Substantive Explanations and Examples – Lesson 3

Table of Contents

• Providence, resolution, and the individual-collective relation in Maimonides
• The threshold of providence and the example of bosons
• Individual providence according to Maimonides and the scope of the basic “entity”
• Political and moral conceptions of the individual and the collective
• The move from values to ontology and the difficulty of separating them
• Collectives as a useful fiction, corporations, peoplehood, and Shlomo Sand
• Postmodernism, Rabbi Shagar, and the circle of differences
• National romanticism, Rabbi Kook, and collectivist language
• Emergence: John Searle, liquidity, and properties of an aggregate
• Mental-biological determinism, split-brain, and “the life of a cursor”
• Collective properties in the world of values and the structure of collectives
• The unique quality of Israel and the connection between metaphysics and values
• Maimonides in the laws of repentance: judgment of a person, city, state, world
• Do the halakhic examples require a collectivist metaphysics?
• Tosafot: the public does not die, “a generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth stands forever”
• The giving of the Torah, souls at Mount Sinai, and a collective covenant
• The Rosh, communal bans, and the collective addressee of law
• Harming innocents, the law of the pursuer, and war between collectives
• A conceptual framework versus “proportionality,” and the doubt about a fiction that justifies killing

Summary

General Overview

The text presents a theological-philosophical question about providence and degrees of freedom in creation through Maimonides, and translates it into a more general question about the relation between the individual and the collective, and where the “level of resolution” is set for the entity over which providence is exercised or judgment is applied. It suggests that the concepts of individual and general providence can be understood as depending on how the basic entity is defined, and broadens this into a modern discussion of collectivism and individualism, the distinction between value claims and metaphysical claims, and the possibility that certain properties “emerge” only at the level of the whole. It examines halakhic / of Jewish law and aggadic examples that seemingly present an ongoing collective existence, but keeps returning to the point that it is unclear whether they really commit us to a collectivist metaphysics, and raises a sharp practical implication through the question of harming innocents in wartime, arguing that such a justification seems stronger if a collective is a real entity and not merely a legal fiction.

Providence, Resolution, and the Individual-Collective Relation in Maimonides

The text continues an earlier discussion of Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed about providence over the species in general without providence over individuals and without involvement in individuals, and presents the question of how an individual relates to the collective of which he is part. It suggests a formulation in which the object over which the Holy One, blessed be He, exercises providence could be “all peacocks” as one entity with “many limbs,” and compares this to the possibility that providence applies to a single peacock but not to the molecules and cells that make it up. It states that even in human beings, even if there is providence over the individual, that does not necessarily mean that the Holy One, blessed be He, “takes an interest” in cell number 17,000,004 from the left in the right hand, but rather in the human being as a whole.

The Threshold of Providence and the Example of Bosons

The text argues that in the proposed view one always reaches a threshold level below which “it doesn’t matter what happens,” and notes that one could deny this and claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, is interested in every electron with no threshold at all. It brings an example from physics about fermions and bosons and argues that bosons have no “identity card” and no “distinct continuous identity,” so a statement about N bosons is a statement about a collective and not about N individuals. It concludes that in such a case, even if the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to, He “could not” exercise providence over each boson separately, because there is no such thing as a separate boson in any defined sense.

Individual Providence According to Maimonides and the Scope of the Basic “Entity”

The text affirms that according to Maimonides there is individual providence in the sense of providence over every “entity,” but emphasizes that the dispute is over who counts as the “basic entity.” It suggests that for human beings the basic entity is an individual person, whereas for peacocks the basic entity is “the whole aggregate of peacocks” or “all peacocks.” It raises the question whether providence depends on righteousness and qualifies that the speaker is not sufficiently expert to answer, but reconstructs from what was learned that in human beings there is providence over individuals while in animals there is providence over the collective.

Political and Moral Conceptions of the Individual and the Collective

The text presents contemporary disputes about the relation between the individual and the collective, and cites fascist and communist conceptions as models that place the collective at the center and treat individuals as “oil on the wheels of the revolution.” It describes collectivist views in which “the players on the field in this world are collectives,” while individuals are like limbs or cells in a body. Against that it places an individualist view that sees the single human being as the basic value, and society as meant to serve the individual person.

The Move from Values to Ontology and the Difficulty of Separating Them

The text distinguishes between a moral-value claim that the collective is more important and an ontological-metaphysical claim that the collective “exists” as an entity. It argues that the two can be separated, but it is hard to separate them, and that usually someone who centers the collective on the value plane will also tend to see the metaphysics that way, namely that the collective is an existing object. It emphasizes that there is no need to posit a “soul” or some entity beyond matter in order to speak of a collective entity, because the whole made up of the cells can itself be considered an entity without any “something beyond.”

Collectives as a Useful Fiction, Corporations, Peoplehood, and Shlomo Sand

The text describes a dominant Western position according to which collectives are a “useful fiction,” and brings examples from legal contexts such as corporations and from state-national contexts such as a “people.” It presents Shlomo Sand and When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? as a claim that emerges from a conception that does not accept the notion of a people as a metaphysical reality, and describes responses that agree that a people is a fiction but argue that this is simply how the term is defined in political science and there is nothing pejorative about it. It also brings the example of “there is no Palestinian people” and the outrage against that statement as an argument that already assumes that a people is a fiction, and formulates the idea as: “you can’t pretend to be a people, because once you pretended to be a people, you really are a people,” together with the quote, “Suddenly a man rises in the morning and feels that he is a people and begins to walk.”

Postmodernism, Rabbi Shagar, and the Circle of Differences

The text quotes Rabbi Shagar in Broken Vessels about how comfortable it is for a Jew in a postmodern world to join the “circle of differences,” where there is no commitment to truth but only “different forms of discourse.” It describes a strategy in which a view under attack joins the challengers and says, “we’re all fictions,” and in that way becomes “impossible to attack.” It interprets the “circle” as a metaphor in which everyone is equally distant from the center and therefore equally distant from the truth.

National Romanticism, Rabbi Kook, and Collectivist Language

The text describes the national romanticism of “a hundred and fifty years ago, two hundred years ago, a hundred years ago” as a conception that saw the nation as something real, awakening, and possessed of a role. It argues that Rabbi Kook is a product of that romanticism and that his thought is influenced by that discourse, especially in the collectivist interpretation of “the entirety of Israel,” “the Shekhinah,” and “Knesset Israel.” It notes that the Nazis also used the same kind of language of “a chosen people in the bad sense of the term,” and distinguishes between the possibility of seeing a collective as “the angel of Esau” or a “soul,” and the possibility of seeing it as an organic material entity, similar to organisms in biology.

Emergence: John Searle, Liquidity, and Properties of an Aggregate

The text presents John Searle and his argument in favor of emergence, according to which the mental dimension is nothing more than the material whole and there is no need to posit an additional substance such as a soul. It gives the example of liquidity and argues that a single water molecule is not liquid/solid/gaseous, and that a state of matter is a property of a collection of molecules and not of an individual one. It concludes that certain properties “arise” only at the collective level, and applies this to thought, will, and emotions as possible properties of a material whole.

Mental-Biological Determinism, Split-Brain, and “The Life of a Cursor”

The text describes the implication of emergence as the speaker understands it: namely, the claim that the mental plane is completely passive, and that everything that happens is governed on the physical-biological plane according to the laws of physics, while the feeling of making a decision is just a story the brain tells itself. It brings examples of a “split brain,” in which the speaking side invents explanations when it has no access to the information, and argues that the brain “fills in stories” in a creative way. It compares the continuity of consciousness to a cursor on a computer that seems to move, though in fact what is happening is simply points turning on and off, and formulates the claim as: “our whole life is basically the life of a cursor.”

Collective Properties in the World of Values and the Structure of Collectives

The text applies the idea of emergent properties to values such as equality, and argues that equality by definition requires at least two human beings, so it does not exist in a world of a single person. It adds that freedom too is a relation between a person and an environment, not an isolated property, and explains that values define groups that struggle for those values and crystallize around them. It distinguishes between a collectivism that begins from metaphysics (“first of all, we are a people”) and a religious/ideological collectivism that begins from values and produces a collective committed to values.

The Unique Quality of Israel and the Connection Between Metaphysics and Values

The text links Rabbi Kook to “the question of the unique quality of Israel” and presents a model in which there is first an “us” on the metaphysical level, and only afterward does the Holy One, blessed be He, impose tasks on the basis of special qualities. It argues that the Jewish collective is unusual because it connects the two directions, from metaphysics to values and from values to metaphysics, and that “both of them are engines.” It states that the discussion returns to the question whether halakhic / of Jewish law and theological statements require us to conclude that the entirety of Israel is a metaphysical object, or whether this is only value-based language.

