The Mundane and the Sacred – Rabbi Michael Abraham – Lesson 6
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- Holiness, the mundane, and Hanukkah
- Social mapping: Haredim, secular people, and Religious Zionism
- Hasidism, the Mitnagdic world, and Breslov and Chabad
- “Religious Zionism” with a hyphen versus “without a hyphen,” and fused composition
- Har Hamor, ideological ethos, and Haredi pragmatism
- Theory versus reality: ideology, game theory, and Tadiran engineering
- Ponevezh and Slabodka: patterns, creativity, and the model of “start and finish”
- The fourth model: Zionism, religiosity, and the separation of religion and state
- Value-laden mundanity, optional matters, and Maimonides’ five kinds of speech
- Democratic values versus halakhic / of Jewish law values, and decision-making under tension
- Reform, double commitment, and the question of the source of authority
- Coercion, Sabbath desecration, a coerced divorce, and the limits of “until he says, ‘I want to’”
- Rabbenu Nissim’s Derashot, sermon 11: the judges’ law versus the king’s law
- A historical accident: “striking and punishing not according to the law,” customs, and “Da’at Torah”
- Contemporary application: the legal system, secular courts, and integrating values into public life
Summary
General overview
The text presents a model that distinguishes between holiness and the mundane, and rejects two extremes: one in which everything is holy and one in which everything is mundane. It argues that the Sages criticize the mixing of these domains. It maps current outlooks as follows: Haredism sees the mundane as impurity from which one ought to distance oneself; secularity sees everything as mundane; and ideological Religious Zionism sees the mundane as holy and blurs the boundaries between domains. In response, it proposes a fourth direction, “Religious Zionism without a hyphen,” which holds Zionism and religiosity as two different domains. From there it develops a claim about the legitimacy of “normative duality,” a parallel commitment to halakhic / of Jewish law values and to moral-democratic values, grounding this in Rabbenu Nissim’s Derashot, sermon 11, on the judges’ law versus the king’s law, which separates halakhic true justice from the political repair of civil order.
Holiness, the mundane, and Hanukkah
The struggle of Hanukkah is described as a confrontation between Greeks, for whom everything is mundane, and Hasmoneans, for whom everything is holy. The Sages are presented as criticizing both views. The preferred model places the mundane alongside holiness in a clearly bounded way and says it is wrong to mix them. This outlook is presented as having contemporary implications for the attitude toward ordinary life and spheres of life outside the study hall.
Social mapping: Haredim, secular people, and Religious Zionism
Haredism is described as a broad outlook that sees mundane life as a kind of impurity and develops a principled reservation toward the return of the Jewish people to the stage of history and toward Zionism, even apart from its secularity, from within an attitude of “we are not supposed to do this,” waiting for the Messiah and for the Temple to descend from above. Secular people are described as saying that everything is mundane “by nature.” Religious Zionism is described as the opposite position, identifying the mundane as holy and striving to conduct all spheres of life in holiness to the point of blurring domains.
Hasidism, the Mitnagdic world, and Breslov and Chabad
The text argues that the claim that the struggle between Hasidism and the Mitnagdic world has ended is inaccurate, because “there simply are no Hasidim,” except for two groups considered “real Hasidim”: Breslov and Chabad. It defines “real Hasidism” as a continuation of the revolutionary spirit, originality, and breaking of frameworks that characterized early Hasidism, while institutionalized Hasidism is described as retaining mainly external markers. It concludes that wherever there really are Hasidim, the struggle is still fully alive.
“Religious Zionism” with a hyphen versus “without a hyphen,” and fused composition
The text quotes Yosef Burg, who said that the main thing in Religious Zionism is “the hyphen between them,” and interprets this as the claim that Religious Zionism is not merely a combination of two components but a fusion in which “your Zionism is religious and your religiosity is Zionist.” It adopts the Rogatchover’s distinction between “fused composition” and “neighboring composition,” and illustrates fused composition through an ideological identity in which the components melt into a third concept. It then proposes “Religious Zionism without a hyphen” as a position in which a person can be Zionist and religious without Zionism becoming a religious value and without religiosity becoming a Zionist value, describing this as a solution that allows a clear demarcation between domains.
Har Hamor, ideological ethos, and Haredi pragmatism
The text brings a story in the name of one of the rabbis of Har Hamor who said that if the State of Israel were destroyed, he would take off his kippah, and interprets this as an extreme expression of the identification between religiosity and Zionism. It argues that this ethos is authentic even if, in practice, people will find excuses when ideologies clash with reality, as theories develop to explain events like the disengagement and political compromises. It presents Har Hamor as a world that is “very, very ideological,” where everything is judged according to whether it fits the outlook, in contrast to mainstream Haredism, which it describes as “not ideological at all” but rather pragmatic. It illustrates this with the example of Litzman, who became a minister due to a High Court requirement, despite the historic stance that this was absolutely forbidden.
Theory versus reality: ideology, game theory, and Tadiran engineering
The text presents ideology and theory as frameworks that provide direction and insights but do not “solve any problem” directly, and calls childish the expectation that theory will work one-to-one in reality. It compares this to game theory, which offers insights but not solutions, and to a personal experience at Tadiran, where it became clear that analog engineering reality does not behave according to academic models, whereas the digital world is closer to theory. It argues that one cannot do without theory, but one also cannot cling to it all the way, because life is “more complicated” and requires critical judgment.
Ponevezh and Slabodka: patterns, creativity, and the model of “start and finish”
The text describes two differences between Ponevezh and Slabodka: a pattern-based learning style with “right and wrong” in Ponevezh, versus a more subjective and homespun style in Slabodka; and the fact that almost all roshei yeshiva come out of Ponevezh. It explains that pattern-based tools enable even an average person to achieve results and give a general lecture on any topic / passage, whereas a non-pattern-based style requires genius in order to produce results. It tells of a lecturer whose talks were identical to those of Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky on tractate Sukkah and who claimed he had not copied them, but simply “learns like Rabbi Shmuel.” This is presented as an expression of the aspiration to reproduce through pattern. It proposes a model that begins in Ponevezh in order to acquire patterns and tools, and continues to “metaphorical Slabodka” in order to develop one’s own method, arguing that both extremes miss the point when they remain only in pattern or only in subjectivity.
The fourth model: Zionism, religiosity, and the separation of religion and state
The text proposes a division into three outlooks: Haredism, in which “what is outside is impurity”; Religious Zionism, in which “there is no outside because everything is holiness”; and secularity, in which “everything is mundane.” It then presents a fourth direction, Religious Zionism without a hyphen, which maintains two separate identities. It cites the joke about “the rabbi from Ponevezh,” who neither says Hallel nor omits supplication prayers on Independence Day, and interprets it seriously as a position that recognizes the value of the state without sanctifying it religiously, while mentioning hanging the flag and guarding it. It argues that the mundane is good and legitimate, like giving thanks for breakfast and for “the fact that my bodily openings worked properly,” without turning that into holiness. It formulates a practical expression of this stance as the distinction between celebrating with flags and bringing a flag into the synagogue, and presents the principled edge of the position as support for the separation of religion and state and opposition to religious or secular coercion.
Value-laden mundanity, optional matters, and Maimonides’ five kinds of speech
The text argues that there are several kinds of the mundane, including mundanity that contains commandments, mundanity that contains values even without a commandment, and mundanity that is entirely optional. It attributes to Rabbi Lichtenstein the distinction that optional matters are not a completely neutral sphere. It cites Maimonides in chapter one of his commentary on Mishnah Avot, where he describes “five kinds of speech” and places them between holiness and impurity: speech of commandment, value-laden optional speech, neutral optional speech, negative optional speech that is not a halakhic transgression, and forbidden speech such as slander. It presents a broad map in which holiness and impurity are the extreme sectors beyond commandment and beyond prohibition.
Democratic values versus halakhic / of Jewish law values, and decision-making under tension
The text argues that a religious person can support civil rights such as civil marriage and adoption by homosexual couples even though this is “against Jewish law,” because in addition to religious values he also has democratic values and opposes the state harming people’s rights. It rejects the assumption that “the religious value always prevails” and presents dilemmas in which a moral value may prevail, using expressions like “the fifth section of the Shulchan Arukh” and “a transgression for its own sake.” It gives examples such as not attaching invalid witnesses to a secular couple in order to invalidate the marriage, the question of legalizing prostitution, and the idea that there are “meta-halakhic” considerations of “it’s just not fitting” that can decide even against a formally halakhic utilitarian consideration.
Reform, double commitment, and the question of the source of authority
The text distinguishes between a “duality of values” within a world that is committed to Jewish law and a lack of commitment, and argues that value-duality is legitimate when both sides are truly binding and create a real conflict. It refers to Moshe Zemer’s book A Sane Halakhah and argues that some Reform arguments are legitimate value arguments, but some stem from frivolity, “it doesn’t suit me right now,” or lack of commitment. It presents an outlook in which morality is not a separate source of authority from the Holy One, blessed be He, but another way in which Hashem expects a person to “do what is upright and good,” and explains that from this also follows a commitment to democratic government and to non-coercion.
