Innovation, Conservatism, and Tradition – Lesson 18

Table of Contents

• From changes in Jewish law to conceptualization as dynamism
• A student understands his rabbi better than the rabbi understands himself
• The development of the hermeneutic principles and the debate with researchers
• The model of a “dynamic law given to Moses at Sinai” through general and particular
• Articulation and the Inuit language for snow
• Scholarly criticism and Menachem Kahana
• The Temurah passage: forgetting laws and the difference between a law given to Moses at Sinai and interpretation
• “One thousand seven hundred a fortiori inferences, verbal analogies, and scribal fine points” and the dialectic of Otniel ben Kenaz
• “A fortiori inferences and verbal analogies” as a code name and classification of the principles
• The giving of the Torah as two languages: plain meaning and interpretation without terminology
• Otniel ben Kenaz as a “language researcher” of interpretation
• “Dynamic law given to Moses at Sinai” and the aggadah about Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall
• System 1 and System 2, and intuition versus rules
• Stradivarius, dance, and language learning as analogies for tradition
• Rules of halakhic ruling as approximate rules: “we do not derive from generalizations”
• The role of rules as a ladder for reconstructing intuition
• The decline of the generations and the ascent of the generations on two axes
• Modern problems like electricity and the need for later tools
• Conclusion and blessings for a good year

Summary

General Overview

The lecturer presents a mechanism of dynamism within tradition that is neither a change in Jewish law nor a disagreement with the early authorities, but rather conceptualization. He argues that a student can understand his rabbi, and even Maimonides, better than they understood themselves, by means of later analytical tools. He applies this to the development of the hermeneutic principles and argues that the growing number of such principles is not evidence of historical invention, but of a process of articulation: splitting and naming sub-rules that were already implicitly included on an intuitive level. Based on the passage in Temurah about laws forgotten during the mourning period after Moses’ death, he suggests that Otniel ben Kenaz reconstructed interpretations through his dialectical reasoning by extracting rules from interpretations that remained. From this he develops the model of a “dynamic law given to Moses at Sinai,” in which Moses received the “language of interpretation” without formal terminology. The model also explains the tension between early intuition and later analytical rules, and the possibility that later scholars may be better logicians but need rules as crutches—while being careful, since those rules are approximations with exceptions.

From changes in Jewish law to conceptualization as dynamism

The lecturer distinguishes between dynamism that stems from changes in Jewish law and dynamism that stems from conceptualization that does not disagree with the early authorities. He brings the examples of Rabbi Yehoshua Hutner and Seridei Esh regarding the question whether Rabbi Chaim interpreted Maimonides or whether he was really “interpreting Rabbi Chaim,” given the gap of seven to eight hundred years and the fact that Maimonides did not study with modern Brisker-style conceptual analysis. He argues that Rabbi Yehoshua Hutner is right, and that it is possible for Rabbi Chaim to be “more correct than Maimonides in understanding Maimonides,” even if Maimonides himself would have said otherwise.

A student understands his rabbi better than the rabbi understands himself

The lecturer argues that a student places his rabbi’s words into more developed patterns of thought, terminology, and analytical tools—like “a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant.” He presents the possibility that the student translates his rabbi’s intuitions into explicit logic, extracts implicit truths, and answers difficulties without having to “squeeze” the explanation where the rabbi himself would have had to round off corners for lack of tools. He quotes Rabbi Kook about Rabbi Eliezer, who “never said anything he had not heard from his rabbi,” while at the same time “he said things no ear had ever heard,” and adds, “I would claim—even not the ear of his rabbi.”

The development of the hermeneutic principles and the debate with researchers

The lecturer presents a debate between researchers and traditional learners over how the hermeneutic principles developed. Tradition attributes them to a law given to Moses at Sinai, while researchers view them as a later creation that became more sophisticated over time. He brings scholarly evidence from the various lists: Hillel the Elder has seven, Rabbi Ishmael has thirteen, Rabbi Yosei HaGelili has thirty-two, and in practice there are more principles in the Talmud than in any of these lists. He argues that this evidence does not force us to conclude invention, but fits a model in which a “law given to Moses at Sinai” is not a “hollow pipe,” but a tradition that undergoes ever-expanding conceptualization.

The model of a “dynamic law given to Moses at Sinai” through general and particular

The lecturer suggests that the principles were given “in some sort of raw, primordial form,” or as a smaller number of basic principles, and over the generations they undergo conceptualization that reformulates and spells them out into a larger list without “inventing” new principles. He explains that “general and particular” originally functioned as a broad label for several kinds of inclusion, whereas in Rabbi Ishmael’s formulation it split into three principles: general and particular, particular and general, and general-particular-general. He adds that there is also a “fourth principle” of particular-general-particular, which is not explicitly named that way in the Talmud but is hinted at in the Nazir passage and appears in the language of medieval authorities (Rishonim). Its conceptualization is simply a continuation of that same process of elaboration, not creation ex nihilo.

Articulation and the Inuit language for snow

The lecturer compares the process to the many distinctions among types of snow made by Eskimos/Inuit, as opposed to “snow” as a single term for people who do not live inside that reality. He presents this as “refinement” and “articulation” in philosophy of science: a multiplication of distinct terms for subtypes of the same phenomenon. He argues that the concept of general and particular in a later generation does not mean exactly the same thing it meant in an earlier generation, but “they do the same work,” and the gap lies in the richness of the conceptual system that resolves “dozens, hundreds of contradictions.”

Scholarly criticism and Menachem Kahana

The lecturer describes a conversation with Menachem Kahana from the Hebrew University and presents his own book on “kelalei u-peratei” as a critique of Kahana’s foundational article on general and particular. He argues that scholarly assumptions lead Kahana to see disagreement between generations, whereas in his own view this is an articulation of the same midrashic practice within a richer conceptual framework. He presents the traditional assumptions as a research paradigm whose explanatory power can be tested against the accepted academic paradigm.