Maimonides in the Laws of Repentance: Judgment of a Person, City, State, World

The text cites Maimonides in the laws of repentance that on Rosh Hashanah each person is judged, and afterward the city, and afterward the state, and afterward the world, and brings the question raised by the commentators: what is left to judge after the individuals have already been judged? It suggests an answer that there is something in the collective entity beyond the direct sum of the individuals, such as the possibility that a community may be composed of good people and yet be run corruptly, or the opposite. It interprets this as meaning that a person is judged under different hats, as a private individual and as an organ of the city/state/world, and in the end a weighted result emerges.

Do the Halakhic Examples Require a Collectivist Metaphysics?

The text goes back and argues that one can accept the functioning of “society” as a fact and distinguish between private judgment and collective judgment even within an individualist metaphysics, and therefore the speaker is not sure one can bring proof from Maimonides to a collectivist metaphysics. It presents the question as originally connected to the issue of the unique quality of Israel, and asks to distinguish between halakhic / of Jewish law-value language and assumptions about “what exists” in the sense of real entities.

Tosafot: The Public Does Not Die, “A Generation Goes and a Generation Comes, but the Earth Stands Forever”

The text brings Tosafot in Arakhin “page 9b” concerning a sacrifice whose owners died, and argues that the public has no such problem because “the public does not die.” It notes that Rabbi Soloveitchik brings this in On Repentance, and that the verse is cited, “A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth stands forever,” presenting this as a conception in which the public remains the same public even if all the individuals have been replaced. It connects this to the image of “the Ship of Theseus” and to questions of identity when all the matter has been replaced, and also brings contexts of the impurity of vessels and a vessel that breaks, where its breaking is its purification.

The Giving of the Torah, Souls at Mount Sinai, and a Collective Covenant

The text argues that in Jewish law there is no “oath of souls,” and therefore the claim that all souls stood at Mount Sinai cannot operate as a legal oath upon individuals. It interprets the idea to mean that the one who received the Torah was the Jewish collective, and the obligation passes on to anyone who belongs to that collective, in the image of legislation that binds citizens even when the generations have changed. It emphasizes that the giving of the Torah is a two-sided covenant and asks: who is the body that stands in that covenant?

The Rosh, Communal Bans, and the Collective Addressee of Law

The text cites the Rosh, as brought by the Rema in Yoreh De’ah in the laws of vows, that parents cannot impose a vow on their children, and contrasts this with the fact that communal bans do apply to later generations. It explains that the ban is addressed to the community as a collective, and the community “does not die,” so the enactment remains binding as long as a person remains a member of the community. It gives as an example the Aleppan ban in New York against marriage with a male convert or female convert, including a narrative comment about a Torah-observant couple who were harmed by the ban and about questions posed to Rabbi Ovadia on the subject.

Harming Innocents, the Law of the Pursuer, and War Between Collectives

The text raises as a contemporary example the question of a targeted killing that involves harm to innocents, and presents the tension between “a person may not save himself with the life of his fellow” and the permission of the law of the pursuer. It argues that at first glance an innocent person in the vehicle is not a pursuer, and therefore the halakhic / of Jewish law justification seems problematic, and rejects the attempt to base it on a Jew/non-Jew distinction while drawing on the spirit of Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli’s remarks about the property of a non-Jew and stressing the prohibition of murder. It suggests a possible line of justification in which this is a struggle between a pursuing collective and a pursued collective, so that harming someone who belongs to the pursuing collective can be viewed differently even if he is innocent in his individual capacity, and notes that the absence of unequivocal halakhic / of Jewish law sources leads to reliance on a collectivist argument as a possible foundation.

A Conceptual Framework Versus “Proportionality,” and the Doubt About a Fiction That Justifies Killing

The text criticizes the use of the magic word “proportionality” as a substitute for a systematic framework of principles, and states that the feeling is that many decisions are made “from the gut.” It argues that one must build in advance a conceptual system that classifies situations such as a pursuer, saving oneself through another’s property, types of threats, and degrees of indirectness, even if some evaluation still remains in each case. It concludes with the question whether a justification for killing an innocent person can really stand on a “legal fiction” of a collective, and states that here, precisely, the argument seems stronger if a collective is a “real entity” that threatens, and not merely a useful convention.

Last time I finished the discussion of these Maimonides sources about degrees of freedom in creation, about the theological problem of whether the Holy One, blessed be He, leaves degrees of freedom within creation. One of those sources was Maimonides’ statement in Guide for the Perplexed about providence over the species in general, without providence over particulars, without being involved in particulars. And while we were talking about that topic, I said that there is really a question here—a question that arises here—about how exactly an individual relates to the collective, what the relationship is between those two things. I said, in one of the formulations at the end, that maybe the object over which the Holy One, blessed be He, exercises providence is the peacock collective. And the peacock collective is one object—it’s not… and that object has lots of limbs, so to speak, and the Holy One, blessed be He, basically wants something from that collective. Maybe turn on the air conditioner over there? This organism, or this entity, over which the Holy One, blessed be He, exercises providence is the peacock collective. And in that sense He really is exercising providence over every entity that exists. Why do we decide that the individual peacock is an entity in its own right, and then say, okay, there’s a degree of freedom? By the same token, I could say that the Holy One, blessed be He, exercises providence over the individual peacock but not over the molecules that make up its body. Not over each and every molecule. It doesn’t matter if a molecule gets replaced, if a cell gets replaced, as long as that peacock is here and doing its job. Or take human beings, where providence is indeed supposed to be over particulars and not only over the collective. Even with a human being, I assume—at least Maimonides would say—that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not interested in what cell number 17,000,004 on the left side of the right hand is doing. Rather, He needs this whole integrated object called a human being. I mean this particular human being, not humanity in general. And the particulars that make up this whole—what difference does it make? That’s called individual providence; it’s not called general providence. From this perspective, it somehow seems obvious to us that a human being is some kind of organic entity, an organism. And to watch over the human being as a whole is, in effect, to watch over the individual. We don’t want anything from the particulars beyond their composing that whole in which the Holy One, blessed be He, is interested. So with peacocks it’s the same, except that with peacocks the basic unit is apparently the peacock collective and not the individual peacock. But in any case, at least in this conception, we always arrive at some level of resolution below which it doesn’t matter what happens. Now someone can come along and reject this whole conception and say: what are you talking about? The Holy One, blessed be He, is interested in what every electron is doing, or every tiniest thing—every such thing matters to Him. There is no threshold beyond which it no longer matters. And then of course we are exempt from discussing the relation between collective and individual. I noted last time that one of the examples I gave involved the two types of particles in physics, fermions and bosons. Bosons are a collection of particles that have no identity card; they have no personality at all—“personality” isn’t the right word—no distinct enduring identity. We say there are N bosons, N—the letter N—bosons; that is really a statement about a collective, not a statement about N particulars. And so there it seems that even if the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to, He could not exercise providence over each boson separately, because there is no such thing as an individual boson. The whole is the entity; there are no particulars here. So in that context, it seemed to me—again, unless we’re missing something in physics—but at least according to what physics knows today, with those kinds of particles, even if the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to, He could not exercise providence over each one separately, because in some defined sense it does not exist on its own. And therefore I think Maimonides’ conception is, after all, just a conception that says there is some threshold, a threshold of scale, from which point onward the Holy One, blessed be He, exercises providence. True, the size of the scale varies: with human beings it is the individual person, and with peacocks it is the peacock collective. But still, the basic conception is not as radical as it may seem at first glance. So according to Maimonides, is there individual providence? Yes. I’m saying: individual providence in the sense that it is not over every electron, but individual providence over every entity. But who is the basic entity? So every human being, yes—in human beings it’s the individual human being. But with peacocks it is over the peacock group, the peacock whole. That is the basic entity. Isn’t it only over the righteous? The righteous peacocks? No, no—the righteous people. No, no, no. In Maimonides, isn’t it that the more righteous a person is, the greater the providence? I don’t know—greater or lesser, I don’t know. I’m not expert enough in Maimonides to answer that. What we read—maybe—but what we read was that among human beings there is providence over particulars, while among animals there is providence over the species. In any case, this raised the question—and I said we’d deal with it today—it raised the question of the relation between the individual and the collective of which he is a part. How exactly do we relate to these two things? And today I want to talk a bit about that.