Coercion, Sabbath desecration, a coerced divorce, and the limits of “until he says, ‘I want to’”
The text argues that coercion is ineffective in an ideological dispute because commandments require intention, and interprets Maimonides’ phrase “until he says, ‘I want to’” as fitting only someone who believes. From this it draws a practical stringency according to which a religious court cannot coerce a secular person to give a divorce, because a coerced bill of divorce would be invalid when the person does not believe. It distinguishes between Sabbath desecration out of rebellion, which in principle incurs stoning under conditions of witnesses and warning, and Sabbath desecration out of a different belief, which it defines as the act of someone under compulsion.
Rabbenu Nissim’s Derashot, sermon 11: the judges’ law versus the king’s law
The text presents at length Rabbenu Nissim’s Derashot, sermon 11, as a model of two legal systems: judges entrusted with “justice that is truly just in itself,” aimed at “bringing down divine abundance,” and kingship entrusted with “repairing political order” and settling the world. It explains that a strict evidentiary procedure such as “did you warn him and did he accept the warning” is appropriate from the standpoint of legal truth, but that if punishment were imposed only in this way, “the political order would be entirely ruined,” and therefore the king judges “without warning, according to what he sees is necessary for the political collective.” It emphasizes that kingship in Israel is “the same in Israel and in the other nations” and that appointing a king is mundane in the sense of a universal need, whereas appointing judges in Israel bears a unique dimension of divine abundance, and therefore the Sanhedrin sits in the place of the Temple. It cites Rabbenu Nissim’s claim that the laws of the nations may possibly provide better political order than some Torah laws, and interprets this as a distinction between the goal of a civil legal system and the goal of Torah law.
A historical accident: “striking and punishing not according to the law,” customs, and “Da’at Torah”
The text argues that the modern difficulty in accepting Rabbenu Nissim’s model stems from a historical accident in which the powers of the king were funneled into the religious court, and thus a doctrine emerged that “the religious court may strike and punish not according to the law.” It argues that the presidents of the Sanhedrin came from the house of David because they also fulfilled a royal function when there was no king, and that from this developed a confusion in which everything came to be perceived as part of the study-hall domain. It criticizes the inclusion of various customs and enactments into the Shulchan Arukh and argues that the content of such customs is not “Torah” in the essential sense, even though they have halakhic authority. It connects this to the expansion of the concept of “Da’at Torah” and the tendency to ask a rabbi about mundane areas that are not supposed to be under halakhic authority.
Contemporary application: the legal system, secular courts, and integrating values into public life
The text argues that the model of holiness and the mundane requires clear demarcation without mixing, but also recognition that in the world of the mundane there are binding values of morality and social order that are not neutral. It presents a principled possibility for the legitimacy of a civil legal system that accepts evidentiary rules that are not halakhic, so long as it is understood as parallel to kingship and not as a replacement for Jewish law. It emphasizes that the problem today is the absence of “recognition of the authority of the Sages at least over their own wing.” It concludes that the concept of “normative duality” projects onto public questions such as civil marriage, the Western Wall, and minority rights, and emphasizes that there is no principled contradiction in a person being committed to Torah and commandments while insisting on democratic principles even when they clash with halakhic prohibitions, because the decision cannot be made only by the rules of Jewish law but requires a decision from outside the halakhic framework.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the topic / passage of holiness and the mundane, last time I mentioned the discussion about Hanukkah itself, really, the Hasmoneans versus the Greeks. I suggested a certain interpretation of this, that this is a struggle between two polar, opposing conceptions: with the Greeks, everything is mundane, and with the Hasmoneans, everything is holy. And it seems that the Sages criticize both conceptions. Meaning, in the end, the model they draw is the mundane alongside holiness, in a way that is clearly bounded, and it is not right to mix the two. I mentioned at the end that these issues also have contemporary expressions nowadays. As a generalization, of course, but you can say, for example, that Haredim hold that one should relate only to holiness. Everything outside the study hall, or outside the narrow world of holiness par excellence, is impurity, and really one should distance oneself from it. Which is a little surprising when we’re talking about Hasidim. Lithuanians—that’s almost the essence of their outlook, distancing themselves from filthy alleyways, as Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin writes. But the Hasidim, in practice, more or less have as their motto that there is divinity everywhere, and still today Hasidim are kind of toy Hasidim. Most of them. And once I said to someone that there are two Hasidic groups that are still genuinely Hasidic. Because after all, people commonly think that the struggle between Hasidism and the Mitnagdic world has basically ended. Meaning, that’s not the issue anymore. Fine, there are political power struggles, but the spiritual and conceptual struggle no longer really exists. That’s not true. It no longer really exists because there simply are no Hasidim. There are two groups that are real Hasidim, and against them the struggle is being waged in full force: Breslov and Chabad. Those are two groups that are truly Hasidic in the old senses of early Hasidism, not in the sense of today’s institutionalized Hasidism, which is nothing except sidelocks and a shtreimel. Meaning there is nothing there except that. Again, I’m exaggerating a bit, but basically there is no Hasidism there—that revolutionary quality, that originality, that breaking of frameworks that characterized the Hasidism of the past. Good morning. It doesn’t exist today. It exists among Breslov and Chabad, and against them the struggle really remains. So that’s why I think this mistake—that supposedly the struggle between Hasidim and Mitnagdim no longer exists—is incorrect. It’s not that the struggle no longer exists; it’s that the Hasidim no longer exist. Wherever there are Hasidim, there is also struggle. Fine. But to our subject: what I want to say is that a Haredi outlook, broadly speaking—and I’m including all the factions in it—is basically to see mundane life as some kind of impurity that one should distance oneself from. And again, don’t hold me to every word—there are those for whom this isn’t so—but broadly, as a general description of how they relate to ordinary life, to our people’s return to the stage of history, as people say, with the Zionist movement—which basically returned us to the family of nations, to the stage of history; we stopped being a tribe, we started being a state, you become present in history—this is viewed with a lot of reservation. And I don’t think it’s only because of the issue of secularity or non-secularity. There’s something here like when people say that the Temple will descend from above and the Holy One, blessed be He, will send us the Messiah—we’re not supposed to do this. That’s not a claim against secularity. It’s a claim against the Zionist movement regardless of its secularity. Its secularity only helps sharpen the negative attitude toward that movement, but really there is some kind of attitude here toward the mundane world in general. So the mundane is impurity. And Religious Zionism, I said, is the opposite side—that what old Hasidism was, that is basically what Religious Zionism is today: it sees the mundane as holy. Everything is holy. One has to conduct all spheres of life in holiness. Everything is holy. To the point that the boundary gets pretty blurred in many contexts. The secular say that everything is mundane, of course, by definition. And the model I was aiming at last time is what I called Religious Zionism without a hyphen. I once wrote about this, because Yosef Burg once said that the main thing in Religious Zionism is neither the Zionism nor the religiosity but the hyphen between them. And that’s really true—it’s a nice sharpening, but it reflects something very real. Meaning, the point is that among religious people there are all kinds, and among Zionists too there are all kinds. Religious Zionism is not being both Zionist and religious; Religious Zionism is being something in which your Zionism is religious and your religiosity is Zionist. Meaning, there is some kind of fusion or connection between the two sides of the equation, not just that both are present in the same person. And they merge. What? Yes, exactly—fused composition and not neighboring composition, in the language of the Rogatchover. Wait, what does he mean by neighboring here? Huh? What is neighboring? The Rogatchover says that there are places where two components merge and create some third concept. But in certain cases the merging is a neighboring merge. What does neighboring mean? That the two components are neighbors to one another. They’re simply both in the same basket. And there is fused composition, where they merge with one another, meaning they are melted together.
[Speaker B] It’s like in chemistry: a mixture versus a compound.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly—they’re melted into some third thing, to the point that the basic components no longer really exist in a distinct way. So yes, I once heard this from one of the rabbis of Har Hamor, who said— we talked about this once— that if the State of Israel is destroyed, he’ll take off his kippah. Meaning, in short, he said: that’s it, no. Meaning, for him, this is a principle of faith. It’s like proving there is no God. Yes, it’s a contradiction to faith. Yes, it’s like proving there is no God—for him there is no difference. This is maybe a very strong expression, I think, or an extreme one, of this identity between religiosity and Zionism. It’s not that he is both religious and Zionist; his religiosity is soaked in Zionism. Meaning, without it, it doesn’t exist. He’s not prepared to accept religiosity without Zionism. It’s an extreme expression, but I think at least he was straightforward enough to say it. Others recoil from saying it. By the way, I’m not sure that for him himself it would actually happen; he’d find excuses and in the end it wouldn’t happen. But in ethos, that’s what he is. A lot of times we examine—yes, we already talked about this—we examine outlooks.
[Speaker D] Why really wouldn’t it happen to him?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It wouldn’t happen because in the end I believe he is, in fact, a believing Jew.
[Speaker D] Right, because the root isn’t that. Huh? Because at the root it isn’t that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m saying he’ll find some explanation for why this is—just like people find explanations for many things. People are constantly busy with excuses. It’s like with Stalin; we talked about this already. Meaning, every time communist predictions failed, there were all kinds of explanations for why this was really an indirect process, but in the end the proletariat would still prevail, and all kinds of things like that. Ideological conceptions always shatter against reality. Reality is more stubborn than all of us and than all our theories. But whoever insists on the ideological conception has to enter into all kinds of excuses. So you find one excuse here and one there—that suddenly the State of Israel carries out a disengagement, or agreements with compromises, and things like that. It shatters the whole ideology. Not only is it forbidden according to that outlook—it can’t happen. Not that it’s forbidden, because it’s against the process of redemption. And then all kinds of theories develop, that redemption is more from below, kind of—it’s more sinusoidal, meaning it’s not monotonic.
