Freedom and Liberty – Lesson 2
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
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Table of Contents
- The Exodus from Egypt, the Giving of the Torah, and the collective
- The rabbinic Jew and the sovereign Jew in Ari Elon
- Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s epigram and the Orwellian reading
- The distinction between freedom and liberty: definitions and moral consequences
- Constraints as a source of the potential for liberty: Frankl and the concentration camp
- Syria, Switzerland, and “Kamchatka”: choice with costs versus choice without meaning
- Benjamin Libet’s experiments: readiness potential, veto, and the distinction between picking and choosing
- Freedom without constraints as slavery to impulse: a new interpretation of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi
- Correcting the criticism of Ari Elon: rabbinic and sovereign as cumulative conditions
- Amos Oz, “a full wagon and an empty wagon,” and the furniture room
- Genre rules in art and the critique of postmodernism
- Returning to Passover: from Egypt’s freedom to Sinai’s liberty
Summary
General Overview
The text summarizes a lecture about an internal tension in the Festival of Freedom: the Exodus from Egypt is experienced as a transition from slavery to freedom, but that freedom is immediately threatened by the Giving of the Torah as a “new boss,” and by the very formation of the Jewish collective. The speaker contrasts Ari Elon’s opposition between “the rabbinic Jew” and “the sovereign Jew” with Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s epigram, “Servants of time are servants of servants; only the servant of God is free,” and suggests that the key to understanding it is a distinction between freedom as the absence of constraints and liberty as autonomy within constraints. From there he argues that freedom is an asset, not a value; liberty is a value; and liberty cannot be taken away, only made more difficult through added constraints. He explains, through examples (Frankl, elections in Syria/Switzerland/“Kamchatka,” and the puzzle of constraints), why moral meaning and creativity exist specifically within constraints. Finally, he interprets Rabbi Yehuda Halevi accordingly: without a binding framework, a person is swept along by impulses and is therefore a “slave of slaves,” whereas within a framework of given good and evil one can truly be free, and from here also comes the link to Passover and the Giving of the Torah.
The Exodus from Egypt, the Giving of the Torah, and the collective
The Exodus from Egypt is celebrated as a transition from slavery to freedom, but the state of freedom is challenged by two aspects. One aspect is the Giving of the Torah, in which after fifty days the Torah is received and a “new boss” is created, raising the question of how far we can see ourselves as free people under obligation. The second aspect is the collective dimension, because being part of a collective is perceived as a lack of freedom, and the Maharal and others describe Egypt as a “pregnancy” from which the Jewish collective was born, something that seemingly clashes with the ideal of freedom.
The rabbinic Jew and the sovereign Jew in Ari Elon
Ari Elon is presented as someone who contrasts “the sovereign Jew,” who legislates values for himself and determines his own path, with “the rabbinic Jew,” whose Jewish law, halakhic decisors, and rabbis determine for him what to do and what to think. The speaker describes how Elon presents his becoming secular as a “transition from slavery to freedom,” rather than an entry into the yoke of Torah and commandments. The speaker argues that this contrast sharpens the feeling that commitment to Torah and commandments does not look like freedom.
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s epigram and the Orwellian reading
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi is quoted with the epigram, “Servants of time are servants of servants; only the servant of God is free,” and the speaker describes how the statement sounds to him like Orwellian demagoguery in the style of “slavery is freedom.” He compares it to propaganda that explains to unfree people that they are the truly free ones, and emphasizes that the word “only” sharpens, in his eyes, the demagogic element. Even so, the speaker finds in the subtext a meaningful assumption: Rabbi Yehuda Halevi takes the trouble to persuade us that the servant is free, and therefore grants legitimacy to the aspiration for liberty rather than treating it as an evil impulse that must be overcome.
The distinction between freedom and liberty: definitions and moral consequences
Freedom is defined as the absence of constraints, and is presented as an asset rather than a moral value, similar to wealth, so that depriving someone of freedom is an immoral act, but the fact that a person is free is not necessarily of moral value. Freedom is treated as objective in the sense that it stands in inverse proportion to the number of constraints, where constraints include both external and internal ones, such as character traits that were not chosen. Liberty is defined as autonomous action within a framework of given constraints, and is presented as the opposite of freedom: it requires constraints, it is a value, and it cannot be taken away, only more constraints can be added, because the degree of liberty depends on the person himself as long as he functions as a human being.
