God and the World – Lesson 9

Table of Contents

• Policy Change and Withdrawal
• Science, Scripture, and Maimonides
• The Psychological Explanation for the Opposition
• Bans, Spinoza, and Concern About Practical Consequences
• Tools for Resolving Contradictions: Lex Specialis and Two Verses
• Point of Departure, Forced Answers, and Philosophy of Science
• Judging Favorably: Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, Bartenura, and Rabbenu Yonah
• Theological Implication: The Problem of Evil and the Distinction Between Human and Natural Evil
• Free Choice, the Slippery Slope, and Collective Responsibility
• Natural Evil, Laws of Nature, and the Burden of Proof
• Questions from the Audience and Responses

Summary

General Overview

The text argues that the religious reality has changed such that the Holy One, blessed be He, is less involved in the world, and presents this as a “policy change” consistent with indications such as the absence of prophecy and open miracles. It prefers to maintain both the scientific worldview and loyalty to Scripture by arguing that what existed in the biblical period does not exist today in the same way, and explains that the uproar against this position stems mainly from psychological needs and from fear of practical consequences for religious commitment. It then proposes a framework for dealing with contradictions between principles one is committed to, by means of rules of decision and reconciliation, and from there develops a theodicy that distinguishes between human evil and natural evil: human evil is attributed to free choice and humanity’s collective responsibility, while natural evil is attributed to a rigid system of natural laws for which there may simply be no disaster-free alternative.

Policy Change and Withdrawal

The text suggests that the Holy One, blessed be He, is slowly withdrawing from the world, and that there are agreed-upon indications of this, such as the fact that today there is no prophecy and no open miracles. It argues that if it is already accepted that there was open involvement in the past and that it diminished, then it is less radical to claim that on the hidden plane too, the involvement has diminished or disappeared. It presents a reversal of the burden-of-proof argument and claims that the “presumption” of involvement can change when there are general signs of change, and therefore this is not a claim that requires especially strong proof.

Science, Scripture, and Maimonides

The text presents a dilemma between the scientific point of view and the traditional point of view, and refuses to assume automatically that the biblical side prevails. It brings Maimonides as an example that when one becomes convinced of a philosophical or scientific thesis, one interprets verses creatively—such as taking verses about corporeality out of their plain meaning, and like his statement that had he been convinced of the eternity of the world, he would have taken the verses of Genesis out of their plain meaning as well. It sharpens the point that his own proposal is less radical than Maimonides’, because it does not take verses out of their plain meaning, but rather claims that the verses describe a reality that existed then and has since changed.

The Psychological Explanation for the Opposition

The text accepts Marx’s statement that religion is the opium of the masses, in the sense that belief in providence is calming and gives a sense that there is “an owner of the manor” in a cruel world, but rejects the conclusion that this therefore makes the belief false. It argues that the intense reactions against his position do not stem mainly from a biblical difficulty, because the interpretive tradition of the Sages and of Maimonides includes even more drastic moves, but rather from damage to the religious experience and to the feeling of interaction with the Holy One, blessed be He, and from personal distress.

Bans, Spinoza, and Concern About Practical Consequences

The text tells of a conference at Tel Aviv University called “Spinoza, the First Secular Jew,” and describes in it a secular search for an authority figure somewhat like a “rebbe.” It argues that pantheism, in his eyes, is atheism, but adds an explanation according to which the opposition to Spinoza did not stem from understanding his philosophy, but from abandoning halakhic / of Jewish law commitment—similar to the claim that someone placed outside the fold is someone who abandoned Jewish law. He compares this to Shabbetai Tzvi and to Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz, and argues that clinging to ideas is sometimes a cover for the motivation of fear over practical consequences—for example, the fear that people will not keep commandments if they do not see providence as interaction.

Tools for Resolving Contradictions: Lex Specialis and Two Verses

The text proposes ways of deciding when one is committed to two contradictory sides, and brings the principle of lex specialis, according to which the specific rule overrides the general rule so as not to empty the law of its content, with the example of the obligation to stone Sabbath desecrators as against “You shall not murder.” He connects this to the interpretive principle, “Two verses that contradict one another [remain so] until a third verse comes and decides between them,” and presents a dispute between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, where Rabbi Ishmael reconciles the verses by dividing the contexts. He quotes the Raavad in his commentary to Sifra and argues that the preferable tendency is a reconciliation that leaves both sides intact, so that “all our desires remain in our hands.”

Point of Departure, Forced Answers, and Philosophy of Science

The text states that a person’s starting point determines what will be considered forced and what will be considered reasonable, similar to monetary law, where the money remains with the current holder. It argues that even if the explanation of a policy change seems forced, that is legitimate when the scientific picture is presumed correct, and compares this to the way science itself operates. It cites Karl Popper on falsification, and Thomas Kuhn, who explains that scientists do not throw out a successful theory because of one anomaly, but add ad hoc explanations until anomalies accumulate to a critical threshold that leads to a paradigm shift. He uses this to justify creative interpretation of the Torah in the face of scientific conclusions.

Judging Favorably: Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, Bartenura, and Rabbenu Yonah

The text brings a witticism in the name of Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, that the Holy One, blessed be He, created a “crooked intellect” in order to judge people favorably, but rejects that as inaccurate. It quotes Bartenura, who states that one judges favorably only when the matter is evenly balanced and there is no decisive indication, and that a person established as wicked may be judged unfavorably; and he expands this with Rabbenu Yonah, who distinguishes between a completely righteous person, an average person, and a completely wicked person. He illustrates this with an example about Rabbi Shach seemingly chasing someone with a knife, and concludes that judging favorably means using straight common sense, not inventing detached interpretations. He parallels this to the Chafetz Chaim’s statement, “one should be concerned, but it is forbidden to accept it as true,” and to a political example of the presumption of innocence versus public judgment.

Theological Implication: The Problem of Evil and the Distinction Between Human and Natural Evil

The text states that if the Holy One, blessed be He, is not involved, then the problem of evil has to be rethought, and it divides the problem into human evil and natural evil. It argues that human evil is easier to explain because it is the result of free choice, and brings the story of Rabbi Amital and Abba Kovner, in which Abba Kovner loses faith in the Holy One, blessed be He, because of the Holocaust, while Rabbi Amital loses faith in man. He presents this as a confrontation between two religious conceptions, and argues that a conception that distances the acts of atrocity from the Holy One, blessed be He, can prevent religious abandonment, even though he admits that the question of why the Holy One, blessed be He, does not intervene in extreme cases remains a difficulty.

Free Choice, the Slippery Slope, and Collective Responsibility

The text develops a slippery-slope argument according to which, if one expects intervention in extreme cases, there is no clear limit to where that stops, and therefore consistent intervention would nullify free choice and empty the value of choosing the good. It formulates that “no evil comes down from above,” in the sense that human evil is man’s doing, while the very possibility of choosing—even choosing evil—is an absolute good, because without it there is no morality and no meaning to actions. It adds that responsibility for the Holocaust and for atrocities is attributed not only to the individual criminal but also to humanity as a collective, and brings examples for this from the Maharal on the people of Shechem, from a biography of Stalin in which no individual can resist but the collective enables the system, and also from a dispute surrounding Israel Independence Day as a claim of collective responsibility for what was done with the “gift.”

Natural Evil, Laws of Nature, and the Burden of Proof

The text argues that the world is run according to fixed laws of nature in order to enable human existence that is not chaotic, and therefore the question is why the laws of nature include tsunamis, epidemics, and volcanoes. It offers a “mathematical” claim that perhaps there simply is no rigid system of natural laws that leads to the same goals but without disasters, and it shifts the burden of proof to the challenger to show that such an alternative exists. It claims intuitively that such a system would require “discontinuous clearing,” and therefore is not plausible, and concludes by saying that the question of whether this limits the Holy One, blessed be He, will be discussed in the next lecture.

