conceptual mistake. A mistake—it is conceptual confusion. Not true. It is a value determination. And after we determine that such a thing is dangerous, there is the third determination, and about that too there are disagreements among halakhic decisors, right? Even if it is dangerous, there are decisors who say: good, if it is dangerous then one should make the agreement in order to save human life. Other decisors say: “be killed rather than transgress”; for the Land of Israel one must fight, and casualties are not a reason to surrender territory from the Land of Israel. So here is a nice example showing that stage three is not an automatic result of stage two. In stage two one must determine whether it is dangerous. In stage three one must determine whether danger justifies surrendering the territory or not. These are two separate questions. There is a connection between them, but they are separate. It is not the same question. Here the example is much more tangible than the matter of driving on a road. Here stages two and three are really clearly distinct from one another. Therefore I argue that in a question of this kind too, people are mistaken—this time in the opposite direction, but the root of the mistake is the same root. They miss the existence of stage two. Stage two actually tells me that even in determining what the relevant facts are, the value-decider is involved and not only the expert. And that is the important point. It connects with the examples I gave in previous lectures, yes, on the question whether glass is solid or liquid. Ostensibly that is a factual question—whether it is solid or liquid—and I said no, there too it is not the physicist who determines it. The one who determines it is the rabbi. The physicist provides data, but in the end the rabbi determines whether it is solid or liquid, and after that he also determines whether it is permitted to heat it on the Sabbath or not. That is stage three. Stage two is whether it is solid or liquid. I’m just showing you that what I did here is only a more systematic conceptual analysis of what I discussed in previous times, only now I’m presenting the complete picture, you might say. We can call it that—again, only schematically of course—but this now seems to me to be the complete picture. And therefore what confuses people in this context is that they take the naturalistic fallacy too seriously. It is true, the naturalistic fallacy is true, one must not fall into the naturalistic fallacy—but the distinction between facts and norms is not quite as sharp as it appears at first glance. There is a stage in the process where the normative value dimension is involved in determining the facts. And this is a very important point that many people miss. Okay, maybe I’ll give one more comment that I forgot regarding the legal speed on the road. There is a claim by many decisors—Rabbi Shlomo Zalman says this in several contexts—“the Lord protects the simple.” Meaning, if you drive at a speed that is reasonable to drive, then it’s okay—“the Lord protects the simple.” The criterion is more or less what is normal among people; that is also what Jewish law expects you to do. One cannot halakhically forbid something that a reasonable person does. Of course I do not mean if a reasonable person eats pork, but rather a danger that a reasonable person takes is not a danger that Jewish law is concerned with. Now even if that is true, and then it means basically that if the reasonable person drives this way, then drive this way—again, this is identifying the halakhic threshold with some threshold of what is accepted among people—then I would comment on it what I commented in the previous remarks. Even if I accept this, it is still only because Jewish law determined “the Lord protects the simple.” In the end, that itself is a halakhic statement. Jewish law itself can say: okay, I waive setting a separate threshold; I am willing to accept the threshold accepted among people, or the legal threshold, or whatever it may be. But that itself is a halakhic statement. In the end, Jewish law is the one that determines the threshold, even if it chooses to identify it with an existing threshold or some other threshold. No problem, because it chose to do so, but it could also have chosen not to do so. In the end the authority is entrusted to the halakhic decider. Now, I want to show that this failure to distinguish leads to confusion in several more questions that we encounter literally every day, and people have very firm positions on them and they are all mistaken. Sorry for the sharp statement, but they are simply all mistaken; conceptually they are all mistaken. And in light of the picture that is ostensibly very simple, the one I described here, you can suddenly see endless implications of this picture, and endless implications that almost all run against people’s common sense, what is accepted by most people. As Sheinfeld said: listen to what most people say and do the opposite; there’s a decent chance you’ll hit the truth. I’ll take perhaps a first example, one that has come up more than once on the site and also in a debate I had with Yoram Yovel in Makor Rishon, and afterward we continued it a bit on our websites, his and mine, on the question of homosexuality. Yes, in that article in Tzohar when I published this, it was shortly after I heard some debate—I think it was Zehava Galon and Benizri from Shas—where Benizri explained his view on homosexuality and Zehava Galon said that he was benighted and primitive and not at all up to date with the new scientific findings. He was simply mistaken about the facts. After all, the American Psychiatric Association already removed homosexuality from the DSM, from