Abstraction, Lecture 12

Table of Contents

• A historical debate about the origin of money and barter
• Abstraction and concretization: value as a scale and money as representation
• Regulation, counterfeiting, Bitcoin, and mechanisms of trust
• Barter acquisition and money acquisition in Jewish law, and money’s double role
• Money in betrothal and the feminist polemic
• An apparent return beyond money: something worth money is like money, bank records, and numbers as a handkerchief substitute
• The chapter “Gold”: what counts as money and what counts as merchandise, “sharp” and “important,” and the distinction of physical transfer in barter and in money
• What is acquired when one “buys money”: value as an abstract object and the distinction between debt and value
• A loan is given to be spent, “driving away a lion,” and sale proceeds versus a loan in Maimonides and in the Sabbatical year laws
• Virtual money, the bank as an application of abstraction, and Hershele’s parable
• Information, copyright, and the conception of value as an idea, with a warning about idolatry

Summary

General Overview

The text presents a conceptual account of the birth of money out of barter through a process of abstraction and concretization: abstraction isolates from acts of exchange the concept of “value” as a shared scale, and concretization realizes it in money as a concrete, agreed-upon representation. It then argues that one advances to a stage in which “something worth money is like money” seemingly makes money itself unnecessary, and then to a stage in which even tangible representations are replaced by bank records, without really returning to a primitive barter market. Along the way, it weaves in laws and distinctions in Jewish law between barter acquisition and money acquisition, the question of who is “the money” and what is “the merchandise” in the chapter “Gold,” and a sharpening of the idea that in sale proceeds the buyer possesses “value” that belongs to the seller, whereas in a loan, “a loan is given to be spent,” to the point that the loan is viewed like a gift that creates a commandment to repay. The conclusion applies the same pattern to information and copyright, arguing that information is an abstract entity that can be owned, parallel to the way value ceases to be a property of objects and becomes an abstract “thing” that can be acquired, alongside a conceptual remark about the pursuit of money as idolatry when one serves the representation instead of what it represents.

A historical debate about the origin of money and barter

The text presents a debate among economists over whether there was a historical stage of barter before money. It attributes to Keynes the claim that the moment people began exchanging things, money immediately came into being, and that the concept of money was imposed on society from above rather than emerging from a natural process of exchange. The text criticizes a way of viewing historical facts through ideological lenses and distinguishes between interpretation and an ideological determination of what happened.

Abstraction and concretization: value as a scale and money as representation

The text presents barter as stuck because it requires a “coincidence of wants” between two parties, and sometimes even the need for a third mediating factor, and it defines money as the “ultimate lubricant” of the wheels of the economy. The text argues that even in barter there is, in the background, a single scale of value that determines exchange rates between goods, even if it is not explicitly conceptualized. The text distinguishes between things that have no common measure and goods that are arranged on a scale of value, and defines money as the concrete realization of an abstract concept: money is an agreed representation of value, and therefore a ruler or king can determine nominally what the coin is and what its value is without changing the relations among the goods themselves.

Regulation, counterfeiting, Bitcoin, and mechanisms of trust

The text states that for money to work, coercion, oversight, and the prevention of counterfeiting are required, and that in a world without control there will not be a functioning free market either. The text describes Bitcoin as a mechanism that prevents counterfeiting not through centralized rule but by means of a difficult computational puzzle, and raises the concern that when there is extremely fast computing power that can mine bitcoins easily, “you’ve finished the market.” It presents this as part of the ongoing game of competition between encryption and decryption.

Barter acquisition and money acquisition in Jewish law, and money’s double role

The text presents barter acquisition as an exchange of goods and as “the father of all acquisitions,” something natural, and it defines the source in the Book of Ruth as a “mere disclosure of a fact,” documenting reality rather than serving as a binding Torah-level source for acquisition. The text describes money acquisition as something that arose with the appearance of money and requires formal legal regulation of what acquires, how, and when ownership takes effect. The text notes that according to Jewish law, money does not acquire movable property by rabbinic law, but physical transfer does, whereas with land, money acquires ownership (as do document and possession). It brings the well-known dispute between the Sma and the Taz in section 194 of Choshen Mishpat over whether the money of acquisition for land must be additional to the payment or can be taken from within the payment amount itself. The text concludes that the very existence of this dispute reveals two roles for money: money as payment value and money as acquisition-money that effects the proprietary act, and it cites the yeshiva-style distinction of “acquisition-money and value-money.”

Money in betrothal and the feminist polemic

The text argues that in betrothal, the money is, by all opinions, acquisition-money and not value-money, because betrothal with something worth a perutah is not payment of value but a formal act that effects the legal status of betrothal. The text mentions a claim by some commentator that the money of betrothal is in the category of value, and defines that as a strange conception. The text brings up an article by Rivka Lubitch calling not to perform betrothal because it is the acquisition of the woman and unequal paternalism, and presents a response article by the speaker arguing that this is an incorrect interpretation, and that the giving of money does not impose ownership over the woman but is a formal act creating the bond of betrothal.

An apparent return beyond money: something worth money is like money, bank records, and numbers as a handkerchief substitute

The text presents a movement in which, after value was conceptualized and concretized in money, one returns and seemingly gives up money itself, first through the rule “something worth money is like money,” which already appears in the Talmudic text, and later through credit cards and transfers that are simply records in a computer. The text describes the return to goods not as regression but as a sophisticated barter market in which the good functions both as a consumer product and as a representation of value, so that it is still a money-acquisition even without physical money. The text states that when money becomes only a record, the issue is oversight over how much value each person has, and explains that the “shekel” in this situation is a unit of value and not an object, so that numbers move from a conception of a “cardinal number” counting tangible units to a conception of an “ordinal number” ranking intensities of value.

The chapter “Gold”: what counts as money and what counts as merchandise, “sharp” and “important,” and the distinction of physical transfer in barter and in money

The text describes how, once money itself becomes merchandise, or once two metals can both serve as currency, the distinction between what is money and what is merchandise becomes blurred, creating many difficulties for medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim). The text presents the Mishnah’s question, “gold acquires silver,” as the question of what is the coin and what is produce, because in money-acquisition, physical transfer of the money does not acquire the merchandise, whereas physical transfer of the merchandise does acquire and transfer the money to the other side, while in barter, transfer by one side acquires for both sides. The text quotes Rashi on the Mishnah in the chapter “Gold,” who states that the silver coin is “money” because it is “readily spendable,” whereas a gold dinar is like movable property, and it notes that the Talmudic text decides according to the criteria of “sharp and important.” The text explains the rabbinic enactment that physical transfer is required for movable goods against the background of the concern, “lest he say to him: your wheat was burned in the attic,” and raises the question why a parallel enactment was not made in barter, suggesting that barter requires simultaneity of two sides and therefore the enactment there would be more complicated.

What is acquired when one “buys money”: value as an abstract object and the distinction between debt and value

The text raises the difficulty that when it is said that through transfer of the merchandise, “the money is acquired,” there is no meaning to some specific coin having been acquired, because the seller can spend all his coins and the other party will not be able to point to any coin and say it is his. The text proposes that what is acquired is the value of a certain amount, not the coins themselves, and that this is different from “acquiring a debt,” because a debt is not an object that is acquired but the creation of an obligation. The text develops a conception according to which, after conceptualization, there is “value” as a kind of abstract entity that can be acquired and can be found with one person while belonging to another, even without physical embodiment.

A loan is given to be spent, “driving away a lion,” and sale proceeds versus a loan in Maimonides and in the Sabbatical year laws

The text brings the principle that “a loan is given to be spent” and interprets it strongly, according to which in a loan the borrower has nothing that belongs to the lender, but rather a commandment to repay is created, and therefore repayment of a debt is “driving away a lion,” because it merely prevents loss and does not provide a new benefit. The text brings proofs from the Talmudic text regarding minor orphans, who are not subject to commandments and therefore are not obligated to repay, and from Nedarim, which permits paying the debt of someone forbidden to derive benefit. The text quotes Maimonides in Laws of Sale, chapter 5, law 4, who distinguishes between using sale proceeds to buy additional movable goods and a debt originating in a loan, which does not acquire until physical transfer, and presents this as a foundation that confuses commentators. The text quotes a Mishnah in the Sabbatical year tractate that the Sabbatical year cancels a loan whether documented or undocumented, but that “a store credit account is not canceled” and “sale proceeds are not canceled,” and it brings Maimonides’ explanation that a store credit account is a mechanism of convenience for accumulating an obligation and not a loan. The text argues that according to Maimonides, in sale proceeds the buyer possesses “value” that belongs to the seller, similar to a deposit, and therefore it is not canceled and one can acquire through it, whereas in a loan there is not even value that belongs to the lender; everything belongs to the borrower, and repayment is in the category of a commandment that is nullified by the Sabbatical year.