Questions from the Audience and Responses

The text brings a question about a story in the Talmud / Talmudic text in which the Holy One, blessed be He, tells a poor man that if He were to change his situation, He would have to “create the world מחדש,” and responds that this is evidence for his point—that alternative laws of nature would create other problems, and therefore the present world is the optimal one. It brings another question: why the great sages of Israel did not raise arguments of this kind. He answers that this is a question for them; he does not rely on authority but on arguments, and it is also not true that all the sages thought there was comprehensive involvement. He concludes with the claim that language about the Holy One, blessed be He, is always human language, and in our terms we speak of involvement or non-involvement; and he clarifies that he is arguing for non-involvement, not for the absence of existence, and then it ends with “Shabbat shalom.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. Last time I dealt a bit with the proposal I made for how to reconcile the view that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not involved—the view I presented earlier together with the biblical and early sources—and I suggested that maybe what we have here is a change in policy: that the Holy One, blessed be He, is gradually withdrawing from the world. And I said there are also various indications of this that are agreed upon and that have nothing to do with the debate over what I’m talking about here, namely providence. For example, that there is no longer prophecy, or that there are no longer open miracles. Meaning, in any case we see that the Holy One, blessed be He, is in some sense less involved in the world, in less interaction with what happens in the world. And if that’s so, then it seems to me much less radical to claim that on the hidden plane too He is less involved. If He is withdrawing, then He is withdrawing. Meaning, this is no longer—people take these claims very hard because what I’m saying goes against explicit verses. But by the same token, saying that today there is no prophecy and no open miracles also goes against explicit verses. There are explicit verses saying that there is prophecy and that the Holy One, blessed be He, performs miracles. Fine, that is apparently what existed in the biblical period, but it changed. And once it changed, then in principle I don’t see why one couldn’t claim that His hidden involvement too, the lesser one, also declined or disappeared.

And my claim was basically that there is some sort of advantage here—contrary to what people usually think—because the burden of proof, they always tell me, rests on me, since the presumption is that the Holy One, blessed be He, is involved; that’s what is written in the Torah. I want to claim that today it doesn’t happen? Bring proof. Meaning, the burden of proof is on you, because I’m going against the accepted view. But what I’m actually claiming is, as I said there, that the presumption can change. Meaning, in the end, when I have various indications that this whole business changed anyway regardless of this particular debate, then in this area too I no longer see it as such a problematic claim or one that requires such heavy proof. Yes, so apparently what is described in the Torah was true then and changed. Meaning, today it’s no longer like that—at least not with the same intensity or the same force.

Beyond that, I said there is some kind of dilemma here between the scientific point of view and the traditional, Torah-based point of view—I don’t know exactly what to call it. And when faced with that dilemma, we have to think about how to handle it. In the end, once I am committed to both sides, it is not automatic that I choose the biblical side and then somehow make do with science. I also believe in the scientific worldview. So by the same token one can say: I accept science, and I’ll figure out the Bible afterward. And I brought Maimonides on corporeality and on eternity, where he says that if he were convinced about eternity, then he would read the verses in Genesis non-literally. Meaning, for him the scientific outlook, let’s say, is a more reliable basis to rely on when we want to talk about facts, and facts are not derived from the Bible. So if the Bible doesn’t fit, then use creative interpretation. That’s not the point. Regarding corporeality he says it works exactly the other way. Corporeality—the claim is that the Bible essentially describes God as corporeal—and Maimonides arrives philosophically at the conclusion that God is not corporeal, and therefore he reads the biblical verses non-literally. But Maimonides’ mode of thinking, both on corporeality and on the issue of eternity, is actually what I am saying here. When I look at the world, for me the proper tool for learning about it is the scientific tool, observation, scientific reasoning, scientific research. After I reach a scientific conclusion that doesn’t fit what appears in the Torah, if I am convinced on the scientific level, then I will interpret the Torah creatively.

Here I’m not even arguing for creative interpretation of the Torah. I’m simply saying that what is written in the Torah did indeed happen at that time—or at least it could have happened—but that it changed. The policy of the Holy One, blessed be He, changed, and today it no longer happens in the same way. So this is even less radical than what Maimonides is trying to suggest, because he says: let’s take the verses away from their plain meaning. I’m not taking the verses away from their plain meaning. The verses remain as they are. The verses can remain as they are—at least for the sake of the discussion, and I’m willing to discuss that too—but at least for the sake of the discussion, the verses can remain as they are. I’m only claiming that that was then, and it does not exist today. Therefore I don’t see why people become so agitated when they read what I write—why there are these sharp arguments, why people take what I say in this context as some kind of personal offense. It really doesn’t seem to me to be anything so far-reaching.

True, there is—maybe I didn’t talk about this last time, so I’ll add it here—there is some psychological aspect here. As Marx already said, our teacher Rabbi Karl, religion is the opium of the masses. And in a certain sense he’s right. He’s right in the sense that religious faith helps a great many people psychologically, calms them down. They feel they are in good hands and that someone is taking care of them, and that is convenient for us. It’s convenient for us to live in a world that is not Kafkaesque, where we are tossed around among blind natural forces that do with us whatever they want. Rather, there is some ruler of the palace, some master of the house who watches over things and makes sure that what needs to happen happens, and that we won’t get hit too hard. So it is very comforting for people to think that the Holy One, blessed be He, is involved. And in that sense I agree that religion has an aspect of opium for the masses.

The conclusion that therefore it’s probably not true, because people adopt it only for psychological reasons—that is already a logical leap I do not accept. I agree that there are psychological reasons to adopt belief. I do not agree that therefore the belief is probably false and people are just deluding themselves. Not true. Sometimes something that is convenient for me to hold is also, by coincidence, true. Meaning, it is convenient for me to hold the view that whipped cream is tasty, and by coincidence whipped cream really is tasty. Meaning, it doesn’t have to be that if something is convenient for me, that means it’s false. Too good to be true, as they say. No—it can be convenient and also true. So I agree with Marx that religion is the opium of the masses; I do not agree with his conclusion that therefore it is probably not true and is just a fiction people created for themselves.

But for our purposes, what I want to claim is that in my view this fierce struggle, the wars people wage against my view of providence—the stormy reactions on the website and at the conference we held at Bar-Ilan for the publication of the trilogy and so on, where people fought with great fury and saw these statements as completely unacceptable—these reactions do not stem from the problem of the sources. With the sources, one can manage much more easily than what Maimonides does to the sources, and than what the Sages do to the sources. Forget Maimonides. “An eye for an eye” means monetary compensation, and “until I come to my lord in Seir” means in the future to come, and similarly the Sages do with the sources whatever they want. So it seems to me I am offering really conservative proposals compared to what sages throughout the generations have done with the Bible. I’m simply saying: the Bible means what it says, only today the policy has changed. It doesn’t sound so radical to me. So what makes people go to jihad over this issue?

It seems to me that what causes this is that it really does somewhat empty out their religious world. Because if the Holy One, blessed be He, is not involved, then in what sense do I stand before Him? In what sense is religious service some kind of two-way interaction between me and the Holy One, blessed be He? And of course there is also that feeling of calm, or opium, that divine providence gives people in our cruel world. It is very comforting for us to think that there is some great hand here making sure everything is run properly. Let’s just say that in quite a few cases that hand fails a little, if it is here, and therefore—I don’t know—maybe it calms people, but factually I’m not sure there is any basis for that calm. In any event, once again, I don’t like descending into psychologism, so this is just a parenthetical remark. I’m not trying to make that claim as a substantive argument in the debate. I’m only trying to say that my position, which is presented as a very, very radical one, does not sound to me particularly radical, and the cries of outrage against it, in my view, do not stem from the radical nature of the position or from the sources, but rather more from personal distress. I’m just closing the parenthesis.

And that reminds me that once I was at an amusing conference many years ago—about thirty years ago already—at Tel Aviv University called “Spinoza, the First Secular Jew.” I’ve mentioned this in several contexts already; it was a very amusing conference in many respects. People stood there on stage, various lecturers and so on, and talked about secular people looking for a rabbi for themselves, basically. Meaning, Spinoza was the Moses of the secularists. So they tried to show that Spinoza was indeed the first secular prophet, and questions came from the audience like what Spinoza would say about our situation today, and all kinds of questions of the sort you hear in the religious world—what Maimonides or what Moses would say about our situation today. It was really an amusing anthropological experience.