The Temurah passage: forgetting laws and the difference between a law given to Moses at Sinai and interpretation

The lecturer brings the Temurah passage about “three thousand laws that were forgotten during the days of mourning for Moses,” and about the refusal to ask in Heaven because “it is not in Heaven” and “these are the commandments—from now on a prophet is not permitted to introduce anything new.” He explains that the forgetting resulted from the forty days of mourning and the prohibition against Torah study, when the entire Oral Torah existed only orally, so details were forgotten. He emphasizes that a law given to Moses at Sinai—which according to Maimonides has no anchor in the written text, “not even by way of interpretation”—cannot be reconstructed. He cites the Mareh HaPanim, who explains that after such forgetting, the sages acted in a way that was no longer the original status of a law given to Moses at Sinai, but rather a human reconstruction.

“One thousand seven hundred a fortiori inferences, verbal analogies, and scribal fine points” and the dialectic of Otniel ben Kenaz

The lecturer quotes the baraita that says “one thousand seven hundred a fortiori inferences, verbal analogies, and scribal fine points were forgotten,” and that Rabbi Abbahu says, “Otniel ben Kenaz restored them through his dialectic.” He argues that the difference between this and the forgetting of the “three thousand laws” is that here we are dealing with products of interpretation, which can be reconstructed by means of interpretive tools, whereas a law given to Moses at Sinai has no such tools available. He interprets this to mean that Otniel ben Kenaz did not forget the very ability to interpret, but the products of interpretation, and therefore he could “interpret them מחדש”—that is, derive them again—and approximate the law through the rules.

“A fortiori inferences and verbal analogies” as a code name and classification of the principles

The lecturer argues that the phrase “a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies” is a rabbinic anachronism used to describe the period of Joshua, and that it functions as a code name for two families of hermeneutic principles: logical principles and textual principles. He defines kal va-chomer and binyan av as analogy and logical inference that are not unique to the Torah, as opposed to gezerah shavah, a textual tool that relies on verbal hints rather than logic. He argues that this expression appears elsewhere too as a way of referring to the entire “world of interpretation” without listing every principle.

The giving of the Torah as two languages: plain meaning and interpretation without terminology

The lecturer sketches a metaphorical description in which the Holy One, blessed be He, teaches Moses “the language of plain meaning and the language of interpretation” through actual explanation, not through a list of rules, so that Moses understands intuitively but does not know terms like kal va-chomer, general and particular, or gezerah shavah. He compares this to learning a natural language, where speakers are unaware of “subject, predicate, direct object, indirect object,” and the grammar is only extracted later by a researcher. He brings Moshe Koppel’s image of language developing without explicit rules, where conceptualization comes only after the language already exists.

Otniel ben Kenaz as a “language researcher” of interpretation

The lecturer conjectures that Otniel ben Kenaz gathered the interpretations that remained, extracted patterns from them, formulated rules, and in that way succeeded in reconstructing the forgotten laws by applying those rules to the verses. He describes this as scientific work: facts → laws → prediction of new results, similar to deriving laws of nature from phenomena. He presents the process as the beginning of conceptualization, which later branches out into Hillel the Elder’s seven principles, Rabbi Ishmael’s thirteen, and Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili’s thirty-two.

“Dynamic law given to Moses at Sinai” and the aggadah about Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall

The lecturer defines a “dynamic law given to Moses at Sinai” as a situation in which the content is from Sinai, but the formulation and formalism are later—to the point that Moses himself would not understand the terminology. He connects this to the midrash about Moses sitting “at the end of twenty rows” in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and not understanding, until he heard “a law given to Moses at Sinai,” and then “his mind was put at ease.” He compares this to his earlier claim about Rabbi Chaim and Maimonides: modern conceptualization can be faithful to the source even if the originator himself would not recognize its language.

System 1 and System 2, and intuition versus rules

The lecturer adopts Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between System 1, which is intuitive and fast, and System 2, which is analytical and rule-based. He argues that intuition is not “emotion” but a cognitive tool that makes truth-and-falsehood judgments, as seen in the example of solving an equation immediately versus working on it laboriously. He argues that rules can fill in where intuition fails, but the rules too are only approximations, and sometimes native intuition is more accurate than they are.

Stradivarius, dance, and language learning as analogies for tradition

The lecturer compares the gap between intuition and rules to the advantage of a Stradivarius maker who builds with natural talent, as opposed to modern reconstruction through science and technology; and to the difference between “a flowing dancer” and a “robot” that calculates steps. He explains that a native speaker is usually more correct than a student in an ulpan, because the rules were derived from natural speech and therefore contain exceptions. He argues that a system of rules mainly helps when dealing with new situations in which the intuitive speaker has no prior experience.

Rules of halakhic ruling as approximate rules: “we do not derive from generalizations”

The lecturer argues that rules of halakhic ruling are created after the fact from the data, not as absolute principles, and therefore they have exceptions. He brings the rule “the Jewish law follows Rava except for YAL KGM,” and the statement in the Talmud in Kiddushin, “we do not derive from generalizations, even where it says ‘except.’” He notes examples in which Maimonides rules like Abaye even though the case is not one of the six, such as “do not form separate factions” and “an action done in violation is ineffective,” and argues that the rule is an approximation that does not bind in every case.

The role of rules as a ladder for reconstructing intuition

The lecturer argues that rules are an aid meant to reconstruct the original intuition, not replace it, and describes this as “a ladder… that you use and then throw away.” He emphasizes cautious use of rules, “respect it and suspect it,” because there are always exceptions. He sets as the goal a halakhic ruling that relies on analytical tools too, but ultimately strives for an intuitive grasp of “what is right in the situation.”