Virtual money, the bank as an application of abstraction, and Hershele’s parable

The text presents Maimonides as pointing to a kind of “computer age” situation in which one can buy and transfer rights through value itself, without embodiment in a coin or in something worth money, similar to bank records. The text compares the development to a process in which one creates money as a concretization and then “throws away” the concretization and remains only with value itself, and it tells Hershele’s parable about the doughnuts and the rolls in order to illustrate how, seemingly, one is left with nothing, but in fact one is left with something abstract. The text states that the bank could not have arisen directly from a barter world without first passing through the conceptualization of value and its concretization in money.

Information, copyright, and the conception of value as an idea, with a warning about idolatry

The text compares value to information and argues that just as value underwent abstraction from being a property of goods into an abstract “thing,” so too information is an abstract object and not merely a property, and therefore Torah-level ownership applies to it and copyright violations are theft when they cause harm. The text interprets Maimonides’ statement that there is no acquisition in “the smell of an apple” or “the appearance of honey” as denying ownership over properties detached from an object, not as denying ownership over everything abstract, and it brings examples like light and even referring to the Holy One, blessed be He, as an abstract object in order to argue that something abstract can still be a “thing.” The text parallels this abstraction to Plato, who turned properties into existing ideas, and concludes with a conceptual note that chasing after money itself resembles idolatry when one worships the tangible representation instead of the abstract concept it represents.