In any event, one of the speakers there—I think it was someone, Matzor Miyehud, something from the University of Haifa, I think—spoke there about the question of why people went after Spinoza. What is the meaning of the bans that various rabbis and religious thinkers imposed on Spinoza? Now I, for example, think Spinoza was an atheist, so there’s no need to search too hard for explanations, because pantheism in my view is atheism; it’s the same thing, a synonym, just a word game, the difference between them. But he explained there that basically—and I think in that sense, if I remember correctly, because it really was many years ago, but if not then I’ll say it in my own name—that most of those who excommunicated him had no idea about Spinoza’s philosophy. I assume they also did not understand his writings, did not read his writings, and did not deal at all with that kind of material. Meaning, most rabbis throughout the generations—halakhic decisors, commentators, rabbis—did not engage in philosophical material, did not read works of that kind. How would they know the subtleties of Spinoza’s view, and to what extent it does or does not fit, and all kinds of things of that sort? They banned him because in the end he left his halakhic commitment, that’s all.

This is also a claim of Leibowitz, which he repeats many times: no person was ever expelled from the fold unless he abandoned halakhic commitment. Worldviews never really bothered anyone. You hang it on worldviews, but in the end it’s like with Sabbatai Zevi. In the end, the problem they found with his kabbalistic teaching was not really the reason they went after him. The reason they went after him was his deviation from Jewish law, that’s all. The later focus on the ideological dimensions—that he is a heretic and says this, and Kabbalah says that—those are subtle kabbalistic nuances because of which you expel a person from the fold? Come on, that’s really nonsense. In the case of Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz they found more or less, apparently, the same kabbalistic statements—not that I understand those nuances, but that’s at least what I gather from the controversies. And Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz, although they did try there to classify him as a Sabbatean, no one today accepts that. Why? Because Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz remained committed to Jewish law. He was a Torah scholar, an important halakhic decisor, also an important preacher; I don’t know if he was an important philosopher—I don’t know, his books are more homiletic. But therefore no one thought to put him outside the fold, even though perhaps in his kabbalistic conceptions he was like Sabbatai Zevi. Perhaps—I don’t know; again, I’m not sufficiently expert. I think the appeal to ideas is often a cover for a different motivation when people go after someone. When people go after someone, they are basically worried about the practical consequences of something he says, about a lack of religious commitment.

Something similar is often brought up regarding me too—the concern, why should people keep commandments if they don’t think the Holy One, blessed be He, is in interaction with them? And so the concern is really about the impact of the ideas, and the debate against the content does not really reflect a genuine disagreement about the content or arguments about the content, but only excuses. In the end, it is a debate that begins and ends on the practical plane and in halakhic concerns, and so on. Fine, so that is just a supplementary remark to last time.

I want only to add one more remark, because this dilemma between what I called the scientific perspective and the biblical perspective really does raise—and I spoke about this—the question of the burden of proof. What do we do when there is such a dilemma, when we are committed to both sides? How exactly do we solve it? This depends very, very much on the question of how committed you feel to each of the two sides. Very often you choose the side to which you are more committed, and somehow you interpret the other side creatively or something like that. That’s one possibility. A second possibility is to decide such a dilemma by a consideration of—in the context of the science of freedom, in the context of free choice I spoke about this—a consideration of lex specialis. Meaning, the question is how I can resolve the contradiction in a way that leaves me with all my desires in hand, not half my desires in hand. Right?

For example, in the legal world it is accepted that one should prefer the more specific principle; the specific principle always overrides a general principle. For example, there is an obligation to stone Sabbath violators, and there is a prohibition against murder. On the face of it there is a contradiction between two halakhic commands of the Torah. So I have two options. If I take “Do not murder” seriously, then I need to give up the obligation to stone a Sabbath violator. If I am committed to the obligation to stone a Sabbath violator, then I need to give up “Do not murder.” What do we do in such a situation? So our cousins, the jurists, tell us—and this is really simple intuition, they just conceptualized it—that the more specific principle overrides the more general principle. Meaning, the obligation to stone Sabbath violators is a specific obligation. The prohibition against killing in general is a general prohibition. One should always prefer the specific obligation over the general obligation. What is the idea behind this? Because if the general obligation prevailed, then the obligation to stone Sabbath violators would be completely emptied of content. It would in fact be wholly inapplicable; it would drop off our code of law. Because every time you kill a Sabbath violator, you are actually violating “Do not murder,” and after all there is a verse that says, “Whoever profanes it shall surely be put to death.” So you can’t erase that verse from the Torah.

On the other hand, if I adopt the obligation to stone Sabbath violators but give up “Do not murder,” that doesn’t mean I’ve erased the verse “Do not murder” from the Torah. “Do not murder” remains. In the context of Sabbath violators it is qualified: there one should kill. Okay? So clearly this solution is preferable because it preserves both verses; I keep both sides in force, both the side of “Do not murder” and the side of the obligation to stone Sabbath violators. Therefore the more specific principle is always stronger. And this is true—if you look at life, you’ll see we work this way all the time. Even in a law book, when there is a contradiction between a specific law and a general law, clearly I prefer the specific law because it speaks specifically about this case. The general law talks about many cases, so perhaps in this case it does not apply. It is obvious that this is a much more reasonable interpretation. But what underlies this interpretation is that I always prefer the resolution that will preserve both conceptions in which I believe; that is why I entered into this conflict, this tension—to preserve both conceptions as they are.

Now, the resolution I propose—contrary to what others say: okay, so I’m faithful to the Torah, everything is in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He, and what about science? Throw it in the trash. That’s it, too bad. And conversely, if I accept science, then throw the Holy One, blessed be He, or the tradition or the Bible in the trash. I say no. I have a resolution: the Bible remains intact, but the policy has changed, and therefore there is no problem at all; today I can adopt the scientific view in full. And because of that, it seems to me that in this sense the idea of lex specialis—it’s not exactly lex specialis, but it’s the idea of lex specialis—that idea basically says that I can remain… if I find two verses that contradict each other until a third verse comes and decides between them. There is a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) about how to interpret this hermeneutic rule. There are those who—I think this already begins among the Tannaim. It’s a dispute between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael. And Rabbi Akiva—wherever you find an Akivan midrash from the school of Rabbi Akiva that uses the rule of two verses that contradict one another, and there aren’t many by the way, only a few—you’ll see that what he does is this: there is a third verse that goes like one of those two verses, and it decides the matter. Then it turns out that two verses decide against the one. And what about the one? Then why was it written, if it isn’t true? That requires analysis; I don’t know.

Rabbi Ishmael says otherwise. For Rabbi Ishmael, whenever he handles two verses that contradict one another, he basically finds a verse that mediates between them. The third verse does not join one side and decide against the other; rather, it offers an explanation that there is no contradiction here. This verse speaks about this context, and that verse speaks about that context. Therefore the Raavad, in his commentary on the Sifra—at the beginning of the Sifra there are the thirteen hermeneutic principles of Rabbi Ishmael—the Raavad basically claims that “two verses that contradict one another” is also the basis for how we resolve contradictions in the Bible even without any connection to a third verse. Even without a third verse, if there is a contradiction in the Bible, I find a solution, I reconcile it: this one deals with this context and that one deals with that aspect, and therefore there is no contradiction. On what is this ability to reconcile contradictions based? On that very rule of two verses that contradict one another. Of course, that is according to Rabbi Ishmael’s interpretation and not Rabbi Akiva’s.

I’m saying that for our purposes, what I think is that Rabbi Akiva’s interpretation is much weaker in essence, because it leaves one verse unexplained, a verse that is not true. There are two verses that prove that the verse—after all there is such a verse—so for Rabbi Akiva it remains unresolved. Rabbi Akiva isn’t alarmed by contradictions or by unresolved questions; yes, he sees a fox emerging from the Holy of Holies and laughs. Therefore Rabbi Akiva was a person who was not frightened by contradictions. But Rabbi Ishmael says, “The Torah speaks in human language”; we work with our intellect and our logic, and if we can reconcile both verses, then we do not decide that one is right and the other wrong—we reconcile them. We are simply preserving things so that all our desires remain in our hands and not half of them in our hands. And therefore it is preferable to find a resolution that preserves both faith in the Bible and faith in science, and everything is fine. So it seems to me that here my proposal is really called for.