The decline of the generations and the ascent of the generations on two axes

The lecturer presents a model according to which there is a decline of the generations on the intuitive axis, and an ascent of the generations on the analytical-logical axis. He argues that Rabbi Akiva would not have understood “a Rabbi Akiva Eiger-style framework,” and that “we are much smarter than they were” in the sense of logic and analysis, but usually, when it comes to “who is right,” the generation closer to the source is the one that gets it right. He concludes that the later scholar understands the earlier one better through conceptualization, but the earlier one decides more correctly by virtue of intuition. From this comes a traditional dynamism that is not invention of new content, but a more sophisticated formulation of the same content.

Modern problems like electricity and the need for later tools

The lecturer argues that without scientific knowledge and context, an early sage like Rabbi Akiva would have been “helpless” in the face of electricity, and therefore modern decision-making relies on the “tool system” distilled from tradition within a new reality. He notes that some new questions might perhaps have been answered well by early intuition and some not, but in practice “you can’t summon them from the dead,” so the decisions fall to the people of the present.

Conclusion and blessings for a good year

The lecturer concludes by saying that the next lecture will only be after Rosh Hashanah, and wishes everyone “a good year, may you be inscribed and sealed for good… success in everything.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so last time I said that now I’m starting to deal with a different kind of change, or dynamism, within tradition. In the classes up until last time—well, not including it—I spoke about changes in Jewish law, meaning a situation where I don’t accept what the earlier authorities said, but change it, or at least apply it differently. Right, applying differently is not necessarily disagreeing; we talked about that. In any case, last time we began talking about a different mechanism that also, in effect, makes Jewish law dynamic, but there there’s no dimension at all of change or disagreement with the earlier authorities, but rather conceptualization. And I brought those examples of Rabbi Yehoshua Hutner and the Seridei Esh, who discussed there whether Rabbi Chaim, when he interpreted Maimonides, really got to the bottom of Maimonides’ intent, or whether this is basically an invention of Rabbi Chaim, which we respect and all is well and good, and of course we’ll study his words and maybe even rule according to his view—but we don’t really assume that Rabbi Chaim understood Maimonides or is interpreting Maimonides. Rabbi Chaim is interpreting Rabbi Chaim. Because, as I said before, the fusion of horizons between him and Maimonides is almost impossible. We’re talking about a gap of, I don’t know, seven hundred, eight hundred years, and therefore it’s not reasonable to think that he truly got to the bottom of Maimonides’ intent. And more than that: since Rabbi Chaim introduced a new style of thinking—yes, modern lomdus—it’s obvious that Maimonides didn’t learn that way. No question. There are lots of jokes about this in yeshivas. So there’s no doubt that Maimonides never dreamed of everything Rabbi Chaim put into him. What I wanted to argue—and this is the debate between Rabbi Yehoshua Hutner and the Seridei Esh—I wanted to claim that Rabbi Yehoshua Hutner is actually right. Meaning, I think Rabbi Chaim really is interpreting Maimonides, and maybe he’s even right about Maimonides’ words. And I said it’s possible that he’s right about Maimonides’ words even though, if Maimonides himself were here, he would say: you’re not right. And that doesn’t matter. Rabbi Chaim could still be more right than Maimonides in understanding Maimonides. And this is not mysticism and not some “faith in sages” or, I don’t know, divine inspiration or things of that sort. These are things I’ve experienced myself. Meaning, these are things everyone experiences. There are situations—I explained this—there are situations where, say, I hear things from my teacher, and of course I put them into my own thought patterns and analytic tools and terminology. My teacher had different terminology, different tools of thought, and so on—usually, by the way, less sophisticated ones, because I, as we said before, the Jewish law follows the later authorities, yes, a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant. So I have his tools plus additional tools that were added in later periods. And yes, that’s the expression of the medieval authorities (Rishonim), the Tosafot Rid and others, about a dwarf on the shoulders of a giant. And the dwarf on the shoulders of the giant sees farther than the one before him, because he stands on the giant’s back, so he manages to see farther, even though in and of himself he’s a dwarf compared to the previous generation. So in that sense, again, I don’t accept the image of dwarf and giant here, of course, but still I think that if I look at things I heard from my teacher, it’s definitely possible that I’ll understand them better than he himself understood them. I’ll understand him better than he understood himself, because I have analytic tools that he didn’t have, and maybe they’ll help me clarify things and organize things in a way that he himself wasn’t able to organize for himself, what he intuitively understood on his own. And when I succeed in conceptualizing his intuitions and putting them into some explicit logic—yes, putting it on the table, extracting the implicit truths that were inside him and putting them on the table—it may be that I succeed in understanding better what he himself said. And if you had asked him some difficulty on his words, he would have been squeezed and given one explanation or another, but I, with my analytic tools, would be able to answer the difficulty without being squeezed, because I have better analytic tools. And then I can remain with the original intuition of Maimonides, or of my teacher, doesn’t matter, without squeezing it and twisting it and rounding off corners and so on, things he had to do because he didn’t have sufficient analytic tools. So it is definitely possible for a student to understand his teacher better than the teacher himself understood himself. That’s what Rabbi Kook writes, yes, about Rabbi Eliezer, that on the one hand he said nothing he had not heard from his teacher, and on the other hand he said things that no ear had ever heard. So he says he heard from his teacher things that no ear had ever heard, and I would claim—even his teacher’s ear. He heard in his teacher things that even his teacher himself did not understand of what he was really saying. And that’s true; it’s not just homiletics. Anyone who really studied with a teacher, it seems to me, can have this experience. I think it’s a simple thing. Okay, did someone want to comment here before? Fine, I’m just going to mute because there are some noises. So that is basically the claim, and I said I want to demonstrate this second dynamic mechanism, the one I just mentioned, through the unfolding of the hermeneutic principles. And then I started describing the history of the hermeneutic principles. And in principle I began with the fact that there’s a dispute between scholars and traditional learners over the question of how the hermeneutic principles developed. Traditional learners attribute them to a law given to Moses at Sinai. I’m talking about halakhic midrash. They attribute it to a law given to Moses at Sinai. Meaning, Moses had already received it; nobody invented anything over the generations. Scholars claim these are things that arose in later periods and even continued to develop and become more sophisticated throughout history. Now there is excellent evidence in favor of the scholars, because we know a number of descriptions or lists of hermeneutic principles: with Hillel the Elder there are seven, and we saw several sources that bring this; with Rabbi Ishmael there are thirteen; with Rabbi Yosei HaGelili there are already thirty-two; and as Rav Sherira Gaon writes, and others write, there are more principles in the Talmud than thirty-two. Meaning, even those lists are not complete. We see that little by little the list keeps swelling. What does that mean? There are certain principles that appear in the later lists that did not appear in the earlier lists. So how can one say that the hermeneutic principles are a law given to Moses at Sinai, that nobody invented anything? Clearly these things are invented, or created, over the course of history, and the fact is that they keep increasing and the number grows, new