Essential Explanations and Examples – Lesson 1

This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.

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🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI

[0:07] Introduction: two issues for theological understanding
[1:20] Israel’s special quality: chosen vocation versus innate specialness
[2:48] Theological questions about arbitrary choice
[12:57] The problem of evil and suffering in the world
[15:42] The possibility of a world with alternative laws
[28:14] Attempts to enlist the Holy One to change the laws
[30:22] The World to Come and the assumptions it makes about reality
[35:36] The holy tongue and translating the recitation
[43:05] Providence over the species and the connection to morality
[45:44] Providence over a ship and the people inside it
[54:20] The nature of the ship and the questions about providence
[55:28] Does individual providence exist in nature?
[56:35] The example of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
[57:59] The justice of animal suffering in Jewish law

Summary

General overview

The speaker presents Israel’s special quality as an example of two phenomena he wants to clarify: a tendency toward essentialist explanations that leave little room for “degrees of freedom” and for the possibility that things could have been otherwise, and a tendency toward dogmas that have taken root as binding truths even though their basis is unclear. Here he focuses on the first phenomenon and argues that even if one adopts an essentialist explanation for divine choice, in the end one always reaches a stopping point where one says, “That’s how He decided,” so the theological problem of arbitrariness does not disappear. He proposes a hypothesis according to which some of the evil and suffering in the world stem from logical constraints of a fixed system of natural laws designed to achieve certain goals, rather than from point-by-point choice, and he illustrates how in Maimonides one finds technical, non-essentialist explanations in areas like the holy tongue, providence, and the understanding of divine actions. He concludes by arguing that some of the questions of “why us rather than others” rest on a logical mistake, because replacing the chosen party changes the identity of the questioner rather than creating any essential superiority.

Two phenomena around Israel’s special quality: essentialism versus degrees of freedom, and entrenched dogmas

The speaker says that Israel’s special quality highlights two phenomena he wants to address later, the second being dogmas treated as binding truths from Sinai though on examination they are not clearly grounded. He says that today he is focusing on the first phenomenon: non-essential, incomplete explanations, and recognition that there are “degrees of freedom” and that things are not necessary. He presents Israel’s special quality as a starting point for distinguishing between an essentialist view and a view that sees the special quality as a mission imposed upon Israel and that could just as well have been imposed on the Tunisians or the Belgians, which introduces an element of arbitrariness.

The choosing of Israel and the choosing of Abraham: the Maharal versus a non-essentialist possibility

The speaker presents the essentialist view as saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, has a necessary reason for everything and could not have acted otherwise. He attributes to the Maharal a tendency to see in everything an essence that could not have been otherwise, and brings an example from the Maharal at the beginning of Tiferet Yisrael or Netzach Yisrael regarding the choosing of Abraham. He says that the Torah begins with Abraham at “Go forth from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house,” without any prior explanation, unlike Noah, about whom it says, “For you have I seen,” and the Sages fill in the gap with midrashim such as the fiery furnace, but in the Torah the choice looks unmotivated. He explains that the Maharal interprets this as Abraham’s innate essence, so that the deeds are the result of his inborn nature and not the reason for the choice, and he contrasts this with the opposite possibility, in which the role and the choice create the character rather than resulting from it.

Maimonides versus the Kuzari-Maharal-Rabbi Kook line, and the discussion within Jewish thought

The speaker presents the position that the choice was not necessary and could have been otherwise, and notes that this raises the theological difficulty of “a lottery” or “playing dice.” He says that the one who represents the view that the special quality is not innate is Maimonides, and points to an article by Aryeh Stern in the journal Tzohar comparing the Kuzari and Maimonides. He describes a traditional continuum of essentialism associated, in his mind, with the Kuzari, the Maharal, and Rabbi Kook, and comments on the place of Maimonides relative to the usual genre of “Jewish thought.”

Arbitrariness, the perfection of creation, and stopping the explanation at “that’s how He decided”

The speaker argues that if the Holy One, blessed be He, leaves degrees of freedom in which roles can be switched between different agents without changing the outcome, that looks like a flaw in the perfection of creation, something not minimal or necessary. He adds that even if one assumes an essential reason for the choice, one still has to ask why the Holy One, blessed be He, gave precisely the Jewish people that inborn character and not others, and here too in the end one arrives at “because that’s how He decided.” He says that every explanation is given within a world of already-existing principles, but there is no way to explain why the principles themselves were created as they were without entering an infinite regress of reasons. He concludes that the theological difficulty of arbitrariness exists in any case and cannot be escaped.

The problem of evil, reincarnations, and Nachmanides on Job

The speaker moves to an associative example of the problem of evil in the world and distinguishes between evil created by human beings, such as the Holocaust, and natural suffering of sick infants that is not the result of human choice and is not a plausible punishment for their deeds. He says that reincarnations are a solution invented to explain the fit between prior sins and future compensation, and attributes to Nachmanides an understanding of Elihu in Job along the lines of reincarnation. He suggests that one can look for another solution based on logical constraints rather than ad hoc assumptions, while criticizing solutions that explain everything in a way that protects themselves by means of the very assumption.

Logical constraints, laws of nature, miracles, and moral randomness

The speaker says that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not act against the laws of logic, though He can deviate from the laws of nature, and raises the question whether one can create a world that fulfills its goals and runs according to fixed laws without elements of unnecessary suffering. He proposes the hypothesis that if the very existence of a system of laws that leads to the desired goals also logically requires phenomena such as disease and suffering, then “the question from the outset does not arise,” and there is no need for reincarnations. He explains that local intervention by miracle is a possibility, but it conflicts with the desire that the world be run according to laws, and therefore intervention is limited to exceptions. He argues that in order truly to ask a theological question about “the righteous person who suffers,” one has to propose an alternative system of laws that produces all the good without the side effects of suffering, and that without such an alternative, what seems arbitrary may be the result of logical constraint.

Individual providence: passive versus active, Nachmanides at the end of Bo, and “there is no reward for a commandment in this world”

The speaker distinguishes between passive individual providence, in which the Holy One, blessed be He, knows and tracks what happens, and active individual providence, in which everything that happens to a person is a divine decision. He says that personally he does not believe in the active sense, and mentions Nachmanides at the end of the portion of Bo in connection with the discussion of miracles. He notes that “there is no reward for a commandment in this world” comes up in the discussion of recompense, and that assumptions about the World to Come remain assumptions based on a “from below” perspective. He suggests that individual providence itself requires dismantling and rebuilding, and presents human prayers and requests as attempts to enlist intervention against the system of laws that generally operates without much success.

Traditions, impregnation of souls and reincarnation, and searching for sources according to what one is looking for

The speaker refers to claims about sources for reincarnations and distinguishes between reincarnation and soul-impregnation, amid an argument about terms and sources. He gives Yossi an assignment to spend a week looking for hints in the Torah, in the Talmud, and in the words of the Sages for his alternative thesis, and argues that one can find sources pointing in different directions depending on what one is looking for. He sets out a rule of “weighting” between anchor in sources and internal logic, and argues that there are things that in his view were invented at a certain historical stage and became dogmas, hinting that even the Thirteen Principles may come up in a future discussion.

First example in Maimonides: the holy tongue as a technical explanation (Guide of the Perplexed III:8)

The speaker brings from Maimonides in the Guide of the Perplexed, Part III, chapter 8, the claim that the holy tongue is called that because no direct terms were assigned in it for the sexual organs, the act of intercourse, semen, and excretion, and instead these matters are spoken of through substitutes and hints out of a sense of modesty. He presents this as a technical explanation opposed to the essentialist view of the holiness of the language as connected to an inner fit between words and reality, and attributes such an essential view to Nachmanides, the Raavad, and sources brought by Rabbi HaNazir in Kol HaNevuah. He says that Maimonides understands Hebrew as a conventional language like the other languages, and proposes an analogy to the discussion of Israel’s special quality: the language is not essentially holy and therefore chosen; rather, its holiness stems from the way it is used.

Halakhic and conceptual implications: reciting Shema and Megillah in any language, and the Raavad against Maimonides

The speaker brings from Rabbi HaNazir a proof from Maimonides’ laws of reciting Shema that “it may be recited in any language… provided one pronounces its letters carefully,” and cites the Raavad’s outcry that “every translation is an interpretation, and who can be exact about its interpretation?” He explains that Maimonides sees precision in pronunciation as an act of respect and not as an essential condition tied to the uniqueness of the holy tongue, and therefore for him there is no principled superiority to the original language. He adds that Maimonides writes in the laws of Megillah that foreign-language speakers read it in their own language, and presents this as further support that, for him, there is no unique essential holiness in the holy tongue, unlike other medieval authorities (Rishonim).

Second example in Maimonides: providence over human beings alone, and species-level providence among animals (Guide of the Perplexed III:17)

The speaker quotes Maimonides as believing that divine providence in the sublunar world applies only to individual members of the human species, while regarding the other animals, and certainly plants and inanimate things, his view is that of Aristotle, that these things happen “by pure chance.” He cites Maimonides’ examples of a spider preying on a fly, spit falling on a gnat, and a fish swallowing a worm, in order to illustrate that there is no personal divine will here. He also cites the example of a sinking ship, where the sinking of the ship itself is attributed to natural chance but the presence of the people on the ship is said to derive from divine will according to justice, and he raises an internal difficulty with that distinction because nature-events and the course of human life are constantly intertwined. He notes that he himself had previously proposed a different conception of natural suffering, and clarifies that here Maimonides seems to be saying that everything good and bad that reaches a person follows justice and recompense.

Verses, the Sages, and interpreting “He feeds from the horns of wild oxen to the eggs of lice” as providence over the species

The speaker explains how Maimonides supports his position from verses about reviewing the ways of human beings, and presents Habakkuk’s “And You make mankind like the fish of the sea, like creeping things with no ruler over them” as proof that fish and creeping creatures are ordinarily in a state of abandonment from personal providence, while human beings resemble them only at times of punishment. He cites Maimonides as saying there is no contradiction from verses like “He gives the beast its food,” or “The young lions roar… to seek their food from God,” or from the rabbinic saying “He sits and feeds from the horns of wild oxen to the eggs of lice,” because these are interpreted as species-level providence that prepares food and the material conditions of survival for each species, not personal providence over every individual. He notes that Maimonides explicitly attributes this to Aristotle, and even to Alexander in the name of Aristotle, and presents the claim that preparing food for a species is a necessary condition for its survival.