One final remark concerning the question of how one deals with contradictions, or what one does when I have a conflict between two principles in both of which I believe. Here in this matter, I’ll say this first in a general way. It is clear—as I mentioned earlier—that if there is a position that seems to me clearly correct, then when someone raises an argument that contradicts it, I will resort to far-fetched explanations, and that’s not a problem; it is perfectly okay. Meaning, a person’s starting point when he approaches a discussion is very important for how the discussion proceeds. If my starting point is a scientific one, and now someone comes and says to me, “Yes, but the Torah says otherwise,” then I will interpret the Torah creatively. If my starting point is complete trust in the Bible as literally true—as it is written—then when someone raises a scientific argument against it, I will find a creative interpretation of science, or I will reject science, or something like that. Meaning, very often the outcome of the debate is determined by the question of what your starting point is, because the arguments themselves in both directions can be given different weights, can be interpreted in different ways, and by themselves are not enough to decide the discussion. In the end, what decides the discussion is what is already established for you as true, as in monetary law: there is evidence this way, evidence that way, or there is no evidence either way—what do we do? We leave the money with the current possessor. Meaning, the starting point often determines the outcome of the discussion. Here too it is like that.

And therefore, even if we say that the answer I propose is a far-fetched one—that there was a change of policy on the part of the Holy One, blessed be He, yes, that He withdrew from the world—but as long as this is what helps me remain with the scientific conception in which I believe in its plain sense, without creative interpretations, then even though this thing in itself is far-fetched—and again, I claim it is not far-fetched; I explained that earlier—now I am adding another layer: even if it were far-fetched, so what? If I really think I have strong grounds for the scientific conception, it seems correct to me, and I’m unwilling to give it up, then it’s no surprise that I resort to far-fetched explanations when something attacks it. There is nothing wrong with that. That is indeed how people behave, and it is not dishonesty. Since if I believe—if I trust the scientific conception, that trust is based on criteria; meaning, I have had good experience with it. I didn’t just decide to believe it; there are good reasons to believe it. So now I adopt it, and if something attacks it, I’ll find a far-fetched explanation.

It’s somewhat similar to what Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, explains there: that Karl Popper’s description of the scientific process—the way Karl Popper described the scientific process—Karl Popper says, look, we observe certain phenomena, and a certain explanation is proposed for them, some theory that explains them. This theory cannot be proved; it can only be refuted. Because if I say, for example, “All ravens are black”—a classic example of a scientific theory—how will you prove that theory? You can never bring all the ravens, and you also cannot know whether you’ve seen all the ravens; maybe there is a raven you haven’t seen. There is no way to prove a scientific theory. But if you bring one pink raven, then you have refuted the theory. Meaning, a scientific theory is refutable but not provable. That is Karl Popper’s well-known claim.

And now when Karl Popper describes how research proceeds, or the scientific process, he basically says this: we propose hypotheses; as long as they stand the empirical test, fine. Not that we say they are true, but rather they have not yet been refuted. And if there is a particular experiment that challenges the theory, that contradicts what the theory claims, then the theory falls. That is Karl Popper’s claim. Thomas Kuhn says this is not an accurate description, it is not faithful to reality—and by the way he is completely right about this, despite all my antagonism toward Thomas Kuhn and his doctrine, on this point he is completely right. What do you mean? Science does not work like that. Suppose I have a theory that is a good theory, that has passed many tests, that explains a broad range of phenomena. Now I have found one phenomenon that contradicts it. In my life I am not throwing that theory away. So okay, that requires analysis. I need to think; maybe in that context the theory is not right, but I am not throwing away the theory. I come up with ad hoc excuses, one explanation or another, but I don’t give up the theory. And there are dozens of examples of this in the history of science. I find strained explanations in order to defend the theory.

When does a theory get replaced? Thomas Kuhn says: when there are too many things that challenge it, when there are too many phenomena and experiments that are not explained by the theory. Then there is some critical threshold of problems from which onward I say, okay, this theory probably needs to be replaced; let’s look for a better theory. But as long as we haven’t reached the critical threshold, then I add epicycles and deferents, I add all kinds of patches, and say okay, so the theory doesn’t work here, so it works there, or maybe in cases like these it doesn’t apply, or I simply remain with an unresolved question. But in the end I do not throw away the theory. Here too it is the same. The scientific theory works well. We got to the moon with it. It is not something I throw away lightly. And if the scientific perspective tells me something, and there are other things that contradict it, then I find creative interpretations for those other things. In effect Maimonides—who had much weaker science than we do—said the same thing: to find a creative interpretation of the Torah if it contradicts his scientific or philosophical conclusions.

Now for us today science is much more established, much stronger. We understand nature much better than Maimonides did. Maimonides had no idea about modern science; he cites bizarre Aristotelian science there. And if this well-grounded science is convincing enough to me—and it seems to me that every reasonable and rational person does indeed accept scientific findings on a basic level, not absolutely and not always, but on a basic level—then when there is a thesis that threatens or an argument that threatens, you find creative interpretations, you find strained explanations, and you say okay, I’m sticking with mine, unless there are too many refutations of the matter and then I need to change paradigms. Okay, that is already another discussion.

And here I’ll bring in the Mishnah in tractate Avot, which is the basis for this issue. I already wrote about this in articles too. The Mishnah says in chapter 1, mishnah 6: Joshua ben Perahiah says, “Provide yourself with a rabbi, acquire for yourself a friend, and judge every person favorably.” Right, so what is “judge every person favorably”? Once they asked Rabbi Chaim of Brisk: why did the Holy One, blessed be He, create in His world a crooked mind? Every single thing, even a mosquito that was created in the world, we have received by tradition that there is a reason for it. Why was a crooked mind created? Rabbi Chaim said: in order to judge favorably. When you see a person doing something that looks bad, use all your creative intelligence, even crooked interpretation, in order to make him come out looking good. Judge him favorably. That is this Mishnah. A nice little homiletic saying, but not accurate. Why? Let’s look at what the commentators say about this Mishnah.

Take the Bartenura, for example. The Bartenura says this: “And judge every person favorably”—when the matter is in the balance and there is no decisive tilt one way or the other, such as a person whose deeds we do not know, whether he is righteous or wicked, and he did an act that can be judged favorably and can be judged unfavorably, then it is a pious quality to judge him favorably. But a person established as wicked may be judged unfavorably. For they said only that one who suspects the innocent is struck in his body, implying that one who suspects the wicked is not struck.” What does the Bartenura say? When do you judge a person favorably? When it is reasonable. If there are two possible interpretations of a person’s deeds and his record too is balanced—he could be righteous, he could be wicked, you don’t know, or sometimes he is this and sometimes that—when he does an act that can be interpreted this way or that way, adopt the positive interpretation. Look with a good eye and not with an evil eye.

But a person established as wicked—or alternatively an act that is clearly wicked—there is no need to judge him favorably. Or in other words, Rabbi Chaim was not right, that one should use a crooked mind when judging favorably. One should judge with a straight mind. And with a straight mind you understand that if this person is wholly righteous and suddenly does something that looks bad, you probably just didn’t interpret the act correctly. So it depends on who the person is, or what you know about the person, and it depends on what interpretations are available for his act, and how plausible the good or bad interpretations are. Therefore in the end, judging favorably means using a straight mind, not a crooked mind.