If we’re talking about human beings—and I’m going to focus on human beings in general—there are major disputes, certainly in our era, about how to view the relationship between the individual and the collective to which he belongs. There are fascist conceptions that say the collective is really the important thing and the individuals are supposed to serve it. That is, yes, the Communists said that the human sacrifices are oil in the wheels of the revolution. In other words, individuals are just the molecules—exactly the picture I described earlier. In the end, the goal is the goal of the collective; the individuals are not important, they are a means. But in one form or another this is true of other conceptions too, conceptions that see individuals as limbs of the whole or as servants of the whole, and at least in terms of the moral relation or importance—who serves whom—the individual does not count. Collectivist conceptions say that the players on the field in this world are collectives. And the individuals merely compose the collective, just as cells compose my body. Notice that I have shifted here from a moral description to an ontological description. Ontological, that is, concerning being—ontology. Because in the moral description you can say: no one is making a metaphysical claim that collectives exist. The collective isn’t really something that exists. I’m making a moral, ideological, evaluative claim saying that collectives are the important things and people are less important in the moral sense. That does not necessarily have to be expressed metaphysically, by saying that I see the collective as a kind of entity. That is a statement on another plane that in principle is not connected to morality; it is connected to the question of how I see the world. That is, what exists here? What is a defined entity and what is not a defined entity? But it seems to me hard to separate the two. It is possible, but hard to separate, and I think that usually someone who sees the collective in the evaluative-ideological sense as the central thing also tends to see the metaphysics differently. That is, he sees the collective as some sort of object that exists, and perhaps even the only thing that exists. The Communists certainly didn’t think that way. What? When you mentioned the Communists—surely Communists were materialists too, and they didn’t think there was some entity here beyond matter. I don’t know. When we speak of a collective entity you don’t necessarily have to speak about a soul. Many people think that in our body there is nothing except the cells and molecules, and still it is obvious to them that our body is an organic entity that exists in some sense. Sometimes it can become a matter of definition. Because there is something there beyond its cells—again, according to… It’s also beyond. The whole of the cells—that is the entity. I’m not talking about something beyond, not necessarily some additional thing. The whole of the cells is the entity that exists here. The individual cells are not; they are its limbs. Do you understand? I’m not—it doesn’t necessarily have to translate into some entity of another kind. Because if it’s an entity of another kind, what does that have to do with the cells? Then each cell exists separately, and there is that other entity too. I’m talking about the whole of the cells, not another entity.

This takes us back a bit to the questions of pantheism we discussed a few times ago, the question whether the Holy One, blessed be He, is nature—what does that mean? Is the natural whole the Holy One, blessed be He, or the soul of that thing, or however exactly one defines it? So it is the same here. In any case, that is one side of the coin. The other side is the more individualistic conception, which sees the single person as the fundamental central value, and in large measure the collective or society is supposed to serve the individual person. And now again I’ll translate from values to ontology or metaphysics, and I’ll say that from this point of view it is obvious to people that even if a human being is a collective of molecules or of cells, society is not a collective of people in the same sense. It is not an organic collective in the sense that I am prepared to see it as some sort of entity with existence of its own. Fine, for various reasons it is convenient for us—efficient, useful—to define collective entities. For many reasons, including legal contexts, we define corporations, though I do not think people presume to say that a corporation is some sort of entity in the metaphysical sense, that we have created a new being in the world. We defined something; it’s a convention. We defined something at the legal level, and it is convenient or efficient or useful to relate to it as though it were a separate entity. So at the basic level this is an evaluative statement, not a metaphysical one. But again I’m saying that many times that evaluative statement also translates into a metaphysical conception. And I think that very often people who are individualists in the evaluative sense—if you ask them about their metaphysics—their metaphysics will reflect that as well. That is, they will not accept claims that a collective is some kind of entity. It is a useful fiction. It is useful to define it in various contexts, as with a people, a nation. Yes, not only a corporation in a legal context, but a people. A people, yes—even claims like those of… what’s his name from Tel Aviv University? Shlomo Sand. Yes, exactly, Sand—Shlomo Sand, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? Often you can read that as though he is speaking specifically about the Jewish people, but it is clear that it comes from a conception that in general does not accept the concept of a people at all. And by the way, most of those who answer him answer him on the same terms. That is, they say, “You’re right in the metaphysical conception”—they agree with him. They only say: it’s not a fiction in the sense that… the concept of a people. That is, the concept of a people is defined as something constituted through a shared history and also a shared mythology, and not everything has to be historically true, and so on. Why? Because that is the accepted definition today even in political science. Yes, the accepted definition today is that a people is a useful fiction. And that is not meant as a criticism of the concept of a people. I’m speaking on behalf of those who defend the national conception against critiques like Sand’s. Even those who defend it do not oppose him—many of them do not oppose him—on the metaphysical level and say: listen, you simply do not see reality correctly; there is some collective here, it has one or another characteristic, but there is some collective here. Like the whole “there is no Palestinian people,” often in current discussions. It was Golda, I think, right? Golda is the source of that, who said there is no such people. And the protest against Golda’s conception, ironically, is always upside down. The protest is in the name of those who see a people as a fiction, not in the name of those who do not see a people as a fiction. They basically say: what do you want? A people is, by definition, a fiction. In other words, a group that decides about itself that it has a shared consciousness, invents for itself shared myths—that is what is called a people. What do you want? It’s like the famous joke: why can’t you dress up as a rebbe, do you know? You can’t dress up as a rebbe because if you wear a rebbe’s clothes and put two thugs in front of you, then you really are a rebbe. In other words, you can’t dress up as a rebbe—that means the rebbe is a costume. So in that sense you also can’t dress up as a people. You can’t dress up as a people because once you’ve dressed up as a people, you really are a people. Suddenly a person gets up in the morning and feels he is a people and starts walking. That is the conception. The conception is that a people is a fictive concept.

So I’m saying this sharpens the point that one has to understand that there are two different claims here, even though they often come together. The claim that I see the collective or the individual—either side—as central in the evaluative sense does not always reflect a different metaphysical conception, that I see the collective as some kind of existing entity, or that I see only individuals as existing entities. But it often does come together. Not always, but often it does. Today this conception—that collectives are a fiction—so dominates that in Western thought certainly, almost absolutely, anyone who says otherwise is simply bizarre within accepted frameworks. So even those who defend national concepts, what is often called the Right in various contexts, defend them within this field of discourse. In fact they say: precisely because it is a fiction, what do you want? We are a fiction like all the others—how can one attack us? As Rabbi Shagar once wrote in his book Broken Vessels, it is very convenient for a Jew to live in a postmodern world because he joins the circle of differences. In a postmodern world, the circle of differences basically means that you are not committed in any way to any truth. There are only different forms of discourse. So each one—this is exactly the point of narratives. One of the things the narrative conception attacks is national narratives; one of the central things it attacks is national narratives. He speaks about religious narrative, but it’s the same idea. And then he says: what do you want? If everything is fiction and everything is only false consciousness—false consciousness in the positive, factual sense, not in a negative sense; it’s not criticism, that’s simply how it is—then what is the problem? In what way are we worse than others? So it is very convenient for an attacked conception to join those who undermine hegemonic conceptions, because then I’m basically saying: okay, so we’re all really the same, so what is the problem? It exempts me from dealing with questions. It’s impossible to attack. Yes, exactly. It exempts me from dealing with questions, because there are no questions. I agree with you that it’s a fiction; you too are a fiction; we’re all a fiction; let’s join hands and dance in the circle of differences. A circle, of course, is a place where everyone stands at equal distance from the center—that is what a circle is. In other words, everyone is at equal distance from the truth. Yes, that is the metaphor of a circle.

So in that sense, even those who defend collectivist conceptions, ideological or group conceptions, today usually do it—at least in today’s discourse—within that field. They basically say: look, but fiction is also important. People do in fact live this way, it affects us, it is part of our consciousness; one cannot ignore that part of our consciousness even if it has no true metaphysical basis. That is the claim. The national romanticism of, say, 150 years ago, 200 years ago, 100 years ago—the kind of thing Rabbi Kook was a product of—of course saw it differently. It understood that ideological collectivism or the great ideologies, before the age of shattered ideologies, were carried on the shoulders of collective entities. In at least some cases, the entity—the being—I don’t know, again, regarding Communism it is subtler, because there I really do not think they conceived of themselves as some kind of entity in the metaphysical sense, so there it truly is a different evaluative conception and not necessarily a metaphysical one, it seems to me if I understand correctly. But in, say, national or nationalist romanticism—fascism—fascism speaks very much in the language of collectivist metaphysics. And Rabbi Kook, I think, in large measure his doctrine is influenced by that discourse. That is, Knesset Israel, the congregation of Israel, and collectivist concepts, the Shekhinah and so on—which of course are not concepts he invented at all—but the content or connotation, the interpretation he gave those concepts, I think it is hard to ignore the influence of the environment in which he operated. That was the world then. This national romanticism sees the nation as something existing, awakening, possessing a purpose and a role in the world, and so on. Very much, with all due distinctions, the Nazis also used exactly that same language. The Aryan Germans—we have some role, a chosen people in the bad sense of the term. But this was a kind of discourse of national romanticism, which sometimes translated into nationalist romanticism, into fascism, beginning from a different metaphysics. One creates collective entities. Some, as I say, can do it in an entirely materialist framework; that is, not by saying there is some angel, the angel of Esau, say, or an angel—angel being the language that the Sages sometimes use to describe this collective entity—and sometimes they call it the Shekhinah, Knesset Israel, all sorts of things of that kind, which at least in the initial intuition are perceived as something that is not the collection of people but something beyond that, which governs the collection of people, or is the soul while the collection of people is the body in which that soul dwells, or something like that. But I’m saying, as I said earlier to Arik, that is not necessary. A collection of people too can be conceived as some kind of collective entity, as we know from organisms in biology. A collection of cells can be conceived as something that is a collective entity without necessarily assuming the existence of a soul or spirit or things like that. So that’s why I say the connection between the evaluative plane and the metaphysical plane exists, but it is not absolute. It does not always work that way.