Animal suffering in Maimonides: “for the sake of perfecting us”

The speaker emphasizes that Maimonides deals with “the prohibition of causing suffering to animals is Torah-level” and with “Why did you strike your donkey?”, and cites his words that these were said “for the sake of perfecting us,” so that we should not learn cruelty and should not cause needless suffering, and not because personal providence applies to animals. He points to a further step in Maimonides that connects the lack of personal providence over animals with the permissibility of using them for human benefit, and even the commandment to slaughter them. He explains that Maimonides permits use for the need expressed by “when your soul desires to eat meat,” but forbids causing pain for amusement or cruelty, all within the framework of correcting human character traits.

“Why did He show providence over human beings and not over the other animals?” as a mistaken question, and its application to Israel’s special quality

The speaker quotes Maimonides, who suggests that the one asking about providence should ask himself “why intellect was given to man and not given to the other species of animals,” and interprets this as saying that questions of this kind merely swap identities and do not create injustice, because if animals had intellect they would not be animals, and if a human being had no intellect he would not be a human being. He expands the same logic through the example of jealousy toward Moses our teacher, and argues that if one had been given different essential traits, it would not have been “him” but someone else, connecting this also to the argument of wrongful birth. He returns to Israel’s special quality and concludes that even if the Tunisians had been chosen, they would have been “the people of Israel” in the sense of the role and the special quality, and everyone else would have asked why not them, so the question “why specifically us?” rests on a logical error. He concludes by saying that later he will discuss additional dogmas and more from Maimonides, and says that “the pages” he will bring next time.

Full Transcript

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In previous sessions we talked about Israel’s special quality, and I think that’s an example of two phenomena I’m going to want to talk about in the coming sessions. The first phenomenon is non-essential explanations

[Speaker D] Or

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] or the existence of degrees of freedom, things that are not necessary; I’ll clarify that in a moment. And the second phenomenon is dogmas that have taken root as some kind of binding truth from Sinai, when if you examine them a little more closely you see that it’s actually not clear whether they really have any true basis. So about that second issue I’ll speak next times; today I want to talk a bit about this matter of degrees of freedom, or incomplete, non-essential explanations. Meaning, I’ll explain better what I’m talking about. We’ll see later on—maybe I’ll begin with Israel’s special quality, that’s the example we dealt with in previous sessions. The view that the Holy One, blessed be He, chose the people of Israel because they have some special qualities—this is an essentialist view. A view that says the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t do things just like that because He decided. Meaning, everything has some reason, and specifically this way and not another way. It couldn’t have been otherwise, basically. Okay? In contrast, the view that sees the special quality as a kind of mission that the Holy One, blessed be He, imposes, and not as the result of some innate special quality, is basically a view that reflects a non-essential approach. Because according to that principle, the Holy One, blessed be He, could have imposed this mission on the Tunisians. Not the Jews from Tunisia, okay—the Tunisians from Tunisia. Yes, even the Belgians.

[Speaker E] Not the Belgians—the Belgians I’m already careful with, I said, we’ve moved on to Tunisia already.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So He could have imposed this mission on the Tunisians, and then they would have become a chosen people with a special quality. If you really don’t need some inborn basis, inborn qualities, in order to receive this role, then there’s a certain degree of arbitrariness here. Meaning, this basically says that the Holy One, blessed be He, did something that He also could have done differently. Meaning, He could have chosen another people. There’s nothing essential here, nothing a priori necessary. Now, that in itself raises not-simple theological questions if one adopts such a view. Because the Maharal, who of course is not suspected of holding such a view of Israel’s special quality, also really tends, I think at least—I’m not a great expert in the Maharal, but Shmuel, correct me if I’m wrong—but the Maharal tends to see in everything something essential. Meaning, something that could not have been otherwise. Everything has to have an explanation; it cannot be that the Holy One, blessed be He, does something but could also have done it differently. For example, the Maharal at the beginning of Netzach Yisrael, I think, describes the Holy One’s choice of Israel. We talked… Tiferet Yisrael, not Netzach Yisrael. Netzach…

[Speaker F] You’re mixing up Netzach.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be, I don’t remember. In any case, he talks there about how the Holy One, blessed be He, chose Abraham without a reason. The Torah doesn’t describe things because of which—say, regarding Noah it says, “For you have I seen,” yes? Meaning the Holy One, blessed be He, saw that he behaved better and therefore chose him. With Abraham our forefather it begins with “Go forth.” “Go forth from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house”—there’s no preface. The Sages fill in all those things in the midrashim, the fiery furnace with Nimrod and all the stories about Abraham our forefather, but in the Torah the Holy One, blessed be He, immediately says to Abraham, “Go forth from your land and from your birthplace,” as some kind of choice not rooted in anything. The Maharal, of course, takes this in the essentialist direction. And that means that it really wasn’t because of Abraham’s deeds, but because of his inborn nature. Meaning, even without the deeds. The deeds too are ultimately just a result of the inborn nature. Meaning, there’s no… it’s not that the person chose something, became a good person, and therefore was chosen. Meaning, he chose to behave in a commendable way and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, chose him because he was the most worthy. It works in the opposite direction. Since he was built in advance as destined for this matter, built in such a way, therefore he was chosen. The Holy One, blessed be He, chose Abraham because after all someone had to be chosen. Fine? And as a result of this choice and the role placed upon him, and his readiness to accept—Abraham our forefather first of all chooses this path himself, and the special character that we later discover takes shape in him as a result of the choice. It’s not the background because of which the choice happened. So these are of course two ways of seeing this process of choosing Abraham our forefather, if it wasn’t because of

[Speaker G] his deeds. Why assume that only Abraham is the exception? If everyone else, all along, both before and after, was on the basis of choosing the better one?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because here the Torah doesn’t describe it that way, and with Noah it does.

[Speaker G] So he’s sort of some outsider.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. Maybe yes, maybe no—that’s the question.

[Speaker C] Who advocates the second view? What—who? The one about the special quality. Not the special quality—that the special quality is not innate.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s Maimonides, plainly. There’s an article by a man named Aryeh Stern, in Tzohar—he wrote there, I don’t remember which issue already—where he draws this distinction, he compares the Kuzari and Maimonides on this conception. I don’t remember, you’d have to check which issue of Tzohar.

[Speaker C] The counterpart to the Maharal. What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The counterpart to the Maharal. Maharal, Kuzari, yes, Rabbi Kook—it’s a kind of chain, a sort of tradition, I don’t even know what to call it, kind of what today is called Jewish thought. Even though Maimonides isn’t exactly Jewish thought, I think, in the usual genre. In any case, the claim that what happened here was something not necessary—it wasn’t a necessary reality, it could have been otherwise. Basically there’s a degree of freedom here. That raises questions of various kinds. First of all, what—the Holy One, blessed be He, just does things arbitrarily? What, is there a lottery here? Does He do lotteries? He works through lotteries? It sounds a bit problematic. Playing dice. Playing dice, yes. Or actually one can go further back and ask: did the Holy One, blessed be He, create a world in which not every detail is necessary? He left degrees of freedom so that you can switch roles here between two agents and nothing will happen, everything will be… Then something in the creation of the world isn’t perfect. Meaning, I would expect a perfect Creator to make the world in the most minimal way necessary for the realization of His goals. Okay? So if He needs one chosen people, then let Him make it—let Him make someone who is destined in advance for that role. But once He makes various things that can essentially be interchanged, things that are not necessary—He leaves degrees of freedom—that looks like some kind of choice that isn’t… a creation that isn’t complete. Not perfect. There’s something here that’s not—maybe an injury to the omnipotence of the Holy One, blessed be He. I just wanted to note before moving on, that even if I understand there is a reason for the Holy One’s choice—say we’re still dealing with the example of Israel’s special quality—even if we say there is an essential reason, what does that mean? Our inborn character is pre-designed for the role that the Holy One, blessed be He, imposes on us. Fine? One has to understand that the Holy One, blessed be He, also created that character. So now you can go back one step and ask, wait—then why did He give this character specifically to the people of Israel and not to the Tunisians? At some point, obviously, this has to stop, and there we’ll say, well, because that’s how He decided. So in the end we always remain with some decision that the Holy One, blessed be He, simply decided that way. Explanations are always given in terms of the world as it already stands before us. So now we can begin to offer explanations in terms of the given principles. But when I ask why the given principles were created, or why reality in general was created as it is, I have no real way of answering that through reasons. Because those reasons too would need reasons behind them. What’s the reason that this reason existed and not another? Meaning, we’re not going to get out of this.

[Speaker D] Are we even allowed to take on that pretension of analysis?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—even if not, it doesn’t matter. The question is whether there is any such reason at all. Even if I don’t know how to describe what the reason is. But am I forced to assume that there was a reason? I’m saying not even that. Because if everything had a reason, then what begins that chain? Or say, if I’m talking about the Holy One, blessed be He, creating the people of Israel with a special character in order to impose on them the role He wants to impose on them, then I ask one step back: why specifically the people of Israel did He make with this special character and not someone else? So what will we say, it was because of something else special in Israel? And why was that something else there? After all, He made it all; He created them.

[Speaker H] But this is where freedom comes in—that there’s some degree of freedom.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s what I’m saying—in any case I’ll be left with a degree of freedom. That’s why I say that this theological problem, which supposedly exists in the conception of arbitrary choice, actually exists in any case. There’s no escaping it. Exactly. There’s something here that is not—I think it’s an illusion, anyone who thinks one can really escape this. Because we’re talking about the creation of the principles we use to explain things, so by definition we’ll never have an explanation for that, unless by means of something else—I don’t know—not from our world of explanations, I don’t know exactly, from something I don’t know how to think about. Fine, about that I can’t say anything. I’ll give you maybe an example that’s associated with this, though not entirely.