And if we use one more commentator—the first source is actually Maimonides, but Rabbenu Yonah puts it more unequivocally. Let’s see where we are. Oh, Rabbenu Yonah, here. Look at Rabbenu Yonah. Maimonides is also like this; all the commentators on the Mishnah are like this, by the way. This is contrary to the accepted view. “And judge every person favorably”—this speaks of a person of whom it is not known whether he is righteous or wicked. And if you know him and he is an intermediate person, sometimes he does bad and sometimes he does good, and he does something that can be judged negatively and can be judged positively in equal balance—more or less equally weighted interpretations—or even, at first glance, leans more toward the side of guilt, if from some angle one can judge him favorably, one should say he intended it for the good. But this does not refer to a completely righteous person or a completely wicked person. For the righteous person—even in an act that appears wholly bad and leans toward guilt from every angle—one should judge him favorably, saying that it was an error that came from the ruler, and behold, he regretted it and sought forgiveness. And as the Sages said, if you saw a Torah scholar commit a transgression at night, do not think ill of him by day, perhaps he repented. ‘Perhaps,’ you might think? Rather say: he certainly repented.” Yes, the meaning of “perhaps, you might think” is that since he is a Torah scholar and until now no mishap has come through him, certainly he immediately repented. So you see that the completely righteous person is never to be judged unfavorably.

And therefore the Mishnah did not need to teach that regarding him, “judge every person favorably.” Nor did it speak of the completely wicked person, because even if his act is wholly good and there seems to be no suspicion of sin from any angle, a person may judge him unfavorably and say that outwardly he acted one way, but inwardly he is not what he seems. “Outwardly” meaning externally, and inwardly not matching it. As it says, “Though his voice be gracious, do not trust him, for seven abominations are in his heart.” And Maimonides wrote similarly, and in this matter Solomon in his wisdom said, etc. Okay, so in short, what does Rabbenu Yonah say? He says this: “Judge every person favorably” applies neither to the wholly righteous person nor to the wholly wicked person. In the case of the wholly righteous person, even without the Mishnah it is obvious that even if you saw an act that was blatantly wicked, clearly you must judge him favorably, because that is what reason dictates. As for the wholly wicked person, reason dictates judging him unfavorably even if he appears to do a good deed. After all, you know he is wicked; it is not plausible that he did a good deed, so you judge him negatively.

What is the Mishnah talking about? It is talking about a person who is neither wholly righteous nor wholly wicked, who does an act that can be interpreted for good and can be interpreted for bad—say fifty-fifty for the sake of discussion. So if you ask me what is the chance that he is righteous? Fifty percent. The Mishnah says here: judge him favorably. “Kaf” means one side of a balance scale when the scales are even; tilt the scale of merit. And only about that does the Mishnah speak. The Mishnah tells us what goes beyond what straight reason requires, but even there it is only a slight step beyond, not much. When the interpretations are balanced and you have a person with no clear indication whether he is righteous or wicked, assume he is righteous; go in his favor in your interpretation.

But if there is a person who is completely righteous—right? You see Rav Shach, I’m still living in an older era—chasing after an engaged young woman with a drawn knife in the city streets. Okay, what do you say? This man is a wicked criminal, he wants to rape an engaged young woman by threat. That’s one interpretation. A second interpretation: maybe this engaged young woman was a maid in their house, and she forgot the knife there in the kitchen, so Rav Shach took the knife and, in order to return a lost item, ran after her saying, “You forgot the knife, take the knife.” Those are two possibilities, right? Now if this were some polished murderer we were seeing there, I assume we would not adopt the second interpretation. But if it is Rav Shach, I would adopt the second interpretation—and not because the Mishnah says to judge favorably, but because straight reason says so. Straight reason says that a person like that does not do such a thing. It is simply not plausible. The negative interpretation is simply implausible. Therefore that is irrelevant.

Where was it said to judge favorably? In a place where you have a person you don’t know, you have no idea whether he is righteous or wicked. The act can be interpreted more or less evenly in both directions—there judge him favorably. But even regarding such a person, whom you don’t know whether he is righteous or wicked, if there is an act that is clearly wicked, there is no point in judging him favorably. That is a crooked mind. We do not use a crooked mind—contrary to what Rabbi Chaim says.

There is that story in tractate Shabbat about that laborer, yes, whose employer didn’t pay him, and he asked him for sheep and he said, “I don’t have any sheep,” and then he asked him for something else, and again he said… in short, he didn’t pay him. Then after a year, when he finally pays him, he asks the laborer, “What did you think about all the excuses I gave you?” And the laborer invents all sorts of explanations out of nowhere to explain with signs and wonders why the employer was actually in the right not to pay him. Afterward they say that this laborer was Rabbi Akiva—I don’t remember whether that appears in the Talmud or only Rashi says it; I don’t remember anymore. In any event, there the explanations are very strained, but in the end it turns out that those explanations were also correct. What does that say? That the obligation to judge favorably is not some moral obligation; it is an obligation of straight reason. If you see an upright person who does not pay you, apparently he cannot pay right now. You don’t have explanations? Invent strained ones. But those explanations are only called strained if you place them in the context of a person about whom you don’t know. In the context of a righteous person, that explanation is not strained at all; it is a mistake to treat it as strained.

What does that actually tell us? Yes, it’s like, for example, the Chafetz Chaim, who says in the laws of guarding one’s tongue that when you hear slander, you may be concerned about it, but you may not accept it as fact. Meaning, you are allowed to be suspicious, but forbidden to accept it. I never really understood what he wants. What does it mean that I’m allowed to be suspicious but forbidden to accept it? If I don’t accept it, why should I be suspicious? At most you can say that since it is fifty-fifty, you cannot decide that the person is wicked. On the other hand, it’s fifty percent, so you may be suspicious in order not to lose your money when you go into business with him, for example. That you can say. But I don’t remember how explicitly this is written in the Chafetz Chaim, but many commentators and people who cite him say: no, no—you have to decide, with signs and wonders, that this man is completely righteous; you only remain suspicious. This is nonsense, of course. It is nonsense not only because this is not the interpretation of that rule; it is impossible to say it even if it were. You can’t implement it; it is simply nonsense. If I’m sure that’s the case, why should I then suspect the opposite? What is this—am I fooling myself? Obviously if I’m suspicious, then there is a side of me that thinks that may also be the truth. Meaning, you can’t play games like that.

At most you can… in a place where I have Rav Shach chasing with a knife after a girl—what did he do? If I arrive at the conclusion that this is the truth, that he is going to return the knife to her, then clearly I also would not shoot him under the law of a pursuer, right? Because if that is the truth, then that is the truth. I won’t say, yes, but one should still be concerned—maybe I’ll shoot him under the law of a pursuer even though I’m sure he’s not… that he’s not pursuing her. If I’m sure he’s not pursuing her, then I also don’t shoot him. So you can’t separate in that way between the question of what is true and the question of what I am concerned about. You can say that since it isn’t certain, you are allowed to be concerned, but you can’t decide that the person is wicked and treat him as wicked. But in terms of your practical consequences, certainly you are allowed to behave rationally. Look at what reason says and what seems plausible to you as reality.

I have a column about this on the website, and there I also apply it to the issue of the presumption of innocence and a prime minister under indictment, where people always tell us that we have to separate the legal plane from the public plane. And that sounds like the sort of arguments made by leftists, but that’s not true; it’s a simple truth. On the legal plane he is innocent until proven otherwise. If you ask me whether he is guilty—obviously he is guilty. With so many indictments and so many judicial instances it has passed through, obviously—in a factual sense—it is clear to me that in some respect he is guilty. Therefore if you ask me whether to appoint him prime minister: absolutely not. Sorry for expressing political views here. But in the legal context, clearly there is a presumption of innocence and one cannot convict a person without evidence. Here there is a gap, like with the Chafetz Chaim: you may not accept it, but you may be concerned. Meaning, what does “you may not accept it, but you may be concerned” mean? You may not accept it means not that the truth is that it is correct, that the man is wicked and one should beware of him. You cannot judge him as wicked until there is clear evidence, as long as there is another possible interpretation according to which he is not wicked. Fine. On the legal plane I cannot convict him, but certainly if I am concerned, then in my estimation it is reasonable to assume that this is the truth. So these distinctions are very simple.