principles are born—so how can one say this is a law given to Moses at Sinai? On the face of it, this is clear evidence in favor of the scholars against the traditional conceptions. And about that I wanted to argue that this is not evidence. Rather, I propose a different model. The concept “a law given to Moses at Sinai” can be interpreted in a way that is not trivial. Usually, when people understand the concept “a law given to Moses at Sinai,” they understand it as if all the generations were a hollow pipe. Meaning, Moses received something at Mount Sinai, he passes it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, to the Men of the Great Assembly, and the whole chain of generations described in great detail in Pirkei Avot, and in even greater detail in Maimonides’ introduction—basically all those people didn’t touch it, didn’t do anything, they just transmitted it, a relay race, passing the baton from generation to generation, and that’s how they pass the law given to Moses at Sinai from Moses until our own day. That’s why, for example, Maimonides claims that no dispute ever arose over a law given to Moses at Sinai. Meaning, anything about which there is a dispute is known not to be a law given to Moses at Sinai, because the conception is that a law given to Moses at Sinai is simply to transmit the thing as is. We are merely a hollow pipe with respect to that. And I want to suggest something else. I want to argue that there are laws given to Moses at Sinai—and maybe even all of them are like this, or most of them—that are dynamic laws. What does that mean? That the principles, say, were given to Moses in some raw form, or a few basic principles, and over the course of history we conceptualize the principles we received from Moses, reformulate them, maybe this even gets expanded into a larger and more detailed list of principles, but all of this is an act of interpretation. We are not inventing principles; we are conceptualizing the tools of interpretation we received from previous generations, and little by little our toolbox contains more and more principles that have names, distinct names. But it’s not that we invented new principles; rather, we learned from our teachers things that in fact our teachers themselves didn’t even notice. For example—I’ll jump ahead to the end, I’ll come back later, but just so it will be clear—for example, the principles of general and particular: we already saw last class that the principles of general and particular initially appear as a single principle, interpretation by general and particular. There are texts where it says general and particular, and particular and general. With Rabbi Ishmael there already appear three interpretations, three principles: general and particular, particular and general, and general and particular and general. What is the meaning of that? Did Rabbi Ishmael invent a principle, and Hillel the Elder invent the first principle, and after him they invented a second principle and Rabbi Ishmael invented the third? I claim not. What Hillel the Elder called general and particular is actually a collective name for several methods of interpretation, all of which have some common feature: they generalize particulars that appear in the Torah to things similar to them. But how to generalize, how far to generalize, what are the features on which I build the generalization—those were various things. I make generalizations, but there are all kinds of generalizations. Okay? Now little by little, over the generations, we grasp more and more the different kinds of generalization, and the moment we conceptualized them, when we understood that there are certain kinds here that can be defined and they are different, they begin to receive names. So what at first was called general and particular is not one of Rabbi Ishmael’s three principles—it is all three of them. But in the earlier period the conception was: okay, this is general and particular, meaning the generalization of particulars into general categories. Little by little we try to understand exactly how the generalization is done. What happened here? We’re not inventing; we’re looking at the practice of our teachers. What did we receive from our teachers? And little by little we understand that in fact there are several sub-principles here, each one a form of generalization in its own right, and it can be defined, and it appears in several places in the same form. But there’s another way of generalizing that can also be defined, and it too appears in several places in the same form, but it is different. And there is a third method of generalization. And suddenly we understand that these three are really sub-principles of the principle that Hillel the Elder called general and particular. And then, once we understood that, they receive names. General and particular is one principle, particular and general is a second principle, general and particular and general is a third principle. In fact there is also a fourth principle: particular and general and particular. Nowhere is that term written explicitly, but I’ll prove to you that that principle exists too. That is the fourth principle. It appears in the Talmud only in one place, in the Nazir passage, without really calling it by name, I think, but in the medieval authorities (Rishonim) here and there you can already see that they even express it with the name itself. So here we have an example of conceptualization that continues Rabbi Ishmael. I don’t know of anyone who did it—but explicitly, when I did it for the first time, conceptualizing it—but I can show that it existed earlier. I didn’t invent it. I can show that it’s there, but nobody gave it a name. So in effect I continued Rabbi Ishmael and made a fourth principle. I didn’t invent it; I showed that it appears in the Talmud, appears in the medieval authorities (Rishonim), and what happened here is simply that I further detailed what Hillel the Elder called general and particular into one more principle. There were already three sub-principles, three details; I added another detail. There is in fact one more principle that has to enter the toolbox, and we’ll see later how this whole business works. But that’s where I’m heading. Meaning, this really closes the picture. Everything else is details, and the rest—go and learn—that’s what we’re going to do now. All right? But I want the picture to be clear. Meaning, I want to use the unfolding of the hermeneutic principles to demonstrate a different kind of dynamism of tradition, of how the laws are transmitted and yet they are dynamic. But they are not dynamic in the sense that the later differs from the earlier. The later is more sophisticated than the earlier, more detailed than the earlier, and conceptualizes the earlier. Once you conceptualize, you naturally have better tools to understand that in fact there are different kinds here. What the earlier authorities—yes, the example always given in this context is the thirty words in the Eskimo, the Inuit, language for snow. We—I don’t know, people in Europe maybe know this better. I’ve barely seen snow. I’ve almost never seen snow in my life. Okay? So I look outside and I say, okay, that’s snow. I can barely distinguish between snow and hail. But here and there maybe I can distinguish. But to distinguish between different kinds of snow? Never in my life. As far as I’m concerned it’s all snow. Now from the Eskimo’s point of view these are completely different words. I don’t even know whether he would classify all these appearances under one common phenomenon. Would he understand that all these are different kinds of snow, or not? It’s simply thirty phenomena. Okay? So why is that? Because he knows these things up close, he experiences them every day, and he sees that there are different things here. So if I had told him, look, there’s this phenomenon called snow, and then he moved there to Greenland or I don’t know where, to the pole, and suddenly saw different kinds of snow, little by little he would create more and more words—but he’s not inventing; he is further detailing what I called snow. Only from his point of view, snow has many, many subtypes. But they are all, or species, they are all species of this term called snow. It is not invention; it is refinement. Articulation, as they call it in philosophy of science. Right? It is basically a refinement of the earlier expressions. It could be—and I don’t think the medieval and later authorities would admit this or agree to say it—but it could be that once we really are equipped with more sophisticated tools, we can understand better than previous generations what they themselves did. It could be that they were mistaken and we can correct them because they really were not equipped with these distinctions. This