Constraints as a source of the potential for liberty: Frankl and the concentration camp
The speaker argues that the stronger the constraints, the greater the potential for the expression of liberty, because autonomous choice becomes more meaningful within a narrow space. He brings the first part of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as an example of people in concentration camps who appear free in the deepest sense precisely within a condition far removed from freedom. He emphasizes that he is not claiming that everyone in a concentration camp is free, but rather that someone there may possess a higher potential for liberty, because every tiny decision made against what the circumstances dictate testifies to a high degree of autonomy.
Syria, Switzerland, and “Kamchatka”: choice with costs versus choice without meaning
Elections in Syria are described as a situation in which circumstances dictate the result because there is only one ballot, while Switzerland is described as a metaphor for a country without problems, where there are no costs and therefore the choice is meaningless. “Kamchatka” is described as a place with problems, where choice is made within constraints and costs and therefore acquires meaning and becomes liberty. The speaker also uses the image of a puzzle: getting to 100 without any restriction on numbers is easy and uninteresting, but getting to 100 under constraints is meaningful and testifies to creativity; therefore constraints are a condition for meaning.
Benjamin Libet’s experiments: readiness potential, veto, and the distinction between picking and choosing
Benjamin Libet is described as someone who tried to test free choice empirically by measuring the readiness potential on an EEG before an action and comparing it to the time of awareness of the decision. The speaker presents the finding according to which the readiness potential precedes the moment of decision, and the escalation in later experiments that speak about a gap of seconds, as well as Libet’s attempt to preserve space for choice through a veto. The speaker presents the “first floor” of his argument against empirical resolution: an arbitrary button press is not a value-laden decision but picking rather than choosing, and therefore even a libertarian would find no reason to exercise a veto when there are no opposing considerations. Hence, such an experiment does not test the kind of choice that actually matters in the context of liberty.
Freedom without constraints as slavery to impulse: a new interpretation of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi
The speaker applies Libet’s logic to the Switzerland metaphor and argues that when there are no costs and no considerations, a person does not choose but simply realizes the first impulse that arises. He argues that in a state of freedom understood as the absence of constraints, freedom actually belongs on the side of determinism, because behavior is dictated by the “RP” rather than by a meaningful decision. He interprets “servants of time are servants of servants” in that light as a state in which only time flows and there are no constraints, so a person is swept along by impulses and does not really decide. By contrast, “only the servant of God is free” is interpreted by him as “only he is truly free,” because a binding system of right and wrong creates the conditions for liberty.
Correcting the criticism of Ari Elon: rabbinic and sovereign as cumulative conditions
The speaker argues that Elon sees only half the picture and confuses freedom with liberty, because sovereignty alone is not enough if a person legislates bad values for himself, such as becoming a hired murderer. He states that two parameters are needed in order to evaluate a person: sovereignty in the sense of choice and responsibility, and also “rabbinic-ness” in the sense of acting within an objective scale of good and evil not determined by the person himself. He adds that the contrast between rabbinic and sovereign is not parallel to the contrast between religious and secular, because there is rabbinic and sovereign both in a secular context and in a religious one, and an external value system also exists in the secular world through commitment to morality.
Amos Oz, “a full wagon and an empty wagon,” and the furniture room
Amos Oz is brought in with the image of the “big bang” of the Giving of the Torah, which creates a Jewish space that fills up with layers of interpretation, while in his view the Orthodox do not remove “furniture,” and therefore the interpretive space shrinks. The speaker responds with the analogy of arranging a room: the more chairs there are, the less freedom there is in the sense of empty space, but the number of possible ways to arrange the room grows up to a certain point, and therefore precisely an abundance of constraints increases creative possibilities and enables the expression of taste. The speaker argues that Oz is confusing freedom with liberty, because an empty room allows absolute freedom but only one meaningless arrangement, while a furnished room creates a space of meaningful possibilities.
Genre rules in art and the critique of postmodernism
The speaker argues that in the aesthetic context the same confusion occurs as in the ethical one, because without genre rules a work has no meaning and there is no way to interpret it, judge it, or identify creativity. He presents the rules of genre as constraints that allow the creator to innovate within a framework shared by creator and viewer, and argues that postmodern art deceives itself into thinking it operates without rules, even though in practice other rules exist. He concludes that “artistic freedom” devoid of constraints lacks value and meaning, while “artistic liberty” within constraints enables meaningful creation, and he connects this also to the claim that a world devoid of ethical or aesthetic values is a world without meaning, in which there is not even any possibility of opposition.