[Speaker C] No, that was also the explanation for the disengagement, because they really were sure it wouldn’t happen, because they were told it couldn’t happen.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. I’m saying, though, this runs very deep in the outlook—at least, I’m saying, in the outlook of ideological Religious Zionism, of Har Hamor.
[Speaker C] But they didn’t take off their kippot.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, they didn’t take off their kippot, and that’s why I also believe they won’t take off their kippot even if the state is destroyed.
[Speaker E] Some of them changed it to a black one.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe changed it to black, yes, like Rabbi Tal. There are those who did. But I’m saying: the ethos, the ethos he expresses here, I think really does contain something very authentic, regardless of the question of whether it will actually be realized in the end or not. A lot of times we live in light of ethoses that aren’t really— I also spoke about this a few days ago. Yesterday I had some kind of class at my house for a few guys, and somehow this came up—that Har Hamor is a very, very ideological outlook, like I also talked about here once. Meaning, everything has to be tested through the question of whether it fits or doesn’t fit. They don’t just flow with things. Meaning, they don’t see—say, the Haredi world is not ideological at all, contrary to what people think. Really not ideological at all. I’m not talking about Satmar; I’m talking about mainstream Haredi society. Not ideological at all. A very pragmatic world. With all the stubbornness and all that—even the stubbornness doesn’t come from ideology at all. The stubbornness comes from practical considerations. Even when they go against political processes and all sorts of things like that, it’s not from ideological considerations; it’s from practical ones. They think that this is the more correct way to manage— not achievements in the petty sense of money, but really to influence the character of the state or whatever. But it’s not because this is permitted and that is forbidden. Today they live with Sabbath desecration, which basically—except for the Gerer Rebbe and that crowd—they are willing to accept in one form or another, because they understand that it doesn’t pass, that it can’t work. So we talked about, for example, Litzman now being a minister. This is drifting a bit into current affairs, but that’s exactly the point. Litzman is a minister, right? But there was an absolutely clear ideology—all the great Torah council leaders, over decades, they were not ministers, they were deputy ministers. Under no circumstances. Because you have ministerial responsibility for all government decisions. You are responsible for all the horrifying decisions, from their point of view—and maybe really horrifying—of the government. The moment the High Court forced him, then they became—he became a minister. Now if something like that had happened in Har Hamor, he would have resigned from the Knesset. He would never in his life have become a minister. Obviously not. It’s against the ideology; it’s the destruction of Torah. Pamphlets would immediately come out there with sparks from here and sparks from there, proving with signs and wonders that on this one does not compromise. Once I really admired that. I still admire it today. There is something there to admire, in that ideological element. And on the other hand, it’s a little childish. It’s childish because ideologies never really work, and that’s a good thing. They’re not supposed to work. Ideology is a good thing—it’s like game theory. Game theory gives you classroom solutions for all kinds of…
[Speaker B] Ideology is a kind of direction.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ideology gives direction. Yes, exactly. So I once heard—I don’t remember, maybe Chaim Shapira said it, or I don’t remember who—that game theory basically gives you insights; it doesn’t solve any problem. It gives insights, what can affect what. Which is really interesting—you see insights there—but don’t try to solve a life problem with mathematics; it won’t work. One of my frustrations was when I worked at Tadiran. I worked there half-time in the fourth year of engineering studies. So I got there and saw that nothing worked the way I had learned. Meaning, you know, all the technicians there knew how to do everything a thousand times better than I did. I was doing calculations and diagonalizing orthogonal polynomials and all that—I also had a tendency toward mathematics, it’s a personality thing too. So I was a theoretician, with two left hands, didn’t know what to do with screwdrivers and things like that. And I saw that when they had some problem, they stepped on it, tossed it, replaced the capacitor with a transistor, and in the end somehow it worked—I don’t know how. Or they copied from the Japanese. Meaning, then they came up with how to do it right. And I kept trying to check how it works, with calculations and this and that, and nothing came out.
[Speaker C] You only got in their way.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, I only got in their way. In the end I drew the conclusions and went with physics. Really—that came out of there. It became clear to me there that this was not for me. So in a certain sense, to think theory works—that really is childish. I came from the university, this kind of kid, learned the theory, understood that it described reality one-to-one, then you move to reality and immediately you just need to apply what we learned and everything’s fine, everything will work. Nothing works. In the digital world, by the way, it’s a little different. In the digital world theory is much closer—that’s its advantage—much closer to practice. Because in the digital world it’s one or zero. Meaning there isn’t— in the analog world, theories don’t work. It’s crazy; you can’t build analog things.
[Speaker D] It’s really terrible.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s why in Israel—
[Speaker D] there are more programmers than physicists and electronics engineers.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It works.
[Speaker D] Exactly. But even without theory, you can’t.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s why I say: it’s not that theory isn’t important. Theory gives direction, gives insights. If you understand the theory, you can try to think how hard to kick the transistor so it’ll work. But in the end you have to kick it, not try all kinds of calculations. So the same goes for game theory, the same goes in many places. Meaning, theory can give direction. I very much appreciate theories; I’m a theoretical type. But at a certain stage you grow up and understand that it’s a little childish to think theory gives you the answer. Fine, theory is some kind of conceptual framework, it gives insights, and that helps. And someone without theory really does think in a more primitive way. But someone who clings to theory is a child. Meaning, that’s also a bit—I’m reminded of another context where the same thing comes up. Just now, suddenly… I was in Bnei Brak, in my merry period in Bnei Brak, and I was kind of an amateur sociologist. I’m always a bit of an outsider in different places. I look at things from the side, trying to document the phenomena, to understand them. So I saw there a very interesting phenomenon. This was always the introduction I would give at the beginning of every academic year in the yeshiva in Yeruham and in the kollel at Bar-Ilan. I told them: look, there are two yeshivot—at that time there were two large and important yeshivot in Bnei Brak: Slabodka and Ponevezh. There are two differences between them, two main differences that I can point to. One difference is in the style of learning. Slabodka is much more subjective and much less pattern-based. Meaning, much less with a fixed mold, with distinctions, with a very defined way of thinking, very… differentiated. There’s right and wrong. In Ponevezh everything is very pattern-based. Meaning, it’s very much that there’s right and wrong; they’re incapable of hearing something that deviates from the patterns. They’re simply closed to it. You can’t talk to them outside the normal patterns. And in Slabodka it’s the opposite: everyone says what seems right to him—seems to me like this, seems to me like that—a kind of homeowner’s thinking, less pattern-based, less logical, less… the Chazon Ish, basically, right? I always found the Chazon Ish difficult because I come from a Ponevezh study hall. The Chazon Ish was always difficult for me. They warned me before I went to the Chazon Ish kollel: listen, you won’t get along there. I said, what do you mean I won’t get along there? Two yeshivot in Bnei Brak, everyone dresses the same, learns the same—how different can it be? Two frogs living in a puddle who think they’re on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. And it turns out—not so. I really didn’t get along there. I left after some time because it just wasn’t— you can’t talk with them. Meaning it just wasn’t— there was a whole group there I couldn’t hear. Someone says “it seems to me like this” and “maybe this” and “maybe…” Here it should be built with two sides, with analytical distinctions, with a proper structure. That’s one difference in learning style. The second difference was that, at least in those days—I’m less updated today, but I believe there’s still something to it—almost all roshei yeshiva came out of Ponevezh. Meaning, roshei yeshiva in other places, not from Slabodka. Almost none. Again, today I’m less updated, but you know a bit—is that still true? It still is, right? Almost all roshei yeshiva came out of Ponevezh and not Slabodka. And I claim these two things are connected. Because if you learn in a homespun way, whatever seems right to you—you say this, it seems that way to you, maybe like this, maybe like that—then if you’re the Chazon Ish, you’re the Chazon Ish, and if not, you’ll remain a nobody. Because this business of “it seems like this, it seems like that” doesn’t—
[Speaker B] pull the…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not only does it not pull, you really don’t achieve much that way. But if you’re in Ponevezh, even an average person, if he does the work properly, will become a rosh yeshiva. If he works, he’ll become a rosh yeshiva. Because you get such structured tools that every topic / passage you come to, you can give the general lecture on that topic / passage. Toward the end of my period in Bnei Brak, I would always go on holidays to hear all kinds of talks by roshei yeshiva, who would give them in synagogues or places like that. I really enjoyed it, and at some point I suddenly realized that once the talk began, I could tell you the whole talk till the end, how it would end. Meaning, now he’ll bring the practical ramification from there, and he’ll ask two such nuances, and then he’ll bring this, and he’ll bring the view of the Rashba from there. I more or less knew everything that was going to happen. Again, here and there there could be slight deviations. Talk after talk after talk, I could tell you—
[Speaker B] There are different styles among roshei yeshiva, even those who come from Ponevezh, not—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They’re not all duplicates, but there are still very, very clear patterns there, shared by all of them. And that means it’s terribly pattern-based, okay? But that’s its strength. Since it’s terribly pattern-based, that means that if you acquire the pattern, if you work on it—and again, there’s talent involved and toil involved, there are no free lunches—but if you do the work properly, you’ll come out a rosh yeshiva. No problem. You’ll give a general lecture on every topic. I once told this story—today I’m drifting a bit—but I once said: our lecturer, when I studied at Netivot Olam, had been a student of Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky, and very attached to him, really learned closely with him. And once my wife heard a story when she was in a seminary for ba’alot teshuvah. One of their lecturers told them: “There was a guy in our yeshiva—when a phone call came for him they’d say, ‘Moshe, Moshe,’ and he’d be sitting by the shtender and wouldn’t hear you at all.” That was my lecturer—it turned out it was him. In any case, he learned that way. At some point, Rabbi Shmuel’s lectures hadn’t yet been published—they came out only afterward. There were notebooks of Rabbi Yosef Rozovsky; that was the yeshiva ‘raid’—the standard yeshiva corpus—but Rabbi Shmuel’s books still weren’t out. And we learned tractate Sukkah that year, and the first book that came out of Rabbi Shmuel’s was Shiurei Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky, on Sukkah. So some of the guys brought the book in, and we were appalled. It was really unpleasant, because we saw there in the book all the lectures of our lecturer, without saying that this was Rabbi Shmuel. He gave us Rabbi Shmuel’s lectures and didn’t say he had taken them from there. Now it was awkward, but I was kind of the senior student, I had studied only with him in that yeshiva, I was with him for five years. So in the end I went over—I couldn’t help it—and I asked him, “Rabbi, tell me, you know, Shiurei Rabbi Shmuel came out, and it’s really one-to-one, I mean it’s…” Then his face lit up. He said to me: listen, I never learned Rabbi Shmuel on Sukkah, and I have no notes. Rather, he learns like Rabbi Shmuel. Meaning, when he learned the passages in Sukkah, he didn’t learn them at all with Rabbi Shmuel. When he learned the passages in Sukkah, out came Rabbi Shmuel’s lecture. He was overjoyed. I was a little embarrassed by that.