is general and particular, this is particular and general, and here one has to generalize beyond the particulars. It’s called the principles of general and particular; I prefer to call it the generals and particulars because that’s a collective name for all those principles of general and particular. But in rabbinic literature it is called general and particular, which in Rabbi Ishmael is one of the thirteen principles, and it itself is called general and particular. I am only claiming that in the earlier language, that same term, general and particular, did not serve in Rabbi Ishmael’s sense; rather, it served as a collective name for all of Rabbi Ishmael’s principles of general and particular. And by the way, with this you can erase entire books written by scholars. Because scholars try to show how this whole business develops, and how he learned the term general and particular, and how he learned the term general and particular, and I think they are fundamentally mistaken. Just now I was speaking with Kahana, who is the father of them all, yes, Menachem Kahana—he’s a very important scholar at the Hebrew University. I spoke with him about the booklet I wrote, but in fact my book on the generals and particulars is a critique of a very large and very foundational article, maybe the most foundational, that he wrote about general and particular. Because his assumptions are scholarly assumptions, and I claim he is wrong because of that. Meaning, he is wrong because he thinks there is a dispute between the earlier generation and the later generation because the later generation uses the term general and particular differently from the earlier generation. And I claim this is not a dispute; it is articulation. The term general and particular in the later generation simply does not function in the same sense in which it functions in the earlier generation, but they are doing the same work. In terms of the interpretations, they are making the same interpretations. It’s just that the later conceptual system is richer, and therefore also more precise and more conceptualized. And this resolves a huge number of contradictions—you have no idea—dozens, hundreds of contradictions. You can simply throw into the trash a huge number of articles that deal with comparisons and contradictions. If I’m right—maybe I’m wrong and they’re right, who says?—if I’m right in this paradigm, the entire scholarly literature on general and particular can be thrown into the trash. And that is a claim, a research paradigm. Meaning, one can try to test it and show these things. I’m not speaking here now about the superiority of tradition over scholarship. Traditional assumptions can function as a research paradigm. And now you can test and see what is more successful, or what does the job better. I think this does the job much better. We brought many examples for this. We wrote a book on the generals and particulars; it’s the second book in the Talmudic Logic series, and there we try to show how this whole thing works. Okay, in any case, that’s the general picture. Now let’s try to get into the matter a bit more. Last time, at the end of the class, we reached the passage in tractate Temurah, and that passage itself is what made the whole thing click for me. The passage in Temurah—again, let’s try to recall it for a moment. I’m sharing it with you. “Returning to the matter itself, Rabbi Yehuda said that Shmuel said: Three thousand laws were forgotten during the days of mourning for Moses. They said to Joshua: Ask”—right? Through prophecy—“ask the Holy One, blessed be He, to restore them to us.” He said to them: “It is not in heaven.” They said to Samuel: Ask. He said to them: “These are the commandments”—that a prophet is no longer permitted to introduce anything new from now on. Rabbi Yitzchak Nappacha said: Even the law of a sin-offering whose owners died was forgotten during the days of mourning for Moses. They said to Pinchas: Ask. He said: “It is not in heaven.” They said to Elazar: Ask. He said: “These are the commandments,” that a prophet is no longer permitted to introduce anything new from now on. In short, we’re stuck. What was going on there? So I explained: during the days of mourning for Moses, they cried for him forty days. For forty days the leader of the generation has died; they do not study Torah. A mourner is forbidden to study Torah; we are all his students, we are mourning him, we are all forbidden to study Torah. The Torah at that time was oral. The Oral Torah had not been written down. There are those who would say that even the Written Torah had not been written down. The Oral Torah certainly had not been written down. So what happens in such a situation? For forty days the entire people of Israel does not engage in Torah, everything is oral, and naturally some things will be forgotten. Three thousand laws were forgotten. Now what do you do when laws are forgotten? There is no way to restore them. Laws, in the simple sense, are a law given to Moses at Sinai. Therefore the example they bring here—of a sin-offering whose owners died—the Talmud says explicitly that this is a law given to Moses at Sinai. So a law given to Moses at Sinai—Maimonides writes that a law given to Moses at Sinai is a law that has no anchor in the written text, not even through midrash. It cannot be derived from the text, neither through interpretation nor through hermeneutics. Rather, it is simply a law transmitted by oral tradition from Sinai. Seemingly there is no way to restore it. It’s gone. If this were an interpretation, you would say: fine, let’s interpret the verse anew, hoping we can reconstruct the earlier interpretation. But there is some basis there, something on which I can try to build and try to hit what was there. But a law given to Moses at Sinai is not anchored in the text in any way, so how do you reconstruct it? It’s just information that was passed to me orally and I forgot it. Someone said, “My name is Moshe,” and I forgot his name. I have no way to reconstruct his name unless it’s written somewhere. Otherwise there’s no way to reconstruct; it’s just an isolated piece of information. If I forgot it, I lost it. Therefore they asked him: ask in heaven that they restore it—but in heaven you can’t do that. We’re stuck. And I mentioned that the Mareh HaPanim on the Jerusalem Talmud actually writes this. He brings some Talmud about a sin-offering whose owners died, where the sages changed it—it wasn’t exactly what they did there. And he says: how can that be? After all, this is a law given to Moses at Sinai; you can’t do such a thing. So he says: but this is a law given to Moses at Sinai that the Talmud here in Temurah says was forgotten. So we act in some way, in some manner that we decided to act, but the way we decided to act is no longer a law given to Moses at Sinai. It is our reconstruction. Or not a reconstruction—I don’t know—our conjecture. So that already no longer has the status of a law given to Moses at Sinai; it has the status of rabbinic law, and that is how one should relate to it, because in truth a law given to Moses at Sinai has no way to be reconstructed. Now, later it says as follows: “It was taught in a baraita”—it should probably be “in the baraita”; this is a baraita—“One thousand seven hundred a fortiori inferences, verbal analogies, and scribal fine points were forgotten during the days of mourning for Moses.” Earlier they spoke of three thousand laws, I remind you. Here they speak of one thousand seven hundred a fortiori inferences, verbal analogies, and scribal fine points. Rabbi Abbahu said: Nevertheless, Otniel son of Kenaz restored them through his dialectical analysis, as it is stated: ‘And Otniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother, captured it; and he gave him Achsah his daughter as a wife.’ And why was her name called Achsah? Because anyone who saw her became angry with his wife.” I want to compare this passage to the previous one. In the previous passage they spoke about three thousand laws that were forgotten. Here they speak about one thousand seven hundred a fortiori inferences. In the previous passage there were appeals to heaven—restore this to me through prophecy—and then they said to him, “It is not in heaven.” Here there are no such appeals. In the previous passage, once the requests were not granted, it was lost; we lost it. And I mentioned that a sin-offering whose owners died is indeed some kind of reconstruction that perhaps no longer even has the status of a law given to Moses at Sinai, because we have no way of restoring it. Here it says that Otniel son of Kenaz restored these laws that had been forgotten. What is the difference between this baraita and the previous baraita? I think the difference is that the previous baraita deals with laws given to Moses at Sinai. This baraita deals with interpretations— a fortiori inferences, verbal analogies—these are hermeneutic principles. What’s the difference? Laws given to Moses at Sinai cannot be restored, so they tried: ask in heaven, and they were told: it is not in heaven. But here these are interpretive methods. You forgot the law? Derive it again—what’s the problem? You have a tool with which you can work on the verse and… You’re not guaranteed to reconstruct it faithfully to the original, but at least you can try. You’ll be as close as you can be; that’s what you’ve got. A judge has only what his eyes can see. But you have the ability to try and reconstruct. It’s not like laws given to Moses at Sinai. Therefore, because there it’s laws given to Moses at Sinai and here it’s a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies, there they could not reconstruct and here they could. Therefore there they turned to heaven and here they do not turn to heaven. Therefore there they really got stuck in the end, and here Otniel son of Kenaz succeeded in restoring them through his dialectical analysis. Now let’s try to understand a bit—this is a conjecture—let’s try to understand what exactly this dialectical analysis of Otniel son of Kenaz was. This really is my conjecture, and it seems to me a reasonable one. Let’s think for a moment what exactly happened there. After all, there were one thousand seven hundred laws, a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies. They didn’t forget the a fortiori inference and the verbal analogy; they forgot the products, the one thousand seven hundred laws that the a fortiori inference and the verbal analogy produced. Okay, so what’s the problem? Derive the a fortiori inference and the verbal analogy again and reconstruct those interpretations. So here I want to make another comment. Why does it say only a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies? What about general and particular, building a principle from one verse, from two verses, one text from two verses, all the thirteen principles, or the thirty-two, or however many you want—many dozens. Why specifically a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies? I think this is a very important hint. In my opinion, a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies is an anachronism. After all, this description is of course a rabbinic one in the Talmud. What is being described here is Otniel son of Kenaz—that’s really in the period of Joshua son of Nun. I don’t think that in the time of Otniel son of Kenaz the words a fortiori inference and verbal analogy were familiar to them at all. The sages use the language that existed in their own time to describe what happened there. Now, a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies are actually, I think, a good example, because one can divide the hermeneutic principles into two subgroups. There are hermeneutic principles that are logical principles. A fortiori reasoning, building a principle from one verse—that’s analogy, two verses that contradict one another, I think that too is a logical principle. There are principles that are textual principles. They are not based on logical reasoning; they are based on a textual hint—for example, verbal analogy. In a verbal analogy one word is written here, and in another context the same word is written. Logic does not say one has to compare the two contexts. This is text. But there is a textual consideration saying that if the same word is used, then apparently the Torah wants to hint to us to learn from here to there or vice versa. Those are what I call textual principles. Most principles are textual. The principles of general and particular, for example, are textual principles. But building a principle from one verse and from two verses, and a fortiori reasoning, are logical principles. Analogy and a fortiori reasoning are used outside Jewish law and outside Torah too. Every person everywhere uses analogy, induction, a fortiori reasoning, logical rules in logical interpretation. So those I call the logical principles; they are called, as a code name, a fortiori inferences. Verbal analogies means the rest of the interpretive methods, the textual interpretations. And therefore I claim that when it says a fortiori inferences—and by the way, this appears elsewhere in the words of the sages, where they use the term a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies—they don’t say hermeneutic principles and they don’t bring more principles, and in my opinion this is a code name for the whole world of interpretation. When they want to refer generally to the world of interpretation, they say a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies. Meaning, the two types of principles, but each type contains several principles. And I want to make one more claim. In the time of Moses, if you had said to Moses “a fortiori inference” or “verbal analogy,” he would have stared at you blankly. He would not have understood what you wanted from him. He didn’t know those words at all. Rather, what I want to claim—now I’m presenting the model I’m proposing—I want to claim that the hermeneutic principles are a dynamic law given to Moses at Sinai. What does that mean? Now of course I’m describing something in pictorial language; this isn’t a factual description, but to illustrate the idea: Moses ascends on high to receive the Torah. He sits with his stander together with the Holy One, blessed be He, and they study as a pair. And the Holy One, blessed be He, teaches him the Written Torah, reads him a verse, teaches him the verse, and so on. Together with that, He teaches Moses not only plain interpretation but also the world of interpretation—again, I’m speaking of halakhic interpretation, not homiletics, not aggadic midrash, but halakhic midrash. And He says to him, “You shall fear the Lord your God”—meaning, one must fear the Holy One, blessed be He, fear of Heaven; that is one of the commandments. But also “You shall fear the Lord your God”—the word ‘et’ comes to include Torah scholars—that is an interpretation. So the Holy One, blessed be He, reads the verse “You shall fear the Lord your God,” and says to him, look, in the plain sense it means you shall fear the Lord your God, the Holy One, blessed be He. In interpretation, it includes Torah scholars. And so on. He goes verse by verse and teaches him the plain meaning and the interpretive meaning. Of course, this is all metaphorical; it never literally happened, but it’s a story meant to illustrate the process. Now Moses did not hear from the Holy One, blessed be He, a single interpretive concept. Not a fortiori reasoning, not general and particular, not verbal analogy, not building a principle from a verse—none of these terms was familiar to Moses. Rather, what happened was that the Holy One taught Moses, or spoke with Moses, the language of interpretation, and simply taught him how to read the verse through the lenses of interpretation and through the lenses of plain meaning. In the world of plain meaning too, the Holy One does not teach Moses interpretive principles. He simply reads and explains. Later Moses thinks to himself: wait a second, by what principles did the Holy One interpret? Then maybe he succeeds in formulating for himself various interpretive principles. But it’s not that the Holy One told him a list of interpretive principles, and the same with interpretation. The Holy One read it in the language of plain meaning and read it in the language of interpretation, all the verses. A parable for this—I once saw this in my friend Moshe Koppel, professor at Bar-Ilan in mathematics and computer science, emeritus by now, I think. He once compared this in an article of his to language learning. When a language develops, no one in the first community that begins the language formulates rules. There is no direct object, indirect object, subject, predicate, and so on. Obviously not—nobody knows what those rules are. They begin speaking, and little by little patterns begin to form, and then everyone imitates those patterns and the language becomes richer and develops and everything else—there are no grammatical rules at all. Those rules are in the subtext; they are some unarticulated intuition of the speaking community. At some stage, some researcher can come along, look at that language, identify various patterns, and then say: ah, look, all your sentences—notice—all your sentences are built as subject, predicate, direct object, indirect object, modifier, adjective, all sorts of things of that kind. But these are concepts that the speakers who created the language are not familiar with at all. They use them intuitively, but they do not know them. The one who