[Speaker F] Maybe there’s some sort of—I’m just trying here—maybe there’s some kind of reverse twist here. The Maharal basically says that this is an individual choice and this is a collective choice. With Noah it’s individual and with Abraham it’s collective. But Abraham is still alone when He says to him “Go forth,” so what’s collective? It’s Abraham by himself. Now if we look from Abraham onward, there’s a people here that is constantly suffering and described as suffering from the creation of the world until our own day, through Ahasuerus, through everything. That suffering turns them into one people—meaning maybe that makes it a collective choice. I’m trying to think.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that doesn’t relate to the basic question

[Speaker F] of how the beginning began,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] it doesn’t relate to the basic question whether there was a reason why specifically this people was chosen. Whatever it is—so suffering-capacity is innate, doesn’t matter—then suffering-capacity is what’s innate. So again the question is whether it’s really innate or created, acquired.

[Speaker D] The question is whether because of the suffering they believe Him

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] exactly, as people say: why couldn’t the Holy One, blessed be He, have chosen another people? Why did He choose specifically us?

[Speaker F] Since many complain about His choice,

[Speaker G] Who said He chose correctly?

[Speaker F] The people of Israel succeeded big-time; monotheism rules

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the world today. Okay, you can never know whether someone else wouldn’t also have succeeded, and those are always hypothetical problems—you can never answer them. In any case, I’ll just give an example that’s associatively related, but not really. There’s the problem of evil in the world—we talked about that one of the previous times—no evil comes down from above; how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, created evil dimensions in the world, unnecessary suffering, meaningless suffering, suffering without sense. So many things are not things the Holy One, blessed be He, created, but things human beings created. We talked about the Holocaust and things of that kind. Rabbi Amital and Abba Kovner—I think I mentioned that once. But there are things that aren’t like that. There are little children, babies, who are sick with some illness and suffer terribly from it. It’s not plausible that this is because of their evil deeds, some punishment for their evil deeds. It’s also not the result of a human choice by someone who decided to do it to them; the world did it to them. And in a certain sense that means the Holy One, blessed be He, did it to them. Then of course the question arises how to explain that, and that’s one of the reasons—maybe the best reason—for inventing reincarnations. That is an invention to explain how this fits both with previous sins and with future compensations. It obviously opens infinite possibilities for explaining the whole matter.

[Speaker G] And that’s the solution in Job?

[Speaker I] That’s how Nachmanides understands it,

[Speaker G] that Nachmanides understands Elihu that way—that he didn’t tell him about reincarnation: why are you crying? Last time you were terrible and that’s why now. But come on—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But let me perhaps suggest another solution.

[Speaker J] But I think something is missing—what is individual providence?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who talked about individual providence?

[Speaker J] No, I’m asking about what there is in a person’s fate, in sin and happiness and free choice—I haven’t yet heard from the Rabbi about individual providence.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What—whether everything is the result of the actions of the Holy One, blessed be He? So now I’ll comment on that; we’ll speak about it in a moment. From Maimonides. It could be—I’m suggesting a hypothesis—that maybe this can explain the matter. We’ve spoken more than once about how the Holy One, blessed be He, is also subject—yes, in quotation marks—to the constraints of logic. Meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do things that are logically impossible. He can suspend the laws of nature; the mouth that forbade is the mouth that permitted. But He cannot act against the laws of logic, because the “cannot” here is inherent—there’s no such thing. The “cannot” here is only metaphorical; there simply is no such thing as against the laws of logic. Now, the question is: can a world be created in which the goals that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to achieve with this world are achieved, one that operates according to laws—physics, chemistry, biology, all the laws of nature—and in which there are no evil elements, like unnecessary suffering of babies and the like? If—I don’t know how to prove such a thing—but if it could

[Speaker K] be, if there were the hand of God. If the hand were more active, then God would sort of do it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s always the reincarnation solution. But I’m suggesting another possibility: maybe there’s another solution that can solve this problem too, in the sense that there is a logical contradiction here. If the Holy One, blessed be He, decided to create a world that operates according to certain laws as He decided, because that’s what fulfills His will, then a necessary consequence of those laws is that children sometimes catch diseases, are born in this way or that. And therefore the matter can only be handled in one of two ways: either change the laws of nature—but then there are various costs from various directions that the Holy One, blessed be He, apparently doesn’t want; He wants these laws—or intervene locally, meaning to say: here I freeze the laws of nature for a moment, I heal this child even though he should have been sick. A miracle.

[Speaker I] A miracle.

[Speaker G] That too is part of the laws of nature.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The miracle is like freezing the laws of nature. We talked about the functioning of laws and miracles—that’s what we talked about this year. So some kind of local intervention, a suspension of the laws of nature. And that itself is something the Holy One, blessed be He, does not want to do, because that’s the whole point—He wants the world to be run according to the laws He established. And in that sense He usually restrains Himself from intervening, perhaps except for unusual cases, certain cases.

[Speaker I] But there’s some tension here between, on the one hand, the understanding that there probably has to be evil to some degree or other, and problems and troubles and so on, and on the other hand the question of why I was chosen, because that’s really the question, I think.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not chosen. The claim is that this is what came out. The laws of nature sent the viruses to me, and that’s that. I got infected, I was there, what can you do.

[Speaker I] Not chosen—and is that completely random? Yes, that’s the claim.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The claim is that it’s completely random. Meaning—what do I mean “the claim”? I’m proposing a hypothesis that maybe solves the problem.

[Speaker I] This random claim seems to have a moral dimension in the sense that okay, there’s a person sitting there and in fact suffering.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nothing can be done, because those are the laws. Not for others—for the world. We were all born into this world because the Holy One, blessed be He, had some goal; He created the world as it is in order to achieve what He wanted to achieve. Now, part of that requires it to run according to fixed laws without interventions, or at least not too many interventions, by the Holy One, blessed be He. The price of that is that the laws of nature sometimes do things that are inconvenient and maybe even things the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself would not want. The question is whether there is, at the logical level, an option to create a different system of laws that carries out everything the Holy One, blessed be He, wants it to carry out and at the same time avoids all the suffering. If there is no such system of laws, then the question from the outset does not arise. Then I don’t need to get to all kinds of reincarnations and so on; there are logical constraints that even the Holy One, blessed be He, is not free of. Now of course there’s some difficulty here because in a certain sense it looks as if the Holy One, blessed be He, is limited. But if I say that these are logical constraints, then it’s not a limitation, because there simply is no other thing. The other state of affairs does not exist. If it existed and the Holy One, blessed be He, couldn’t do it, that would be a limitation. But if the other state of affairs doesn’t exist, then it’s not a limitation.

[Speaker E] Like in a game of chess.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. Okay. Now in order to ask this theological question of why the righteous person suffers, why there is suffering in the world, and so on, you basically have to prove—or formulate—you have to be a good mathematician to ask this question, or a good physicist. You have to propose an alternative system of laws that would produce everything that exists in this world the way it exists in this world, but without these side effects, this unnecessary suffering. If there is such a system of laws, that’s a theological question. And sometimes something that seems to us arbitrary or without reason simply stems from logical constraints.

[Speaker G] What’s the meaning of throwing us into some arbitrary system that no one controls and where in a random way one person gets hit and another doesn’t—for what? What is all this for?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not the whole system, but it’s part of it. There’s a side effect. Meaning, the system does carry out what the Holy One, blessed be He, expects it to carry out. He created it in such a way that it will, broadly speaking, lead where He wants it to lead. Like evolution, say, yes? From the Big Bang we get to human beings and life and everything here. The claim is that this was pre-directed; the system of laws created a situation within which the developmental process would ultimately lead to life. Okay? But it was pre-directed—this is how He created this system of laws. But built into that is also that from time to time someone will get sick even though he doesn’t deserve it, because what can you do—the world follows its natural course; these are the laws of nature.

[Speaker G] The world is the most—

[Speaker K] He doesn’t refer, so to speak, only to this world.

[Speaker G] It would have been possible to make a law so that this wouldn’t happen.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s impossible to make a law so that this wouldn’t happen. Then it wouldn’t be a law; it would be local intervention. If you make it a fixed law, that fixed law will have a short blanket. You’ll solve this problem but ten other problems will pop up. The question is whether there’s a law that solves this problem without creating—I don’t know. I’m saying, in order to ask this question you have to show me that there’s a more perfect alternative. Understand? And I don’t know whether such a thing can be shown. I certainly can’t show it; I’m not a physicist.

[Speaker G] It seems to me reincarnations are simpler.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. The question is whether they’re needed. Ad hoc assumptions are always the simplest thing. Ad hoc assumptions always mean, well, he died, so apparently he was wicked. Because apparently he was wicked, because whoever isn’t wicked doesn’t die—there, proved it. But what about what is written explicitly in the Torah?

[Speaker G] Explicitly, explicitly—with Korach and Samuel it’s totally orderly. What? With Korach, that the sons of Korach did not die, and that the generation had to be redeemed until it reaches Samuel. He received measure for measure, everything.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are sometimes situations in which the Holy One, blessed be He, intervenes.

[Speaker G] Why is that reincarnations?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are situations in which the Holy One, blessed be He, sometimes intervenes. But that doesn’t mean He intervenes every time something happens that doesn’t seem right to Him. What His criteria are, I don’t know. At the Red Sea He apparently intervened in some way. He intervenes from time to time. But if He intervened every time there were some suffering of this kind that wasn’t intended, then there really wouldn’t be laws of nature anymore.

[Speaker K] Just as you see the local will of the Holy One, blessed be He—if there’s a situation, why did He choose this? He intervened here and He chose—so you don’t understand the criteria, you agree that you don’t understand, so also you don’t understand—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I claim there are criteria. He—there are no—

[Speaker K] He has no criteria? He just suddenly intervenes?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, He doesn’t just suddenly intervene. Rather, things happen according to the laws of nature. It’s clear why they were created; He has reasons why He created them this way. But within the laws of nature all kinds of things happen that were not supposed to happen according to His plan. He knew they would happen, but He cannot escape that, cannot avoid it. In some of them He intervenes in order to prevent them, and for that He has criteria—when to intervene. And sometimes not. Obviously He can’t always intervene, because if He always intervened then there would be no laws. We talked about that when we discussed miracles.