What is all this aimed at? Basically what I want to claim is that in our context too it is the same. I can sometimes say things that are very far-fetched. The Torah says, “I will give your rains in their season,” “you shall keep My commandments,” and so on. Seemingly the Torah promises a response, action and reaction. If you keep the commandments, rain will fall; if you do this, then everything is very clear. And the interpretation I offer is a far-fetched one—that this was said regarding earlier generations, but today it has changed. There is a certain strain in that, I agree. But on the other hand, the second alternative is to give up my scientific perspective. And if my scientific perspective is, in my eyes, established—established as correct—then I am willing to adopt interpretations that, without that, would be considered strained, in order to defend it, or to keep it in force. Therefore even if this interpretation were strained—and again, I say it is not so strained—but even if this interpretation of the Torah were strained, as long as my starting point is the scientific picture, then I adopt strained interpretations, just as everyone does. Whoever’s starting point is the Torah adopts strained interpretations regarding science. Everyone does it, and that is perfectly okay, since the starting point dictates what is considered a strained interpretation in the first place and what is not.

As we find in the Beit Yosef in Yoreh De’ah 228, I think, section 228, where that famous line is written: it is preferable to stretch the language than to stretch the reasoning. When you see a verse or some Talmudic passage or something like that that sounds unreasonable, illogical, then you can find a strained interpretation according to which it comes out sensible—but a strained interpretation. The accepted view is that it is preferable to stretch the language than to stretch the reasoning. To interpret the text literally but be left with weak reasoning is less good than to stretch the language of the verse but remain with a reading that is well-settled in reason. And that is exactly the phenomenon I’m speaking about here. Where I have strong reasoning, the strained interpretation is not a strained interpretation. Because the alternative is more strained—it is strained in reason. If the simple interpretation of the verse were true, then I would be stuck with a strained result in reason. That is what is strained. Therefore very often an interpretation that people tell me is strained is strained only if you look at it from the seat of some UN observer who has no position. But if you come from a certain starting point, then it is not true that this interpretation is strained, because from within that starting point it is clear that the alternative is incorrect and one must find an interpretation that keeps your starting point in force. And the same is true here. One second. Sorry.

Okay, so up to this point that is basically the discussion of how one relates to the sources in light of the scientific starting point. What do we do when there is a dilemma? I think that in this discussion we had at the end of the previous class and now, one can use this kind of tool in many, many dilemmas we encounter in life. Not necessarily practical dilemmas, but intellectual dilemmas. Meaning, I have two principles that seem, on the face of it, contradictory, or two values that seem contradictory, and I am committed to both. The question is what to do in such a situation. I can’t prove that one is right and the other wrong. What do I do? There are all kinds of ways of dealing with such conflicts without deciding between them. Meaning, without saying this one is right and that one is wrong, or something like that, but rather finding some reconciliation, even if it appears strained—or if it even appears strained at all. Lex specialis, all these techniques are basically techniques for conducting oneself in situations of intellectual conflict. Okay, I think this is applicable to a great many questions and situations.

Okay. Now I want to move on. The implication of the picture I described—I’m now returning to the general course of the argument. The picture I described is basically that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not involved in the world. At least in recent generations and onward. Okay? The claim is that if He is not involved in the world, then we really need to rethink the question of evil. I hinted at this a bit in previous classes. The problem of evil is a very troubling and ancient question: why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper? Why is there evil in the world at all? If the Holy One, blessed be He, created it, then let Him create it good. Why does He allow evil to exist in the world?

Following the discussions I have held so far, I want to divide the question into natural evil and human evil. Two different things. The question of human evil is relatively easy to solve, and I already spoke about this, as I mentioned Rabbi Amital and Abba Kovner there. Rabbi Amital tells that he met Abba Kovner—he was a socialist political commissar, or a commissar of the Labor movement—and it happened that he was a partisan and a Holocaust survivor, and he met Rabbi Amital, who of course was also a Holocaust survivor, and he says to him—Abba Kovner says to Rabbi Amital—“I lost my faith in the Holy One, blessed be He, because of the Holocaust.” And Rabbi Amital answered him that he lost his faith in man because of the Holocaust. And that exchange is very interesting, because specifically Abba Kovner, the secular one, attributes the Holocaust to the Holy One, blessed be He, and therefore loses faith in Him because of the Holocaust; and specifically Rabbi Amital, the rabbi, the religious man, attributes the Holocaust to human beings and not to the Holy One, blessed be He, and therefore does not lose faith in the Holy One, blessed be He.

Of course, this is a somewhat literary description, because actually the logic of this argument is different. Both of them are religious in origin, and now they encounter the Holocaust. So Abba Kovner, who assumes within his religious conception that everything that happens in the world is the handiwork of the Holy One, blessed be He, says: well, if this is what He does, then I’m not willing—I’m severing diplomatic relations with Him. Rabbi Amital, by contrast, from within his religious perspective, says that from a religious point of view I do not think that what happens in the world is the handiwork of the Holy One, blessed be He. So when he sees the Holocaust, he does not attribute it to the Holy One, blessed be He, and therefore does not lose his faith or his commitment to the Holy One, blessed be He. The dispute is not between a religious person and a secular one. The dispute is between two religious worldviews, one of which leads the person who holds it to become secular.

And incidentally, this is a wonderful parable for many things I talk about here and in the trilogy in general, because people see these statements as terribly dangerous statements—they can lead people to abandon religious commitment and faith and so on—and in my view that can be true, and it has probably indeed done that for some people; I know of at least several people. But on the other hand, not saying these things has an impact no less severe, because then you can become Abba Kovner. If I had said to Abba Kovner—when he was still in his religious phase, I have no idea, I don’t know his biography, but for the sake of discussion—when he was still in his religious phase, if I had said to him: listen, the Holy One, blessed be He, is not involved in what happens here in the world; the ones who did this to you were the Nazis, not the Holy One, blessed be He—then perhaps he would not have found himself forced to leave his religious commitment. Okay? So in that sense, these so-called heretical statements are precisely the kinds of statements that can save people from abandonment and not lead them to abandonment. And I think I have quite a bit of experience with people for whom that indeed happened. So there are costs in all directions.

In any event, for our purposes, what I basically want to claim is that Rabbi Amital is offering here a theological solution to the problem of human evil. What does that mean? When there is human evil, then we have already seen that even according to the Sages, when a person chooses to do evil there is “one who is swept away without justice,” what the rabbi in tractate Chagigah says, or what the Talmud in tractate Makkot says about one who kills unintentionally. What came out there? That what is the result of a person’s choice is the handiwork of the person, not of the Holy One, blessed be He. And it can happen even if the Holy One, blessed be He, does not want it to happen or wants it not to happen. That is the meaning of His giving us free choice to act. Therefore when I come with complaints to the Holy One, blessed be He—why did the Holocaust happen?—I’m simply turning to the wrong address. I should be turning to Hitler with my complaints about why the Holocaust happened, because the one who caused the Holocaust was not the Holy One, blessed be He.

Just as there is no need to look for explanations of why the Holy One, blessed be He, did the Holocaust to us, because He did not do it, so too there is no need to be troubled by the problem of evil, because the problem of evil assumes that evil is the handiwork of the Holy One, blessed be He. But if evil that stems from choice is the handiwork of human beings, then there is no question why the Holy One, blessed be He, did it. Therefore, basically, the problem of evil seemingly does not arise.

I qualify this a bit, because one could still argue: fine, but where things get extreme, why doesn’t the Holy One, blessed be He, intervene? After all, He certainly can intervene. He chooses, as a matter of policy, not to intervene. That is what I described earlier. But the same mouth that forbade is the mouth that permitted. He created us, gave us free choice, created the laws of nature, and by the same token He can also freeze what He created. He can take free choice away from human beings, or intervene and not allow them to act and carry out what they plot to do. Therefore this does not completely exonerate the Holy One, blessed be He. It somewhat softens the sharpness of the difficulty. But it does not completely clear Him in the sense that there is still a question: why were six million Jews murdered—not to mention, I don’t know, twenty million Russians too? Why doesn’t the Holy One, blessed be He, intervene in such a situation? And to that question, apparently, there really is no answer. Here I don’t answer, because that is His policy not to intervene—but that is precisely the question: why is that the policy? In extreme cases, change your policy. A policy is not an explanation. A policy is a result. I am asking why the policy is such; what explains why this is the policy?