[Speaker B] He aligned with the view of the great ones.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Meaning, that’s what he was aiming for. He was aiming to reproduce Rabbi Shmuel. And that’s exactly this pattern-based quality I’m talking about. If you learn it that way, in the end you’ll be Rabbi Shmuel. That’s all. Again, this is always exaggerated. Obviously Rabbi Shmuel was talented and not everyone will become like him, but broadly speaking, you’ll be Rabbi Shmuel. They all come out of there as little Rabbi Shmuels. So if you’re the Chazon Ish, you can grow in Slabodka, but most people are not the Chazon Ish. And that’s why average people can come out of Ponevezh as roshei yeshiva. So the lesson I told the students there was that the right model—exactly like here—the right model is to start in Ponevezh and finish in Slabodka. In the end, in my opinion, both miss the point, because I don’t agree with my lecturer’s model. Do you think my goal is to reproduce Rabbi Shmuel? Rabbi Shmuel already existed; we don’t need another one. He surely did it better than I’ll do it, to be Rabbi Shmuel. I need to use Rabbi Shmuel and everyone else in order to be me, in order to be Zusha. And therefore, really, you have to start in Ponevezh, because if you start by saying whatever you want and whatever you think, you won’t get anywhere with that. You need to build on what has already been built, on what already exists. That’s the meaning of the yeshiva raid, yes, what they learn in the yeshivot. But the raid wasn’t meant so that you reproduce it throughout the Talmud; the raid was meant to build within you some first story on top of which you can add your own addition. And that is what one does in Slabodka. But in Slabodka they do that from the beginning, which is a mistake. And in Ponevezh they do it all the way to the end, which is also a mistake. Because they really all come out as Rabbi Shmuels. What should be done is to start in Ponevezh, and after you’re sufficiently skilled and you know what’s going on and what people say in a topic / passage and how it works, then you can already develop your own method, your own form of thinking. Then move on to metaphorical Slabodka—it doesn’t matter right now whether you do that physically. But I think this is—I also told the students—each person has to understand until when he needs to be in Ponevezh and from when he needs to move to Slabodka. And someone who has already passed Ponevezh shouldn’t sit in my lecture; he doesn’t need lectures. He should sit and learn on his own and do something according to what is taking shape within him. Meaning, if I can still help him build himself, then let him sit in my lecture, because that’s the Ponevezh stage. Not because I learned in a Ponevezh style—that’s also true—but not because of that. Rather, because when you learn from a lecturer, what you’re really supposed to learn from him are the patterns. You’re not supposed to reproduce him. So after you’re done, you understood, you extracted from him what you could, move on and develop what you want to say in learning. So here too, again, to take Ponevezh is to take theory all the way and apply it also in life. That’s childish. In this case it’s a learning theory, of course, not an ideological theory, but it doesn’t matter—the idea is the same idea. Because life is more complicated, and in the end you also have to bring yourself in and see whether it makes sense or doesn’t make sense. Meaning, you have to look at things critically.
[Speaker B] You also have to bring in the analog parts.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. Okay, so in any case, this division—in the end, what I want to say is that secular people, Haredim, and Religious Zionists with a hyphen are three outlooks. Either what is outside is impurity, or there is no such thing as outside because everything is holiness, or everything is ordinary, mundane life, right? The Greeks, the Hasmoneans, it’s all there. And I’m trying to propose a fourth direction that says: religious Zionism without a hyphen. Be a Zionist and be religious, but the religiosity is not Zionist and the Zionism is not religious. They’re two different things. Like the famous joke—we already talked about this once when I spoke about contraction, I think—the famous joke about the rabbi from Ponevezh. Everyone used to tell me this with tremendous excitement in my cheerful Bnei Brak period, that the rabbi from Ponevezh said he neither recites Hallel nor says Tachanun on Independence Day. So they said to him: either way, if you object, then say Tachanun, and if you support it, then recite Hallel. What do you mean, neither Hallel nor Tachanun? He said: I’m no more Zionist than Ben-Gurion; he also doesn’t say Tachanun and doesn’t say Hallel. So everyone was so delighted by that sharp line, but they didn’t understand that he meant it seriously. He meant it seriously, because what he meant to say was that he was a religious Zionist without a hyphen. I see value in the state, but I don’t turn it into some kind of religious value the way Religious Zionism does. But it’s known that he did see it as a value. After all, he was a Holocaust survivor, and “on Mount Zion there shall be a remnant” was written there in Ponevezh, yes, and he made sure to hang the flag. A flag, exactly, and after him also Ginihovsky. I spoke with Dov Ginihovsky, and he told me that he sat with the rabbi from Ponevezh on the roof and guarded the flag. They raised a flag in front of the students who were stealing the flag. They guarded the flag. All day he sat up there on Independence Day and made sure no one took the flag down. And afterward people tell me stories, the guys, that he put it there because he was afraid for his life, that the Zionists would kill him. Really, it’s so absurd, this whole thing. In my opinion he had a worldview exactly like this—that’s exactly the point. He’s saying: I’m completely in favor of this whole thing, I’m a citizen of this state, I want it to succeed, everything’s fine. I just don’t see it as a religious value, just as any non-Jew wants his country to succeed. That’s all. Why does everything have to be painted either as impurity or as holiness? There is ordinary life. It’s ordinary life, and ordinary life is also good. I thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for breakfast, and I thank Him that my bodily openings worked properly when I was in the bathroom, and that doesn’t make my bodily openings holy, nor breakfast holy. There is ordinary life, okay? And ordinary life is perfectly fine. It’s allowed to identify with ordinary life, it’s allowed to live within the world of the ordinary. Not only allowed, but advisable and necessary and proper. And not to mix it with holiness—that is, these are two different things. And I think that is exactly the outlook I’m talking about. As a result, you can take this further. I’ll maybe take it further on two planes, or two expressions of the same plane. One plane is that when you apply this in the end, say, in relation to the state today, then really—I already spoke about this, about the flag dance and this mixing of Zionism into religiosity, or the flag in the synagogue; I said this last time too. This concept of religious Zionism without a hyphen means: I can walk with a flag, I’m going to pray, but the flag won’t be in the synagogue. That is, these are two different things. And I celebrate with the flag and that’s perfectly fine, maybe it’s a meaningful symbol. I don’t like symbols in general, but that doesn’t matter, that’s a matter of personal inclination. But not in the synagogue; that is, I don’t think that’s its place. Again, there’s no prohibition against bringing it in there. I’m not trying to make an ideology out of that either. I’m saying: what it conveys—the atmosphere it conveys. And this actually means, in an even more basic sense perhaps, or more theoretical sense, some kind of—in the extreme form, it means separation of religion and state. That is really the practical meaning of this outlook. I’m a religious person, but the state doesn’t play for me on that field, and I don’t want the state to determine my beliefs, nor anyone else’s—even though sometimes that works in favor of what I believe in, I still don’t want it. I don’t want them dealing with it. No coercion—neither religious nor secular nor anything else. Let the state stay outside the game. And that is perhaps the extreme expression of this outlook of religious Zionism without a hyphen. And maybe as an expression in the realm of values, I’d say even more than that—and this really is the point. I mentioned last time that there’s also ordinary life, and there are several kinds of ordinary life. There is ordinary life in the sense that it isn’t holiness but it contains commandments. There are things that don’t even contain commandments but do contain values. That is, these are not neutral things on the level of value—what Rabbi Lichtenstein spoke about as optional matters. Optional matters are not a neutral sphere. There is right and wrong, proper and improper, even in the realm of the optional. Jewish law does not lay down hard and fast rules on this issue for various reasons—which, by the way, I don’t agree with, the reasons he gave; we spoke about that once, I think, the Maggid Mishneh in the laws of neighbors. And there is something that is completely optional. We talked about this. Maimonides, in the first chapter of his commentary on the Mishnah in Avot, writes that there are five kinds of speech—I mentioned this—the five middle categories. Apart from holiness and impurity, which are the extremes, the five middle categories are: speech of commandment, optional speech that has value, neutral optional speech, optional speech that is negative but not halakhically forbidden—that is, not a Jewish-law transgression, but still not right to do, idle talk or something like that—and there is evil speech, speech that is forbidden. So that’s five sectors, while of course if I want to make the full map, then there is holiness and impurity, which are two more things. Beyond commandment there is holiness, and beyond prohibition there is impurity. Okay? Those are the two extreme sectors. So I want to talk for a moment about the combination of holiness and ordinary life, or ordinary life on the basis of holiness—ordinary life. And ordinary life with values. And the claim really is—and this really applies to a lot of current issues, and I’ve written this on the website in several contexts as well—that even if there are certain religious values that seem to people to make it obvious which side of the political map they should be on—we’re not talking about politics of security and foreign policy but internal politics, that is, relations between religion and state. Letting homosexual couples adopt children, allowing civil marriage, all such things. So religious people naturally feel it’s self-evident that they’re supposed to oppose it, because obviously it’s forbidden by Jewish law. So you have to oppose it. And I claim that this is not true. Why is it not true? Because in addition to the reli—this is that video that Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah made with those interviews, also for the website, where I spoke about this briefly—but besides my religious values, I also have democratic values. I believe in them too. And therefore, from a democratic standpoint, I oppose the state infringing on anyone’s rights, including homosexuals, including those who want to marry—not just marry, but live together or marry in whatever form they choose, it doesn’t matter however it seems right to them. I oppose it; that is, I will fight as much as I can so that this won’t happen, so that the state won’t impose religious values. Even though ostensibly this is a prohibition and the state is just doing me a favor—I don’t want people living that way. Fine. But on the other hand, I also don’t want coercion. That I also do not want.