There is a claim—I once spoke about this, I think, when we discussed free choice in that year when we dealt with free choice. John Searle, an American philosopher, spoke about the relation between body and soul—he has a book, I think it’s called Mind, Brain, and Science, something like that, a series of lectures he gave on the BBC—and he tries to argue there in favor of what is called emergentism. That is, in favor of the conception that what we call the soul, or the mental dimension of the human being, is nothing more than the material whole. You don’t need to posit an additional kind of entity, another kind of substance. The material whole is what is called soul—sorry—and there is no need to assume that there is some additional thing, a soul or something like that. The example he gives is this: he says there is something else—he says it exists, but it is expressed in the whole. No, no, there is nothing except the material whole, but our mental dimensions simply arise from the fact that there are properties—now maybe I’ll add one more sentence. Like liquidity? Yes, exactly. Liquidity is his example. That is, when we take a state of matter of a certain substance, say water, it can be steam—that’s gas; it can be liquid; and it can be solid, ice. Okay? That depends on temperature, pressure, and so on. What is the state of matter, the property of—what is it? A single water molecule is neither liquid nor solid nor gas. State of matter characterizes an aggregate of molecules. That is, it characterizes an aggregate of molecules; it is not a property of a single molecule. Okay? Which means that there are certain concepts that do not exist at all on the level of the individual and arise—or become relevant, become existent—only at the collective level. Pressure and temperature too, which we discussed last time, yes, are also properties of that sort. So he says liquidity is one example of such a property. A single molecule has no property of state of matter; it is not liquid, gas, or solid. The molecule is the same molecule. The relation between the molecules, or the property of the aggregate—that is state of matter. That is, state of matter is a state of the aggregate. Aggregation has to do with the aggregate. And what he wanted to demonstrate through that is that when we see a material whole in a human being producing effects or properties that we would not have expected from familiarity with the material components—namely thought, will, emotions, and the like—he argues that sometimes certain properties arise on the collective plane even though at the level of the individual elements they have no meaning at all; they cannot exist there. So yes, we are made up of—let’s now translate this—yes, we are made up of molecules, and a molecule is not something that thinks, wants, or feels, but that does not mean that a collection of molecules, at least in a certain arrangement such as a human body, cannot think, feel, and want. Therefore he argues there is no need to posit the existence of a soul or another type of substance; the whole, the material whole, may itself explain the mental phenomena, what we call psychic phenomena. Fine? And by the way, today I think this is the most prevalent view. He was still relatively early, but today there is almost a consensus about this among brain researchers and philosophers and the like; it is very close to consensus.

So there are no acquired properties? Meaning what? There are, and the whole acquires properties too—what’s the problem? If it’s molecules, how do the molecules change? There’s temperature, heat, pressure, so the state changes. No, say a person is stingy and wants not to be stingy anymore. His whole is built differently from another person’s whole. In this whole he is stingy; in that whole he is not stingy. And if he becomes stingy? Then something happened—his structure changed somewhere, maybe in the brain, maybe elsewhere, but something changed in him and he became stingy. So if I build an identical arrangement of molecules in two people? Then it will be the same, yes. According to this conception it will be the same with the same behavior—exactly the same. He says the claim is that mental properties are a one-to-one function of material structure. So if there are two people, and one raises his hand at a certain moment, the other will also raise his hand? Yes, but if they are in the same environment, with all the surrounding conditions exactly equal. You also need the same conditioning. There is action and reaction. Two identical computers too—if you put different software into them, they won’t function the same, right? You react to your environment, and if you were in exactly the same situation with exactly the same history, then you would behave in exactly the same way. Yes, that is exactly the claim. No, but a person who decides to change, goes to some course for change? What does it mean “decides to change”? He argues that something changed in him; he does not decide to change. Something changed in him; that decision too expresses some sort of change, a biological change, and as a result there arises in him a mental feeling, a desire to go improve himself, and that’s it, everything is fine, we continue. Everything takes place on the biological plane. That is the claim. Just now someone sent me an article, once again, about all the issues of free choice and neuroscience and all that. People simply do not understand—it is unbelievable how much philosophers do not understand the material. People do not understand that when we talk about emergentism—what I described now, that emergentism means that the mental properties emerge from the material whole, just as liquidity supposedly emerges from the gathering together of water molecules under certain conditions—then the conception, and I’m continuing now from what you noted earlier, say I decide to go improve myself. There was some change in me; it created in me a feeling of wanting to go improve myself. So now I go improve myself—why? Because I decided to go improve myself? Not at all. Because the biological state that created the feeling of wanting to go improve myself activates the laws of physics, and so its next state is simply going to that place where one improves oneself. That’s all. Nothing happens on the mental plane. The mental plane is entirely passive. Everything happens on the physical-biological plane. Everything happens there: there is a state, and the laws of physics transfer it to the next state, and each such state is expressed in some mental manifestation. We create some sort of mental sense of continuity, as though we decided and therefore acted. But the claim of emergentism is that this is an illusion. There is really a biological state that we experience as a decision to improve ourselves; the state that comes after it is simply, according to the laws of physics, a state in which I take my legs and go to some place which, from the point of view of consciousness—understand how fantastical this is—from the conscious point of view, I connect these two states of consciousness and create some continuity. That is, I say: I decided and therefore I am going. But of course, according to their conception, that is nonsense. It is not that I decided and therefore I am going; that is the story I tell myself. By the way, our brain does do things like that, and there is very good evidence for it. Excellent evidence, not just decent. Our brain fills in all sorts of things and completes stories in very, very creative ways. I think in that year we talked about split-brain. Split-brain—there are fantastical stories there, truly unbelievable. They show a person something on one side, and with a split brain it’s like two personalities. The left side is responsible for speech, but if some visual impression reaches only the right side, then when I describe that visual impression—and description is speech—it comes from the left side. So I have to explain to myself things that the left side doesn’t understand. The right side knows it, but the left side doesn’t understand. So it invents a story, it fills it in. It simply invents a story out of thin air. How does a phenomenon occur that it cannot explain because the relevant information is in the right side? So it cannot—sorry, what is in the right side passes to the left hemisphere of the brain, and therefore it belongs to speech. The left hemisphere belongs to speech. In any case, they claim that our whole life is one such story, a fictional story. We tell ourselves some sort of story, when really what exists is a sequence of flashes. Think of it like a flashlight. Or better, let’s say it differently: look at a computer. On a computer there is a cursor; it moves. I’m fond of this parable. The cursor moves from left to right, say. Right? But of course nothing is moving there. Everyone understands that nothing is moving there. A dot lights up on the screen here, then it goes dark and the dot next to it lights up. Then that one goes dark and the next one lights up. But what story do we tell ourselves when we see this? That something is moving from left to right. In other words, the story we create connects this sequence of events and produces from it some dynamic continuity. The claim of the emergentists is that this is our whole life. Our whole life is really the life of a cursor. That is, we have some biological state that says, “Now I decided to improve myself,” if we go back to your example. Then there is a biological state, “Now I decided to go there.” Then there is a biological state, “I arrived there.” A biological state in which I do something when I’m there. But it’s nothing—it’s all like a cartoon. What? Like a cartoon. Yes, exactly, like a cartoon. But there is still a connection because one causes the other. One causes the other biologically, but it has nothing to do with the mental dimension. No, I don’t go there because I decided to go there. I decided to go there, and afterward I also went there. But then the first decision isn’t really a decision either, right? We call it a decision; we merely experience it as though I decided something, but really it is some sort of sequence, and that is our story. That is the claim. Fine? In my eyes it is completely imaginary, but that is how many people understand it today. And those who don’t understand this are very often not—there are many who advocate emergentism without understanding that this is its meaning. Usually philosophers don’t really understand the relation between the physical and its implications, or what emergentism really is. And so it is convenient for them to live with it, while at the same time they continue to explain—they can be liberal and humanistic philosophers, saying the human being decides and is autonomous and has rights and so on, when they simply do not know what they are talking about.