[Speaker C] You’re basically talking about why there is—why there has to be a case where it doesn’t work out. Why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m claiming maybe it has to be that way—I don’t know. According to our laws it clearly has to be, right? That’s clear. Diseases are a result of the laws of nature, and that’s the simple assumption everybody accepts. The question is whether there could be other laws of nature that would do exactly the same thing as these laws of nature except for the diseases?

[Speaker I] And not only diseases, but—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] poverty, suffering, all exactly, all the things that shouldn’t be. But all the rest they would do properly. Not a short blanket that solves one problem and creates ten others.

[Speaker C] What do you mean, shouldn’t be?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So maybe it should have been? For example—no, you’re saying there’s no reason why this little child, who didn’t sin, didn’t do anything, why he deserves to suffer. That’s not plausible. Why does he deserve to suffer? It shouldn’t have happened. Right—but what can you do, sometimes there’s no choice, it’s necessary.

[Speaker G] According to this principle that we ourselves understand that measure for measure is something absolute, and only reincarnations make it work out—and in nothing along the lines you’re suggesting does measure for measure work out.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t even have to be—that’s another point. If you say it’s the result of an action of the Holy One, blessed be He, then really there’s no measure for measure here. But I’m saying maybe it isn’t an action of the Holy One, blessed be He. It’s an action of the laws of nature. He didn’t want the child to be sick. But He found that there should be fixed laws of nature, and He has no way to have laws of nature without the child—

[Speaker G] No choice?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s looking for the one above Him.

[Speaker G] Why? Who said so? Because it can’t be that He would act and throw us into a random system like roulette. Why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why can’t it be?

[Speaker G] He doesn’t even enjoy it, so what’s the point? What do you mean, He doesn’t enjoy it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Enjoyment” is not a good term here. He has goals for which the world was created. In order to achieve those goals He created the laws of nature as He did. Apparently that’s what does the job from His point of view. But what can you do—this system of natural laws also creates viruses.

[Speaker G] So everything he wrote in the Torah is just nonsense? If you behave, things will go well for you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, as I said, sometimes He intervenes and sometimes He doesn’t.

[Speaker E] But it doesn’t say in the Torah that… that from time to time He doesn’t, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, and you also see that it’s only collective, not individual—that it applies to the community, not to the individual. “I will give your rains in their season,” and all those things. But not on the individual level.

[Speaker G] There are too many difficulties here, and then you have to defend it all by saying it’s all reincarnations.

[Speaker I] I’m saying again,

[Speaker G] I—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know how to say anything about reincarnations, whether there are reincarnations or there aren’t.

[Speaker G] There are enough hints—halitzah, there’s a lot, not halitzah, impregnation of a soul.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, I don’t know, I don’t know what to say about reincarnations, whether they exist or not. What I’m trying to show here is a kind of logic. A logic that says: I’m not claiming this answer is correct; I’m claiming it’s worth thinking about it too. Maybe it’s right, maybe not, but it’s a kind of option that very often we don’t even take into account. We have some theological difficulty here, and we stand in front of it and say, wait, there’s no answer—why does a small child suffer? No problem, just invent reincarnations. I’m saying no, there is a problem. Now again, maybe it’s true, maybe these are situations

[Speaker K] like that from which he can grow into something special. Maybe he was given certain conditions through which he can develop a personality that copes in a certain way, so he completed that stage.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A one-month-old baby—what personality?

[Speaker K] What personality did he develop?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A one-month-old baby dies; he hasn’t even reached the stage where he’s actually lived.

[Speaker K] His parents had to cope with it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so he has to die so they can cope? Does that sound fair to you? Reasonable? I don’t know, it doesn’t sound reasonable to me.

[Speaker G] You see that up to age twenty—how Nachmanides says there in the aliyot—that he saw yeshivah students under twenty who were, as it were, not obligated at all in this respect, such that they were slaughtered over the lectern. Who can tell me that they had already committed sins and so on? Certainly—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And certainly if you’re talking about a one-month-old baby. What? And certainly if you’re talking about a one-month-old baby.

[Speaker E] Well, there someone did that to them—that’s an injustice, that’s a sin.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right. In a case where someone else did it to them, I have less of a problem with that. Someone else chose, and yes, we have the ability to choose and to do harm. I’m talking about suffering that comes from nature—as if not because of a human choice—which is harder to understand. Like the virus. Even suffering that comes to us from other human beings, most people are troubled by, because they think that that too comes from the Holy One, blessed be He. In my view that’s a complete mistake. But what I’m saying here is that I’m talking about suffering that comes to us from the laws of nature, not from the decisions of other people.

[Speaker G] That goes against everyone—Rashi and the like—with providence and all that, the ladder, prophets, and so on.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, Rashi there, the source, I—

[Speaker G] think—Rashi supervises—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What, a murderer—

[Speaker G] unintentionally, incurred this, and so on, there’s that whole story. So they’re all just talking nonsense?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, they’re coming to tell you some kind of mechanism. That doesn’t mean it’s always like that. The question is whether it’s always like that. Why does he say it only about an unintentional murderer and not about every single thing that happens? I don’t know. It could be that there he thinks that’s how it is. I don’t know—I’m offering you a possible hypothesis. Think: it could be that he deserved to die because earlier he committed some sin; that doesn’t necessarily raise a difficulty. On the other hand, it could also be that not. So I don’t know— all these aggadic passages are not unequivocal, in my opinion. In any case, I’m not claiming that I’m following the medieval authorities (Rishonim) here. I’m proposing an alternative; you can consider it.

[Speaker F] Our prayers and our requests, and “the snake kills and the snake gives life”—all that is our attempt to recruit the Holy One, blessed be He, to intervene against the laws that are running.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, and generally not really successful.

[Speaker G] A one-in-a-thousand chance, what a—

[Speaker C] waste of time.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that’s part of the laws?

[Speaker C] What’s part of the laws? That if you direct your heart and if you pray, you receive merit points, and with x merit points you get such-and-such.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] According to the believer.

[Speaker C] Fine, that’s part of the laws; it could also be that that’s part of the laws, it doesn’t—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] contradict the point.

[Speaker K] “Everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted”?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted” is something else; we already talked about that. What?

[Speaker J] How does this fit with the personal providence we were educated on?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know what you were educated on. I know what I was educated on, and it doesn’t fit so well. I can only tell you that the concept of personal providence really also needs treatment. Meaning, reconstruction, what’s called—or deconstruction. Because personal providence can have a possible passive meaning, in the sense that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows what happens to each person and keeps a record before Him and follows it. And there is personal providence in the active sense, that everything that happens to a person is the result of a decision of the Holy One, blessed be He. In the second sense, I don’t believe. Personally.

[Speaker I] Nachmanides at the end of Parashat Bo—that all our ways… we talked about that when we talked about miracles—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And there I spoke about it a bit. Yes, I don’t believe in that.

[Speaker G] But do you accept Nachmanides? Wait—and also not that there’s only… and also not that there’s a record of what you did? Also not that there’s a record?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—passive providence, personal providence. Passive providence, in the end, means an accounting: the Holy One, blessed be He, follows what we do. Fine, that yes.

[Speaker G] But then what comes out of it? He can’t be with—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] everything random—how will He reckon with us and how will He give us reward? First of all, “there is no reward for a commandment in this world.” There is no reward for a commandment in this world. We talked about reincarnations—no problem, upstairs we can rearrange the settlements.

[Speaker G] Wait, wait, is there a World to Come? A World to Come? A World to Come? Then there has to be, if so.

[Speaker K] Why, what is the World to Come? But with that too you can’t really hold onto the logical system, because you don’t understand what it is.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, the World to Come—

[Speaker K] So you don’t know what happens there. You’re kind of looking at the map from below and making all kinds of assumptions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ugh, like everyone. Everyone looks at the map from below and makes all kinds of assumptions. Yes, but different assumptions. I’m only trying to expose those assumptions and suggest alternative assumptions that can also be made. And I agree about all the assumptions: none of us knows what happens there. I’m only claiming that just as those assumptions can fit with what we see down here, these assumptions also fit with what we see down here. And now everyone can choose what seems right to him. I don’t know—again, I’m not claiming that I know what happens there. I said: I’m proposing an alternative logic, and it’s worth thinking about.

[Speaker G] It has no basis at all in the Torah, unlike reincarnations, which do.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yossi, if you sit with the text—what is impregnation of a soul?

[Speaker G] Who said—

[Speaker I] that it’s impregnation of a soul?

[Speaker H] It’s not reincarnation. A stage in learning—that’s impregnation of a soul.

[Speaker G] It’s—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] reincarnation—

[Speaker G] because it says in the Talmudic text that it’s impregnation of a soul.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yossi, if you sit down—take this on, Yossi, take yourself a task—

[Speaker H] for a week.

[Speaker G] the more professional term—

[Speaker H] impregnation of a soul is much closer to renewed souls in the Talmudic text, in personal providence in that period, than to reincarnation.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yossi, take yourself a task for a week: find in the Torah and in the Talmudic text and in the words of the Sages hints to my thesis, not to the other thesis. I promise you that next week you’ll give us a two-hour lecture about it.

[Speaker G] Maybe. I’m not promising.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s only a question of what you’re looking for. You’re the search champion, after all.

[Speaker G] You’re right, but I’m not saying you should first mark the target.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying, when you search for something—

[Speaker G] after all, I read the haftarah of Samuel, I saw exactly the same words as Korach, I started investigating, digging—why like Korach?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: start investigating and looking for sources for this, and I’m sure you’ll find them too. Since that’s the case, I don’t even look, because after all you can find both this and that, so what’s the practical difference?

[Speaker C] The problem is Torah-level.

[Speaker G] Yes, the problem—

[Speaker C] is gematria, the same words as with Korach and Samuel, but not with Korach and Samuel. So why?

[Speaker G] That’s how he was punished. Master of the Universe, maybe it’s because Korach’s soul was reincarnated in Samuel.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Only to a certain extent.