[Speaker F] There’s a religious value and there’s a democratic value. What? But doesn’t the religious value override?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why—who said it overrides? No, I don’t agree that it always overrides. Well, it’s a dilemma. We once talked about moral dilemmas, and I claim that when there is a dilemma, the religious value does not always prevail. Sometimes the moral value prevails.
[Speaker F] What is that measured by?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know—how important it is, how harmful it is, how deep it is. Sometimes the religious value is only slightly harmed, a little nick on the wing, but the moral value here is in crisis. Like the Chazon Ish called it, the fifth section of the Shulchan Arukh. Sometimes you understand that this is it. I brought a few examples of this when we talked about it. So I said that, for example, almost all halakhic decisors agree that it is not right to assign invalid witnesses to a secular couple getting married. Ostensibly that would solve all the problems, right? All adultery and illegitimacy and all sorts of things like that. Invalidate their kiddushin and everything is fine—what’s the problem? Put invalid witnesses there and that’s it. Everything is wonderful. Or legalizing prostitution—also a question that came up. Why not legalize prostitution? Then let them immerse, so at least the prohibition of menstruation impurity won’t apply, and there’ll be medical supervision, everything is wonderful—just legalize it. And the majority—well, not majority, I think Pachad Yitzchak writes this—not Pachad Yitzchak Hutner; Pachad Yitzchak Lampronti, I think, or the author of Akedat Yitzchak, one of the two, I already don’t remember—one of the Yitzchaks. But one of the two speaks about legalizing prostitution, and he says it is not right to legalize it. There was some community that wanted to do it, with all sorts of considerations about reducing transgressions. He says no, don’t do it. Why not? The formal halakhic consideration is very logical—you reduce transgressions, you reduce risks. You say, true, but this can’t be. It’s just not fitting. So it can’t be. So that’s an extra-halakhic consideration, but sometimes it overrides the halakhic consideration. Or you increase transgressions if you don’t do it, but the extra-halakhic consideration overrides. Or invalidating kiddushin—the halakhic consideration says: invalidate it, those are cases that are liable to prohibitions. Why do you need to do that? No, the act of kiddushin has to be conducted properly. What is this? That’s some sort of meta-halakhic value, not a halakhic value, because from a halakhic standpoint, in terms of utility and halakhic profit and loss, there is a lot of logic in the claim that one should invalidate it, to put invalid witnesses there. So it’s not certain—transgression for its own holy sake, we’ve talked about that more than once. A transgression for its own holy sake is also a situation where some extra-halakhic value overrides the Jewish law and tells you: commit a transgression now—Yael, the wife of Hever the Kenite. So it’s simply not true that whenever Jewish law clashes with morality, Jewish law always overrides. That’s really not true. In any case, the claim basically is that if I really accept the sphere of ordinary life as something legitimate, then it can also lead to what I said here. And that basically means that from my point of view there are additional values besides halakhic values, and these are values of ordinary life, let’s call them that, and together with the halakhic values, that’s the toolbox of values I have. And sometimes there are clashes, so I believe in both values, then I’m in conflict and I have to decide what to do—but the halakhic value does not automatically override the democratic value. That’s simply not true. People assume it’s self-evident that if you’re religious then it must be that way, and it absolutely does not have to be. You can believe that if you want, but I don’t think it has to be that way, and I also don’t think it’s correct.
[Speaker D] Isn’t that similar to Reform? No. Why not? They also have values, right? Sabbath is important, but they turn on music on the Sabbath in the synagogue. An important value. Here you need to get into definitions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is Reform? There are certain arguments the Reform raise that really are entirely legitimate arguments. There’s a book by someone named Moshe Zemer—he was the head of the gang here in Israel—so he says there, the book is called Reasonable Jewish Law. And there he talks about various theses. Now some of the arguments really are arguments of this type: that it contradicts other values, and then we need to discuss it, and it’s not absurd. There are arguments—it also depends when—whether this is an essential clash or an incidental clash. We once talked about this when we discussed conflicts. But sometimes there are arguments that are really not like that at all: it doesn’t suit us now, it’s hard for us, it sounds silly to us, it seems unnecessary. That’s not—it’s not that all the arguments are only because of values. There’s also some lack of commitment there. No, it’s not just the result of value clashes.
[Speaker D] But when there is a value, that’s duality—meaning you believe in something else besides… Right, it’s harder if it’s a clash of values than if it’s just that you don’t feel like it, an evil inclination.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whether it’s harder or not is another matter. But a duality of values is completely legitimate within the world of halakhic commitment—that’s the claim.
[Speaker D] So what is halakhic commitment, then? Up to where does it go?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, halakhic commitment—I’m fully committed to Jewish law, and I’m also fully committed to morality. So when they clash, I have to find a solution—what can I do? Someone who isn’t committed to one of the two sides, that isn’t called a clash. Then there’s no clash. To this I’m committed, and to that I’m not.
[Speaker D] So when is there duality, then?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Duality exists only in theological questions, when you believe in another source of authority besides the Holy One, blessed be He—that’s a duality of values. What, source of authority? The source of authority for morality too is the Holy One, blessed be He.
[Speaker F] How is democracy constructive? Because something can be decided contrary to what the Holy One, blessed be He, said.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, expects me to behave like a human being, to behave morally. And if I think democracy is the least immoral system—or I don’t know what to call it, at least the lesser evil—then yes, I fight for that, even though it sometimes clashes with halakhic values, and I understand there are costs. All that is true.
[Speaker F] That also doesn’t come from religiosity.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I said when we sat and talked about Torah and morality, that if someone really sees morality as something detached from the Holy One, blessed be He, and thinks it has some source—I don’t know what—a source in human dignity or whatever, I don’t understand these things because in my opinion it’s nonsense—but someone who believes in that, then yes, that is duality, because he is subject to another source of authority besides the Holy One, blessed be He. Here there’s some sort of partnership. But if I think that the Holy One, blessed be He, speaks to me on several fronts or on several planes or through several channels, using the halakhic channel to convey halakhic values to me and the moral-conscience channel to convey moral and human values to me, and all of these together are what He expects from me—just as within Jewish law itself there can be a clash between saving life and the Sabbath, so what, does that mean I’m not committed to saving life or to the Sabbath? Of course I’m committed to both. But precisely because I’m committed to both, a clash arises, and then I need to find a solution. I can’t fulfill both.
[Speaker F] Can you say they are not religious values?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. What do you mean, not religious values? You can call it whatever you want, but from my point of view, commitment to values in general stems from my commitment to God’s will. I think God’s will—“and you shall do what is upright and good”—it is written in the Torah. So from my point of view, what is upright and good is democratic government, and a government that does not coerce. “And you shall do what is upright and good”—that comes out of the Torah, because I think that is what is upright and good. Now someone can come and say: I disagree with you that this is called upright and good, and I interpret that verse differently. Fine, legitimate; we’ll have to argue. But my claim is also legitimate. I say that this is what is written in “and you shall do what is upright and good.” Do you have a clash with Jewish law? It’s like a clash between saving life and the Sabbath, and you need to find a solution because it’s a clash between two things the Holy One, blessed be He, expects me to do.