Okay, last time we started with the topic of money, and also the topic of abstraction. I started, and today I sent you on WhatsApp—I saw some little article there about the story of the three nuts that I also mentioned last time, about how, basically, we arrived at this conception of money, at using the concept of money, and how little by little the situation apparently went back, returned to what it had been before. So briefly, I said—and afterward I saw in that article—that apparently there’s a dispute among economists, but it’s a historical dispute that starts from ideology. It’s very strange. People see history through ideological glasses. Keynes and someone else. Can’t it be otherwise? Yes, but no—there’s a difference between interpreting events and deciding what happened through ideological glasses. The historical facts? Yes, the facts. And the question is whether there was a stage of barter. I saw there’s some dispute there between Keynes and—who was the other one, I forgot, I don’t remember anymore who it was. Look there, what I sent you on WhatsApp. What? Friedman? No, no. What do you mean, Keynes thought there wasn’t a barter stage? Yes. He claims that the moment people started exchanging things, they immediately made money. Right. And Keynes basically argues that money was imposed from above onto society, and not through the process I described in the previous class, some natural process that starts with barter, which is the natural thing—and that’s also exchange acquisition in Jewish law. And then people basically want to lubricate the process more, because I described how the whole business gets stuck: with barter you really can’t function. You always need to find someone who has what you need and who needs from you what you have. And if that doesn’t work, then suddenly you need a third party, who needs what you have to give and can give me what I want to receive, in order to mediate between us. So that basically jams the functioning of the market. And then the ultimate lubricant on the wheels of the economy is money. And then the invention basically says that all things—we measure them anyway, and this is the stage of abstraction I was talking about—all things are ultimately measured on some single scale. Even in barter, in the background there was actually a concept that maybe wasn’t conceptualized and wasn’t present, but it was there. Because when you decide to exchange tomatoes for a chair, by what rate are you exchanging? How many tomatoes equal a chair? And implicitly—yes, I said there are concepts, actually maybe one could say almost all concepts are incommensurable. Meaning, they don’t share a common measure. How can you measure which is greater: the water in the ocean or human kindness? Which is greater? It’s not that I don’t know the answer—there is no answer. The question is nonsense, because these are two things not measured on the same scale. So also in the context of tomatoes and chairs, on the face of it, if there’s no money in the world and nothing of the sort, and you want to exchange tomatoes for a chair—why one tomato for one chair, or fifty tomatoes for one chair? How do you exchange? So there has to be something—again, a result of supply and demand and so on, it doesn’t matter, there are all kinds of parameters that determine it—but in the end we arrive at some scale on which all commodities are arranged. That scale is the scale of value. The concept of value. And value is determined, again, by supply and demand and all sorts of things like that, but in the end there is some scale of value on which tomatoes and chairs and tables and houses and cars and whatever you want—everything is arranged on that scale. And once it’s arranged on that scale, then you already have an exchange rate; you can decide how much of this is worth how much of that, and so on. And then the next stage says: okay, if there’s such a scale, let’s realize it. After we performed the abstraction, we perform concretization. We talked about how those always come together; abstraction is never done by itself. And then after you abstracted from barter and suddenly distilled or conceptualized the concept of value, suddenly you understood that there is such a thing, even though you can’t point to it with your finger. What is value? Where is it located? But it exists—fact is, when we exchange, in the background there is the concept of value. And then the next stage takes that abstract thing we reached through abstraction and makes it concrete. Turns it into something tangible, yes? And then basically we create money. Money is a concrete representation of this abstract concept called value. And then we create something that is fundamentally conventional—and again I’m not getting into the historical questions—whether money was itself a commodity worth its value, say a precious coin, a precious metal, or a symbolic matter. Meaning, you decide that such-and-such a thing is a shekel. And that’s just a decision. It’s not really supposed to be worth a shekel in some deeper sense. So it’s a kind of decision. And why can you decide however you want? Because really, this thing doesn’t stand opposite anything. It’s just the lubricant that helps me make exchanges. Who cares—do whatever you want. That’s why, as Keynes says, the king can determine it from above. He can determine: there is a coin, the coin is worth such-and-such, and that’s it; it changes nothing. And what it ultimately says is only how many coins need to be given for a chair. What difference does it make whether I give five coins or twenty coins? In the end, when I exchange it for tomatoes, ultimately I need goods; money is only a means. When I exchange it for tomatoes, the number of tomatoes per chair will be the same. If this goes through the mediation of a shekel worth one tomato or a shekel worth five tomatoes, that really makes no difference. Fine, so I can print however many coins. What? I can simply print. Fine, there are technical problems because of which it’s preferable one way or the other—inflation or non-inflation. On the principled level, without the technical problems, it really doesn’t matter. Okay? So that’s why it’s the ruler who cuts off the head of whoever counterfeits. Yes, right, of course you need coercive means and you need supervision, and this can’t work in a world with no control at all. In a world that is a totally free market, there won’t even be a free market, there’ll be nothing. So then Bitcoin isn’t a free market? What? Bitcoin isn’t a free market? You can’t counterfeit it. Yes, but it’s not a free market. Ah, you made a mechanism. Right. You make a mechanism that prevents counterfeiting not through central authority but through a puzzle that’s hard to solve. Okay. So the moment they invent software or artificial intelligence on a level that can mine bitcoins, you’re done, the market is finished. I mean, I think—if I understand correctly, I don’t really understand this so well—but it seems to me. What? It’s already mined by software; it just takes a lot of computing time. No, that’s why I’m saying, if you have a quantum computer, I don’t know, something that can do it quickly. They’re trying with the quantum computer to succeed. Okay, could be. A race between encryption and decryption, yes, that’s always the name of the game. In any case, for our purposes, the claim is that after we reached the concept of value through abstraction, we came back and concretized it through the concept of money. And the concept of money now basically became a kind of medium in the market. And then transactions were done that were not barter transactions—chairs for tomatoes—but rather a chair for money and tomatoes for money. And then there’s no problem, you don’t need to find a third party to mediate between you and the other person if you want to make a transaction. It doesn’t have to be that he has a commodity you need; the main thing is that he needs some commodity—you’ll give him your goods, he’ll give you money. And that’s what’s called acquisition by money. And exchange acquisition is the exchange of goods; that’s the natural concept, and therefore exchange acquisition has no source. It has a source—I mentioned it, I think, from the Scroll of Ruth—and there the Mishnah, no? But that source is just a factual indication, because it’s the Scroll of Ruth and not the Torah, so it can’t be a source for a Torah-level acquisition. If we assume it’s Torah-level—but simply speaking that’s not right; it is certainly a Torah-level acquisition, it’s the father of all acquisitions, exchange. Rather, what is it? It’s just a factual indication. They simply tell you that this is how it was. It’s not a source that gives validity to exchange acquisition. It’s a source that tells you that it has validity. Meaning, it documents reality, that’s all. That’s what’s called a factual indication. Things like that can be derived also from the Prophets, not only from the Torah. “And Zedekiah son of Chenaanah made horns of iron”—there’s that in the first chapter of Bava Kamma. There the medieval authorities (Rishonim) comment on it: how do we derive goring damage from Zedekiah son of Chenaanah, which is in the Prophets? It’s a factual indication, it’s not really a source. So for our purposes, exchange acquisition is the basic acquisition. Once the concept of money was created, another kind of acquisition was created. I’m not exchanging goods for goods; I’m exchanging goods for money. But money had value like— I’m saying, that’s a historical dispute. Did it have value or not have value—it doesn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned, money is something symbolic. Historically there are all kinds of disputes about it, but on the principled level, conceptually, money is something symbolic; it doesn’t have to be worth its face value. Its form, what the Talmud calls the “form” of the money. So these new transactions are exchanges of goods for money. And that of course required conceptualization or expansion of acquisition acts and turning the act of acquisition into a formal legal act. Exchange needed that less, needed less conceptualization. You want tomatoes, I want a chair—let’s exchange. You take the chair, I’ll take the tomato, and that’s it. No need to regulate the matter. Money is already a concept that requires regulation. Now the question is how do you acquire, what do you acquire, what corresponds to what, in what form do you acquire, when does it become yours and when not—and that is basically the concept of acquisition by money. By the way, as an aside, in the end in Jewish law we rule that money does not acquire movable property; pulling acquires. By Torah law, money probably does acquire, but rabbinically you need pulling. But in land, money does acquire the land, and there there’s a dispute between the Sma and the Taz, a well-known dispute in section 194 of Choshen Mishpat, over the question whether the money you give in the acquisition of land—whether the money you give to carry out the acquisition act can be part of the amount that serves as consideration for the purchase, or whether it has to be independent. Suppose you agreed to buy a chair from me for 100 shekels. The question is whether you need to give me 100 shekels and a perutah—one perutah to effect the acquisition by money, and 100 shekels as consideration—or not, whether out of the 100 shekels one perutah can be used to generate the acquisition. So that’s a dispute between the Sma and the Taz, an interesting dispute by the way; one can perhaps connect it to principled issues. I’m not completely sure that’s right, but maybe it is. For our purposes, what matters is not the various opinions but the fact of the dispute itself. The very dispute shows us that after conceptualization, money plays two roles. One, it serves as consideration—yes, the concretization of the value of the chair; I give you value in the form of money. Two, it also defines the acquisition act. Meaning, when you take the money, that itself turns—or applies—your ownership to the other person’s object, sorry, to the object. Okay? Now with movables, I’m saying that’s only by Torah law; rabbinically you also need pulling. But with land it remains even rabbinically; that is, even in practical Jewish law, money acquires land. Money, deed, and possession acquire land. So we see that money actually plays two roles: acquisition money and value money—they call it in the yeshivot acquisition money and value money. And in the case of a woman, for