Returning to Passover: from Egypt’s freedom to Sinai’s liberty
The speaker returns to Passover and argues that the Exodus from Egypt creates freedom in the sense of a reduction in the constraints of Pharaoh’s bondage, but not yet liberty in the value-laden sense. He places the Sinai revelation fifty days later as the granting of a binding system of right and wrong that is not our decision—“a mountain held over them like a barrel”—as the condition that enables us to become truly free. He concludes that without a system of constraints not dependent on man, choice has no meaning and there is no way to judge creativity or morality, and therefore “you have to be rabbinic in order to be sovereign.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re basically a little bit in the middle, so I’ll start with a short summary of last time. I began with the point that the Exodus from Egypt—the Exodus from Egypt is something we celebrate as a transition from slavery to freedom, right? It’s the Festival of Freedom. But the state of freedom that was created after we left Egypt is challenged, let’s put it that way, or threatened, by two aspects, two dimensions. One aspect is the Giving of the Torah. Meaning, after fifty days we receive the Torah, and basically now we have a new boss. We left the previous boss and now we have a new boss, and the question is to what extent we can regard ourselves as free people in such a situation, in such a situation. And the second aspect is the collective aspect, right, which is perceived as the idea that being part of a collective is some kind of—not sure I’d call it enslavement—but a lack of freedom. To be free means not to be bound to a collective. And in the Exodus from Egypt, as the Maharal and others explain, Egypt was basically some sort of pregnancy, and when we left Egypt the Jewish collective came into being. And the moment a collective is created, that again is something that doesn’t quite fit with a conception of—seemingly doesn’t fit with a conception of freedom. So basically the question is to what extent we can really say that we went from slavery to freedom. I brought that play on words from Ari Elon, who speaks about the rabbinic Jew versus the sovereign Jew. A sovereign Jew is a Jew who legislates values for himself, determines his own path; as opposed to the rabbinic Jew, for whom Jewish law, halakhic decisors, rabbis, or whatever forces that are not himself determine what he should do and what he should not do, what he should think and what he should not think. And he creates a contrast that sharpens what I said before: that being bound to Torah and commandments does not seem to be freedom. Right? He even describes his own biography there—he says that in his biography, when he became secular, that was the transition from slavery to freedom, not the transition into the yoke of Torah and commandments. That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, in his well-known epigram, tells us that “Servants of time are servants of servants; only the servant of God is free.” Which, as I think I told you last time, has annoyed me ever since I first encountered it, because somehow it sounds like an Orwellian statement, like “ignorance is strength,” “slavery is freedom,” in George Orwell’s 1984. Basically, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi goes to the people who are in fact the least free people imaginable, and explains to them that they are the truly free ones. Meaning, those who are not servants of God are servants of servants. It’s like communist propaganda, right, where they explain to you that you, the worker, are the most productive, the collective farm is the pinnacle of agricultural management—when the bitter truth, of course, is exactly the opposite—and the hope is that if they repeat it enough times everyone will be convinced, even though it’s complete nonsense.
[Speaker B] I think especially the word “only.” What? Especially the word “only.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that sharpens even more the—
[Speaker B] the element—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the demagogic element here.