In any case, I now return to liquidity. This demonstrates that there is a certain kind of properties, of characteristics, that do not exist at the level of the particulars. They exist at the level of the collective; they emerge at the level of the collective. When a collective is formed, certain properties emerge that have no meaning at the level of the particulars. Last time we spoke about pressure, temperature, and so on, which are also properties of this kind. Now the claim, by analogy to the world of values and collectivism and nationalism and so on, is also a very similar one. The whole of the people is some kind of entity. You can invent for it a soul and call it the Shekhinah or Knesset Israel and the like, but you don’t have to. There can also be materialist collectivist conceptions. And this whole has certain properties, goals, I don’t know exactly what, that do not exist on the level of the individual person. Do you understand? For example, even on the Communist level—what is equality? Equality by definition is a relation between different people; there is no equality in a world of one single person. The concept of equality does not exist there. It is not that equality cannot be achieved; the concept does not exist. The concept of equality requires at least two human beings, right? There are two sides to the equation. So if you want this to be equal to that, then there is equality. But there is no equality in a world of one individual. So the value of equality, for example, in a certain sense is by definition a collective value. Maybe even freedom, by the way, although freedom appears more individualistic. Freedom is the Right, freedom is the opposing value. But freedom too—freedom from what? Freedom from other people. It also speaks about some relation between me and my surroundings, between me and the collective within which I operate. A tendency or some characteristic—they usually speak about collectives in two senses. First, the value itself has meaning only when collectives exist, not in the world of a single person. Second, the group that fights for this value or wants to realize this value is a group. Values usually define groups. Whoever believes in this value belongs to a certain group; whoever believes in another value belongs to another group. In fascist conceptions, for example, sometimes you find certain values around which the collective is supposed to unite, and there too it works that way. But there, in the natural form, it is not exactly so. There we begin from metaphysics. First of all, we are a people, regardless. We do not necessarily have roles, and these need not be religious conceptions, nor conceptions of where roles come from. We are a people. And we are this entity, which has to survive here, be strong, cope, and so on. It begins from the metaphysical conception and is afterward expressed in evaluative terms. That is in contrast to, say, religious collectives, where often it is the other way around. First of all, one must be committed to shared values, and the group committed to those shared values is the collective. So it can work in both directions. Jewish national romanticism—Rabbi Kook, yes—makes exactly this connection between the two opposite directions. Because nationhood begins from metaphysics and perhaps manages also to produce values that the collective is supposed to realize, fight for, establish, and so on. Religion works in the opposite way. It begins with values, and for the sake of them one creates a collective that will advance those values, that believes in those values and advances them. Rabbi Kook somehow connected these two things, and in effect says: first of all, we are—and here we return to the question of Israel’s singular virtue, yes, this is exactly the conception of the singular virtue of Israel, which basically says there is some “something” here even before tasks were imposed upon us, even before we have common goals. First of all, we are here on the metaphysical plane. After that, in light of the special properties, in light of the fact that we are some collective entity at all, the Holy One, blessed be He, also imposed certain tasks upon us, and now we are also supposed to accomplish them. So this is a collective entity both in the nationalist-fascist sense—today those have negative connotations, but it need not be negative; I mean it only to define the matter—and also in the religious sense, in the ideological sense, where ideology defines the collective. Therefore the concept of the Jewish collective is really unusual in that the movement is from metaphysics to values, and in accepted conceptions both from metaphysics to values and from values to metaphysics. That is, there isn’t one thing that begins the chain and another that is merely the locomotive and the car. They are both locomotives. These two axes both exist.

So that is a kind of philosophical definition or treatment of the relation between particulars and collectives. In halakhic / of Jewish law and Torah terminology, I think one can see such an approach, and it is not a simple question whether this also implies such a metaphysics. Because a Torah approach means values—how I relate to collectives or to individuals—and the question whether there is a metaphysics behind that, I don’t know, I’m not sure. But there is such an approach. For example, in Maimonides, in the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides writes that on Rosh Hashanah each person is judged, then the city is judged, then the state, and then the whole world. So the commentaries on Maimonides ask: if each person has already been judged individually, then what remains to judge about the city? Once you have judged each of its residents, the judgment of the city is already known. Why hold another session to judge the city? And likewise the state and the whole world. What? By the majority, the world goes by the majority. Doesn’t matter. Even then, if let’s say I deserve to die because I was wicked, and someone else does not deserve to die because he was righteous, then those who deserve to die will die and those who don’t deserve it won’t die. In the end, perhaps the city will be destroyed because its residents will no longer be there, but that is a side effect, a result. What is there to do on the level of the city? What is there here beyond the sum of the particulars? The answer, I think, is that there is something in the collective entity—collective entity, I hope, yes, not necessarily metaphysics; in a moment I’ll come back to the question of metaphysics. There is something in the collective entity beyond what exists in the particulars. That is, there can be a situation—and I think we know such phenomena—of a community, or a group, or a city, where all in all the people are good people, but the community is run in a bad way, corruptly, sometimes even cruelly, although the people themselves may be good people. And the reverse as well: there can be a community or group of bad people, but they created some system of rules by which the collective is run reasonably well. You can give examples of this, but that’s not the point at the moment. At the principled level, when Maimonides speaks about judgment carried out on individuals and then on the city and the state and the world, he is speaking about this. When I am judged as an individual person, I am judged in my capacity as an individual person—that is the first judgment. Then I am judged in my capacity as a limb of the community, or of the city, or of the state, or of the world. And in each such circle I may receive a different judgment. But won’t the result be contradictory? No, the result will be the weighting of all of them, the sum. But if my result as an individual should have led to my destruction, say, and the weighting of my role will keep me alive? It depends what outweighs what. So my individual judgment won’t be true. No, I’m saying the individual judgment is only one step along the way. In the end what will happen to you is the sum of all the judgments, because every person has different aspects. Each time another aspect of him is judged. What will happen to him as a whole? You can’t keep my collective aspect alive and kill my individual aspect. Like what we discussed about murder—that if a person decided to murder, it doesn’t matter that the victim did not deserve to die, because the murderer has the freedom to murder. Yes, no, but here I’m saying the opposite. The Holy One, blessed be He, takes all the aspects into account and will conclude what to do with me after weighing everything. If it is worthwhile for Him to keep me alive because of my collective function, even though on the individual plane I am thoroughly wicked—maybe. Does he say that? He doesn’t say anything—I’m not… He says that they judge the person, the city, and the state. Now interpret as you will. And the judgment of the person is sealed, of course—the intermediates, the righteous, and the wicked—but who says his judgment is sealed on each of those separately? I think it also sounds very reasonable, by the way. If I were, so to speak—it’s a bit grandiose—if I had to judge the world and its inhabitants, that is what I would do. One needs to judge the world on all these planes. As I said earlier, if there really is a community that behaves in a truly righteous way, yes, but the people themselves are not good people, there is room to discuss it. If there is a person who is thoroughly wicked but is terribly necessary for the existence of the world, and contributes extraordinarily to the collective—and sadly there are many such examples—then what? It may well be that he will remain alive and unharmed because the collective needs him. It is clear that our judgment—we once spoke about this, about the complex perspective… maybe not, I don’t remember when; I think I talked about it in Jerusalem there with Rabbi Shagar, about the complex approach that people mistakenly identify as postmodernism. I’ve given the chocolate example dozens of times, that’s for sure, I just don’t remember when, but I’ve brought it up many times: from the standpoint of health, it is not good to eat it, and from the standpoint of taste, it is good to eat it. So is it good to eat it or not? It is a weighing of the two things, and a person has to decide what outweighs what. Does health outweigh the desire to eat something tasty, or does the consideration of taste outweigh the consideration of health? In the end you decide whether to eat it or not, but you conduct the discussion in separate steps. First you examine the health aspect—you consult doctors and dietitians and whoever else you want. Then you examine the aspect of taste and whether it tastes good or not. And in the end you have to make an overall decision: what about this chocolate—eat it or not? But the judgments taking place here are independent; there are two different judgments. You need to judge the health issue and you need to judge the taste issue; there is no connection between them. They are two completely different judgments. So in this sense too, I think that is the plain meaning in Maimonides: the individual judgment and the collective judgment have no necessary connection, even though it is obvious that in the end they will be weighed together into one result. In the end something has to be done with people, so the Holy One, blessed be He, has to decide what to do with each of us, but that decision can definitely be composed of different components, some sum of discussions.