[Speaker B] What do you mean, no coercion? Someone who desecrates the Sabbath is stoned. He wants to desecrate the Sabbath.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in my opinion he is not stoned. In Jewish law? No, Jewish law does not say he is stoned; it depends. If he desecrates the Sabbath because he believes that’s right, he is not stoned, he is under compulsion. If he desecrates the Sabbath as a kind of rebellion, when there is such a thing, then he is deliberate and he is stoned. That’s perfectly fine; I have no problem with that, as long as of course there are witnesses and warning and all the conditions are fulfilled. Perfectly fine. But precisely because if this is an ideological disagreement, there is no point in coercion; coercion won’t help you either. Commandments require intention—what good will coercion do you? Maybe only in the sense of “until he says ‘I want to,’” that Maimonides maybe. On the principled level—and there too we talked about it—that “until he says ‘I want to’” applies only to someone who really believes. Someone who doesn’t believe—this is irrelevant, none of it matters. He won’t get to “I want to.” He can say “I want to,” but it’s just words. That explanation of Maimonides applies only to believers, and therefore it’s not relevant to them at all. By the way, that comes out more stringent—we already talked about this earlier. It comes out more stringent that today a religious court cannot coerce a secular person to give his wife a divorce bill. In my opinion the divorce bill is invalid if it is a coerced divorce bill, because the whole explanation of Maimonides, when he says “I want to,” that it reflects his inner will—that is not true of a non-believing person; it is true of a believing person. In any case, my claim is that this separation between Zionism and religiosity, or between morality and religiosity, or between ordinary life and holiness, or between Jewish law and morality—all these boundaries I spoke about earlier—basically, removing the hyphen creates normative duality, creates some kind of commitment to double systems, or even triple systems, or something like that, and you can be committed to both. So there is no contradiction here at all. Sometimes it will create practical conflicts. You won’t know what to do; you have to decide. But there is no principled problem here. A source that presents this very, very nicely—I assume we also spoke about this, I no longer remember—is the Derashot HaRan, discourse 11. There he speaks about the well-known model of the Ran regarding the king’s law and Jewish law. “Our master Shlomo Yitzchaki wrote in his commentary: appoint righteous judges”—yes, on the verse “Judges and officers shall you appoint for yourself… and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment,” he’s referring to that verse. “Our master Shlomo Yitzchaki wrote in his commentary: appoint righteous judges and experts to judge justly. And he was forced to explain it that way, because if the verse only came to command the judges to judge justly, it already says afterward, ‘Do not pervert justice.’ Therefore he explained that it only comes to say that the judges we appoint should be fit to judge justly.” The duty to judge justly is obvious, but we also have an obligation at the stage of appointment to appoint judges who are fit, such that when they judge they will judge justly. That is, they should be righteous and expert, and so it is taught in the Sifrei, “righteous judgment,” etc. “But in my opinion the plain meaning of the verse is this”—and here he skips a bit—“in my opinion the plain meaning of the verse is this,” says the Ran: “It is known that the human species needs a judge to judge among its members, for otherwise each person would swallow his fellow alive.” So you need judges, “and society as a whole would be corrupted”—yes, the public basically becomes corrupted if we don’t have a legal system. “And every nation needs this for political order”—he means of course social and public order—“to the point that the sage said that even a band of robbers agreed among themselves about justice.” Yes, that’s the ethics code of lawyers—every such group has ethical rules. “And Israel needs this no less than the other nations.”
[Speaker B] Meaning, there is of course the commandment of laws.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Which is one of the seven Noahide commandments. Meaning that basically: organize a legal system for yourselves, because there needs to be justice, there needs to be social order. The Ran says: Israel needs this too. It’s not only the seven Noahide commandments; we also have a commandment of laws. But you would say, what are our laws commandment? Our laws commandment is civil law; we have a legal system in Jewish law. No—that’s not our laws. “And beyond this they need another thing for another reason, namely, to uphold the laws of the Torah and punish those liable to lashes and those liable to death by the religious court and those who transgress the laws of the Torah, even though that transgression involves no damage whatsoever to political order.” In other words, with us there is another matter. Jewish law does not come only to achieve social justice or order in the social-legal sense; it has other concerns. “The application of the divine matter,” he calls it later, in language similar to that of the Kuzari. That is, to bring the Holy One, blessed be He, into our midst, one must perform commandments. Just as it is forbidden to eat pork, there are also these legal commandments. Not only that—even civil law belongs to that branch. “And there is no doubt that on each of these two sides two situations will arise: one will require punishing a certain person according to true justice, and the other that it would not be fitting to punish him according to true righteous justice, but it would be necessary to punish him for the sake of political order and the needs of the hour.” The true righteous justice is halakhah, and the needs of the state are morality, law in its secular sense, social order. “And God, may He be blessed, assigned each of these matters to a different group.” That is, each of these two tracks has a different authority responsible for it. “And He commanded that judges be appointed to judge the righteous and true judgment”—that is halakhah, that’s the judges, yes. “And this is what is meant by ‘and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment,’ meaning that it comes to explain what these judges are appointed for and how great their power is. And it said that the purpose of their appointment is to judge the people with true righteous judgment in itself.” “And because political order is not completed by this alone, God completed its arrangement through the commandment of the king.” The king is responsible for the second track. So there is the halakhic track, for which the judges are responsible, and there is the track of social-political repair, the regular legal track as there is among all nations, for which the king is responsible. In other words, according to the Derashot HaRan, in the halakhic conception there are two different legal systems. And two different legal systems—not one legal system and a king, like a government and the judicial branch. No, there are two judicial authorities. The king is also a judicial authority, not just the government. Okay? And besides that there are the judges or the religious courts. And then he says: “And we will explain this further by positing one side of the matter. We learned in the chapter ‘They Would Examine’: Our rabbis taught, ‘Do you recognize him? Did you warn him? Did he accept the warning? Did he release himself to death?’” etc. All these clarifications the judges make with the witnesses in a murder case, yes, before they execute the murderer: they need to know, did you warn him? Did he accept the warning? Did he kill within the time it took to speak after your warning, or did he wait a bit? All these things are conditions without which he is not executed. “And there is no doubt that all this is fitting from the standpoint of righteous judgment.” This is the truth, and so it should be, with the truth, because why should a man be put to death if he did not know that he was placing himself in a matter carrying a death penalty and then transgressed? And for this he needs to have accepted the warning and all the other things taught in that baraita. “And this is true righteous judgment in itself, and it was given to the judges.” “But if transgressors are punished only in this way, political order will be entirely ruined.” If you only punish someone when all these conditions are met, then no one in the world will ever be punished. Right? And after all it is obvious that if a person knows that if he accepts the warning he will be punished, then he won’t accept the warning. He won’t say, yes, and on that condition I am doing it. What is he, crazy? Is he suicidal? I said more than that: if someone actually does that, he should be exempt because of insanity. He’s handing himself over to death. No, I mean this very seriously—that’s a person whose mind has become deranged. And that is obvious. “Murderers would proliferate and not fear punishment, and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded, for the sake of the settlement of the world, the institution of kingship.” The king judges people without all those restrictions.
[Speaker B] The king keeps order.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Jewish law does the truth, but you can’t run a grocery store with truth. In other words, this brings us back to what we said earlier, yes? With theory, with logic—you can’t operate in life. There is the abstract theoretical truth, all very nice, but in life it doesn’t work. You also need the king. As it is written in this portion: “When you come into the land… you shall surely place a king over yourself,” which is a commandment we were commanded to appoint a king over ourselves, as comes in the tradition of our rabbis. “And the king may judge without warning, according to what he sees is needed for the political collective.” If there is some legal-social interest, then the king will do it. Self-incrimination and all sorts of things—the king is not subject to almost any legal rule. “And it follows that the institution of kingship is the same in Israel and among the other nations.” In other words, the king in Israel is exactly the same thing as the law of the kingdom among the gentiles, and therefore the authority of a king in Israel is the law of the kingdom—it’s like the king of the gentiles, exactly the same thing, no difference whatsoever. I’m saying this because it means that kingship in Israel, or sovereignty, or a state—all these things—are ordinary life, like among the gentiles. It is not connected at all to Jewish law, to holiness, or to anything like that—not at all. It is completely ordinary life, exactly as among the gentiles. We too are a people, so we too need social and legal order and everything else, and therefore we too need a king. That’s all. There is no holiness in this king. “And the appointment of judges is unique and needed more in Israel.” Judges are something else. In Israel there is a second legal system, which the gentiles do not have, and that is the judges. And that belongs to holiness or halakhah or the more rightward branches of the spectrum I sketched earlier. “And I explain further and say”—I skipped a bit—“that just as our Torah is distinguished from the legal systems of the nations of the world by commandments and statutes whose concern is not political order at all”—there are commandments and statutes that are unrelated, that have no legal dimension, that don’t come to create order or justice or regulate society—“but what follows from them is the application of divine flow upon our nation and its attachment to us.” The claim is that there are laws in halakhah—ritual law, dietary law—that are not concerned at all with repairing society. That is not halakhic law in the judicial sense. So what are they? They are the application of divine flow upon our nation, cleaving to the Holy One, blessed be He. One must observe halakhah because it is our connection with the Holy One, blessed be He. “Whether the matter appears to us as in the case of sacrifices and everything done in the Temple, or whether it does not appear so, as with the other statutes whose reason has not been revealed, in any case there is no doubt that the divine flow would cling to us and rest upon these actions”—that is, through these acts—“even though they are far from rational inference.” You don’t understand why it is good and what it helps, morally or legally, but it is needed for the connection with the Holy One, blessed be He. “And this is what distinguishes our holy Torah from the legal systems of the nations, which have no concern with this at all, only with arranging their collective affairs.” All the legal systems in the world come to regulate life. They don’t have ritual law and dietary law; they have only civil law and family law, meaning marriage and personal status. So he says: “And therefore I hold, and it is fitting to believe, that just as the statutes that have no role at all in correcting political order”—ritual law, yes—“and they are a direct intrinsic cause for the application of divine flow, so too the judicial laws of the Torah have a great role.” That is, even civil law is like ritual law in this sense. Civil law too is not political law, not the Jewish legal system. No—it is not a legal system at all. It is a halakhic system exactly like ritual law. It deals with relations between people, but basically it is ritual law for interpersonal relations, and its purpose is the application of divine flow. Not regulating life and law, not enforcing justice—that is not its purpose. Enforcing justice is the king’s law; that is a parallel system, not civil law. He is not subject to civil law. “They are both shared between causing the divine matter to rest upon our nation and correcting our collective affairs,” because civil law also appears to administer justice, it seems to improve political life, but in truth it also has a halakhic dimension—it also takes care of applying the divine matter. “And it is possible that they address more the matter that is loftier in rank.” Civil law is more religious than legal. “For that correction, the king whom we appoint over ourselves will complete.” Because for that correction I do not need civil law. To do justice, I’ll do as the gentiles do; the king will do it. So it follows that civil law, even in places where it seems to correct social life, that is not really its main purpose. Its purpose is the application of the divine matter; it is not connected to social order at all. Therefore running life according to civil law is social suicide. It is impossible to run life that way. But that is the truth—civil law is the truth. Meaning, if you made a paid-watchman contract, then you are liable for theft and loss—not because that is just, because it regulates life well, but because that is the truth: someone who entered into a paid-watchman contract is liable for theft and loss. If you want to make a stipulation, or if the king legislates a different law, no problem—he can legislate another law to regulate life because he thinks maybe this one is not good or not effective. Fine. That is regulating life, like among all the gentiles.