[Speaker G] But that’s what it says—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Samuel comes from the loins of Korach. When the source is clear to us, when these are things that were created at some stage—and that’s the second topic I’m going to talk about—then fine, so there’s a tradition, so what? It survived five hundred years—does that mean it has to survive another five hundred years? The fact that someone invented something at some stage in history doesn’t mean I also have to adopt it. Yes, but then you say they do—and here not.

[Speaker I] And Maimonides and Nachmanides and those people—who says—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that they are transmitting a tradition here, or that they decided this matter based on their own reasoning? That’s the question.

[Speaker I] After all, on almost nothing do we really know. In the Talmudic text there are still descriptions of what is a law given to Moses at Sinai.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And therefore you have to weigh the degree of logic you see in the matter against the anchor the matter has in terms of sources. If the anchor is weak and you see no logic in it at all, then you say, fine, apparently this is an invention. If the anchor is strong, then maybe even without any logic I’ll adopt it. So it’s all a matter of weighing factors. We don’t have unequivocal indications for making decisions. There are things that in my opinion have not-bad indications that they were invented at some stage in history—they didn’t come from nowhere. And I said this is the second topic I intend to talk about, not today but later: the issue of dogmas that became rooted, kinds of things that are obvious to everyone as true, when in fact it’s pretty clear that this is some invention that emerged at some point over the course of history.

[Speaker I] Maybe like the Thirteen Principles themselves, perhaps.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe the Thirteen Principles themselves. We’ll talk about that in the coming stages. In any case, here I want to talk about the first phenomenon. I said that in the segulah of Israel there are two phenomena; that was the second. I want to talk about the first. So look, I brought—I’ll bring a few examples, three examples to be precise, additional ones where in Maimonides himself you see a conception of arbitrary action by the Holy One, blessed be He—action that is not necessitated, or action that could have been done differently and it wouldn’t have changed the result. So take these pages. But Maimonides consistently thinks this way and never deals with the question of why. I’m not sure about that—

[Speaker I] I—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure about that. He answers it in a slightly different way, I think.

[Speaker I] No, I mean, I don’t think in a book of Maimonides I’m going to come and find “why.” Why, why, why, down to the foundation—you won’t find that with anyone, it’s impossible.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but I do see, for example, also the issue of the segulah of Israel—

[Speaker I] Also the issue of reasons for the commandments—he gives some kind of account of it, and he’s the opposite: he actually tells you that if not seven then eight, meaning he somehow—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] hints that this is exactly the conception I’m talking about. But it’s not that he deals with “why”; he claims there is no “why.” That’s not the same thing—that’s exactly the point I’m talking about now, and I’ll bring a few examples of it now; that’s exactly the point.

[Speaker G] Fine, never mind. What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He claims there is a big “why,” but not a detailed “why”? So we’ll talk about that now. There are different examples here. The first example is in Guide of the Perplexed, part 3, chapter 8: the holy tongue. Okay? It’s on the page where there are two passages. All right? So this is a well-known dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) as to why the biblical language is called the holy tongue. Usually this is what we were educated on—it’s also one of the examples, by the way, maybe I should also have included in the second topic—we were also educated, right, that the holy tongue is something holy, special, rooted in a supernal source, that all the words stand in some correspondence to the reality they describe, all kinds of things of that sort, unlike other languages, which are conventional and were essentially determined arbitrarily. So that is indeed what Nachmanides writes; that is what seems to emerge from the Raavad; Rabbi HaNazir in Kol HaNevuah brings a few sources for this, and there he writes that Maimonides—he says Nachmanides already brings this Maimonides and disputes him—but Maimonides really does not understand it that way. Look at the first passage. “And I too have an argument and a reason for calling our language the holy tongue.” Why is our language called the holy tongue? “And do not think that this is exaggeration on our part or an error, but it is true, because in this holy tongue no name at all was originally assigned to the male or female sexual organs”—yes, it has no expressions for the sexual organs, neither male nor female—“therefore it is the holy tongue, because there are no words in this language for the sexual organs. Nor for the act itself that brings about procreation, nor for semen, nor for emission. For all these things no original term was assigned at all in the Hebrew language; rather they are spoken of by borrowed terms and by hints.” Some of these things I don’t entirely understand why he says, but that doesn’t matter right now. “For all these things no original term was assigned at all in the Hebrew language; rather they are spoken of by borrowed terms and by hints. And the intent in this was that these things are not fit to be mentioned such that names should be assigned to them, but they are matters of which one should be silent”—yes, that’s Wittgenstein—“and when necessity requires mentioning them, one should devise some stratagem with euphemisms from other words, just as one hides from doing them, when necessary, as much as possible.” So Maimonides is offering here an explanation that is a very technical explanation. Clean language. Yes. The holy tongue is because in this language there are no words for the organs of generation. That’s the whole story. Not all the correspondences and mysticism and connection between the word and the thing itself.

[Speaker H] Why doesn’t he say that it isn’t?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why do you need an explanation for why it’s called the holy tongue? So here you have a simple explanation. He understands this language as being like any other language, a conventional language. So why is it called the holy tongue? Because no terminology for the organs of generation was assigned in it.

[Speaker H] And it’s also not clear what it means that no terminology was assigned. If language is something that develops, then nothing was assigned. No. Everything develops.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he says that intentionally this language—not only that; I’m not even sure he sees it as developing at all. The language of Scripture is given. Today we see Hebrew as a living language, a developing language, but he’s talking about the language of Scripture, and with regard to the language of Scripture his claim is that there isn’t. All right? It’s a closed language; it’s not something that keeps developing further. And even when it did develop further, they still used euphemisms and hints and so on—that’s another point. But it doesn’t matter for our purpose. I’m saying the content of his words is not what matters to me; you can debate the content of what he says. Some of the things actually do seem to me to have words, but he claims there aren’t. What I’m trying to show is the mode of thought. It’s a bit similar to the segulah of Israel—do you see the similarity? The question is whether this language has something essentially different from the other languages, and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, chose it to write the Torah in, or the reverse: the Holy One, blessed be He, chose to write the Torah in it, and therefore indeed it has a few characteristics—no term for the organs of generation was assigned in it, He preserves its holiness, and so on—but basically He could also have done it in English. And Rabbi HaNazir in Kol HaNevuah writes there that Maimonides is consistent with his view, and he brings two more laws in Maimonides where you see his conception regarding the holy tongue. One of them is regarding the Shema, which may be recited in any language, even in translation, provided one enunciates its letters carefully—this is what Maimonides writes. So the Raavad shouts at him: every translation is an interpretation, and who is the one who can be exact about its interpretation? What is there to be exact about in the letters of a translation?

[Speaker E] It’s not the original.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then produce a language of your own. You weren’t exact in the letters, so then it’s not spoken English—it’s unspoken English. So I translated “Hear O Israel” into unspoken English—what’s the problem?

[Speaker E] You think that’s exact.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. What, what’s the problem? What does it mean to enunciate its letters carefully when you’re talking about translations? So from here, says Rabbi HaNazir, you see that Maimonides understands that even the holy tongue is no different from any other language. Precision in the letters isn’t the point, as long as you express the content accurately. It’s only to show honor to the Shema. You show honor to the Shema—say it properly, without sloppiness. Say it in a precise language to show it respect. Again, a completely technical matter. Not because there are differences such that there are things that can be expressed only in the holy tongue and cannot be expressed in English. You can express the same thing in English. There is no difference whatsoever. Just translations, and if not, then arrange the English a bit more so it can be translated. But it can be translated. Rather, what? You have to enunciate the letters carefully to show an attitude of respect. That’s all. All right? And the Raavad, of course, against him, consistently with his own view. The Raavad also interpreted Sefer Yetzirah. So the Raavad really does hold that the holy tongue is essential. Therefore he says there’s nothing to be exact about in its interpretations. One fulfills one’s obligation for the Shema in any language, but that doesn’t mean you have to be exact in its letters. Being exact in its letters is not relevant in every language. That’s a different discussion. By the way, there would be a practical implication from this—for example, if you know any language, is it still preferable to recite the Shema in the holy tongue? It can be recited in any language. That’s at the beginning of Sotah, chapter 7, where it says: these may be said in any language. So you can recite it in any language. But if you also know the holy tongue, can you still recite the Shema in English? One who thinks there is something special about the holy tongue will probably say: okay, you can do it, you fulfill the obligation in English too, but certainly it is preferable to recite it in the holy tongue. And Maimonides, who sees all languages in the same way, may not even see any preference in that. Meaning, if one fulfills the obligation in any language, then one fulfills it in any language—what difference does it make? All languages are conventional. The same thing Maimonides brings in the laws of Megillah.