[Speaker B] There’s a certain understatement in this whole thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. So somehow the feeling is that there’s a statement here that doesn’t hold water. And the question is what it means. So I said that even if I take this statement as an Orwellian statement, there is still some interesting assumption in the subtext. The interesting assumption is that Rabbi Yehuda Halevi at least makes the effort to try to persuade us that we are free. Meaning, if we wanted to speak slander—and Rabbi Yehuda, if we had an urge to speak slander the way we have an urge to be free—then Rabbi Yehuda Halevi would basically say to us, listen friends, that’s an urge, overcome it, it’s not okay. Meaning, he wouldn’t need to explain to us that no, no, those who don’t speak slander are actually the biggest slanderers of all. He’d just tell us that speaking slander is an evil impulse and you should overcome it. So in this context I would have expected a similar statement regarding this urge or desire to be free. He should have said to us: friends, you want to be free? I understand, we all want to be free. Not okay. That’s an evil impulse, overcome it. A servant of God should be a servant and not be free. But Rabbi Yehuda Halevi does not say that. Meaning, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi—even if I give an Orwellian interpretation to his words—still, the fact that he tries to persuade us that we are in fact free says something implicitly. It says that he does accept… he gives legitimacy to this aspiration for liberty. He doesn’t see this aspiration for freedom as an evil impulse. He doesn’t say, overcome it. Rather, he tries to persuade us that we’re there, and it’s okay, everything is okay, we’re terribly free. So his subtext says something nonetheless, whatever interpretation we give the text itself. It seems to me that there’s some positive attitude here, an attitude that grants legitimacy to this value of liberty or this state of freedom. But beyond that, I want to suggest—and last time I didn’t get there yet, I only started the road—some explanation that is still a more substantive explanation. I think this is not some Berlin-style statement, but a genuine statement. And again, I think I already mentioned this—I don’t remember anymore—I’ve heard quite a few formulations of the sort that if we are servants of God, then that brings out our true will, and therefore we are the freest possible, and all kinds of kooky Kook-style slogans like that. I don’t know—in my eyes that’s nonsense, I don’t understand those things. I’m looking for an explanation that isn’t sloganizing. Meaning, just to understand what he is saying, whether it holds water, not that they’ll persuade me that my combine harvester is the best. So the beginning of the road is that I distinguished between two concepts. I said this is not a dictionary distinction—don’t catch me with Even-Shoshan open—but I’m defining two concepts for the purposes of our discussion here: freedom and liberty. Freedom, I defined as the absence of constraints. And I said that freedom is an asset, not a value, exactly like being rich. It’s a pleasant condition, a nice condition, I think most people want to be in that condition, but it’s hard to say that this is a value, a value in the moral, human sense. It’s not a value; it’s an asset. It’s good to be like that, that’s all, but it’s not a matter of value. And in both those cases, to take away that asset is an immoral act. I think that’s part of what confuses people when they think about it. Because taking someone’s money without justification, harming his property, taking his property away—that’s an immoral act. To deprive someone of freedom without justification is also an immoral act. To throw him into prison for no reason, tie his hands, whatever—that’s an immoral act. But the fact that taking something away from someone is immoral does not mean that owning that thing is an act with moral value. That logical inference is not correct, because taking an asset away from someone is also immoral. You don’t need to take away a value; taking away an asset is also immoral. It’s his asset—what are you taking it away for? Why are you restricting his movements? I said this is not an analogy; it’s literally the same thing. Meaning, wealth has a strong dimension of freedom in it, because if you have a lot of money then you can do more things than someone who has less money. Therefore a rich person is freer, in principle. So that example is not an example; it’s simply the same thing. I have an asset—my freedom is an asset, and part of that freedom is also my property. And depriving me of that asset is an immoral act. But that does not mean that owning it has moral value. This thing is an asset. But the measure of seeing to it that he has it—exactly, that’s the more precise definition. Meaning, the contrast I made before, which says that if depriving someone of freedom is something negative, then being free is something positive—no. Maybe giving someone freedom is something positive; giving someone money, at least to someone who needs it, is maybe something positive. That’s the more simultaneous contrast.
[Speaker B] So is freedom an innate trait?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean by innate trait? No. Freedom is what I defined before: freedom is the absence of constraints. It’s not innate; it’s a state I’m in. Obviously, the environment into which I was born can differ in terms of the number of constraints it places on me, but it’s not a trait, it’s a condition. Meaning, freedom is simply the absence of constraints. And when I talk here about constraints, I mean both so-called external and internal constraints. Meaning, for example, my character traits are also a constraint. Okay, why are they a constraint? Because they’re not something I choose. They’re something imposed on me, part of the environment within which I act. From my perspective, even though it seems internal, it’s external to me. Therefore all constraints—external, internal, all of them—belong, from my perspective, in the same basket, let’s call it constraints or the absence of freedom. Right, I said there is no absolute freedom. What? Yes, I said there cannot be absolute freedom; that’s obviously a utopia. No one is completely without constraints. But this definition still says that freedom is one over the number of constraints. Meaning, the more constraints you have, the less free you are, and vice versa. So I’m not talking about a state where you are completely free; that’s a hypothetical state. Is the cat free? What? No—nobody is free. That’s why I say there’s no state without constraints.