the psychiatric symptom book, back in the 1970s—’77, ’78, I don’t remember, sometime in the 1970s it was already removed from the DSM. Therefore this man is talking nonsense, meaning he is not up to date with scientific knowledge. Now I assume you are not surprised to hear this because one can hear it from all the speakers, to this day, every last one of them. Meaning, I don’t think I’ve heard a single speaker from the side supporting homosexuality who sensed the nonsense embedded in that statement. Which is pretty amazing, because it is not such a sophisticated distinction. Yes, I’m not talking about that whole story with Sodi Namir. Dr. Sodi Namir had been in my class at the yeshiva high school. He’s a doctor and was on the ethics committee of the physicians’ association or something like that, and then somehow it came out that homosexual patients came to him and he said: I pity you, you are ill. And various things of that sort. And immediately, of course, there was a great and bitter outcry; Haaretz made a huge campaign, and immediately all the media were full of this issue. It was unbelievable what happened there, what this man absorbed for saying the most banal thing—it’s hard to believe. Of course they threw him off the ethics committee of the medical association, and the chairman of the medical association, Leonid Eidelman, explained that the man was simply not up to date on the existing medical knowledge. The chairman of the medical association simply does not know what he is talking about in medicine—that is pretty amazing. Meaning, the man is simply talking nonsense in his own area of expertise while he is chairman of the medical association. And I’m not talking here about a dispute—there is no dispute. He is just wrong, allegedly. It is not even a matter for dispute, he is just confused. Why? Not because Sodi Namir is necessarily right, but because whoever says that Sodi Namir is factually wrong is talking nonsense. You can say: I disagree with Sodi Namir on the value level. But you cannot say that he is wrong about the facts. Why? This was the debate—I return to the debate I had with Yoram Yovel and to that debate with Beni Benizri and Zehava Galon. Yoram Yovel, in his article in Makor Rishon, basically wrote: don’t call them perverts or sick, I don’t remember exactly. Meaning, he says this is not an illness, not a deviation, it’s something else—a tendency, okay? And I told him that he, as a psychiatrist, has no professional tool to determine what he wrote. And as the grandson of Yeshayahu Leibowitz he actually surprised me, because he knows very well Leibowitz’s obsession with the distinction between norms and facts. What he can determine as—I return to the three-stage model I described here—what he can determine as a psychiatrist, assuming he has the full information—and he doesn’t—but assuming he does, and when he will, all he can determine is whether it has an organic source, whether it is genetic, whether it can be cured and how, conversion therapy, whether conversion therapy causes damage or not—all that is medical determination. In principle, that is entrusted to the medical expert, psychiatrist, doctor, whatever, medical researcher. In principle, that is a matter for medical research. Again, not all the information exists today, though everyone is very categorical in these fields; the information there is apparently far from clear. But I’m saying on the principled level, it could be that at some stage the information will be fuller and it will be possible to make certain professional determinations on all these questions. But what connection is there between all these questions and the question whether he is sick or not? After all, what happened in the 1970s when homosexuality was removed from the DSM? Was it because new medical information was discovered? New medical information is always being discovered, but clearly that’s not the point. The point is that there was a change in public opinion, in accepted social norms, and they decided to view this phenomenon as a normative phenomenon. Meaning, they were no longer willing to view it as a deviation or an illness or something like that. So society decided that—or a certain part of society—and as a result the psychiatric association also decided to remove it from the DSM. But there is not a shred of professional determination in that. It is simply nonsense. Whoever sees this as a professional determination is simply confused. Believe me, I have hardly met a doctor or psychiatrist who is not confused in this field, including very smart people. Truly. There is some kind of communication short circuit here that I cannot make sense of—where exactly the mistake lies. Because in the end, the question whether this is an illness or not is the question whether you see it as something objectionable or not. That is the question. After all, how do you define illness? Is every deviation from the norm an illness? I’m six foot five. I don’t know what percentage of the population is that height; I’m not sure whether it is a smaller percentage than the percentage of homosexuals or a larger one, I don’t know. So should we define that as an illness? Will it be determined by the question whether it is very far from the norm, or by how many percent, by what decile I’m in? Nonsense. Obviously once something requires treatment, it is defined as an illness. That’s all. Now a doctor can say whether it is treatable, what its implications are, how one treats it, and things of that sort. The definition whether this is an illness or not is my definition, not his. No one else can determine it for me. In this context I am completely postmodern, with Foucault and anyone else you like. Even a stopped