example, there’s discussion in Achiezer and Beit Shmuel and Avnei Miluim, who cites Achiezer and his brother-in-law, that with a woman, for example, the money is not value money but—according to all opinions, both according to the Sma and according to the Taz, who dispute the meaning of acquisition money—with a woman it’s clear that the money is acquisition money and not value money. Because when one acquires a woman for a perutah’s worth, that’s not her value. Clearly this is a formal act whose purpose is to effect kiddushin, not to pay the woman consideration for what I receive from her. And therefore there, according to all views, the conception is that it is acquisition money and not value money. By the way, at some point I saw there’s some commentator who says it is in the category of value—I don’t remember, maybe yes—but that’s strange, a strange conception. Fine, there’s some article in introductions or I don’t know what, in some later collection or wherever, I wrote there an article about Rivka Lubitch, the rabbinical advocate; she wrote an article there calling not to perform kiddushin. Because kiddushin is the husband buying the woman, and that’s paternalistic, it’s not egalitarian, from a feminist direction. And in my article I tried to show that this is an incorrect conception. She brought there from medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim) more than once, and she wrote there usually with her husband Aharon Endelovitch. And I wrote an article there; I tried to show that this is simply wrong, it’s an incorrect interpretation. The giving of money in kiddushin is not the application of the husband’s ownership over the woman, but a formal act that effects the status of kiddushin. Exactly as I’m saying about acquisition—in acquisition too it’s like that. Meaning, the transfer of the money brings about ownership, but it is not necessarily ownership itself. And therefore one can make the transfer of the money a formal act that brings about something else—not ownership, for example the bond of kiddushin. Okay? And therefore here too I’m saying the same thing. Fine, so for our purposes, this is where we arrived at the concept of money and its use, and then another type of acquisition was created. There was exchange acquisition, and now there is also acquisition by money. I remarked at the end of the previous class that in the end we somehow return—apparently return back—because now, after we grasped and conceptualized value, after we abstracted, we came back and concretized it, translated it into money, and then we come back and say: wait a second, who needs money at all? Let’s dispense with it. Today, yes, with credit cards and transfers and so on, it’s all just computer records; you don’t need any money. But in fact, even earlier it was clear—even the Talmud says this—that something worth money is like money. What does it mean that something worth money is like money? I can have no money at all in the market and still the market can be sophisticated. No need. No need for that artificial lubricant. How? You have tomatoes and I have a chair. You want my chair; I don’t need your tomatoes. What do we do? Last time we said: we get stuck. We need to find someone who wants tomatoes and has something I want. He’ll get tomatoes from you and give me something, and I’ll give you the chair—that kind of circular transaction. Okay? But if not—why? Let’s relate to it this way: after all, if we’ve already conceptualized the concept of value, and a tomato is located somewhere on this scale called value—a tomato is worth two shekels, okay?—let’s use tomatoes as money. So I don’t need the tomatoes. I’ll give you the chair because you need the chair. I don’t need the tomatoes. But you can pay me in tomatoes. I’ll use the tomatoes as something worth money. Why do I need money and then to transfer it and buy tomatoes? No need for this unnecessary translation. Forget it, leave it out. Let’s use the commodity itself. Once we already understand the conceptualization of value, now in fact we no longer need the concretization. No, what for? The goods themselves can now function in two ways. They can function as something worth money, and they can function as something I need as a consumer good. Could that have been even before we invented money? I said okay, okay, I’m not getting into the history. As far as I’m concerned, this is an essential reconstruction, not a historical reconstruction. I mean conceptually, I think it’s right to look at it this way. I don’t care whether historically it developed like this or not. No, but simply it makes it more sophisticated, each time it becomes more refined. Today money has reached its refinement. But after all in the end we actually went back. We went back to goods. If I give you tomatoes I don’t need, but I receive them because I know that with them I’ll be able to buy something else, then I’ll need to store them somewhere. Okay, no, obviously there’s efficiency in recording it on a computer without transferring goods to use them. But this existed before the computer age. The Talmud already says that something worth money is like money. Now in the Talmud, something worth money is like money is something born only after money already exists in the world. And suddenly we return to the world of barter, apparently—but this is already a sophisticated barter world. It’s a barter world in which the commodity itself functions as money. It’s not an exchange of goods; rather the commodity functions in two ways: it can be a consumer good, I need it to use it, and it can also be something worth money. And then I can make money redundant. You’re right: in today’s age, when we do this with computers, it’s even better. Now you don’t need the money מצד אחד, and you also don’t need to store the tomatoes; you can make records on the computer. Actually what I meant was to connect the fact that today we do it by records instead of physical money with the fact that the goods themselves can also be considered— Yes, the conception is very similar. The conception is very similar. Once you understand that money too is nothing; it’s only a tangible representation of the concept of value. So use whatever kind of representation you want. You can use a computer and that will be a representation, and you can use goods that are worth money and that will be the representation. Still, the goods here function as a representation of value, not as a consumer good. So you can do that by computer record—what difference does it make. The main thing is to keep track, that there be supervision over how much value is in each person’s possession. That is basically the goal money comes to achieve. When I keep the money with me and I have bills or coins totaling 250 shekels, that basically means I’ve accumulated value in the amount of 250 shekels. The way to express that I have that value is simply to open my wallet and show you: I have 250 shekels. If I have another way to do that, I don’t need a wallet and I don’t need coins. I can show you—open the smartphone and see, it says in my bank account that I have 250.0. Two hundred and fifty point zero what? Shekels—meaning actual shekel-objects? Of course not. Value of the intensity of 250 shekels. It’s a scale of value, that’s all. I accumulated value at the level of 250 shekels. These are units of value; now these are no longer objects. Once, shekels were objects—actual shekels, 250 little circles. We said no, now 250 has become, say—we talked about this once, I think—from a cardinal number to an ordinal number, basically. Because a cardinal number tells you how many units you have; we talked about this once, I think. A cardinal number says how many units you have. You have 250 shekels: one, two, three, four—you count how many there are, there are two hundred… I have 250 shekels. Now we said no, the number 250 is an ordinal number, not a cardinal number. It simply says what degree of value you have. The degree of value 250 is above the degree of value 249; it orders them. The numbers here are ordinal numbers, not counting numbers. Okay? But basically it’s the same idea; these are all representations. And how does that distinguish between acquisition by money and exchange acquisition when I transfer to you— That’s the question, I’m getting to it. Now what—when this happens, apparently we returned to the same state as at the beginning. We came back to exchanging goods. But as I said, that’s not true; that’s only in appearance, because we have already passed through the concept of abstraction of value. We did not return, we did not regress backward. We advanced one step forward. Now the commodity functions, in one of its hats, as the concretization of value, not only as a consumer good. Therefore the concept of acquisition by money exists even now, although money itself, for the sake of the discussion, no longer exists at all. There is only value worth money, and we exchange goods for goods, but we have not gone back to the primitive market that existed before, the exchange market or barter market. Rather the market remains a sophisticated market. On the contrary—it is so sophisticated that you no longer need money to concretize what is needed. We have all kinds of better means of concretization; money is redundant, you can take the cash out of your pants. But the conception still remains. We are actually using acquisition by money here and not exchange acquisition. And this is something that creates a lot of confusion also among medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim), a lot of difficulties and confusion around this matter. What is equal-for-equal exchange as opposed to exchange acquisition? Equal-for-equal exchange is supposedly acquisition by money by means of goods. So why isn’t that exchange? And in general, which of the two sides here is the money and which is the goods? You’ve already lost the ability to distinguish. I give you a chair, you give me a tomato. So let’s say this isn’t exchange acquisition, it’s acquisition by money. But which is the money? Is the tomato the money or the chair the money? Or both—am I exchanging money for money? What? How do you define such a thing? This raises a lot of difficulties. The chapter “HaZahav” basically deals with this. Does gold acquire silver or does silver acquire gold? What does that mean? The question is really: when I exchange money for gold, which is the goods and which is the money? That’s the question. Because the rule in acquisition by money is that pulling the money does not acquire the goods. By Torah law yes, but rabbinically you need pulling—the pulling of the goods. And pulling the money does not acquire the goods. In exchange, the pulling of one commodity acquires the commodity for both sides. Both sides don’t need to pull. But in acquisition by money you must pull the goods. When you pull the goods, you acquired the goods and the money is acquired by the other side; he doesn’t need to pull it. Once I acquired the goods, the money is acquired by the other one. But if he pulled the money, then neither did he acquire the money nor did I acquire the goods. This forces us now to define in every such transaction which thing is the money and which is the goods. As long as money is actual money—coins—the conventional or symbolic matter I spoke about earlier—everything is clear. Here this is the money and that is the goods, all is fine. But when we return to the ultra-sophisticated market—not just the sophisticated market—the third stage, where money too is basically a commodity, you lose the possibility of defining what the money is and what the goods are. Both are commodities, and both can be treated as money. Something worth money is like money. You can pay for chairs in grain, you can pay for chairs in tomatoes. When you pay for chairs in tomatoes, which is the goods and which is the money? You can define both as money or as goods. And this raises all sorts of confusion and difficulties and so on. And in my opinion, all of it can be understood in a very, very simple way in light of what I’ve described until now. All the questions disappear on their own. Nothing remains difficult. And these are really dozens of difficulties from all sorts of directions, and all kinds of analyses are needed, terrible complications. Because I think this conception of concretization and abstraction perhaps was not clear to some of those dealing with these Talmudic passages, and therefore all kinds of difficulties arose. So at the beginning