conceptualized this is someone later, who looks at the language once it is already built and tries to identify within it structures or principles or fixed patterns, and then suddenly he creates conceptual categories. He says: there are such and such grammatical structures, grammatical principles, begadkefat at the beginning of a word, a dagesh, direct object, indirect object, all sorts of things of this kind, all of which are totally alien to the original speakers. They are using those rules, of course, but without recognizing the rules. Like a child learning a language. When a child learns a language in his home, nobody tells him direct object, indirect object, subject, predicate. They simply start speaking with him, and he gradually picks up the natural rhythm of the language and speaks the language. Then afterward he gets to school and they start confusing him with all the grammar, which of course drives him crazy, but never mind. Maybe for some people it goes in, maybe for others it doesn’t, but somehow grammar comes after you already know the language. It’s not that the language is founded on a defined set of grammatical rules. Quite the opposite: the language developed naturally, and afterward someone came and tried to conceptualize and extract from that natural language some set of rules. That’s why those rules are often approximate. Yes, like the Stradivarius exactly—that’s the parable I bring in this context. So the claim is that at the giving of the Torah it was the same thing. The Holy One, blessed be He, taught Moses two languages: the language of plain meaning and the language of interpretation. Now when you teach a language, it’s not an ulpan, you don’t use rules—know that there’s this rule, another rule—you simply speak the language until you get used to it and understand intuitively how one speaks. And that happened in plain meaning and it happened in interpretation. Moses read a verse and understood what interpretation comes out of it and what plain meaning comes out of it. But he did not know how to define for himself the grammatical rules of those languages, neither the language of plain meaning nor the language of interpretation. Then he passes this on to his students, to the whole people of Israel, and then he dies. And then the people of Israel stop studying Torah for forty days, and they forget some of the laws Moses had taught them. But there still was no system of rules. They didn’t know what an a fortiori inference is, what a verbal analogy is, what general and particular is. So what are they going to do? How will they reconstruct? And I’m not talking now about a law given to Moses at Sinai—there is no way to reconstruct that. I’m now talking about the laws derived from the hermeneutic principles. When you do not have this system of tools, the rules of the hermeneutic principles, how can you reconstruct the interpretive products, the laws that were learned? There’s no way to do it. What did Otniel son of Kenaz do? So I conjecture the following. Since one thousand seven hundred laws were forgotten, there were probably several thousand that remained. They didn’t forget everything; they forgot a lot, but not everything. What Otniel son of Kenaz did was begin doing scientific research. He went over the interpretations they did remember and tried to extract from them rules, the grammar of the language of interpretation. And then suddenly, for the first time, concepts like general and particular, a fortiori reasoning, verbal analogy, began to emerge. Again, I don’t know which rules and how many rules, but Otniel son of Kenaz probably looked at the interpretations we still remembered, the ones that remained, gathered all that everyone remembered, tried to understand, to identify within them where there were patterns he could point to, formulated the rule behind this set of interpretations, that set of interpretations, and so on, and suddenly he saw that there was really some set of rules we are using. And then once you are already equipped with rules, you can reconstruct other laws that we do not remember. Ah, there is already an interpretation of verbal analogy or general and particular—let’s try to check regarding the law of a sin-offering whose owners died, which is a law given to Moses at Sinai, never mind, but a law derived from interpretation—let’s try to apply the hermeneutic principles that I have now conceptualized to the verses and try to see whether I can reconstruct the forgotten law. And he probably succeeded in reconstructing all the one thousand seven hundred that had been forgotten. So essentially my claim is that this “dialectical analysis,” what the Talmud calls Otniel son of Kenaz’s dialectical analysis, was nothing other than scientific work. Like someone researching a language, he researched the language of interpretation, and he succeeded in conceptualizing and extracting from the language of interpretation a system of interpretive rules, and that is how the system of interpretive rules began to take shape. And that system, with Otniel son of Kenaz—or at least in the rabbinic reconstruction—was some two general categories: a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies, which, as I said before, are textual principles and logical principles. In the following generations, the next step known to us is Hillel the Elder. There we already have seven principles: a fortiori reasoning, building a principle from a verse, general and particular, verbal analogy. There are already names. They have already conceptualized more; it’s not just two broad names, logical principles and textual principles, but yes—verbal analogy, think about the concept. Verbal analogy means learning from one place to another. But how to learn? It’s not verbal analogy as we use it with Hillel the Elder or Rabbi Ishmael, where it is already really taking a word here and a word there and comparing the contexts, but rather learning through textual tools. And then little by little we begin to conceptualize it, and there are different textual principles here. As for how he reconstructed it, the answer is very simple, as I said before. After all, some interpretive laws remained. From those laws he understood that apparently in interpretation one uses verbal analogy between places where the same word appears in both places, or general and particular, where one expands beyond the particulars. He saw this through the laws they still remembered, and then applied it to reconstruct the laws they did not remember. As in science: I have phenomena I know, and from them I try to derive laws of nature. The laws of nature explain those phenomena. Those phenomena are demonstrations of the laws of nature. Once I have the laws of nature in hand, I can predict what will happen in experiments I do not know. Right? That is exactly what Otniel son of Kenaz did. He took the remembered facts, reconstructed the laws from them—the laws of nature, so to speak, or the interpretive rules—and then used the interpretive rules he had conceptualized to reconstruct the forgotten laws. That is how he reconstructed them. No, verbal analogy is not arbitrary at all. No principle is arbitrary. So the claim, in the end, is that Otniel son of Kenaz began a process here, but in my view it only began there. And there in the Talmud you can see very clearly the beginning of this process—that’s what I think. And afterward we suddenly see that the two of Otniel son of Kenaz become seven with Hillel, thirteen with Rabbi Ishmael, thirty-two with Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili. So my claim is that this is simply the continuation of that same process. The principles become more and more detailed. Suppose now that Otniel son of Kenaz understood that there is some generalization of particulars here, and he called it general and particular. Then suddenly Rabbi Ishmael comes and says: wait a second, there are actually three kinds of generalization here, as I explained at the beginning of the class—there are three kinds of generalization here. One we’ll call general and particular, one we’ll call particular and general, one we’ll call general and particular and general. And then little by little it gets more detailed, and I now add another particular and general and particular. Okay? And so that is what happened with all the principles, and that is how it kept branching and branching. But notice what the meaning of this process is. The meaning of this process is that the principles that arise in later generations are not invention. They are simply reconstruction and conceptualization of what earlier generations did. I am not disagreeing with the earlier generations, I am not changing what earlier generations did; I am simply interpreting and conceptualizing what earlier generations did.