clock, as I like to say, shows the right time twice a day. In this context, the definition of what an illness is is ultimately merely the definition either of the person himself or of society, which sees a certain phenomenon as a deviation, as something it thinks is not proper, not normative—not non-normative in the statistical sense, but non-normative in the value sense. Okay? Once society changed its attitude toward homosexuality, then of course it left the DSM. And by the way, that is perfectly fine. I have no problem with it. One can argue about it or agree with it, but it’s fine; it is a legitimate decision. I am only claiming that one cannot say this is a professional decision. That is nonsense. Pure nonsense. I asked Yoram Yovel: what do you say about kleptomania? Is kleptomania an illness? So he explained to me all kinds of psychiatric nuances that were completely irrelevant. Why? Because clearly kleptomania is an illness not because he knows its organic roots, but because we don’t want thieves. The determination that kleptomania is an illness is a value determination. Not how to treat it, whether to treat it, whether that is possible, what the costs are, and so forth—that is a professional determination, of course. No problem. That is for psychiatrists and experts to research and examine, whether they have information or don’t. But that is a professional question. The question whether to define it as an illness or a deviation is a pure value definition. It does not have even a shred of a professional component. Simply none. No connection to the professional world. None whatsoever. It is a pure value determination. And again, it is the same missed stage. People keep coming in the name of expertise—after all, the experts said such-and-such—and where do they miss the point? They miss exactly stage two, the one I pointed to. Stage two says that even determining what counts as an illness is a value determination. Afterward, I can also determine that this illness is forbidden, or that it should be treated—that too is another normative determination—but first of all, determining whether this is an illness, whether it is normative or not, is a value determination. That is not for the expert. The expert will give me the graph, give me the various contexts, where it comes from, how it is treated, what the costs of treatment are, all sorts of things like that. That is a question for experts. And there too one must be careful, because not always—even when they speak categorically—they don’t always really know. By the way, many experts really don’t speak as categorically as those speaking in their name in the press. But never mind, in principle that is a question for the expert. Maybe just one or two more examples so you can see. A debate around abortion—I once had an argument with some professor, a very talented and well-known man in his field. The argument rose to high tones; you couldn’t get through to him. He was outraged—by the way, a religious professor—that rabbis sit on abortion committees. There should be social workers and doctors sitting there. I told him if there is one person who should not be sitting there, it’s a doctor. What does a doctor have to do with the cemetery? What’s the connection? The doctor should provide the data—that is what he can say. Beyond that, deciding whether to approve an abortion or not is a value judgment. What does that have to do with the doctor? The doctor should provide data, not decide. He should provide the data and say: if they perform the abortion, this will happen to her; if they do not perform it, that will happen to her—medical questions. Or for example the question from what stage the fetus is defined as a person. Okay? There too, of course, that is a value question. It is not a biological question; it is not a question for the expert. The expert can tell me what functions the fetus has at each stage of the pregnancy. And there too, of course, assuming he has all the knowledge—and he doesn’t—but assuming he does. Let’s say he does; that is a question for the expert. But from what stage does it become a human being? I don’t know. Once it has such-and-such functions, it becomes a human being? Where does that come from? Do you have medical tools to determine that? That is a value determination. What counts as a human being—starting from which functions this creature can be considered a person—that is a pure value determination. The expert has no added value in this context. It has nothing to do with experts at all. If anyone should be thrown off abortion committees, it’s the doctors. They have nothing to do there. It’s not connected to them at all. They should provide the data. The decisions should be made by social workers or legal representatives—a judge, I would have put there—a social worker and perhaps a rabbi, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Whoever society decides is its value-decider, I don’t care right now. It could be that there won’t be a rabbi there, or there will be a rabbi there. A debate with a secular person in this context is a legitimate debate. Because the secular person says: I don’t want a rabbi to be my value-decider. A legitimate debate. But my debate with the religious doctor was a professional debate, not a value debate. He says the doctor is my value-decider—but this is not a value judgment, it’s a factual judgment, that was his claim. And here he is talking nonsense. It was impossible to get through to him. He simply— and he is a very talented man, that is clear. There is some kind of opacity, even among professionals—mainly among professionals, it seems to me—about the boundaries of their profession. Often. Not always, but often. I can give you endless