of the chapter “HaZahav,” as I said earlier, the Mishnah deals with the question of what acquires what. And as I said, it begins from the difference between acquisition by money and exchange. In exchange acquisition, the rule is that the moment we agreed to exchange a chair for tomatoes—now, whether produce can effect exchange or not, that’s a dispute in the Talmud, doesn’t matter—say a chair for a table, okay? Or for a donkey: exchanging a donkey for a chair. So I want from you a chair, and you want from me a donkey. So how is it acquired? The formal definition is that if one of the sides pulls his item, the acquisition is completed. Absolute. What’s called finalized, yes? And each of us is already the owner of his item. And therefore in the case of exchanging a cow for a donkey, a lot of difficulties arise. Exchanging a cow for a donkey, and it turns out her fetus is at her side. Now it depends very much on when she gave birth. Because the moment you pulled the donkey, then you acquired the donkey and he acquired the cow. But the cow is still with me in the stable. I pulled your donkey; you still haven’t taken the cow. Now the moment I pulled the donkey, I acquired the donkey and you already acquired the cow, even though it’s still with me. Now you come to take the cow and you find a calf at her side. Now if that calf was born before I pulled the donkey, then the cow you bought was a cow only, without a calf. When I bought the donkey, you bought the cow, and the calf remained mine. If she was pregnant and had not yet given birth—she gave birth after the pulling of the donkey—then you bought the cow with the calf, now she gave birth to the calf, take the calf, it’s yours. So why did this confusion arise? Exactly because pulling the donkey transfers the cow to you. There is no need for you to pull the cow. There is no need for you to pull the cow and me to pull the donkey. If both of us pulled, there would never be confusion, there would be no problem. You wouldn’t acquire the cow until you pulled it, and I wouldn’t acquire the donkey until I pulled it. No problem. The moment you pull the cow, we’ll see whether it already gave birth or not. But once only one side needs to pull, that creates a mess. Because we can’t know what happened with that cow. And that is the Talmudic passage of exchanging a cow for a donkey and finding her calf at her side. Okay? In acquisition by money, seemingly something similar happens. There too, the pulling by one side finalizes—if you like, cuts—the acquisition. Both sides acquire. But it’s not symmetrical, unlike exchange. When you pull the money, neither did you acquire the money nor did I acquire the goods. When I pull the goods, I acquired the goods and you acquired the money. That’s the rule. In acquisition by money you have to pull the goods. Okay? Again, that’s rabbinic. By Torah law, money acquires movable property. But rabbinically, lest one say to him, “Your wheat was burned in the attic,” you need pulling. What does “Your wheat was burned in the attic” mean? Suppose we would allow Arik to take the money, pull the money, and by that he acquired the money and I acquired the grain that’s still with him. Now a fire breaks out. Fine? I still haven’t taken the grain. So he won’t even bother to extinguish it—that’s my grain burning, what does he care? He acquired the money, the grain is already mine, and if it burned, it burned for me. That’s it, my grain burned. So “lest one say to him, ‘Your wheat was burned in the attic.’” What do you want? Because they were concerned about this, the Sages enacted rabbinically that I do not acquire that wheat until I pull it. You need pulling of the wheat. Money alone will not acquire it. So that’s only rabbinic. But did he acquire the wheat and the money also wasn’t acquired by the other side? Yes, that’s apparently how it is, even though he already physically gave it. The later authorities distinguish—maybe I’ll comment on that later. But that’s how it apparently is. In the case of exchanging a cow for a donkey, both need to pull. What? No. Otherwise there’s no problem of finding the calf at her side. If both need to pull, then what problem is there? The moment you pull the cow we’ll see whether it was pregnant or not. Eh? To whom does it belong? But there’s no question to whom it belongs. If you need to pull the cow, then the moment you pull the cow we can see whether the cow was pregnant or had already given birth. We know to whom it belongs. Why did the confusion arise? Because there’s no need to pull the cow. I pulled the donkey and you acquired the cow even though it’s still with me. Nice that you’re following, I’m saying that creates a problem here just like with the wheat. Right. No, why didn’t they also enact the same enactment regarding exchange? Ah, that really is a good question: why didn’t they enact the same enactment regarding exchange? I think maybe it’s because in exchange—well, that’s a question. Acquisition by money is an artificial legal creation; exchange acquisition is the natural thing that always existed. It may be that when one thinks how to create the formal legal acquisition, one thinks about all the implications and the Sages enact things so there won’t be problems. But with the natural acquisition, they leave it natural. Meaning, whoever wants to operate naturally should do so; there’s no rabbinic regulation of that matter. It’s done the way people ordinarily do it, and that’s it. Acquisition by money, which is entirely a creation of the Sages—or it doesn’t matter, of the governing legislative institution, yes? Or the king, whatever it may be—then the institution also regulates it. It says what needs to be done and how and how not. It really is a question, I don’t know. A good question why they didn’t also enact it regarding exchange. Regulate exchange too. I don’t know; if they enacted it in exchange, maybe then acquisition couldn’t be done. Because what would finally serve as the act? There would be no pulling. No, you know that with money I have the option that it will still be one-sided, because they pull the goods and the money is acquired by the other side. They say the one-sidedness will be only in the pulling of the goods and not in the pulling of the money. But in exchange there is no such way out. You would need both sides to pull. Ah, that’s true actually, maybe that’s the reason. Because in exchange, if you want to enact such a thing, then both sides must pull. Now if both sides pull, there’s a problem. Because if I pulled the donkey, then the donkey is acquired by me and the cow is still not yours. Right? That can’t be. Now I’ll take the cow and walk away with it; it isn’t yours. It has to be simultaneous. And for the acquisition to be simultaneous for both sides, one side has to do an act and that has to finalize the deal for both sides. But in exchange that can’t happen. Maybe one could say that only when the second pulling is completed does it become acquired by the first one as well. Fine, maybe, though that’s probably more complicated. In any event, the Sages don’t do that, they didn’t enact that regulation. Why does the first one need to be pulled? Then the first pulling has no significance. Yes. You just need it to be first so the second can be second. That’s all. Otherwise the second won’t be second. There is something more here—some kind of entity that is effectively a third side. Beyond the two sides, which in practice also determines the legality. The king. Okay, the king or the Sages, doesn’t matter. Who stands here below. In exchange, no. So also in a religious court, the religious court is not just between two; there are three bodies. Why? Because if there’s a case, say, where certain problems arise. Okay, a simple deal is simple, fine, no intervention, but here something happened: you gave money and were supposed to receive the goods, or the store suddenly burned down. So something happened here; you say, that’s not my problem—who bears the burden? So why weren’t they concerned about this in exchange? That’s exactly what they asked, quite rightly. So why weren’t they concerned in exchange? After all, in exchange, if I pull the donkey, you acquired the cow even though it’s still with me. If it burns, your cow burned. The problem exists in exchange as well, so why in exchange didn’t they enact that both sides need to pull? Regarding money they enacted that one must pull the goods. Regarding exchange they didn’t enact it—that was the question. I said maybe it’s because this is not regulated. After that Oren added: maybe it’s because here the enactment would have to be that both sides pull, and we want a simultaneous acquisition. A simultaneous acquisition can exist only with money, not with exchange. Fine. So the concept of acquisition by money basically means that one side pulls the goods and then both sides acquire. And on the Mishnah, Rashi on the Mishnah at the beginning of chapter HaZahav says this. “Gold acquires silver, silver acquires gold”—what the Mishnah discusses there. I’m now exchanging gold and silver. But not by exchange—by acquisition through money. “Silver” there means silver coins, not silver metal—not the coins? I’m exchanging gold metal for silver metal for the sake of discussion, okay? Now the question is which acquires which. What’s the question really? Which is the goods and which is the money, right? That’s really the question. You have here two precious metals, and both of them in certain contexts function as money. Okay. Now you exchanged one for the other, not one of them in exchange for goods. So some problem arises: which one here is the goods and which one is the money? What difference does it make? It makes a difference, because you need to decide when the acquisition is finalized. If the gold is the goods, then when you pulled the silver, nothing yet happened. Neither did you acquire the silver nor did I acquire the gold. But if the gold is the money and the silver is the goods—the gold is the coinage and the silver serves here in the other role—then the moment you pulled the silver, the transaction was finalized because you pulled the goods. Pulling the goods finalizes the transaction. All right? So you need to know what finalizes the transaction in such a case, and therefore the question is which is the goods and which is the money. Sorry. So Rashi writes as follows. Rashi on the Mishnah in chapter HaZahav: “Gold acquires silver”—one who buys minted gold dinars with silver dinars, minted gold dinars with silver dinars, meaning he pays silver dinars for minted gold dinars—once he gave him the gold dinars, the pulling of the gold acquires the silver for the owner of the gold. And the one who received the gold dinars becomes obligated to give him silver dinars. “Gold acquires silver” means that the gold is the goods and the silver is the coinage, the payment. And he cannot retract. But the silver does not acquire the gold, because if he gave him the silver dinars first, he did not acquire, because the silver is the coinage. And both can retract. And silver coin is considered money. Why, how did they decide that silver is the money and gold is the goods? Because it is more current in circulation. Something that passes in commerce everywhere is considered coinage. That’s the criterion the Talmud gives there, and Rashi just anticipates the Talmud; the Talmud explains it: more current and more important. These are the two criteria the Talmud gives for deciding which is the gold and which is the silver, and therefore there is a dilemma between silver and gold. Rabbi says once it was like this and afterward it changed, but the criteria are current and important. “Current” means it circulates in commerce, and “important” means significant. And a gold dinar is only like other movable property and produce, and money does not acquire until one pulls the movable item. But pulling the movable item acquires, and neither of them can retract. And in the Talmud the reason is explained—there are those who say pulling is by Torah law, and there are those who establish it as a rabbinic enactment. We rule in accordance with Rabbi Yohanan that this is only rabbinic, lest one say “your wheat was burned in the attic.” Now what happens in such a case, when I pulled the goods—you acquired the money and I acquired the goods—raises a new question, and again it returns us to the issue of abstraction. What did you acquire? You acquired money. What money? Is there some specific coin somewhere that is now