Okay. But here too I’ll add another remark. Let us imagine that not six million people were killed, but only one. Fine? But that one suffered the same tortures that people went through in the death camps and all the things you know about. And only one person, not six million. Then the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t need to intervene? From that one person’s point of view, the fact that there aren’t another 5,999,999 who went through the same thing changes nothing. He suffers in the same way. And if there is no justification for allowing one person to choose to inflict such terrible suffering on another, then here too the Holy One, blessed be He, should have intervened.

But let’s take this further—the slippery slope question. What about less terrible suffering? Suppose a person is simply killed in a car accident—without suffering, he dies on the spot—because another person decided, I mean consciously decided, to run him over, and he ran him over right there. Okay? An assassination, not a traffic accident. A hit with a kuf, not with a gimel. Meaning, someone assassinates him, shoots him or runs him over, and he dies on the spot. There too, shouldn’t the Holy One, blessed be He, intervene? Why not? A person died. Human life is still something of enormous significance in our ethical system and in that of the Torah. So if the Holy One, blessed be He, sees something like that, seemingly He should intervene there too. And where does this stop? With theft should He also intervene? And with ordinary psychological abuse? Or with injury? Where, where, where does it stop? Seemingly there is no justification for any suffering. If someone does not deserve to suffer, then the question is why the Holy One, blessed be He, lets him suffer. Why does He let another person decide that this man should suffer? Why doesn’t He intervene?

In a certain sense, if we follow this logic, then the whole policy of the Holy One, blessed be He, who decides not to intervene, is null and void. Because there is no real line where from that point on I have a claim against the Holy One, blessed be He, and up to where I do not. Either I say there is no justification for evil, and if there is no justification for evil, then I expect the Holy One, blessed be He, to prevent it in every case, to intervene and not allow people to harm other people. Or not. But if I expect Him to intervene, then I expect that regarding every evil that happens. And if that is so, then in effect the Holy One, blessed be He, should have prevented people from doing evil acts in general. But you understand what the result of that would be? The result would be that we would not really have free choice. Because free choice is the ability to do good as against the ability to do evil, with both options open before me. I can decide whether I do this or that. But if every time I decide, whenever I choose evil, the Holy One, blessed be He, stops it and doesn’t let me, then de facto I don’t really have a choice. Then what value is there in my choosing good? If I have no option to choose evil, then choosing good also loses its value. What meaning does it have? I am compelled to choose good.

Therefore, the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, allows us free choice is a condition for our actions to have value. Usually people say, after all, no evil descends from above. And we say, the Sages say, no evil descends from above. What does that mean? That human evil is evil that did not descend from above, but is the result of decisions and actions performed by the human being, not by the Holy One, blessed be He. So what did descend from above? The possibility for the human being to do evil. The fact that he has free choice. That he received from the Holy One, blessed be He. But what to choose—whether to choose good or evil—that is the person’s decision; that did not descend from the Holy One, blessed be He, from above.

Now, the very possibility of choosing is absolute good. Even if I make bad use of it, then I made bad use of it, but the fact that I have the possibility of doing evil is a good thing. Why? Because if I did not have the possibility of doing evil, then choosing good would also lose its meaning. There would be no morality in such a world, no values in such a world, and in fact there would be no point to our existence in such a world. Because our actions would have no value; they would be meaningless actions. We would be like sheep—yes, I told the story of Amnon Yitzhak’s sheep—so there would be no… it would lose all meaning entirely. Therefore, for our actions to have meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, must allow us also to choose evil, not only to choose good. The very fact that He gives us the possibility of choice is something wholly good; it is not a mixture of good and evil. It is absolute good. Even the possibility of doing evil is absolute good, because if that possibility did not exist, there would be no value in choosing good.

Now if that is so, then the Holy One, blessed be He, really should not intervene and prevent people from doing evil. So when should He? In the Holocaust, yes? And I return to the slippery slope I outlined earlier. On the face of it, if that is already the policy, then I can also understand why the Holy One, blessed be He, says: look, you are grown human beings, grown children. The policy now is that you already know the world, you have a choice between good and evil, I gave you Torah, I gave you values, you understand what this is about. From here on, the world is in your hands; you are grown children, bear the consequences of your actions.

Our claims often come from the fact that, fine, I’ll bear the consequences of my own actions, but why the consequences of Hitler’s? Let him bear the consequences of his own. But that’s not how it works, because the Holy One, blessed be He, addresses human society, humanity as a whole, and says to us: friends, you are a society of adults; this society is responsible for its actions. And “society” here is not Israeli society or German society, but all of humanity. We have collective responsibility for what each one of us does. Just as a person has responsibility for himself, for his family, for his city, for his community, for his state and his nation, so too for all of humanity. The circles get farther and farther away, but we still have responsibility for everything that happens here. And if the Holocaust happened, then it happened because we allowed it to happen. The Germans, in that they initiated it and cooperated with it, and others because they did not stop it with enough force and in time. Therefore, in the end, the results are results that we brought upon ourselves—we as a collective, again, humanity as a whole, not the private victim who perished there in the gas chambers, but humanity as an entirety. In effect the Holy One, blessed be He, also says to humanity as a whole: you are a big girl now; bear the consequences of what you do. What do you want, that I always intervene and pull the chestnuts out of the fire for you?

And therefore, in this sense, all these results are indeed results we brought upon ourselves. I’m just looking at it from a collective point of view. In the personal perspective I say: Hitler did this to me; why should I bear the consequences of his choices? But that’s not so. It was a choice of human society as a whole, and human society bears the consequences of its choices. As the Maharal writes regarding the people of Shechem, yes, whom Simeon and Levi killed. The Maharal discusses there the question—Maimonides writes in the laws of kings that the people of Shechem were liable to death because they allowed their king to rob Dinah and did not prosecute him; there was no effective legal system there, basically the king does whatever he wants. So Nachmanides asks him, and other commentators ask him too: what do you want from the ordinary citizen in Shechem? I assume it was not a very enlightened democracy—not like Shechem today, which is the glory of democracy—so what exactly do you want the ordinary citizen to do to his king? What can he do? The answer is that no ordinary citizen individually can be blamed. But in the end, what happens in that city is under the collective responsibility of all the citizens. If none of them individually is guilty, then no one is guilty. Clearly, when you assign responsibility to a human group for something that happens within it, that is not responsibility of each individual separately. It is responsibility of society as society.

I once gave an example of this. I once read a biography of Stalin. There are several biographies. One of them was by some Russian writer, Dzerzhinsky, something like that. And I remember that when I read that biography, this was a phenomenon I really stood before in astonishment. There is this enormous power, yes—one of the greatest powers in the world in Stalin’s time, maybe not the greatest, but an enormous power. Now all the relevant people—and the man dies peacefully in his bed, aside from this or that conspiracy theory people have. But according to the accepted history, without the conspiracy theories, Stalin died in his bed at a ripe old age after ruling the Soviet Union for, I think, something like thirty years or thirty-five years, something like that. What is the point there? How did Stalin, all by himself, with his ten fingers, manage to overpower an enormous empire with a crazy army, with weapons systems, and all kinds of things like that, machine guns as Begin said, and things like that? How does this happen?

The answer is that no individual person can rise up against Stalin. How do you know who will inform on him? Stalin will wring off his head. It is frightening to rise against such a ruler. Therefore one cannot really come with complaints to any one Soviet citizen. What do you want from him? Stalin does what he does, and he will wring off his head if he rises against him. But I ask: fine, but after all the army and these tools and the industry that manufactures them and everything, all of that was created by the Soviet citizens themselves. So who is responsible if no citizen is responsible? The collective whole is responsible. The fact that each one separately could do nothing is true, but each one separately is a cog in that collective which, taken as a whole, is what is responsible for what happens there. And if Stalin murders people both inside and outside, the one responsible is the Soviet collective, even though each citizen separately really could do nothing, and I myself in their place surely would not have done any better. It’s not that I’m claiming I would have been more righteous than they were. But still one cannot escape this, because otherwise you assign responsibility to no one in any way, for anything. Rather, clearly you say: look, you individually are not responsible, and you individually are not responsible—but all of you together as a group, without you this would not have happened.