[Speaker C] But all this doesn’t apply to a law given to Moses at Sinai.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. There we lost it. What we lost is lost, that’s it.

[Speaker C] No, these interpretive methods too apply only to those interpretations, to interpretation, not to what we lost. Even if today we have a law given to Moses at Sinai, I can’t apply this there to a law given to Moses at Sinai.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course not. Of course not. I’m saying, as for the laws of Moses—after Moses’ mourning period there remained laws given to Moses at Sinai, and 3,000 were lost. There remained interpretive laws, and 1,700 were lost. Now when Otniel son of Kenaz reconstructed, he reconstructed only the laws that were lost through the hermeneutic principles, not laws given to Moses at Sinai, because behind laws given to Moses at Sinai there are no inference rules, there is no grammar there.

[Speaker C] And how do you distinguish today what is a law given to Moses at Sinai?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Only what they remembered and passed on in the tradition. I assume that today those are the laws.

[Speaker C] No, but today, when you learn, only what is written explicitly as a law given to Moses at Sinai is a law given to Moses at Sinai?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. And that’s not my innovation. It’s obvious. Only what they said about it that it is a law given to Moses at Sinai is a law given to Moses at Sinai, that’s clear.

[Speaker C] But with anything that is a law given to Moses at Sinai, you can’t intervene, can’t do anything.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, that’s what Maimonides says.

[Speaker C] No, I mean what you say.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I claim that even with laws given to Moses at Sinai that passed along the route through what’s called the hollow pipe, even there it’s not exactly a hollow pipe. And even there disputes did arise, and it’s clear that disputes arose regarding laws given to Moses at Sinai. So we have ways of reconstructing that through indirect laws, through practical ramifications, but not reconstructing it from verses, because it does not arise from verses. And sometimes we made mistakes—true, there’s nothing to be done.

[Speaker B] How do we know that the three thousand were lost? How do we know how many they forgot? How do we know it was three thousand?