acquired by you? This coin? Meaning, did some object become acquired by you? There is no coin of mine you can say: wait, that’s the coin I bought, bring it to me. Right? There isn’t such a thing. In principle I can spend all my coins and bills, and you can’t peep a word. None of them belongs to you. So what did you acquire? You might say that I obligated myself to 100 shekels, I owe you 100 shekels—but here the formulation is not “owe you 100 shekels” but “you acquired”; so he acquires the money. It doesn’t have to be specifically cash—say I do an exchange and agree with someone that he’ll bring me 100 kilos of tomatoes. What difference does it make? However you arrange it, you didn’t acquire the tomatoes. Why not? If these are concrete tomatoes, then yes. But if it’s tomatoes—100 kilos of tomatoes as value—then that’s acquisition by money, not exchange. I don’t know, I give—you say that will be worth money? Yes, it’ll be worth money and that’ll be acquisition by money; it won’t be exchange acquisition. Exchange acquisition has to be between two concrete things. A specific chair, not “a chair” in general. If you sell chairs and I order a chair from you, that’s not exchange, that’s acquisition by money. Only if there is a marked chair here and I buy it in exchange for something marked on my side is it exchange. All right? Now the question is, so in short: what did you acquire? You acquired the money. When I pulled the gold or the goods, it doesn’t matter, gold and silver are just examples—I pulled the goods, so I acquired the goods, that’s clear what I acquired. The goods we agreed on, that’s what I acquired. But what did you acquire? You have money with me—but what, how? I have nothing with me. All the coins I have with me I can spend. Now this is a very interesting point because this, for example, is a whole list, a heap of difficulties that arise here among medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim). And I think it is solved very simply if you understand what I explained earlier. There are many more difficulties, but this is a first example. My claim is the following: what you acquired is value of 100 shekels. Value is a kind of object that can be acquired—after the abstraction, of course. After that concept called value was created. It was always there in the background but had not undergone conceptualization. Once it underwent conceptualization, the concept of money was created, and of course in its wake the conceptualized idea of something worth money, meaning goods that function as money. Now we can acquire money. What does it mean to acquire money? Not to acquire a specific shekel coin, but to acquire value of a shekel. There is value of a shekel that is with me that became acquired by you. And now I’ll show you the practical consequences; there are major practical consequences. Why not call it acquiring a debt? Why not say you acquired a debt of one shekel? Because you didn’t acquire a debt, you created a debt. Now I owe you—but there’s nothing with me that belongs to you. A loan is given to be spent. I’ll get to that in a moment. I’ll give an example of exactly this issue. The Talmud in Kiddushin says that a loan is given to be spent. So if you lent me 100 shekels, those 100 shekels are not a deposit—your 100 shekels sitting with me. After all, I can use them, spend them, pay with them, and afterward I’ll return you another 100 shekels, not those same 100 shekels. Right? So that means that the moment you gave me those 100 shekels, they became mine. A loan is given to be spent. Okay? And therefore it’s basically like a gift—you gave me those 100 shekels. You didn’t deposit 100 shekels with me; you gave me 100 shekels. That created a debt that I have to return 100 shekels to you. So much so, by the way, that the Talmud says repaying a creditor is a commandment. And the simple reading of the Talmud—the later authorities analyze it at length, and so do the medieval authorities (Rishonim); it’s a very complicated passage—but on the simple level of the Talmud it seems that it really is only a commandment. If I don’t do it, nothing happened. It’s not yours, it’s mine. There is only a commandment to give you back 100 shekels because you gave me before. A kind of gratitude, as it were. It’s not that I really have something that belongs to you. Okay? There are all sorts of proofs for this in the Talmud. For example: orphans to whom their father left a cow or a cloak or something like that—once they are orphans, orphans are not obligated in commandments. So if they are not obligated in commandments, they don’t have to repay the money that belongs to the lender. Amazing. Meaning, he lent to their father, they inherited their father’s property, and they don’t need to return it because there is no commandment incumbent on them; minors are not obligated in commandments. Orphans here means minors, of course. Yes? So they are minors; no commandments are incumbent on them. So that means—this has nothing to do with commandments; after all, it’s his money, he invested his money. It’s not that I’m now giving him my money. No! In the Talmud it seems that it’s their money, the orphans’ money. A loan is given to be spent. And there is a commandment to give you back 100 shekels just as you gave me before. And commandments are for those obligated in commandments. Minors are not. Fine, there are many qualifications and disputes among medieval authorities (Rishonim), I’m not getting into that now. The Pnei Yehoshua says this is a principled matter. More examples: there’s the Talmud in Nedarim, for example. The Talmud says that someone prohibited from deriving benefit from his fellow may repay his debt. Suppose you are forbidden to derive benefit from me, Oren is forbidden to derive benefit from me, he vowed not to benefit from my property. Fine? Now he owes money to Yossi. I now come and repay Oren’s debt to Yossi, giving Yossi the hundred shekels that Oren owes him. Your debt is erased—but you’re not allowed to derive benefit from me, you’re prohibited from benefiting. The Talmud says it’s permitted. I’m allowed to repay his debt. Why? That’s called driving away a lion. What is driving away a lion? Suppose now a lion comes and wants to devour his lamb. Okay? Now he is prohibited from deriving benefit from me. Am I allowed to drive away the lion, to save his lamb? The answer is yes, because he didn’t benefit from me in any positive way; I only prevented him a loss. The lamb was headed for destruction, and I saved the lamb, but he had a lamb and he still has a lamb, he got nothing from me. I only prevented a loss; he didn’t profit from me, I caused—this is permitted. The Talmud says: repaying a debt is driving away a lion. That’s astonishing. What do you mean repaying a debt is driving away a lion? After all, he gained 100 shekels. He owed Yossi 100 shekels; I gave Yossi 100 shekels; now he doesn’t owe. He has 100 shekels more than before. He got those 100 shekels from me. No, he didn’t get them from me. Why? Because he doesn’t have another 100 shekels. Those 100 shekels were his all along; he was just about to lose them because a commandment was incumbent upon him to pay them to Yossi after he received a loan from Yossi. And that’s a commandment, it’s not Yossi’s 100 shekels, it’s his 100 shekels. He has a commandment; I exempted him from that commandment. I gave the 100 shekels and exempted you from a commandment—that’s fine. You had your own 100 shekels and they remain your own 100 shekels; this is driving away a lion. That’s what the Talmud says in Nedarim. Again, this is really an indication that in a state of debt, the lender has nothing with you. There is not something of the lender’s with you. Now look at something beautiful—this is called a loan given to be spent. Usually people don’t understand it this way. Usually they explain “a loan is given to be spent” to mean: there is no concrete thing with me that belongs to you. But clearly there is something that belongs to you. Suppose you lent me 100 shekels. Fine? No specific 100-shekel bill with me belongs to you. Any 100-shekel bill I want I can take and use. Right? Usually that’s how people explain “a loan is given to be spent”—not that there is nothing with me that belongs to you, but that there is no concrete thing with me that belongs to you. What belongs to you is some value. I owe you 100 shekels, but not specific 100 shekels, not a particular coin… But it’s not that I owe you nothing. I want to claim more than that: I owe you nothing. Even something non-concrete I do not owe you. I have a commandment to pay you, to give you gifts afterward. But I don’t owe you anything—not just that I don’t owe you a concrete coin. That’s a novelty. Now I’ll show you. Look, there’s a Maimonides that people really tear their hair out over when they read it; they don’t understand what he’s saying. Maimonides in the Laws of Sale. When the Talmud in Kiddushin says “a loan is given to be spent,” in what context does it arise? Kiddushin 6. Someone who wants to betroth a woman with a loan. I lent a woman money. Fine? So now I seemingly have a debt or money that belongs to me sitting with her, right? Now I want to betroth her with it, to tell her: I forgive you the debt, the money will remain with you, and with that I betroth you. You cannot betroth a woman with a loan, because a loan is given to be spent, because it isn’t mine. Now the simple conception is: a loan is given to be spent because you didn’t give her something concrete. But that conception is strange. If you didn’t give her something concrete, so what? You gave her something non-concrete. After all, to betroth with benefit—is that something concrete? The main thing is that there is some kind of benefit in it. Therefore I say the simpler explanation of the Talmud there is: because there is nothing, not because there is no concrete thing. There is nothing of mine with her; everything is entirely hers. There is only a commandment on her to give me back 100 shekels. I exempted her from the commandment; that is not considered giving her something, that is considered preventing her a loss, exactly like driving away a lion. Therefore she is not betrothed. According to the same logic one could say— One second. So the Talmud says the same applies to a purchase. You also cannot acquire a purchase with a loan, with debt. Fine? That’s what the Talmud says. Just as you can’t betroth a woman with debt, so too in a purchase. And so Reuven—chapter 5, halakhah 4 of the Laws of Sale—“And so Reuven who sold movable items to Shimon for fifty zuz, and Shimon acquired the movable items and became obligated in the payment.” Fine? I sold Oren goods, a chair, and he owes me fifty zuz—the price of the chair. So you became obligated in payment. “And after Shimon became obligated in these fifty zuz, he had wine or an animal or a slave and the like among the other movable goods, and he wanted to sell them.” Now Oren has wine or an animal of some sort and wants to sell them. Fine? “And Reuven said to him: I have fifty shekels with you—you owe me fifty shekels—take those fifty shekels and with that I’ll buy your chair, or your animal or your wine.” “And he said yes—Reuven acquires the movable items wherever they are, even though he did not pull or lift them, because this too is not a common occurrence, and they did not trouble him with pulling.” But if he had a debt owed by him not because of the sale—this is all when I sold him a chair and there are fifty shekels with him that he owes me for the chair. Now I want to give him those fifty shekels in exchange for other goods. That works, says Maimonides. “But if he had a debt owed by him not because of the sale”—the fifty shekels he owes me are because of a loan, not because I sold him something and he hasn’t paid yet, but a loan—“and he said to him: sell me movable goods for the debt I have with you. For those fifty shekels you owe me, sell me your wine and take those fifty shekels you owe me.” “And both agreed”—both agreed. “He does not acquire until he lifts it or pulls a thing that is not usually lifted.” You do not acquire. What is the difference between sale proceeds and debt from a loan? Here everyone tears out their hair. It’s unclear. The Talmud says that one who betroths with a loan is not betrothed, and Maimonides also brings that as law regarding a loan. So why with sale proceeds is it different? What difference does it make? What’s the difference? Actually, very often Maimonides’ view can be understood