examples. Every day in the news, if you listen, you will find several examples. No, it’s really unbelievable. Wherever you put your finger you will see this failure appearing. Maybe one last example because I see the time is running out. A last example: there are discussions of educational problems. They want, I don’t know—I remember, when I wrote this I remembered some discussion on teaching Talmud in yeshiva high schools. Yes, the well-known painful problem. Today I think we’re already past it; back then people were still agonizing over it. Today it’s clear that everyone hates it and it speaks to nobody. Back then people saw it as some kind of problem and there needed to be discussion about what to do with it and how to treat it, and so on. Today they just don’t teach it anymore, that’s all; in most places they gave up. But then they seated on the committee a collection of experts, educators. And I said: why, why are there not, I don’t know, rabbis there, people of ethics, people of Jewish outlook, whatever you want—decide who you want there. Why is this for experts, or only for experts? The expert can provide input. He has suggestions to teach this way or that way—excellent, let him provide input. But in the end, every proposal for how to teach also involves value judgments. How do you want the Talmud to be perceived? What do you want people to learn from the Talmud? It’s not only the question of how to teach, but how you teach also determines what will be taught, what from the Talmud will be learned—and that is a completely value question. The question of what should really be taught there is not a question for educators. It is a question for the value-decider. Now each person can decide for himself who his value-decider is. Maybe it’s the parents in the first place? The parents want to know what they are giving their children. Maybe it’s them? Then this is not a question for educators at all. Again, educators will provide some input on how to teach, and so on. I’m saying in all these fields, expertise itself is limited. But let’s even say there is expertise. Experts are supposed to provide input, not make the decision. And we have some tendency to throw everything onto the experts. Now I’ll just say one concluding sentence: there is not a single interesting decision in the world, not a single interesting decision in the world, that can be entrusted to experts. Although the tendency today is to entrust everything to experts. We have experts for everything. There are experts on nineteenth-century Iraq and experts on twenty-first-century Iran and experts on this type of homosexuality and on… there are experts for everything, and the experts are interviewed here and interviewed there, and it is perfectly fine for them to provide information. But when decisions have to be made, it is never a matter for experts. Decisions that are a matter for experts are only very, very simple decisions. After I told the expert: look, I want you to set the speed limit where the risk is one percent and above—then from there on the expert can do it by himself. Or for example, if there is a question that contains only risks versus only benefits, meaning there is a simple decision between two options, that too is a question for an expert. The expert will say: here there are risks, here there are no risks, so everything is fine; the answer is simple. In principle there is still a value judgment there, but fine, it is such a trivial judgment that there is no need to make it separately. There is not a single interesting decision in the world that it is right to entrust to experts. It is simply a conceptual mistake. And understand: this is not even really a question open to dispute. Someone who argues with this is simply confused. It’s not a matter of “you think this, I think that.” Someone who argues with this is confused; he simply does not know what he is talking about. You can argue about who your value-decider should be. A rabbi, the greatest atheist, the Council of Torah Sages of Meretz—I don’t care. Amos Oz, I don’t know who. Decide whoever you want to be your value-decider, but it has to be a value-decider, not an expert. Of course there is another side to the coin: the value-decider must be well rooted in the facts. This distinction I am making here, on the one hand sharpens the difference between an expert and a value-decider; on the other hand it tilts the balance much more toward the value-decider than people usually allow, but one has to be very, very careful not to tilt the balance too far. It is very important that in stage one the expert provide the graph. And not only that he provide the graph, but that the value-decider understand what graphs are saying. He may not be able to draw the graph—he’s not an expert—but he understands the language, he understands what these things mean. In the interface between the expert and the value-decider there are quite a few pitfalls; perhaps we’ll talk a bit about that later. So now I’m unmuting the microphones. If people asked in the chat—what do you call it? the chat—then I invite them to ask in their own voice because I’m not looking at the chats. Wait, no, sorry, I did it backward. I’ll mute everyone, but I’m giving you control, so anyone who wants to open his microphone and ask may do so; now I’ve opened it. So let’s start with questions related to the lecture, and afterward if someone wants to talk about other things, you’re welcome. Okay. Okay, so if there’s no one, then we’ll end here. The recordings will go up to the WhatsApp group and the website as usual. I mentioned that tomorrow at nine there is the lecture on free will, the second lecture, and that’s it, notices will come. Goodbye, have a peaceful Sabbath.