[Speaker D] Can he decide that there will be interest?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? No, he can’t stipulate about interest itself, but he can determine—through bypass mechanisms, you know. He can say that okay, if he lent you money, then after you return the loan, you also give him another ten shekels as a gift. I declare ten shekels ownerless for you and transfer them to the other person. He cannot tell you that the loan itself obligates you, because that is like—right, like the difference between “on condition that the Sabbatical year will not cancel my debt” and “on condition that you will not be released by the Sabbatical year.” The Talmud says the first is a stipulation against what is written in the Torah, even though it is a monetary matter—they’re speaking about cancellation of debts. But you can’t make a stipulation with the Sabbatical year that it won’t cancel the debt; the Sabbatical year cancels it. What you can do is make a stipulation with the person that he will forgo the money due to him—sorry, that he will not invoke the cancellation, yes, meaning that he will return the money even though in terms of cancellation of debts he doesn’t really have to return it. So one can waive money, and in that sense decrees and the law of the kingdom also work on that plane. The king cannot go against the Torah, but he can act on a parallel track that in effect neutralizes the Torah law. “But the judges and the Sanhedrin, their purpose was to judge the people with true righteous judgment in itself.” That is the truth, not political or legal order, “whether or not it would fully arrange the affairs of the masses.” I don’t care whether it creates social order or not. “And because of this, it is possible that in some of the laws and legal systems of the nations there will be that which is closer to correcting political order than some of the laws of the Torah.” In other words, foreign legal systems are more complete in the legal and moral sense than halakhic law can be. They can be. What? Yes, in principle they are more complete. Like we discussed: I said if there is a machine that is both a washing machine and a dryer, then it dries less well and washes less well, because otherwise everyone would make those and nobody would make separate washing machines and dryers, right? Unless it’s more expensive. Meaning, the product of quality, cost, and efficiency is constant; one comes at the expense of the other. There are no miracles. So here too it is the same. If there is a legal system whose entire goal is to achieve morality and justice, it will achieve that better than a legal system that also wants to achieve the application of the divine matter, because that imposes more constraints. Just as a non-kosher restaurant will always be tastier than a kosher restaurant. That’s a theorem in mathematics. It’s obvious. It’s not an accidental phenomenon. People laugh about this as if it’s some strange thing. It’s not strange at all; it’s simply the result of logic. Because if there is a kosher recipe that is tasty, then the non-kosher restaurant will make it. It has no problem making kosher food. But if there is a non-kosher recipe that is tastier, the kosher restaurant cannot make it. Therefore the non-kosher restaurant operates with fewer constraints, so it will reach better results. That is always the case. No tricks here. He says: “And we are not lacking anything because of this.” People think that if these laws harm morality and justice and legal efficiency, then this is a deficiency in Torah law. He says no, we are lacking nothing in this, because whatever was lacking in the correction mentioned, the king would complete. Meaning, if there are serious harms in our social-legal life, then the king will deal with them. But it is not that halakhah somehow missed this issue, that it failed to notice there is a distortion here. Rather, it is aiming at something else entirely, not this at all. Therefore there is no criticism of halakhah here. “But we have a great advantage over them because insofar as they are intrinsically just”—that is, Torah law is true judgment in itself, not because it achieves political correction—“meaning, the law of the Torah, as Scripture says, ‘and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment,’ thereby causing divine flow to cling to us and rest upon us. And because of this, the chief of the judges and the choicest of them stood in the place where the divine flow was visible.” Why does the Sanhedrin sit in the Temple? What question lies behind that? This really brings us to the point. The Sanhedrin is ordinary life? A legal system is ordinary life. The Temple is holiness. What does one have to do with the other? Why does the Sanhedrin sit in the Temple? What is it doing there? We are forced to conclude that the Sanhedrin is not a legal system. The Sanhedrin is a system whose whole concern is the application of the divine matter, so it sits in the place of holiness. But there is a legal system of the king that really is not there; it operates in the spaces of life. And therefore behind this duality that the author of Derashot HaRan describes, behind this duality there really sits the conception we spoke about earlier: the conception that says there is a world of ordinary life, and that world has value, and all the gentiles share in it because it is universal. It is the value of law and morality and managing social life properly. That is certainly not something neutral. The Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, expect us to manage that properly. But it is not holiness. It is not even Torah, perhaps, in the sense of—not halakhah in the usual sense. Okay? Torah, halakhah, holiness—that is the application of the divine matter, that is, the application of divine flow. That is something else. There are two different things. Now both are important. And it is not true that halakhah always—as I said earlier, it is not true that the king cannot act against halakhah. He can.
[Speaker E] So—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is not true that when there is a clash, halakhah is always what prevails. No, that’s not true. Sometimes ordinary life prevails.
[Speaker E] Halakhah opposes having a legal system that is outside halakhah, because of the laws against gentile courts.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not a system that replaces the halakhic system; it has to exist alongside it.
[Speaker E] Because someone who goes to gentile courts is really—he’s got a problem with that, right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What, what—you don’t need to go; you also don’t need to go to the king’s law. The king summons you to him. That’s the king’s job. You—you are supposed to go to a religious court. But when the king sees that there’s a breach, he summons you. He imposes a veto. He says: you will not go to them, you will come to me. And I will do with you what I find appropriate, because otherwise he understands there are problems there. We talked about this once. I said that this Derashot HaRan looks very strange to modern eyes. In today’s study hall it looks odd. What do you mean, the king? Why would he go against halakhah? Then what are we studying all the time in yeshiva? After all, halakhah is what we’re supposed to observe—to study in order to do, no?
[Speaker F] He bypasses halakhah; he doesn’t oppose it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but accepting testimony from women, or accepting self-incrimination—that’s against halakhah. What do you mean he bypasses halakhah? He sentences a person to death when according to halakhah he is not liable to death. So is he a murderer? In a time of need. That’s why it’s hard for people to grasp this approach of the Ran. But it seems to me—and I think I also spoke about this once—that I said I think this is a mistake that results from a historical accident. Basically, today instead we have the religious court flogging and punishing not according to the law. And we got used to the fact that once there was no king, the powers of the king flowed into the religious court. And I said that the presidents of the Sanhedrin were from the house of David—Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi and Rabban Gamliel and that whole dynasty were really from the house of David. Why? Because when there was no king in Israel, the president of the Sanhedrin also served in the function of the king—not only as head of the halakhic authority but also as head of the secular authority. Okay? And then what happened was that this doctrine developed: that a religious court may flog and punish not according to the law. Because all this functioning that the Ran here attributes to the king passed to the religious court because there was no king. And so today we’ve grown used to the idea that everything is holiness and everything is Torah and everything is determined in the study hall and by halakhic decisors or judges or something like that. But that’s an artifact. It’s an accident, the result of an accident. It’s a mistake. It should not be that way. It’s not—it has no place in the study hall at all. To punish not according to the law—what does the religious court have to do with punishing not according to the law? The religious court is responsible for implementing the law. Except that ordinarily there should have been a king to do that. If there is no king, then the religious court functions in its capacity as king. “A religious court that flogs and punishes not according to the law” is a section in the Shulchan Arukh. It is indeed ruled as practical Jewish law, but people think it is part of halakhah. It is not part of halakhah at all. Someone who studies that section in the Shulchan Arukh has not studied Torah.