by checking what the Ri Migash wrote. In places where there is Ri Migash. Because Ri Migash was the teacher of Maimonides’ father. Maimonides met him in childhood. He saw Ri Migash; he writes about him in astonishing superlatives. He says, “I saw the man whose face was like an angel of the Lord of Hosts”; he admires him. And many times the root of incomprehensible views in Maimonides is found in Ri Migash. I have quite a bit of experience with these matters. Really, many, many things that people struggle with in Maimonides. In this case too, it’s the same thing. Ri Migash already makes this distinction. And what’s the idea behind it? I claim the following. Before I make that claim, let me give you another source where people also don’t understand what Maimonides is saying. In tractate Shevi’it, chapter 10 is dedicated to cancellation of debts in the Sabbatical year, and in the Mishnah in tractate Shevi’it at the beginning of the chapter it says as follows: “The Sabbatical year cancels a loan, whether documented or undocumented. A store credit account is not canceled.” Sale proceeds—you owe me money, the Sabbatical year comes—that is not canceled. A loan is. Sale proceeds are not. Let’s say—not proceeds. Again: you owe me money because I lent it to you. The Sabbatical year arrives; the debt is canceled, right? You no longer owe the money. Cancellation of debts. Okay? Now what happens if this is not a debt but sale proceeds? You bought something from me, you owe fifty shekels—that is not canceled. No. It cancels every loan, as they say. No, it is not canceled. “And if he made it into a loan, then it is canceled.” If he turns it into a loan, then it is canceled. “Wages of a hired laborer are not canceled. And if he made it into a loan, then it is canceled,” and so on. And then also fines for rape and seduction and false accusation and all judicial obligations are not canceled. A whole list of things that are not canceled in the seventh year. And there are disputes here; the simple conception is that only an actual loan is certainly canceled; regarding everything else there are all sorts of disputes. Maimonides’ position is that only a loan is canceled; all the other things are not canceled. And Maimonides explains here in his commentary on the Mishnah something that everyone doesn’t quite understand what he wants. “And store credit,” says Maimonides, “is trust in buying and selling between people and shopkeepers, that he takes from him whatever he needs, and when a sum of money accumulates against him he pays it. And this accumulated amount is not canceled in the seventh year because it is not in the manner of debt; the shopkeeper did not sell to him on condition that it become a debt, but rather he sold him little by little until the whole amount accumulated, and then he gives him the money.” Maimonides says: what is store credit? Store credit is not an act of kindness; store credit is simply streamlining. Instead of every time I give you small change and you give me back change and all that, let’s accumulate. End of the week, end of the month, something like that, a significant sum accumulates, you pay me. Not because I’m doing you a favor, it’s not a loan because you lack money, but to make life easier, so there isn’t a line at the grocery, there aren’t problems. Okay? So Maimonides says this is not canceled because it is not in the manner of debt. The meaning of “not in the manner of debt”—you have to ask: what difference does it make whether you owe me this way or that way? My claim is that this is the source for Maimonides also in the Laws of Sale, in this Mishnah, and Maimonides claims the following—and I think one can also see this in the Kesef Mishneh; something may emerge from it that he may mean also in the Laws of Shemittah and Jubilee. A loan is a gift. When I give you a loan of 100 shekels, I gave you a gift. There is a Torah commandment that you give me back a gift of 100 shekels. That commandment expires in the Sabbatical year. You have a commandment to give me back a gift; the Sabbatical year arrives, and that commandment expires. Okay? Now let’s say I deposited with you an envelope containing 100 shekels. Not a loan—a deposit. I gave you 100 shekels in an envelope: watch this for me, I’m going to the market, when I come back I’ll take it from you. Not the market—I’m flying to Australia, okay? The Sabbatical year arrives. Does it become yours? No. Obviously not. Why not? Because it’s mine. The Sabbatical year doesn’t take my money and transfer it to you. The Sabbatical year just drives away a lion. The Sabbatical year only says: there is a commandment on you to give him money; we cancel that commandment, there is no commandment. But money that is mine and sitting with you does not become yours because of cancellation of debts. That is obvious; everyone agrees. Maimonides claims that store credit is a deposit. When you owe me fifty shekels because you bought a chair from me, that is not like fifty shekels I lent you. Fifty shekels that I lent you are yours, because a loan is given to be spent. Those fifty shekels are yours; there is nothing with you that is mine. There is a future commandment on you to give me fifty shekels back as a gift. Fine? If I gave you a sale, sold you a chair, and you owe me fifty shekels, there are fifty shekels of mine with you. It’s a deposit like in the envelope. True, these are not specific fifty shekels; it’s not exactly like a deposit, there are no fifty shekels I can point to and say, wait, wait, that’s mine, don’t spend that one. Of course not. You can do whatever you want, but there is something with you that is mine. What is that something? Value. Value, a concrete object. Remember the abstraction? No concrete object at all. Value of fifty shekels that is with you belongs to me—not any particular coin or bill. You can spend all the coins and bills. No concrete object is with you. But value is. And that’s the difference, because with loans people understand the concept of a loan like this: that there is no concrete thing but value is with you. I say no—that is sale proceeds. In a loan, even value is not with you. There is nothing. A loan is a gift. And with sale proceeds—one second—with sale proceeds there is with you value that belongs to me, not specific money—value. The Mishnah according to Maimonides says: that is basically a deposit. It’s as if I deposited with you fifty shekels in an envelope for safekeeping. Of course that is not canceled in the Sabbatical year. My money does not become yours. Now what difference does it make whether it is concrete or not concrete? After all, this paper isn’t worth anything; it’s a convention, this fifty-shekel bill is a convention. We’re already after the abstraction, we’re already grown-ups, we already know that you can also write 100 shekels in the bank and that also counts as my having 100 shekels. There doesn’t need to be a specific coin or a specific bill. Right? Which is exactly what is written here. Therefore it’s basically a deposit. Deposited with you is value of fifty shekels of mine. Nothing concrete, no coin, no bill of mine is with you, but there is with you something abstract—value of fifty shekels. In what will it be embodied? In what kind of object will I collect from you? What difference does it make? Choose something, worth roughly fifty shekels, that you have in your hand, and repay the debt, pay your grocery bill—that was my fifty shekels. There isn’t currently any specific object. Now look what Maimonides says in the Laws of Sale. There’s no doubt that this is what he means. What Maimonides says is that in the Laws of Sale, if there are sale proceeds with you—you owe me fifty shekels as sale proceeds—I can use that to buy wine from you with that money. Why? Because I gave you fifty shekels that are mine. I paid you fifty shekels—what fifty shekels? My fifty shekels that are with you. Because with sale proceeds there is with you something that belongs to me. So I can use that to buy wine from you. But if this is a loan—I gave you a loan of fifty shekels. You owe me fifty shekels—that’s how we say it, right? There is nothing with you that is mine, not even value. So how can I buy wine with that? I have nothing to buy with. It’s all yours. What did I give you? What did I give you? Nothing. That’s the difference between a loan and sale proceeds. And I think this is the most beautiful illustration of that process of abstraction I described earlier. The process of abstraction I described earlier—what I said was that money is an abstract thing. Money is just the concretization of the concept of value. We determine that this bill or this coin, for us, symbolizes the fact that you have value of one shekel or value of ten shekels or fifty shekels or something like that. Only a symbol. Okay? Now who cares—remove the symbol from here. Why should I care about this symbol? If we know that with you there are fifty shekels that are mine, then with you there is value of fifty shekels that is mine. Whether it has a symbol or not. Even if it has no symbol, what is really with you that belongs to me is not the symbol, but what the symbol expresses, namely the value. With you there is value that is mine. So Maimonides says: then what difference does it make if it’s not a specific coin but value rather than a specific coin? There is still with you something that is mine, something abstract. That abstract something is value. And that is what one buys with. We said: as a result of abstraction, one can buy with money. But after buying with money, we did another abstraction. Now one can buy even without the money. Just mark in the bank that fifty shekels of value passed from me to you. No need to transfer anything physical from me to you. That is exactly what Maimonides says here. Look, even here we already arrive at the final stage, the fourth stage. Remember the stages—what were the four stages? Three—and you said today it’s already a fourth stage, you said. Now the fourth stage. Here Maimonides appears in the fourth stage—or in the Mishnah in Shevi’it if Maimonides is right that this is its interpretation. The first stage was barter, right? After that we suddenly understood there’s this thing called money. We use money, and then the concept of acquisition by money is created as opposed to exchange acquisition. Third stage: wait, wait—but for money, actually goods are also something worth money. You can use goods as money; something worth money is like money. Fourth stage says: you don’t even need the goods. Let’s write it in the bank. The main thing is that we know how much value each person has—what difference does it make? There’s no need for concretizations at all. Neither concretization in the form of money nor concretization through goods. It’s enough that we know that there are fifty shekels of value with you. That’s what Maimonides says. With sale proceeds that’s what happens. In store credit. Store credit means you owe me fifty shekels. What does that mean? That there are fifty shekels of my value with you. It is not embodied in anything. Not in a coin, not in something worth money, not in anything. What difference does embodiment make? Embodiment is only representation. After all, even when there is something that embodies it, what truly is with you that belongs to me? Value. Not the thing that embodies it. So Maimonides says: then even if there is nothing that embodies it, it is still true that with you there is value that is mine. In a loan, even that does not exist. Why was Maimonides important to me here? I could have brought this proof from “a loan is given to be spent.” Not enough. Because “a loan is given to be spent,” most commentators do not understand it this way. Most commentators understand “a loan is given to be spent” the way Maimonides understands store credit: that there is with you value that is mine, only it is not in something concrete, there is no particular coin, any of the coins you can spend. But there is with you value that is mine, you owe me money. And with that you cannot betroth and you cannot purchase because it is abstract, because you need something concrete to buy with. Fine? Therefore from the fact alone that a loan is given to be spent, or that you cannot betroth with a loan, there is no proof. From Maimonides there is decisive proof. Because Maimonides says: all that is true in a loan, but not in store credit. They ask: what’s the difference between that and store credit? In both cases there is with you