[Speaker C] Not for everything do you fulfill the obligation in any language.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not for everything. The Mishnah there says what yes and what no. There is—Maimonides says also in the laws of Megillah. Maimonides writes that speakers of foreign languages read it in the foreign language. Yes, the Megillah can be read in another language, and there too he shows some kind of dispute between Maimonides and the Raavad, I think, and there too you see in Maimonides that there is no superiority of the holy tongue over another language. And other medieval authorities (Rishonim) say there is a superiority. And Rabbi HaNazir ties this to the dispute regarding the nature of the holiness of the holy tongue. What is holy about it? According to Maimonides there is nothing essential about it—meaning, it is a language of convention like any other language. No terminology for the organs of generation was assigned in it. And the other medieval authorities (Rishonim) say there is something essential in the language, and therefore it was chosen because it is special—not that it is special because it was chosen. Exactly the issue of the segulah of the language, like the segulah of Israel; it’s exactly the same logic. All right? So that is one example of this kind of thought in Maimonides, where he really is willing to accept arbitrary actions of the Holy One, blessed be He—actions that have no essentialist reason. Two additional examples that I brought here: the second is providence over the species, and the third is the details of the commandments, the reasons for the commandments. Let’s start with providence over the species. “And this is the doctrine that I believe, which is less improbable than the preceding doctrines,” meaning more reasonable, less unreasonable than the previous views, “and closer to rational inference. Namely, that I believe that divine providence in this lower world”—that is, beneath the sphere of the moon—“exists only in the individuals of the human species. In this species alone, all that happens to its individuals, and all the good and evil that befalls them, follows justice, as it says, ‘For all His ways are justice.’ But with regard to the other living creatures, and all the more so plants and the like, my opinion about them is Aristotle’s opinion. I do not at all believe that this leaf fell with providence over it”—don’t tell that to the supervision people—“nor that this spider devoured that fly by a decree from God and His personal will at this moment. Nor that this spit that Reuven spat moved until it fell on this mosquito in a particular place and killed it by God’s decree. Nor that this fish snatched and swallowed this worm from the surface of the water by a particular divine will. But all these things, to me, are pure chance, as Aristotle thought.” Chance—laws of nature, that’s all. “However, divine providence, in my opinion and according to what I see, follows the divine overflow. And the species to which that intellectual overflow is attached”—yes, with Maimonides the overflow is the intellect—“so that it becomes an intellectual being and everything that is revealed to an intellectual being is revealed to it—this is what divine providence is attached to, and all his actions are assessed on the basis of reward and punishment. However, if a ship sank, with all those on it as mentioned, and the roof fell on those in the house—if that happened by pure chance, then the coming of those people onto the ship and the staying of those others in the house was not by chance according to our view, but by divine will, according to justice in His judgments, whose order our minds cannot attain.” Yes, he says that if, say, a ship sinks with people inside it, the sinking of the ship belongs to the inanimate realm—the sea, the ship—those are laws of physics. Okay. But the people inside it are under providence. Ships and seas are not under providence, but human beings are under providence. So how did human beings get involved here? How can something happen that is not under providence and still affect human beings, who are supposed to be under providence? So he claims that the human beings who got onto the ship—that was by providence. In other words, the sinking of the ship is chance. It’s a bit strange, notice, because what do you mean? But how did He determine that certain people would not arrive on the ship? After all, He knew it would sink; He knew when they got onto the ship?

[Speaker I] The way I understand it, it’s not that He doesn’t supervise the mosquito or the… there is no significance in the death of the mosquito or the ship. Meaning, the considerations are not weighed as to whether this mosquito will die or not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Passive providence, what I said earlier. Passive providence.

[Speaker I] He does maintain, He’ll change the whole species.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Passive, passive. Right, and that changes things—it’s passive providence, not active. And what happens to it happens according to the laws of nature. The Holy One, blessed be He, supervises because He follows what happens.

[Speaker I] No, but it’s also active, because with the butterfly effect everything has significance.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What—

[Speaker H] do you mean?

[Speaker I] So the death of the mosquito has significance. Obviously when this mosquito goes away, or this leaf falls, then afterward this tree won’t provide shade for some righteous person who passes by here another… Obviously every little thing has meaning and does have an effect—on human beings.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On human beings, and then he says that this is not providence over that thing, but over the human beings not arriving at the place that this butterfly would ruin. He supervises only human actions. After all, why does he need to say that He supervises the entry of human beings onto the ship? Because the sinking of the ship is the laws of nature; He didn’t do that. True, there is passive providence, and in passive providence He knows that this ship is going to sink because the laws of nature will sink it, not because He decided it—

[Speaker I] So in the end, with human beings He will act through the laws of nature. When this person—how will he get to the ship? Because he’ll miss the bus, okay, he’ll—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] miss the bus—

[Speaker I] because the Holy One, blessed be He, will bring some car that has an accident. No, but who decided to cause the accident?

[Speaker H] Someone decided it, so somewhere here there is—

[Speaker I] No one—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] no one decided to cause the accident. What you’re saying is not a simple question; I agree. There really is a problem here. That’s why what I started to say now, I’m in the middle of saying it. In the end, if the Holy One, blessed be He, does nothing with the ship, then it happens according to the laws of nature. So Maimonides says, yes, but He determines which people get on the ship and which don’t. First of all, that requires assuming at least passive providence even over the ship—He has to know that this ship is going to sink in order to determine which people get on and which don’t. Second, He has to control which people get on and which don’t. How will He control that? Isn’t that also happening through events, some of which are events in the inanimate world, and which the Holy One, blessed be He, apparently caused in order to prevent some people from getting on or to cause other people to get on? So how can one maintain that with respect to the inanimate world the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t touch anything except passively, while with man—or in the inanimate or animal world, doesn’t matter—and with man the Holy One, blessed be He, is active? There is something here that I don’t fully understand, how one can make that distinction.

[Speaker H] The fact that He is active with man doesn’t mean He is one hundred percent active with man. It could be that with man too there is some measure of activity, but there is also some measure of passive providence with man too—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or is it all—

[Speaker H] that there is no chance at all with human beings?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s how he understands it. That’s how he understands it. That all the affairs of a person, and all the good or evil that reaches him, follows justice. And he says again the same thing: “and all his actions are assessed on the basis of reward and punishment.” It seems a bit like he really means everything.

[Speaker E] Yes, so then how does the discussion we just had for half an hour about the one-month-old baby work—how is he swept away?

[Speaker C] Not with a baby, I don’t know, I—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say that in the name of Maimonides; I said that in my own name. Maimonides understands it not as I said earlier, or at least that’s how I read this. I think Maimonides does understand that everything that happens to human beings is under providence.

[Speaker E] And how does that fit with personal providence—I’m now… free choice… I just now chose to kill him. Now there is providence…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, here he’s talking about a ship sinking. A ship sinking—no one chose to sink it. It may be that in a case of choice he would indeed say that you can.

[Speaker E] He gives it as an example and says that for everything concerning human beings there is personal providence.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Possibly, okay, that interpretation I’m willing to put into Maimonides. It doesn’t contradict what he says here. He’ll say: if a person decides to do something to you, fine, that could be. Here, I think, he is intentionally talking—at least it could be that he is intentionally talking here about examples where nature does it, not where another person does something to you. At least those are the examples here. I didn’t check the—

[Speaker E] Passive providence, in my opinion, doesn’t need to be assumed. Given the assumption of knowledge—that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the laws of nature—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] then—

[Speaker E] what, He can’t calculate what will happen in the year 2000? That too—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not entirely, because in the natural process human beings are involved in history too. Meaning, there is no separation between the human world and the inanimate world. Meaning, if human beings—we know today—that human beings are destroying the ozone layer, then the sun, the glaciers melt, and all kinds of things like that. Meaning, there is some interaction between human actions and nature, so if you really think that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot predict what a human being will do, then there are elements in nature that He also cannot predict.

[Speaker E] He can’t predict what a human being will do.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, if so, then there are also elements in nature that He can’t predict.

[Speaker E] So how—

[Speaker G] After all, every ship is led by a captain.

[Speaker E] He can predict what a human being will do? Apparently maybe not in terms of free choice.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that’s the question of free choice and knowledge that Maimonides asks in the laws of repentance. The question is how you understand his answer there; I once discussed that. But yes, I’m saying: in my opinion—or according to the Rabbi, according to Maimonides—I think it’s something else. What I said earlier is my opinion. He doesn’t resolve it. They all say, for the sake of discussion, he doesn’t resolve it. He says one has to remain with the contradiction. I don’t know how to resolve it. But the assumption is that both this and that are true.

[Speaker E] His knowledge is not like our knowledge.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I said that I think what he answers there does indeed go in the direction I’m talking about.

[Speaker E] And then it doesn’t fit with passive providence.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not? It fits. You can supervise what you know. What you don’t know, you don’t know. Like the Shelah—I brought the Shelah regarding what the Holy One, blessed be He, can predict, when He foretells to prophets what will happen in the future. So the Shelah says: by way of what will happen in the likely course, and if human beings choose to deviate from His path, then it will turn out that it won’t—

[Speaker C] Right, “in another forty days Nineveh will be overturned.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It was not overturned. They repented, or they chose something like that, and then indeed it won’t happen. So one can understand passive providence as applying to what will happen—there is the law of large numbers, there is normal natural conduct. One who knows that well will know, for most things, what will happen.

[Speaker E] But He doesn’t know about the ship, because He doesn’t know whether the captain didn’t decide, scratched his head, and decided now to sail the ship in another direction.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, I really don’t know how far Maimonides enters into all these calculations, because this is a very modern kind of thinking—this idea that every single thing stems from something prior, and there is basically some physical chain in which a person is involved in the middle. I’m not sure Maimonides carried that calculation all the way through and fully accounted for what happens with those elements in nature that are the result of human action. I don’t know. I simply don’t know.

[Speaker H] Maybe he would have written differently if he had thought that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Therefore I’m saying: I’m not sure he even carried that calculation through all the way there. These are statements that remain at a more general level. Usually among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) you won’t find these extremely high resolutions. I don’t know—that’s more or less the situation there.

[Speaker C] Because a lot of it is intuition. Intuition—they understood the general picture, and that’s how it is.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but sometimes when you carry the calculation all the way through, it can disrupt things.

[Speaker C] But sometimes the details—you get a collection of details that clearly were not the intent of the lawgiver, and the general picture is correct.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the other hand, if you don’t do the calculation, then you haven’t checked it to the end. If you do the calculation and it doesn’t fit, then something in that intuition is not right. You can’t always go with intuition without control. That’s childish. You have to do the calculation.

[Speaker I] With your permission, I’m trying to suggest again out of the difficulty, that Maimonides is saying, as it were, on the principled level that what happens to the ship is not under providence, but since in the end we’ll have to come back, as we ask about the car that delayed me from coming, then in the end I don’t mind saying that there is also active providence over the ship; it’s just that I don’t care about the ship—I care about the human beings.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but then he doesn’t—he says there is no providence over the ship—

[Speaker I] only over human beings. On the principled level of the matter, it is important to Maimonides to show the distinction—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] between—

[Speaker I] human providence and providence…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then let him say that. Let him say that the Holy One, blessed be He, brought about the storm because He wanted to drown those people. He doesn’t need to say that the storm happened on its own and the Holy One, blessed be He, was only the selector who determined who would go in and who would not go in. He doesn’t need to say that. He should say that He made the storm itself because He wanted to drown people, because it concerns people.