[Speaker B] It’s even a phrase with an internal contradiction.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A religious court can issue rulings, flog, and punish outside the strict law, yes. In that sense it is Torah study, because the principle that there is the king’s law and that he is permitted to do this is absolutely Torah study. But the content of the king’s law is not Torah at all. It’s just matters of the king; it’s not… what does that have to do with Torah? It’s like studying some legal system, I don’t know, Belgian. That also is not Torah, even though it’s a system meant to achieve justice and order and morality as much as possible. There’s no difference. And when a religious court flogs and punishes outside the strict law, we study that in yeshiva, so it counts as Torah study and we recite the blessing over Torah study for it; that’s an explicit section in the Shulchan Arukh. I think that’s the result of an accident, it’s a mistake; this thing was not supposed to be. The definition again—where the king comes in and how far he can go—that has to be studied, because Jewish law also lays out the limitations and the boundaries between the systems and so on, but not the content of the matter. Meaning, not what the court actually did. Same thing with all the enactments that made their way into the Shulchan Arukh, the customs of Krakow and customs here and customs there—what does any of that have to do with Torah at all? All these things are a waste of Torah study. In my opinion you can’t recite the blessing over Torah study on that, when these things are being generated. Torah study is the study of what the Holy One, blessed be He, decided, or what the Great Court decided, which by force of “do not deviate” also receives some kind of Torah status. But customs that people started practicing one way or another—do whatever you want; that too has halakhic validity, but that custom has no significance in terms of its content. Its content is not Torah; it expresses nothing. That’s my view. So what happened? We simply got used to all authority being handed over to the judge or the rabbi, and from that also came this whole idea of “Torah opinion” and all that, that on every matter you ask the rabbi. Because once you get used to the fact that he runs all of life—ordinary life and holy life and Jewish law and everything—then naturally now you also ask him whether to set up a kiosk somewhere or open a clothing store. In other words, the perception is that basically everything falls under the halakhic domain, when that was never supposed to be the case at all. It belongs to an entirely different human mandate. And therefore I think that behind this dual model of Ran there really lies the conception I spoke about earlier, that there is normative duality. There are two systems, and both are systems of values. Meaning, what the king does is something measured in value terms. There is right and wrong there. The king cannot practice “the law of extortion,” as people say; there is “the law of the kingdom,” and there is “the law of extortion.” When the king acts tyrannically, it has no validity. Exactly that. So there is moral criticism of what the king does; it’s not an optional matter where he just does whatever he wants. But the criticism is moral, not halakhic. Meaning, he has to conduct himself properly. That’s all. So that does not mean that this domain is a domain of the secular, but it does mean that there is an entire world of values outside Jewish law. It is determined by common sense, by our human moral intuitions. And it obligates us exactly as it obligates gentiles; there is no difference between us and gentiles in this context. And these two systems obligate every Jew who is obligated in Jewish law. These two systems obligate, even though they often clash. They often clash, right. Therefore, for example—this is really a very fine boundary—in principle, when a state appoints courts, and those courts can accept women as witnesses and self-incrimination and all kinds of things of that sort, at the level of principle there is no obstacle to that happening, for all that to be valid. As long as one understands that this is done under the authority of Jewish law and is subject to halakhic review, or at least to some kind of negotiation with the halakhic world and recognition of the authority of the sages at least over their own sphere—which is completely absent here. So therefore the tendency is to say that these are basically gentile courts, and illegal, and illegitimate, and things like that. But originally, as Ran describes here, it is entirely legitimate for there to be a legal system of the king, and for it to do things that go against Jewish law as well.
[Speaker F] Today, does a religious court have powers like that—to accept women as witnesses and the like?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You mean a rabbinical court? Yes. No, I’m talking about the civil court, not a rabbinical court.
[Speaker F] No, I mean in a rabbinical court, when he doesn’t sign on a compromise.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does that mean? First of all, there’s no such thing. A rabbinical court never judges without signing on a compromise. And we talked once about all the absurdities that come out of that. But what does it mean, “does it have authority”? It can do whatever it wants—who’s going to tell it what to do?
[Speaker F] No, not from the… I mean from the halakhic obligation to obey the court.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] From the standpoint of the halakhic obligation, it depends. If it’s a court that has the right to investigate, then of course it can do whatever it wants. But if it’s a court of arbitrators, meaning that we choose judges for ourselves and we say, “Judge for us according to Torah law,” they cannot accept women as witnesses; I did not accept them upon myself for that. If it’s an appointed court in the city that has coercive authority, then it can do whatever it wants; it can also punish outside the strict law, and of course it can also accept witnesses. It doesn’t need “I accepted them upon myself”; it can accept disqualified witnesses. From the standpoint of
[Speaker F] monetary law, where the public has to come before it and must come before it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the contrary, it’s specifically in monetary law that Maimonides writes, at the beginning of chapter 20 of the laws of Sanhedrin—or 24 or 20, one of them deals with monetary matters and one with prohibitions—he says that unlike prohibitions, where one has to follow the laws of evidence and two valid witnesses and all that, in monetary law the judge may do what he thinks is right. By the strict law. By Torah-level law.
[Speaker F] Doesn’t that belong to the king’s law?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. Maimonides claims that in monetary law itself, the court itself does this. Now I don’t know; maybe Maimonides really means to bring in the king’s law, because we have no king, so the court takes that role. In monetary law this is something exceptional. Do what you think is right. Meaning, if you think he is in the right, give him the money. Without witnesses, without—doesn’t matter. The source is the Talmud, with Rava there, with Im Shalom there. Where were we? Right. So what I’m really saying is that this duality that Ran describes here is the same duality I’ve been talking about: on the one hand there is the secular, there is holiness, they do not mix, they are two different systems—in contrast to the historical claim that now there is no king, so suddenly everything gets mixed together among us and everything becomes holy. Again, that is the same mistake. Entire sections—most of the Shulchan Arukh, in my opinion, are not holiness. A lot of things got in there through this custom and that custom. Fine, I don’t know if most, but a lot, a lot of what is there. Because again, it’s the same mixing. And what should be is that there is the secular and there is the holy, and there is a clear boundary between them. But on the other hand, the fact that there is a boundary does not mean that in the realm of the secular you can do whatever you want. In the secular realm too there is guidance. Jewish law deals with the secular. Holiness is only a sub-sub-sector of Jewish law—holiness. Jewish law deals with the secular, and morality of course also deals with the secular, all the sectors I spoke about earlier. Okay, so this is exactly the same confusion that has accompanied us until now: people basically don’t notice that they are mixing holiness with the secular. And what really has to be done is, on the one hand, not to mix them, but on the other hand to recognize the part outside as a legitimate part about which there is also right and wrong—in contrast, say, to the Haredi approach, according to which whatever is outside doesn’t matter; only Jewish law is really meaningful. I’m going back to all the descriptions I gave earlier of the different groups or the different attitudes in society. So here too it’s the same thing. And from here really comes the conception I described earlier of normative duality, because if I believe in the value system that the king was supposed to impose—or maybe even does impose today—say if the government today is seen as the king we have, so to speak, then a large part of what it does are proper and correct things. The king really should have done that too, even if there had been a God-fearing king and he would have done the same thing, because he would have had to close loopholes and run things in a way that is legally effective. Okay. So this is definitely legitimate, and it ought to exist, and one should engage in it, and I am supposed to believe in those same values that guide the actions of the king, or the Knesset, or the government, or whatever it may be, together with the halakhic values. Even when it contradicts them. Because as far as I myself am concerned, since perhaps there is no king in the full sense, I now act both as king, in the sense of moral and human values and so on that are supposed to guide me, and also as a rabbi, which is the question of religious values, and in the end conduct is the combination of all these things together. And therefore there is no contradiction in saying that a person committed to Torah and commandments may insist that there should be civil marriage here, or that the Western Wall be opened to whoever wants, or I don’t know what—various things that are supposedly against Jewish law; not supposedly, they are against Jewish law—but fine, in my opinion democratic values require them.
[Speaker B] And that was also supposed to be guidance from Jewish law? What? And that was also supposed to be guidance from Jewish law, that in such a case…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, these are extra-halakhic values, these are moral values. Jewish law does not deal with that; Jewish law deals with what Jewish law says. But besides that there is the verse, “And you shall do what is upright and good”; it is not Jewish law. It tells me that I have to behave in a moral way. Sometimes moral demands clash with halakhic demands. That decision will not be made within the framework of Jewish law, because Jewish law is one of the sides that are clashing here; it cannot possibly decide the matter itself. It will always decide in its own favor. Not in the sense of interests, but in the sense that those are its rules—they are the rules of Jewish law. It cannot decide what happens when a halakhic rule clashes with a moral rule. Because if you use the rules of Jewish law to decide, then obviously the result will be that the halakhic rule prevails; that’s a logical absurdity. You can’t do such a thing. Therefore by definition the decision has to be one that is not made within the framework of Jewish law. The decision of the king, the decision of the Sanhedrin, but not in its halakhic capacity. And when those functions do not exist, it is each person’s own decision—that is, regarding how he acts and thinks and so on. Therefore this duality projects onto a great many, great many things that are completely current. Okay, let’s stop here. It seems to me that next time, one more meeting, and I think we’ll finish this series.