Now the question is whether something like this must assume a collectivist metaphysics. I am not sure it does. Because people who do not accept—say, Shlomo-Sand types—who do not accept the existence of collective entities, could still accept everything I have said here. They could say: look, everyone understands that there is such a thing as a functioning society, right? And that a society can function well or badly, and that this is not always a direct, simple, linear reflection of how the individuals within it function. Okay? Everyone understands that; it is a fact. It has nothing to do with your metaphysics. And now the question is what you do with such a thing, how you judge it, whether positively or negatively, how you weigh the individual aspect with the collective aspect—all that you can say even if metaphysically you are a committed individualist. I don’t think there is any obstacle to saying such a thing. Therefore I don’t know whether one can bring proof from this Maimonides to a collectivist metaphysics. That is, that he sees the—by the way, if there were such proof, it would not be only about Israel, of course. It would apply to every city, every state, every people. In Maimonides there is no special reference specifically to Israel. So there are collectives, but I’m not sure that this Maimonides really proves there is a collectivist metaphysics here.

A place where one sees collectivist metaphysics somewhat more clearly is Tosafot, when it speaks—Tosafot in Arakhin, I think, on page 9. I never remember whether it’s Arakhin or Me’ilah. On 9b there is a short Tosafot near the bottom. The discussion there in the Talmud is about a sacrifice whose owners died. That’s a problem. We designated a sacrifice—I designated a sacrifice—and then I died. Now this sacrifice has to be offered, but without owners it can’t be offered; on the other hand, it is sacred, so you can’t make any other use of it. So a sacrifice whose owners died is not a simple halakhic complication. Tosafot says there that in the case of the public there is no such thing. That is, if the public designated a communal offering—Rabbi Soloveitchik brings this in On Repentance—the public does not die. Yes, because the public does not die. But even though all the people who designated the offering died—let’s say it’s a long-lived animal—but all the people who designated the offering died, and now their children and grandchildren are here, Tosafot says: fine, it is still the same public, and therefore it is not a sacrifice whose owners died. Is this the whole of the Jewish people, or a public in some specific community? There is no communal offering of a community; we are speaking about a communal offering of the whole of the Jewish people, of everyone together. Yes. Tosafot brings the verse “A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.” And then it says the public does not die, because “A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.” The Rogatchover uses this a lot for this idea that the public does not die. There is a conception here that says the public remains the same public even though the collection of individuals inhabiting it has completely changed. Think of it as the Ship of Theseus—that’s the example philosophers always give. The Ship of Theseus is a ship whose planks were removed and replaced one by one. Every time something rotted, they removed a plank and put in another. In the end, all the material of the ship is no longer the original material. Is it still the Ship of Theseus? Yes, Bnei Akiva’s classic activities—after they take a person and transplant a finger and a hand and a leg and a heart and a liver and a brain and… They transplant everything. So now the question is whether we are still speaking about the same person. The assumption being that they even transplanted the brain, okay? And also duplicated the former brain exactly, every neuron in exactly the same state. Fine? So the question is whether it is the same person or not. What is left of him? A whole person, the previous person. Nothing. Nothing at all, like the Ship of Theseus—nothing. Everything was replaced. First of all, physiologically, in our bodies the cells all end up being replaced. Right, exactly. This is something that happens biologically too. You don’t need transplant surgery for it; it happens on its own. The cells in the brain, I think, are not replaced. If I’m not mistaken, the brain cells are not replaced, at least… I don’t know, I think maybe not either. So let’s transplant the brain, okay? Then the brain too. The principled question is: what remains here? Tosafot claims that the ship remains the Ship of Theseus even though none of the planks is one of the original ones anymore. That’s the claim. A public does not die, and “a generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever”—that already looks much more like collectivist metaphysics. But still I’m not sure.

If it were done abruptly, we wouldn’t say that. If we took a person and literally, as was said here before, we really cloned him, then we wouldn’t say that. Then there are the continuations to the Ship of Theseus, right? What happens if you reassemble it? You take everything apart and build it all over again? No, you replace them one by one, okay? Until in the end everything has been removed. Now everything that was removed is reassembled. So now the question is: which is the Ship of Theseus? The current one, in which none of the original planks remains, or the reconstructed one, which is in fact exactly that ship rebuilt? Simpler just to change the name. Huh? Yes, so the question is whether it’s the same thing. That is exactly the question. If you change the name, do you arrive at the same state or not? In the conception of the collective as something fictive, that is exactly the solution: let’s change the name and solve the problem, because it’s fictive anyway, so define the name that way. There is even a legal ruling on this in the Mishnah. You… a vessel becomes impure, and then you break it, etc., so the impurity departs. What happens if you reassemble it? Okay. So if part of the vessel remains that is more… it’s not clear. If it was completely dismantled then no, it does not return. If it is small enough, then it is a new vessel. Right, it is a new vessel. There is a dispute between Tosafot and Ritva about… whenever I think of the Ship of Theseus it reminds me of this issue. There is a dispute between Tosafot and Ritva: if a husband vows concerning his wife, or divorces her, it doesn’t matter, on condition that “you shall never go to your father’s house.” Now the house collapses and her father builds a new house. Fine? And there they discuss whether “your father’s house” means just this particular building—your father’s home or your father’s house. In other words, the question is whether it means the house belonging to your father, or this particular house that is currently owned by your father. Doesn’t it depend on the intention of the one who said it? Yes, they discuss what the intention was; in the Talmud it is often like that. But the question is, let’s assume that the assumption is really that it means the house and not the home. Has the whole thing been dismantled, so that it is no longer the house? If we reassemble it, will it be the same thing or not? That is exactly impurity of vessels; that is a good example of the matter. There clearly no; the vessel is not the same vessel that was. If it is broken into sufficiently small pieces, its breaking is its purification. Yes, if the impurity has departed, it has departed. It does not come back. Though there one could say that the impurity departed even though it is the same vessel, so it does not become impure again not because it is not the same vessel. But why? There too there is a dispute. Huh? The oven of Akhnai—that’s the famous case. Well? There it was cut up and reassembled? No, there it is an oven that comes apart. It’s not an oven that was broken. It is an oven made of segments. We are talking about an oven that was broken—its breaking is its purification. A shovel? Yes. Exactly. Now if it is below a certain size and you reassemble it—not the size, if it no longer serves, can no longer serve. Yes, right. But if there is a piece of a certain size that has another use, then it remains impure, it is still a vessel—like doors of vessels on the Sabbath and so on. In any case, again I am showing you that a collective treatment on the evaluative plane certainly exists in Jewish law. The question is whether behind it there lurks a collectivist metaphysics. That I don’t know. Very often we make that connection—I often made that connection too—but I’m not sure it is correct. I’m not sure, because again, we came here from the question of the singular virtue of Israel, okay? Meaning, the question whether from these halakhic / of Jewish law or philosophical statements we are also supposed to infer that Knesset Israel, the collective of Israel, is some kind of object in the metaphysical sense, or not. There is some collective evaluative attitude here, but it does not necessarily reflect a collective metaphysics. That is a different question.

Another example is the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Yes? I think we discussed that too. When people say that all our souls stood at Mount Sinai, and therefore we are all obligated to uphold what we accepted there. As I said, I do not know in Jewish law of an oath taken by souls. There is no such oath in the laws of oaths. If my soul was at Mount Sinai and swore that it would keep this, let it keep it—what does that have to do with me? In legal terms, in the halakhic / of Jewish law sense, a soul in a body is a person. In legal-halakhic terms, souls do not exist as bearers of legal standing. Therefore… With reincarnation there would be a problem here. Huh? With reincarnation of souls there would be a problem? I don’t know. But I’m saying beyond that, I don’t think it really holds water. In the regular laws of oaths, to tell me your soul swore and therefore you are obligated to fulfill—I don’t think that is the intention. They are not speaking there about an oath of souls. What they mean there is exactly the idea of Tosafot: the one who stood there and received the Torah was the Jewish collective. The ones inhabiting it at that time were the collection of people who stood at Mount Sinai. But when they accepted the Torah upon themselves, they did not accept it each one for himself. Rather, the collective accepted it upon itself, and from then on it binds everyone who belongs to that collective. An example would be legislation. When parliament passes a law, even if all the voters and all the members of parliament have long since died, as long as the law has not been changed it still binds the current citizens. Why? Because the addressee of that law is not the particular set of citizens currently in the state. The addressee of the law is the collective of the state’s citizens, and that collective still exists; it is the same collective. Again I say: it is very easy to jump from here to metaphysics; I’m not sure one must. Perhaps this too is a legal determination and not a metaphysical one. But with regard to the giving of the Torah, they speak about a covenant, and a covenant has two sides. So it’s not that a law descended on the collective and now the collective is obligated; rather, the collective also accepted it. Like a peace treaty between two states? A hundred years pass—what then? It no longer binds? Everyone is already dead. Obviously it still binds. Legislation too is a kind of bilateral thing. I accepted the Knesset upon myself, I elected it, and therefore what it legislates binds me. If it does something outside the mandate I gave it, that will not bind me. So there is some reciprocity in every such case. That’s not a contradiction. The question is who the body is that stands in this covenant.