value that is mine. What’s the difference? There is simply no concrete object, but there is value. So if so, what is the difference between store credit and a loan? Indeed, all the medieval authorities (Rishonim) disagree with Maimonides and say: what’s the difference? Why with store credit and also with a loan can’t you buy with them? What’s the difference? But Maimonides, who draws a distinction, clearly understands the concept of value as abstraction, and therefore he says: in a loan, even that you don’t have. In sale proceeds, I do have that with you—the abstract thing. Okay? And with it one can buy, because according to Maimonides even with an abstract thing one can buy. After all, all money is just the embodiment of the abstract concept of value. So why should I care to buy also with the abstract concept itself, even without the embodiment? According to the medieval authorities (Rishonim), you cannot buy with the abstract concept; it must have a concrete embodiment. In the laws of acquisitions they too understand that there is a concept of value, but in the laws of acquisitions they require something concrete in order to buy. Maimonides does not require that—even with an abstract thing one can buy. In a loan, what you can’t buy with is not because it is not concrete, but because there is nothing with which to buy. There isn’t even something non-concrete; there is nothing. All right? So in Maimonides you see this in the most beautiful way—this is really the age of computers. This is completely virtual money. Not a coin, nothing—just keep track of how much value each person has. That’s all, like what is written in the bank’s computers. That’s it. Okay? Nice. This also has a practical consequence for “here it is” in that whether you can say “here it is” with this thing. “Here it is”—with land you can do “here it is”; land is inherently “here it is” by definition. But money is not “here it is” unless you actually give it, yes. You’re saying that in admitting part of the claim, in a loan—but according to this, in admitting part of the claim in a sale it’s like “here it is.” Because the value already belongs to you even before I gave you the money. The money is only bringing you the symbol, but the value already belonged to you. So admitting part of the claim in a sale according to this should not have generated an oath obligation. I don’t think that’s right. Maimonides even says—well, we’ll look in Ketubot—in the topic of ketubot, where there’s a dispute about one maneh or two hundred, how much he owes her in the ketubah, Maimonides obligates there an oath of admitting part of the claim, when the husband says he owes one maneh and denies two hundred. But that doesn’t matter; it’s an oath. Fine. In any event, that is basically the claim regarding the abstraction of value, money as the abstraction of value. In the very end, we’re left with nothing—like Hershele with the doughnuts. Fine? I think we told that one, no? When he goes into the delicatessen and asks for doughnuts. No doughnuts? You know what, I don’t want doughnuts, bring me rolls instead. Fine, he takes the rolls, eats them, finishes, leaves the store without paying anything. The storekeeper stops him and says: Hershele, you didn’t pay! He says: what do I need to pay for? Rolls? You ate rolls. I told you, I gave them to you in place of the doughnuts. But for the doughnuts you didn’t pay. I didn’t eat the doughnuts, why should I pay for them? That’s exactly what happens here. We concretize value by means of money. Right? Now we say: actually there’s no money; we’re left with value, and in the end we’re left with nothing—and that nothing acquires. Somehow we created money, gave up money, returned to the original state—but it’s not the original state, it’s a different state. It’s a different state. There is money here, but there is no money here. There isn’t—only something written in the bank’s computers. Nothing passed here from hand to hand, there is no money, there is nothing. Right, but the abstraction of the concept of money helped us understand the situation better. If we hadn’t passed through that stage, the bank would never have come into being. The bank arose only because once there was money. You couldn’t have created the bank immediately after the world of barter. It wouldn’t have worked. You must understand that there is such a concept as value-ness. Called value. Then you translate it into money, then you remove the money, then you say something worth money is like money, and then you say even without something worth money, as Maimonides does, there is with you value of fifty shekels that is mine. The next stage is just to write that there is with you value of fifty shekels that is mine. Once you write it, that’s called a bank account. In a bank account it is written that the bank has value of fifty shekels that is mine. There are no fifty shekels there that are mine; it is only written that such value from within the bank belongs to me. Right? That is exactly what is written, exactly what happens in banks. After we threw away the rolls, threw away the doughnuts, in the end it seems as though we’re left with nothing—but no, we’re left with something. In the end we’re left with something. We threw away the thing, the value, we replaced it with money. After that we threw away the money itself as well, so apparently we were left with nothing. We were not left with nothing; we were left with value. We were left with value. We created money, threw away the money, and were left with something. Okay? This is a beautiful example of the processes of abstraction and concretization I spoke about earlier, the dialectic between them: that you always do an abstraction and then do a concretization, and abstraction is always for the sake of concretization. And in the end here we see it in the most beautiful way, because this concretization is a result of the abstraction of the concept of value, so you can also dispense with the concretization and remain with the abstract thing. What’s the problem? This concretization concretizes something abstract. Once you give up that concrete thing, you remain with the abstraction. You only needed the stage of concretization in order to understand that there was something there, to sharpen for people that there is a commodity. By the way, something like this also regarding information. I spoke today about information as a commodity. Right? Registered patents, copyrights, all kinds of things like that. According to Jewish law, it is commonly thought that there is no such thing. There is no ownership over information, and therefore all the entanglement of all the decisors—what to do with copyright from a halakhic standpoint. Maybe the law of the land, maybe some rabbinic solutions, or such and such technical solutions. But there is no solution from the fundamental law. How can an idea belong to the one who conceived it? By law, it doesn’t belong. So I said—when I wrote an article in Techumin once, we talked about this one of the previous times—that here too we perform abstraction. The claim is basically that information is a kind of object. And therefore it is something tangible enough for ownership to apply. What Maimonides says in the Laws of Sale, that ownership cannot apply to something abstract, and following the Talmud—what examples does he bring? He brings the smell of an apple, the appearance of honey, all sorts of things like that. Ownership cannot apply to that. Why can’t ownership apply there? Because those are not objects. They are not even abstract objects. They are not objects at all. They are properties. There is a difference between the smell of the apple—the smell is not an abstract object. The smell is a property of the apple. Or the appearance of honey, yes, the color of honey. The color of honey is not an abstract object. It is a property of a tangible object. The tangible object is the honey. And when one says there is no ownership over an abstract thing, the meaning is: there is no ownership over a property of a tangible thing detached from ownership over the tangible thing itself. Whoever owns the honey also owns its appearance. Whoever owns the apple also owns its smell. You cannot separate out ownership over a property of a thing while someone else owns the thing itself. Just as there is no ownership of fruits, by the way—that’s the reason there is no ownership of fruits in Jewish law. There is ownership of the body for the fruits. There is no ownership of fruits. Because fruits are a property of the thing. Not the—fruits before they came? No, no, fruits after they came are already not a problem. Now what happens with information? People always say that information is something abstract, and as Maimonides says, from the standpoint of Jewish law there is no ownership over an abstract thing. So that’s not true. Ownership concerns an abstract object. There are abstract entities. The Holy One, blessed be He, is an abstract object. Light is an abstract thing. But it is a thing. It is an object that physics deals with. It is an object; it is not a property. Okay? But it is an object with no mass. It has no location in space. It is abstract, but it is an object. It can be the subject of a sentence. Right? The subject of a sentence is some kind of being. Light moves at such-and-such a speed. Who is the subject of the sentence? Light. But when I say the color of the honey is such-and-such, the subject of the sentence is the honey. The color is a property of the honey. It is the attribute in that sentence. The predicate, the attribute, doesn’t matter. Right? Meaning there are two kinds of abstract things. One of them is not an abstract thing at all; it is a property. The color of this table is not an abstract thing; it is a property of the table. It is not some kind of being that simply has no mass. It is not a being. It is a property of a being. But information is a kind of being. Only an abstract being. It has no mass. It is not located anywhere. But it is a being. Over that there is Torah-level ownership. That is my claim. There is Torah-level ownership over information, and therefore copyright is Torah-level law, and someone who violates it is stealing, fully and in every respect. Like taking someone’s property. That is the claim. And it is exactly the same thing I’m saying here. Value too—people think—what do people think? In the first stage, value was a property of things. Value was not something, not even something abstract. It was a property of things. A tomato has the property that five like it can be exchanged for a chair. That is a property of the tomato. It has no independent existence. What does abstraction do? Abstraction says: wait, wait, wait—this property, just as Plato did with his Ideas. What is Plato’s world of Ideas? Horseness is a property of the horse. Plato turned the property into an object. Into a being. He said the Idea of horseness is a kind of being, called an Idea, and it exists in the world of Ideas. Okay? That is exactly the abstraction I’m talking about. Value is not a property of the tomato. It is a kind of being. There is such a concept as value, and money is its tangible embodiment. It is hard for us to deal with abstract things. By the way, I spoke about this once. I once thought that the pursuit of money is idolatry. We worship abstract things—how? By concretizing them, like an idol. The idol concretizes some spiritual force, and in this way idolatry is directed to the spiritual thing. You can’t worship the spiritual thing; you need something tangible to represent it. Right? Money is a representation of something tangible? No, money is a representation of an abstract thing. When you start worshipping the representation instead of relating to the thing it represents, that is a kind of idolatry. You want the power of the money, you want to buy something with it, to benefit from it—that’s perfectly fine. When you chase the money itself, that is idolatry. Because you turn the representation into something that has value in itself, instead of something that serves as the concretization of the abstract thing. And that is exactly the abstraction they made there: value stopped being a property of things and became a kind of being—an abstract being, but a being. And therefore it can be that with you there is value of fifty shekels that is mine, even though no coin embodies it. That is called there being something of mine with you, and therefore ownership can apply to it—exactly like information. Okay?