[Speaker I] No, but the opposite—he wants to tell you that basically the storm is on its own, and one day you came and saw that a ship sank, so don’t ask why. Because it sank. Like a leaf on the floor—don’t ask why.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A leaf on the floor, no—but a ship with people inside, yes, He wanted to drown them. But he doesn’t answer that. He says that the storm sank the ship—that’s the laws of nature; the Holy One, blessed be He, was the One who determined who would be inside.

[Speaker C] It would have happened even if other people had been on it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, a question. I don’t know how to answer it. And again, I’m not enough of an expert in Maimonides to tell you what his view is. This isn’t the kind of literature I learn very much, so I don’t know.

[Speaker J] But if I remember correctly, in Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides writes that there are different levels of providence, yes, say.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “And God has brought me to this belief, namely, that I found nowhere in the words of a prophetic book that God has providence over any individual among living creatures except human beings alone.” With the Sages, by the way, there are expressions that are—he says prophetic books; what about the Sages? “Over every blade of grass stands an angel and says to it, ‘Grow.’” So how should one understand that? Does that mean—you could understand that not as personal providence in the sense of… only that the grass grows because the Holy One, blessed be He, gives nature the energy to operate, not that the Holy One, blessed be He, decided that this blade of grass should grow because it needs to do something. I don’t know. Meaning, there are statements of the Sages here that one can discuss; I don’t know. “And the prophets as well wondered that providence should exist for human beings, and that a thing so small and insignificant should be supervised by the Creator—how much less any of the other living creatures. As it says, ‘What is man that You should remember him, and the son of man that You should be mindful of him,’ and so on. And explicit verses have come regarding providence over all human beings and the reckoning of all their deeds, as it says, ‘He fashions their hearts together; He understands all their deeds.’ And it says, ‘Whose eyes are open upon all the ways of mankind, to give to each according to his ways.’ And it further says, ‘For His eyes are upon the ways of a man, and He sees all his steps.’ And the Torah has already mentioned providence over human beings and the reckoning of their deeds, as it says, ‘And on the day that I visit, I will visit their sin upon them.’ And it says, ‘And I will visit upon you.’ And it says, ‘Whoever has sinned against Me, I will blot him out of My book.’ And it says, ‘And I will cut off that soul.’ And it says, ‘And I will set My face against that man.’ And this occurs often. And all that came concerning Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, peace be upon them, is a clear proof that individual providence exists for human beings. But regarding the other individual living creatures, the matter with them is as Aristotle sees it, without doubt.” He is completely convinced of this—without doubt. “And for this reason their slaughter was permitted and even commanded, and it was permitted to use them for our benefit however we wish.” You take an animal—you decide to eat it, you slaughter it. You decide not to eat it, you don’t slaughter it. Why? Why doesn’t it matter that it live? For what did the Holy One, blessed be He, create it? Well, of course one can say He created it so that we would eat it. But still, there is a certain claim here that the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t care about the animal.

[Speaker E] That’s a trend that’s developing more and more.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, correct. In a moment we’ll see that he really does make that move. The claim is not only that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not providentially watch over animals; I think he also meant to say more than that: that He does not care what happens to them. That’s a different claim. You could say that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not determine what every cow will do, because He does not care what it does. And still, I am forbidden to cause it suffering. Animal suffering, yes. So He does care that the cow suffers, right? Maimonides, from this, I think, also takes the additional step. He says: since the Holy One, blessed be He, does not care about cows and does not watch over them—I mean active providence—therefore He also does not care that we slaughter them. And that is already one step further. Okay? Now of course there is still the issue of animal suffering, whether it is Torah-level or rabbinic—that is a dispute—but there is such a concept in Jewish law. Still, where I need it for my use, then yes, it is permitted. But regarding human beings, it is obvious that I may not slaughter a person because I need him for my use, because a human being is an end in himself. And therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, cares about him and watches over his deeds. So here Maimonides is already taking one step forward, and he moves from the concern implied by providence to value-based concern—in other words, that the suffering of this creature matters to Him, or preventing its suffering matters to Him, it has value as a living being. And then he says: “And for this reason their slaughter was permitted, and it was even commanded, and it was permitted to use them for our benefit, of course, because otherwise this would be animal suffering, as much as we wish. And the proof that the rest of the animals are not individually watched over, but only as a species—the providence mentioned by Aristotle—is the statement of the prophet Habakkuk, peace be upon him, who, seeing the power of Nebuchadnezzar and the great slaughter among human beings, said before the Lord God as though human beings had been abandoned and forgotten and made ownerless like the fish and worms of the earth.” That’s a nice proof. Maimonides sometimes has flashes of brilliance—he brings proofs from verses. Really, when you compare it, it does look that way. We read it in a literary way, but when you read the verse, it is really written there. Human beings were abandoned like the worms and fish of the earth. What does it mean that worms and fish of the earth are abandoned? The assumption is that they are. But when a human being appears somehow not to be under providence, when things happen to him just randomly, without deserving it, then we say: man is like animals, like fish. So Maimonides says: from here there is proof that animals and fish really are abandoned; they are not watched over.

[Speaker F] Is that like the hiding of the divine face? What? The hiding of the divine face?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that is the hiding of the divine face, but he says the hiding of the divine face applies to human beings. With animals, that is the normal state. The hiding of the divine face is when human beings are treated as in the normal state of animals. “And from this statement it appears that the species are abandoned.” And this is what he means by, “You make man like the fish of the sea, like creeping things that have no ruler over them all; he lifts them all up with a hook.” “For the matter is not so”—not in the sense of abandonment and forgetfulness and the removal of providence—yes, the cloud rose, the withdrawal of providence, yes, that is the meaning. “But rather by way of punishment for them, making them liable for all that befell them.” So what happens there to human beings is not because they were abandoned. The Holy One, blessed be He, never abandons. Everything that happens to a human being is under providence. That is Maimonides’ view. Rather, it is simply punishment that they deserved. “O Lord, You appointed him for judgment, and O Rock, You established him for reproof.” “And do not think that this view is contradicted by the verse, ‘He gives the beast its food,’ and the verse, ‘The young lions roar for prey and seek their food from God,’ and the verse, ‘You open Your hand and satisfy every living thing with favor,’ and the statement of the Sages, ‘He sits and sustains from the horns of wild oxen to the eggs of lice,’ and many such statements that are written and found—there is nothing in them that contradicts this opinion of mine,” like the statement that over every blade of grass stands an angel saying to it: Grow. So he says this does not contradict my view. Why? Because all of these refer to species-level providence, not individual providence. “That is, they recount His actions in preparing for every species its necessary food and the material for its continued existence.” Meaning, Maimonides explains: “He sustains from the horns of wild oxen to the eggs of lice” means that the Holy One, blessed be He, created a world in which there is food for lice and for wild oxen. Which ox? Which louse? Which one survives natural selection and which one does not? The Holy One, blessed be He, does not care about that. The main thing is that the species survives. In principle, the species needs to have food. There is no concern for the individual creature. And regarding this angel standing over the grass and saying “Grow,” that is stronger. Because here it seems that the angel stands over a specific blade of grass, not just that there was general care for the species of grasses so they could grow.

[Speaker I] Yes, but we see that there are grasses that do not grow. We see there are some that do not grow, and those are the ones that do grow.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The proof is that every blade of grass that grows has an angel standing over it saying, “Grow”; it does not just happen on its own. So you would understand that every blade that does not grow either has no angel standing over it, or has an angel standing over it that does not let it grow. It does not matter—but apparently everything is under providence. He says that it does not have to be so. So I am saying that even this does not contradict what Maimonides wrote. Because it is certainly possible that the intention is that things that happen in the world are nourished, receive their energy, from the Holy One, blessed be He. Nothing here operates by itself. But the energy of the Holy One, blessed be He, is energy given to the laws of nature to operate. The whole business is run according to the laws of nature, not by a decision about each particular blade of grass as to whether it will grow.

[Speaker D] And this, and this is explicit, revealed.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “And Aristotle too saw that this kind of providence necessarily exists. Alexander also mentioned it in the name of Aristotle.” That is interesting. Yes, Alexander the Great, after all, was Aristotle’s student. Right—Philip brought Aristotle to teach Alexander in his court there in Macedonia. “That is to say, the preparation of the existence of food for every species so that the world may endure, for without this the species would certainly perish. And this is clear with a little reflection.” Meaning, simple observation shows it; it is obvious. “However, their statement that animal suffering is Torah-level, from the verse, ‘Why did you strike your donkey?’—this is by way of perfecting us.” Now this is an interesting point—this is what I told you earlier. Now he finds it necessary to explain: so why is animal suffering Torah-level? And why do they come with a complaint to Balaam—“Why did you strike your donkey?” What is the question? That itself is apparently the question—what is the problem with it? Why does he see this as a problem? Before the answers—why does he see this as a problem?

[Speaker K] Because the donkey is not under individual providence.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what? Fine, but there is still a prohibition of animal suffering.