That is why there is the Rosh in a responsum, brought by the Rema in Yoreh De’ah in the laws of vows. He says there that parents cannot impose a vow or an oath on their children, except for Samsonite naziriteship, which is an exceptional case where parents can make their son a nazir in the mode of Samsonite naziriteship. But in an ordinary vow or ordinary oath, a person vows or swears for himself, not for anyone else. I’m not speaking about his own property—my own property I can restrict others from—but I cannot impose on them a vow that they should have vowed. A person vows concerning himself. Says the Rosh: then what do we do with communities that place under ban someone who does a certain thing? A ban is a kind of vow. So how can a community place under ban someone who does a certain thing? That is, how can such a ban apply to the next generation or two generations later? And he says that it does apply, even though vows and oaths do not pass from parents to children or future generations. To whom does it apply? It applies to everyone who is a member of that community. No—who imposes the ban? I said: the community. No—on whom does… not who has to obey. Say the Aleppan community in New York has a ban on whoever marries a convert. That’s a fact. Not on a specific person, but on an act. Of course. Still. Whoever does something—it is a kind of legislative instrument. A community that bans a certain thing is basically establishing a law. It established a law that whoever does not abide by it is under ban, but it established it as a kind of law, like the ban of Rabbenu Gershom, that whoever does something is under ban. What? If I want to leave the community, can I? Yes. Then you are not considered Aleppan. Yes. But it is not ethnic or genealogical. The fact that you are of Aleppan descent—so what. If you want to be a member of our community, then know that these are the rules. You cannot force me to be a member of the community; I can leave. Really? Really really. I met in the United States a couple—there was assimilation there, and that’s why they did this. Horrible. It was some device to keep out dubious converts and gentiles and so on; they said, that’s it, no more marrying converts. They are all millionaires, and the child loses everything. And I met a couple living in Boston: he was a convert and she was the daughter of an Aleppan family from New York, and they got married. And they threw him out of all the business networks. He was the librarian of Harvard. He gave me a tour of the library there; it was very interesting. I understood they are now in Israel; I don’t know where. They couldn’t go home. A Torah-observant couple, God-fearing, good people, fully observant, but they cannot go to the synagogue of her parents, they cannot be there. They told me it is truly tragic. There were questions addressed to Rabbi Ovadia about this matter. About whether there was some way to circumvent it, I don’t know. Apparently not. In any case, the Rosh basically writes that this does work, in communal bans. Why does it work? How does it work if parents cannot vow or swear on behalf of their children? Because in a communal ban, the addressee of the ban is the community. On whom does the law act? To whom is the law addressed? The law is addressed to all the members of the community. The community does not die. So even if everyone has already been replaced, it is the same community and it still binds it. That is exactly the conception that says: when I speak to a collective, it works differently than when I speak to an individual person. Does this necessarily assume a collectivist metaphysics? No. I don’t know. But specifically with regard to a ban and a vow, it is harder to say such a thing, because a vow takes effect on the object, unlike an oath. An oath is on the person, and a vow is a legal status on the object. Now the question is: when you place under ban—again, it depends, well, there is a question about the ban. Say someone has already violated this law—then the ban takes effect on him. So that certainly takes effect on his person, so to speak, the ban. I’m asking about the stage before one has violated it. What is this state where a ban is imposed on a certain type of act? Is there some legal effect of the vow? Is this a vow that takes effect now? On the simple level, yes. That’s a conceptual Talmudic question one would have to discuss, but on the simple level yes. On whom does it take effect? On the public. That is, there is some sort of legal effect of a certain kind of vow called a ban, so that if it does something, then the response to it will be such-and-such. And here, if you really see it that way in the full sense of the term, then it already comes closer to collectivist metaphysics. Because what does that legal effect take hold of? It takes hold of some sort of object, as some sort of entity. So okay, one could say that we are willing to accept fictive legal effects upon fictive entities. I’m saying: even here I’m not sure, but this already comes closer.

Maybe one more example in this context. The punishment the children of Israel received—forty years in the wilderness—was it on the collective? But after the wilderness generation it applied to everyone. No, everyone had to bear the forty years. Yes, but until the generation was replaced, because the punishment from the outset was only on them. It is not a punishment saying: everyone who belongs to the people of Israel has to die in the wilderness. If it were that kind, then it would apply to everyone. “You shall be in the wilderness for forty years.” Is a community allowed to say—also the ban of Rabbenu Gershom was a ban for a thousand years. You can impose a ban until a hundred years from now, or only for one generation from now. That is permitted. Just as a community may impose a ban permanently, it can also limit the time. There is no principled problem with that. I’m seeing from the opposite side—and suddenly it clicked for me where this appears—that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not exact judgment fully because in the future someone will come from him, some son who will be such-and-such, and by the merit of that son He does not exact judgment now. The opposite direction. What? Ammon and Moab. So the Talmud says: why did the Holy One, blessed be He, say not to wage war against Moab? One opinion there is: I have two good doves that are destined to come from there—Ruth the Moabite and Naamah the Ammonite. I had this in Balak; Rashi brings it, but I’m saying it’s in the Talmud. Rashi and in another place. Also Abraham by the merit of Jacob, meaning that Jacob would be born from him. What? About Abraham too it says that God chose him by virtue of the fact that Jacob would come from him. Okay.