Fine, but what should one do in practice? After all, anyone who tries to initiate something—who knows, maybe the other person will inform on him and then he’ll die immediately. True. But on the other hand, all of you together somehow brought upon us this disaster called Stalin—upon us and upon yourselves this disaster. Therefore in the end there is some sort of collective responsibility on you, even though each individual separately is not guilty. Perhaps in the same way I want to claim that one can assign collective responsibility to humanity as a whole also—if not to Hitler alone—for what happened in the Holocaust. Therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, basically says: friends, you are grown children, deal with it. You had the tools to deal with it, you did not deal with it, this is what happened.

Maybe from another angle this is a bit like the argument around Independence Day. The debate around Independence Day—how can one give thanks, many Haredim say, how can one thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for a state that is conducted in such a way? Is this redemption—a state that is run in a way not committed to Jewish law, with no regard for Torah, and all kinds of things of that sort? We won’t argue now about whether that description is accurate or not; let us assume for the sake of discussion that it is accurate, okay? This is an absurd description. Why? Because if the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us a state—assuming He did, I don’t think that happened, but on the assumption of both sides, both the Haredim and the Religious Zionists, that He gave us the state—the fact that we ruined it is a reason not to thank Him? What does one have to do with the other? Someone gave you a gift, and you threw it into the sea. So now because of that you shouldn’t thank him? We are the ones who ruined it.

But people in the Haredi world say: what do you mean? Ben-Gurion ruined it; we are perfectly fine. No—there is collective responsibility. The ones who ruined it are all of us, not Ben-Gurion. Exactly like with Stalin, to distinguish between them, yes. It is not that Ben-Gurion ruined it and we remained untouched. The relation is a collective one. Look what you did with the state I gave you, as it were, the Holy One, blessed be He, says to us. I gave it to you; you need to thank Me. The fact that afterward you ruined it—that’s your problem. What do you want, that I save you from yourselves? That is basically the claim I am making here. The claim I am making here is basically that all human evil that occurs in the world is our doing—our doing as a collective. Even what Hitler did is ultimately the responsibility of all the Germans who cooperated with him, but also of the whole world that did not stop it in time and with sufficient force and allowed it to happen and cooperated with a large part of it. And by the way, not only the Holocaust. I don’t like our over-extreme concentration on the Holocaust. There have also been other disasters on other days, in other periods, in many places, for which people are responsible, including us. And to blame the Holy One, blessed be He, for that is basically to make the same claim as blaming the Holy One, blessed be He, for the Russian army, or the KGB, or whatever, carrying out murders around the world. If the Soviet citizens had not cooperated with it, it would not have happened. It’s not the Holy One, blessed be He—it’s us.

And in that sense, I do not think the argument that in extreme cases the Holy One, blessed be He, should have intervened is all that strong. Even in extreme cases, as long as it is human evil, the responsibility is ours. We should have seen to it that this did not happen. That is regarding human evil. Therefore I think that with respect to human evil, the picture I offer gives a perfectly decent solution to the problem of evil. It doesn’t actually give a solution; rather, the problem of evil simply doesn’t arise.

What about natural evil? You’ll say to me, fine, when Hitler decides to murder millions, that is a human decision; he has free choice, the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t intervene because He allows us to choose. Therefore horrible things happen, and it is not the fault of the Holy One, blessed be He. What about a tsunami? Plagues? Corona? What about all sorts of disasters like that that kill thousands and millions of people? Those are natural processes, not human choices. As we saw in the Talmud in tractate Makkot regarding one who kills unintentionally, natural processes—at least according to the Sages’ conception—are indeed in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He. Even if human choices are not in His hands, natural processes are in His hands. There is “one who is swept away without justice,” as the rabbi in Chagigah says—that is a person who kills his fellow man, specifically a person who chose to do something bad. But an event like accidental killing, for example, or something like that, is seemingly indeed in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He. So what about a tsunami? Why doesn’t He stop the tsunami? There too—does He want to give the sea waves or the seismic waves that generate the tsunami free choice? Why doesn’t He intervene there when such things happen?

So here I will make a similar claim. What I want to argue is the following. First of all, we see that the policy of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the world is that the world operates according to fixed laws. There are laws of nature that are fixed and always act in the same way. And the world runs according to the laws of nature. That is the whole thesis I’m discussing here: that nature proceeds according to its own laws and not because the Holy One, blessed be He, activates it each time. Why is it like that? I can explain why it is like that—or at least suggest an explanation. For example, because the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to enable us to get along in the world. If there were no fixed laws of nature, we could not really get along. After all, I let go of this device and I know it will fall to the ground. But if one time I let go and it falls to the ground, and another time I let go and it flies to the moon, then I don’t know how to deal with the situations I find myself in. I need some stability in order to be able to cope with what happens in the world. In a chaotic world we have no way of managing. Therefore a world in which human beings—or creatures generally—can get along is a world that operates by fixed laws. Okay?

So my initial assumption is that the Holy One, blessed be He, decided that the world should operate by a set of rigid laws of nature. Now, fine, but the question still arises: why didn’t He make the laws of nature in such a way that there would be no tsunamis? Why should there be natural evil? Human evil—because human beings choose. But what about natural evil? Why should there be bacteria and tsunamis and plagues and volcanoes and all kinds of things of that sort? Why? Let Him create the world with different laws of nature. Here I want to argue the following, which is really a mathematical claim. I want to claim that if the assumption is that the Holy One, blessed be He, decided that the world should operate according to a set of rigid natural laws, who says there is a set like that that contains no tsunamis? Maybe there is no such set.

Now I want to sharpen this. It is clear that the Holy One, blessed be He, did not decide on the laws of nature arbitrarily. Meaning, He chose these laws of nature—created these laws of nature—because presumably these are what lead the world to the places He wants the world to reach, right? Meaning, they lead to the correct results. Except that here and there there are also problematic results: tsunamis, plagues, volcanoes, and the like. Okay. Now what is the questioner actually expecting when he asks: wait, why didn’t You make better laws? The questioner is actually expecting the Holy One, blessed be He, to make different laws of nature that would bring the world to the same goals He wants, but without tsunamis and without plagues and without volcanoes. Okay? Who says there is such a set of rigid laws?

Now, since he is the one raising the difficulty against the Holy One, blessed be He, the burden of proof is on him. We talked earlier about the burden of proof. Prove that there is such a system of laws of nature, and then you can ask why He did not create the world with those laws rather than these laws. First of all, the burden of proof is on you. And I’ll say more than that: from an intuitive perspective—intuitively, for someone who has basically studied physics and knows a bit of mathematics—I would bet quite a bit of money that there really are no such laws. Not only is it not certain that there are such laws; I am almost sure there are not, that there is no such system of laws. Why? Because think about what such a system of laws would actually have to do. It would have to look exactly like the system we know around us, the same thing, because the assumption is that this is the optimal system in terms of the Holy One’s goals. So the alternative system has to bring the world, to run the world, in exactly the same way—but where there is a tsunami there won’t be a tsunami, where there is a volcano there won’t be a volcano, and where there are bacteria or plagues there won’t be plagues. Meaning, what mathematicians call removable discontinuities. There is almost no chance, in my opinion, that there is such a rigid system of laws. No—I think, again, intuitively, intuitively in my view there is no such system.

But I say once again: even if I’m wrong, still the burden of proof that there exists such a system rests on the questioner and not on the one defending the position. As long as you haven’t shown that there is a better system, you cannot ask why the Holy One, blessed be He, did not create a better system. Who says there is such a system at all? This of course brings us to the question: what, so is the Holy One, blessed be He, limited? He cannot make such a system of laws, one that to us seems impossible? The answer is: He is not limited, and He cannot make such a system of laws—but about that we’ll talk in the next class. Any comments or questions?