[Speaker B] Subject to the constraints, are you still free?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Subject to—if you’re under a constraint, then you’re not free. On the contrary. I’m saying that when there are constraints, when there are constraints, then you are not free.
[Speaker B] So freedom is in your eyes—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Is freedom something subjective? No, no, no. I defined—I’m defining the terms again. The definition of the terms is completely objective: the absence of constraints, that’s what’s called freedom, completely objective. In a moment I’ll get to other concepts and then it’ll come closer. Freedom as a value does not exist. So again, when I say freedom I obviously don’t mean complete absence of constraints. Complete absence of constraints is complete freedom, but that’s a hypothetical state. I’m only claiming that the fewer constraints there are, the more freedom there is, and vice versa. Okay? That’s the definition of freedom. I said two things about it. A: it is an asset and not a value. B: depriving someone of it is an immoral act, but being in that state is not necessarily an act of moral value. As I said before, it’s an asset. Now I defined the concept of liberty. Liberty is autonomous action within a framework of given constraints. Meaning, I exist under given constraints. If I act autonomously, then I am free—in the sense of liberty. That’s my definition of liberty; for now I’m defining it for the purpose of our discussion. I said, don’t catch me with dictionary definitions. My claim was that the concept of liberty is the opposite, in every sense I spoke about before, of the concept of freedom. Meaning, not only are they not synonyms; they are opposite concepts, contradictory concepts. Why? Because the three planes I spoke about earlier regarding freedom, now let’s talk about them regarding liberty. If freedom is the absence of constraints, then liberty cannot exist where there are no constraints, by definition. Because liberty means: what do you do with your constraints? Meaning, given the constraints, do you act autonomously or not? Do you let the constraints dictate what you think or what you do, or not? That is your degree of liberty. In a place where there are no constraints, there is no point talking about liberty. It may be that inwardly—if we were talking about innate traits—a person may be one who possesses liberty even when he is in a state of freedom; it just won’t be expressed. It might be expressed when he reaches another state where constraints are placed on him, and then suddenly I’ll see that he really is a free person in the deeper sense. Therefore I say: it may be that in principle, in his nature, in his character, in his choices, he possesses liberty. But in a state of freedom that cannot be expressed; it has no meaning in a state of absence of constraints. So first of all, the first contrast is the definitional contrast between the two concepts. If freedom is one over the number of constraints, then liberty actually requires constraints. Without constraints, there is no liberty. And I’d say even more than that: the stronger and more pressing the constraints are, or the more constraints there are, the greater at least your potential to be more truly free in the sense of liberty. I mentioned Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, at least the first half of it, with the experiences from the concentration camps, where he basically describes people who were free in a sense that it’s hard even to imagine people freer than they were, even though they were in the state farthest removed from freedom that one could imagine. It’s not despite that—it’s because of that. Because they were in that state, every tiny nuance that they managed to decide for themselves and do according to their own decision, and not simply because circumstances pushed them to it or compelled them to it, points to a very high degree of liberty.
[Speaker D] It’s climbing a steeper slope.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. Meaning, if I’m in a world without constraints, I can’t be free in the sense of liberty. If I’m in a world with constraints, I can be. If the constraints are very strong, then I can be free on a much higher level. I can be, of course. That doesn’t mean that everyone in a concentration camp is free. It means that someone in a concentration camp has the potential to be freer than someone outside. Okay? That’s my point.
[Speaker B] Aren’t you distinguishing between personal constraints and environmental ones?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—internal and external constraints are all constraints from my perspective. Now, the objective definition—objective—what counts as a constraint can already be subjective. But the definition is one over the number of constraints. Now, what is a constraint? There are people who are constrained for various reasons or because of psychological pressures; from my perspective that is a full-fledged constraint. It’s like physical constraints. So on one level, the definitional level, freedom is the absence of constraints; liberty is defined only within constraints. The second dimension is that if freedom is an asset and not a value, liberty is a value. Meaning, to behave as a free person in the deeper sense, to decide for yourself, not to let circumstances or constraints dictate what you do or what you think—I think that is something of value. It is basically your human image or your image of God, really. And the third aspect is that if depriving someone of freedom is an immoral act, liberty cannot be taken away. You cannot take liberty away from a person. All I can do, of course, is pile more and more constraints on him. But after I place constraints on him, even up to the level of a concentration camp, as I said before, the question whether to be free in the sense of liberty or not depends only on him. Obviously, in a case where I’ve taken even that away from him—I knocked him unconscious, I don’t know, I shot him in the head, hit him and he fainted for a second—I’m not talking about that. Fine, then I killed him. Meaning, he no longer functions as a human being at all. But as long as he functions as a human being, all I can do to him is pile more and more constraints on him. But the degree of his liberty depends only on him. So that’s another contrast between freedom and liberty.