In any case, I’ll bring perhaps one more example where, again, I am not one hundred percent sure in any of the examples that we have to arrive at metaphysics, but here it comes very close. And this is a current example: harm to innocents. We carry out a targeted killing; we need to hit someone who poses a threat to us, and this involves harming innocent people. Is that permitted? That is a topic I won’t enter into fully now, but I’ll say briefly, because I think it also concerns us. What is really under discussion here is the following. There are two principles here that seem to contradict each other. On the one hand, one may not save oneself with the life of another. I may not kill someone in order to save my own life, right? One must be killed rather than transgress; I may not. On the other hand, under the law of the pursuer, I kill one in order to save another. Here there is no longer the argument, “Who says your blood is redder?” The pursuer cannot say to me: look, why do you prefer the blood of the pursued person over mine? Don’t kill me. He cannot say that. Why? Because he is guilty; he is a pursuer, so he should have taken that into account. So now in our context, when I look at such a situation: a terrorist is driving in a car. We fire a missile at the car, and there is also an innocent person in the car with him. Or yes, let’s say he’s innocent—a baby. Not someone who collaborated, no—a baby sitting in the car with him, certainly innocent. He’ll grow up and be a terrorist. Maybe yes, maybe no—you can’t… no, we do not carry out the law of Amalek on our own. Okay, not a family member, a Red Cross worker. That is certainly a capital offense. You gave a problematic example. Never mind. Not even Red Cross—UNRWA. An Israeli journalist, okay, not a leftist. That’s more or less the empty set. And there is no one else in the car. So then there’s no problem. Fine. In any case, what is the issue here? On the face of it, we have someone threatening me, and I kill a third party in order to save my own life—that is forbidden. I may not save myself with the life of my fellow, so long as he is an uninvolved party, a third party. So if I classify this under that side of the equation—saving oneself with the life of another—the answer is: forbidden. One may not do that. And if I classify it under the concept of a pursuer, if I see him as pursuing me, then maybe it is permitted. But what justifies seeing him as a pursuer? He is not a pursuer—what do you want? That baby is sitting there in the car; he is not pursuing. True, if I do not hit him I may die, but that is not called a pursuer. That is always true; even when they threaten me, “Kill him or we’ll kill you”—even then, if I do not kill him I will die, but that does not mean he is threatening me. He is not guilty; he does not create the threat. He is the possibility of my being saved; he is not the one threatening me. So that is not the law of a pursuer. So what justifies killing an innocent person? On the face of it, according to Jewish law, it should be forbidden. What about gentiles? What? I can’t hear. Because in Kelim… no, no, I don’t think so. In my opinion there is no connection. It doesn’t matter whether they are gentiles or not. It is a different issue of coercion, but murder is forbidden. More than that, there is a responsum of Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli about the Qibya operation, and there it emerges from him—and I think with considerable justice—that with gentiles it is even more forbidden. Because of desecration of God’s name? No. Say he talks there about property, but I think the idea is similar. What about property? Rashi—there is a Talmud in Bava Kamma that says I may not save myself even with another’s property. Rashi interprets that literally. But, say, Rashba in a responsum disagrees with him and says it is permitted. Why? Because in any case he would have had to expend his property to save me—“do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood.” So I can already take the property myself. Fine? Now Rabbi Yisraeli says: what about gentiles? Gentiles are not obligated to save me. There is no “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood” for gentiles—not toward Jews, just as for me there is no such obligation toward them, by the way. People are always accusing Jews of being immoral because they don’t have “do not stand…” But gentiles too have no “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood” toward Jews. It’s reciprocal. If you do it, wonderful. But there is no obligation. Fine? So the question is—Rabbi Yisraeli says that in truth, regarding a gentile’s property, according to all opinions it would be forbidden. Not only according to Rashi. According to the halakhic ruling like Rashba—and that is the view of most medieval authorities (Rishonim), while Rashi is a lone opinion—it is forbidden to save oneself with a gentile’s property. Of course I mean an uninvolved gentile. If the gentile is involved, then it is the law of a pursuer; just as you may kill him, you may also damage his property. But with an uninvolved gentile, it is forbidden to save my life. I must die rather than damage a gentile’s property. And with lives too, the logic says that even if I am prepared to endanger my life or a Jew’s life to save another Jew, the gentile does not want that. You cannot use him in order to save a Jew’s life. There is no mutual responsibility there; he owes you nothing. So it is at least the same thing, if not worse. There is the story with King David. Yes, that’s the sugya there in Bava Kamma. What does it say? If I do it? You are a murderer. So Jewish law will tell you “well done”? What are you talking about? Why does Jewish law need to say it’s forbidden? Jewish law should say it’s forbidden. On the other hand, Jewish law winks at me to save, and says it’s better that you be a sinning Jew than a dead Jew. No, I haven’t seen it wink. Better that you be a sinning Jew than a dead Jew. No, no. Then Jewish law tells you: don’t do it. But quietly, do it… No, if Jewish law were saying that, it would tell you to save yourself. Better that you violate one Sabbath… that’s a halakhic principle; why doesn’t it tell you that? No, because it won’t… it won’t say it. Why not? Because then you have permitted saving yourself. Right, but then it is permitted, you say—why not permit it if it’s really permitted? You’ll remain a Jew… but remain a Jew. No, no. If you sin, then you have to die. That’s it. No, it’s forbidden. That is the claim. But Menachem Finkelstein… Fine, so we have a difficulty with Menachem Finkelstein. But I too agree that it is permitted, and I’ll tell you why—I once wrote an article about it. Because I am not aiming at the child. Menachem brought this as a judge, not as a rabbi. It’s a by-product. So what? I’m not saving myself through the child. But you know the child will die. The child is situated exactly like the car. You know the child will die. You know the child will die! What do you mean you are not…? What is this, a formalistic game? The claim—I’ll tell you—I think the claim here is that if we are really in a situation of individual versus individual, then it is forbidden to do this. But if we are speaking about war, then what we have here is collective versus collective. It does not matter who is physically holding the weapon. In the end—and here, again, I am saying this is a collectivist conception, which is why I’m bringing this example—there is a collective that is pursuing me. Of course there are babies in it who are guilty of nothing. They are guilty of nothing. A collective that is pursuing my collective? Yes, the collective—not even me personally. I don’t need to be a collective. It is enough if there is a collective pursuing me as an individual person; it is the same law. No, it’s not… That’s why I disagree with those who tie it specifically to the laws of war in our sense. I don’t need war; these are the laws of saving life. And if there is someone in that car who is not part of the collective? Wait, right. Right. Now if indeed there is someone in the car who belongs to the collective that is pursuing me, even if he is not guilty—a minor pursuer—we kill him. The Talmud says—there is a dispute in the Talmud, and the halakhic ruling is that a minor is not guilty, has no legal understanding, but if he endangers me, we kill him. The claim is that if a collective is pursuing me, then I may harm whomever I need to—in order to save myself, of course, not just kill indiscriminately. Killing indiscriminately is a somewhat odd law of pursuer. You may not just kill everyone there. You need to kill those who threaten you. Where is this source? Where does this ruling you are saying appear? In my article. There is a Maharal like this about Simeon and Levi. There are no unequivocal halakhic sources, but I argue that this is the halakhah emerging from the collectivist conception. That is why I bring it as a practical implication of the collectivist conception. See another implication: if there is a Red Cross worker there, or a tourist from Sweden, then it is forbidden to do this. The question is how to define the collective. Perhaps everyone now found in the Gaza Strip has inserted himself into the collective, from the standpoint of that collective. Okay, fine—but let’s say not… never mind. That’s technical. But I mean, suppose there is someone there who happens to be there by chance. I don’t know, a hostage. A hostage, exactly. He is there by chance, I don’t know exactly. That is much more problematic. Now there is some room for the argument you mentioned earlier, Shmuel, about by-product—that is what people usually say in these contexts. But I think that in the halakhic context this seems to me to be the main argument that justifies the harm. And again, now we need to ask ourselves… According to this conception you could also kill him intentionally. Right. If you need to… No. Because he is not threatening you. No, but say to frighten them or something, if you think that would help. No. If… the law of the pursuer does not justify killing the pursuer if you can save the pursued by injuring one of his limbs. And if you can save yourself without killing the pursuer, then you may not kill the pursuer. The fact that someone has the status of pursuer does not mean one must kill him. No, but what Arik is saying is that if you turn this into a struggle between two collectives, then I don’t need there to be a terrorist in that car. It is enough that destroying the car—say there are five women in the car… But that saves my life. Destroying the car as such helps my collective in the war. No, the opposite. If it… again. If it creates a threat… Right. If it creates a threat to life, then yes. That is clear. You don’t need a terrorist there. If it creates a threat to life. If you put a baby with an automatic missile in a self-driving car. Even without the missile, according to this… never mind. I’m saying, here you already need to enter the question of what sort of threat you are willing… To kill someone because by age twenty there is a reasonable chance he will be a terrorist—you can raise that as an argument too. In Gaza that is not an absurd argument, let’s say. And still I think it would be hard to accept such a thing as pursuit. It needs to be something that involves a direct threat to life. So if that’s the case, then you are not taking your own argument all the way. No. I am taking my argument all the way, but one still has to define the state of pursuit. But you said the one pursuing is the people. Right. But the state of pursuit—that the people is pursuing, so what? That does not mean you may kill them. You may kill them in order to save yourself. The question is whether such a thing counts as saving yourself, because the threat is too indirect. Do you understand? Even a pursuer you may not kill if you can save the pursued by injuring one of his limbs, or if the threat has already passed, or if he can no longer pursue. So therefore I say: clearly… the situations are complex. And the magic word “proportionality,” which I dislike so much because people always use it where they cannot understand or define things—but there’s no choice. Sometimes one also has to use that word. I do think—and I also said this to Menachem—I do think that not enough systematic thinking has been done to build the conceptual framework. Once you build the conceptual framework—I sketched a few lines of it here—then of course within it you will still have to discuss proportionality and the degree of indirectness of the threat and so on. But today my sense is that it’s all gut feeling. The question whether it is proportionate or disproportionate—that’s where it begins and ends. There is no systematic way to approach this kind of problem, to classify them under pursuer, saving oneself with another’s property, this type of threat, that type of threat, whether you harm… I mean a real doctrine, an organized body of thought. Within it, of course, you never get an answer for every case, and there is room for judgment. But still, I think it is important to have a somewhat more systematic conceptual framework, and in my opinion there isn’t one. I spoke with Menachem after some lecture he gave here on this topic, and I told him I thought the work that had been done there was insufficient. In this car there is a ten-second window in which it is possible to strike. Okay—then you start making all the calculations and so on. Exactly: you build in advance a system of principles by which you operate. Not to see the situation and then say, wait. For that, one has to invest the thought in advance. Approval is required; in any case, one needs approval for such an action. Such an action is not carried out without authorization. So you always need to authorize it, and then the one authorizing it needs to know by what principles he is authorizing it. What do you mean? There is no action done without asking.

Okay, so maybe one last sentence. I brought this as an example. What do you say here? Is this already a collectivist metaphysics? Because to say that because of a legal fiction I am allowed to kill someone—that is already harder. If you understand that a collective is a real entity, something that actually exists, and it really is threatening me, then just as a person threatening me cannot say “don’t hurt my leg; only my hand is threatening you,” fine, you as a collective are threatening me and I neutralize you in whatever way I must. So here too I’m saying: if you really see it as a collective, then perhaps I can understand how that allows you, gives you justification, to kill an innocent person—innocent on the individual plane, in his individual capacity. Do you understand? But if you see it only as a legal fiction, I don’t know whether that is enough to justify harming an innocent person. With all due respect to fictions, this person is an independent entity and you are killing him though he has done no wrong. So perhaps here it really does come all the way to a collectivist metaphysics. I don’t know. Fine.