[Speaker F] It has its own suffering, but there is no problem if it suffers.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is exactly the example—that is what I said earlier—that here he makes some kind of jump, one step further. He says: since the Holy One, blessed be He, does not watch over the specific donkey, but only over the species of donkeys—if that is even a species—then Maimonides also says that He does not care what happens to them. In principle, the prohibition of animal suffering is not for the animals. And that is really the claim, because Maimonides understands that the fact that there is no providence over them also means that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not care about them. Now this is a step that is not compelled. Meaning, it does not have to be that way. One could certainly understand that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not watch over each animal separately, but still it is certainly forbidden to cause it suffering. Meaning, He does not want it to suffer. That is another matter. He does not determine everything that happens to it, but to suffer—why should it suffer? Animal suffering is Torah-level. Maimonides draws that conclusion further; he applies that assumption further. He says that clearly the Holy One, blessed be He, also does not care what happens to it. So then why is animal suffering Torah-level? That is the difficulty. The answer is that it comes for our sake, to perfect our character traits, as they also always say regarding inanimate objects—that Moses did not strike the Nile, and why? Because he hid in the Nile, and so on. What, does it hurt the Nile when you strike it? What kind of thing is that? There it is pretty clear that the intention is for the sake of perfecting… unless, I don’t know. The question is whether there is suffering there or not. Because after the mother and the offspring are killed, who suffers? They are both already dead. So it could be that it is for the sake of the person. We saw this in The Perplexed of the Generation by Rabbi Kook: so that we should not learn the trait of cruelty, and should not inflict pain pointlessly and without benefit, but should direct ourselves—or orient ourselves, I don’t know—toward compassion and mercy, even toward whatever animal happens to come our way; except when necessary, because “your soul desires to eat meat,” then of course it is permitted to use animals, but not just for no reason. It should not be slaughtered in a cruel way or for amusement—hunting for sport or something like that. “And according to this view I am also not obligated by the question: why did He watch over human beings and not watch over the rest of the animals with individual providence? For the questioner should ask himself and say: why was intellect given to man and not to the other species of animals? And so on.” This is already… what is he really saying? Now at the end he asks the “why” question. Why indeed does He not watch over every animal? Because behind this, once again, there sits a theological problem. If they have no free choice—okay. Meaning, that is where the theological question actually lies. What, the Holy One, blessed be He, created things that are accidental? They could be replaced and nothing would change? Something non-necessary? Okay? There is something here—this is the theological problem. So he says yes, that is indeed true, and the proof is that He also did not give them intellect as He gave it to human beings. What I think stands behind this—maybe, I am not sure—is another interesting principle. A few years ago we talked about this. There is this common claim: a person sees, say, a man who was born very talented, complete in virtues, beautiful or gifted, whatever kind of traits are useful to him in life, and I was not born that way. So I always feel deprived. Why did the Holy One, blessed be He, do this for him and not for me? There is a kind of deprivation here, even inborn deprivation sometimes. Now here—or Moses was born with radiant skin; as far as I know, my skin did not shine when I was born. So he says: he received some tools that I did not receive. That is not fair—why? Why does he get them? Fine, if he did things by his own free choice and reached the level he reached, excellent, he deserves all the credit. But he was born different, he was born with different potential. So why? What is this? Where is equality? The principle of equality? There is no equality. But why is there no equality? That is the question. Let’s talk about Moses. If I had been born with radiant skin, I would have been Moses. What would happen if I had been born with radiant skin? So if I had been born like that, there simply would have been two Moseses instead of one. But what would Michael Abraham have gained from that? So it would not be me in a better situation. I would not exist; rather, two Moseses would have been born. Can I now come with claims and say, wait, You made me by making me me? Like wrongful birth—we once talked about that. A person cannot sue his parents, at least according to most approaches, for bringing him into the world. Because if they had not brought him into the world, there would be no one here to sue. Meaning, the very fact that you are standing here before the court and suing is thanks to the fact that they brought you here. So you cannot sue them for that, because it pulls the ground out from under your ability to stand in court. Okay? So here too, the same thing. You cannot complain: why did You shortchange me compared to Moses? He did not shortchange me. This is Michael Abraham. Meaning, if He had made me like Moses, then there would have been two Moseses and no Michael Abraham. And the Holy One, blessed be He, for some reason, apparently considered it important that there be one like this and one like that. He needs this for the world. Now it is not that He made me Michael Abraham and him Moses. I am Michael Abraham; He cannot make me Moses and then make me Michael Abraham, and then I come and complain. That is absurd. At most, He could swap us—but swapping us is the same thing; swapping us is, again, that is not called swapping us. That is what He did. What do you want? He created one Moses and one Michael Abraham. That is what the swap is between us—it is the same thing, He swapped.

[Speaker C] Like creating triangles and circles for Him, exactly, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, there is… now this is true, of course, regarding traits that are essential traits. Regarding accidental traits, there is room to discuss. Essential traits—without them, I am simply not me at all. If I am not me, then who am I altogether?

[Speaker I] This is basically a somewhat different formulation of the question about the sick child, where you need, say, some percentage of sick children, and now maybe, maybe.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, it is a bit troubling in the sense that the child suffers because others need to learn lessons from it—for others, reality. Reality?

[Speaker I] Okay, fine, it may be exactly the same thing; here you gave it a slightly different name.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, with the illness it really is something essential, such that without it this child is not himself.

[Speaker I] Regarding the situation of Moses, that gap is a very essential gap, it is not just, you know.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. Well, that is of course a big question—where exactly the line passes between essential and accidental traits. But I am saying that many times this kind of question is solved by noticing that the problem is based on a mistake. Meaning, it is simply a matter of definition. It is like the number four coming to the Holy One, blessed be He, and saying: tell me, why did You put me fourth in the sequence? Why is it specifically the number one that gets to be first? I want to be first. If it were first, then it would not be four—it would be one. Meaning, what characterizes four is that it is number four in the sequence. Do you want everything to be only number one?

[Speaker I] Are you saying that this is what Maimonides is saying here?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This is really implicit in Maimonides. Maybe that is what—yes, that is what I am saying—that it may be what stands behind Maimonides. You ask: why does He watch over human beings and not animals? Ask instead: why did He give intellect only to human beings and not to animals? Well, good question—why indeed? Maimonides answers a question with a question, and that is a good technique. But an even better technique is to say to the person who answered you with a question: okay, answer that—why indeed? And the answer is that it is self-evident. Why is it self-evident? Because without intellect, if animals had intellect then they would be human beings, they would not be animals. And if human beings had no intellect, then they would be animals and not human beings. And therefore these are not the kinds of questions that belong to morality at all—whether it is nice to do this or not nice to do this. This is ontology, that is, the theory of being. That is, this is me. That is, it cannot be that I would be in a different state, because the different state would not be me.

[Speaker H] But people do not perceive themselves that way. People perceive themselves as some sort of container into which things were put, and one could have remained the same thing. The question is which things.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To a certain degree maybe that is true, but I think that some of the things are the container itself, and without those things the container would simply not have been the same container. Another part—not so. To make me taller, shorter, richer, poorer—that already seems less essential. But say radiant skin, in the sense of what it symbolizes—not the rays themselves, but that you were born with some special spiritual or prophetic abilities, innate traits—there is something else here, something essentially different. So He needed one such person in the world. Do you want Him to create ten thousand of them? So He needs one like that. The same thing, by the way—and with this I’ll return to the special quality of Israel and for now close the circle—the special quality of Israel raises the same question. Meaning, if the Holy One, blessed be He, needed one people to lead the process, He could have chosen the Tunisians. And if the Tunisians had been the Jewish people, then the same question would arise: why did You choose them and not us? We—who would not have been us—would ask that question. Completely justified; that is exactly what happens. They ask that question. Meaning, you understand that many of the questions—and this connects to our topic because the mode of action, arbitrariness, creates the essence. Many times we assume that there are two alternatives: either to act arbitrarily or to act essentially. But when I look at the question why man was created with intellect, or why the Jewish people were created with special qualities, assuming they have them, in the end you will always arrive at arbitrariness. The arbitrariness is that one people had to be the people with the special quality. So the Holy One, blessed be He, chose one people who at that point were anonymous, because they still had no essential traits, implanted within them the qualities of specialness, and thus the Jewish people came into being. Okay? He could of course have done this with the Eskimos too—it makes no difference. If He had implanted those qualities in them, then they would have been the Jewish people. So what kind of question is it—why did You do it for them and not for us? If He had done it for the Eskimos, they would have been the Jewish people. There would still always be one Jewish people, and everyone else would ask: why is it not us? That question is based on a logical error. Okay? Alright, I’ll just bring the pages next time.

Essential Explanations and Examples – Lesson 1

Table of Contents

Summary

General overview

Two phenomena around Israel’s special quality: essentialism versus degrees of freedom, and entrenched dogmas

The choosing of Israel and the choosing of Abraham: the Maharal versus a non-essentialist possibility

Maimonides versus the Kuzari-Maharal-Rabbi Kook line, and the discussion within Jewish thought

Arbitrariness, the perfection of creation, and stopping the explanation at “that’s how He decided”

The problem of evil, reincarnations, and Nachmanides on Job

Logical constraints, laws of nature, miracles, and moral randomness

Individual providence: passive versus active, Nachmanides at the end of Bo, and “there is no reward for a commandment in this world”

Traditions, impregnation of souls and reincarnation, and searching for sources according to what one is looking for

First example in Maimonides: the holy tongue as a technical explanation (Guide of the Perplexed III:8)

Halakhic and conceptual implications: reciting Shema and Megillah in any language, and the Raavad against Maimonides

Second example in Maimonides: providence over human beings alone, and species-level providence among animals (Guide of the Perplexed III:17)

Verses, the Sages, and interpreting “He feeds from the horns of wild oxen to the eggs of lice” as providence over the species

Animal suffering in Maimonides: “for the sake of perfecting us”

“Why did He show providence over human beings and not over the other animals?” as a mistaken question, and its application to Israel’s special quality

Full Transcript

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Table of Contents

Summary

General overview

Two phenomena around Israel’s special quality: essentialism versus degrees of freedom, and entrenched dogmas

The choosing of Israel and the choosing of Abraham: the Maharal versus a non-essentialist possibility

Maimonides versus the Kuzari-Maharal-Rabbi Kook line, and the discussion within Jewish thought

Arbitrariness, the perfection of creation, and stopping the explanation at “that’s how He decided”

The problem of evil, reincarnations, and Nachmanides on Job

Logical constraints, laws of nature, miracles, and moral randomness

Individual providence: passive versus active, Nachmanides at the end of Bo, and “there is no reward for a commandment in this world”

Traditions, impregnation of souls and reincarnation, and searching for sources according to what one is looking for

First example in Maimonides: the holy tongue as a technical explanation (Guide of the Perplexed III:8)

Halakhic and conceptual implications: reciting Shema and Megillah in any language, and the Raavad against Maimonides

Second example in Maimonides: providence over human beings alone, and species-level providence among animals (Guide of the Perplexed III:17)

Verses, the Sages, and interpreting “He feeds from the horns of wild oxen to the eggs of lice” as providence over the species

Animal suffering in Maimonides: “for the sake of perfecting us”

“Why did He show providence over human beings and not over the other animals?” as a mistaken question, and its application to Israel’s special quality

Full Transcript

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