[Speaker B] You narrow the range of liberty—the more constraints there are, the more you narrow the—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I narrow the range of freedom. But liberty can be very great within that narrow space of freedom, and maybe only there can it be. Because the more—you understand—if someone in a concentration camp has nothing to eat, and decides that he sees someone about to die and gives him the only slice of bread he has, that is much more than a millionaire giving a million dollars to charity, even though he gave much more. Why? Because the range within which the first person is acting is much narrower; he has much less freedom. But precisely because of that, if within that range he still does what he decides and not what the constraints dictate to him, then he is much freer in the deeper sense.
[Speaker B] That also depends on the mental state—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] because a person can decide, I obey all these things, and still be free. Obviously. A decision can also be to obey—
[Speaker D] I’ll still talk about that. What you can do in order to lower the level of being free is to remove constraints from him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that doesn’t make him free in the deeper sense; it makes him free in the sense of freedom.
[Speaker D] No, but you said that the more constraints there are, the more potential there is to be freer in the deeper sense. So if you want to take liberty away from him, you remove constraints.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, I’m not taking his liberty away, no. Removing constraints maybe doesn’t let him express how free he is in the deeper sense, but it doesn’t damage his liberty. Meaning, his liberty is determined by what he is. So even in a space with fewer constraints he can still be free in that sense. True, the situation doesn’t allow him to express his liberty in the highest way. So you can call that depriving him of liberty, but that’s not… okay. So that’s the basic contrast. The example of elections, if you remember: elections in Syria, elections in Switzerland, and elections in Kamchatka. And I said Israel is a fourth model, the most ridiculous model there is. But elections in Syria are elections where the circumstances dictate the outcome because there’s only one ballot in the box. The elections in Switzerland—there are many ballots in the box, but there are no problems. And since there are no problems, what difference does it make to me who the president of Switzerland is? Meaning, there are no costs. Meaning, whether it’s this one or that one, there’s no difference between the paths. Only when there are constraints or costs, and you’re dealing with difficulties and problems, then if you chose correctly you gained, and if you chose incorrectly you lost. And by gain and loss I mean morally, economically, in security terms, in every respect. But in the absence of surrounding costs, since Switzerland is metaphorically a country without problems, then in that state what we have is freedom and not liberty. Because you may indeed be doing what you want, but it has no meaning. Meaning, basically it doesn’t matter what you chose, because you’re not confronting anything. It’s like asking a person a puzzle: get to the number 100 using four arithmetic operations. I didn’t tell him which numbers he is allowed to use. He can use any number he wants—that’s a very easy puzzle, right? If I tell him: get to the number 100 with four arithmetic operations, but using the digits one, three, and nine. Fine? Now you have four arithmetic operations—get to 100. That’s already a harder question. And it’s harder because I placed constraints on him. Right? Meaning, where there are constraints on you, now you become… if you’re creative, if you manage to maneuver within the constraints and still find a solution. When there are no constraints, then of course you can do whatever you want, but it loses its meaning. Therefore the Swiss situation is a situation of freedom; the Kamchatka situation is a situation of liberty. Kamchatka is a place with problems—we’ve heard of places like that from time to time. And in places with problems, when you choose freely, basically there are costs imposed on you; they don’t depend on your decision. And still, you choose how to deal with them. Therefore I compare that to what I earlier called liberty: you act within circumstances, or within a system of constraints, that is given, not in your hands, and within it you determine your path, you decide what to do. In such a state, your ability to decide—what is called freedom in Switzerland—acquires meaning, and that becomes liberty, not freedom. You are not doing what you want; you are doing what you can within the constraints, and let’s see whether you really decide for yourself or whether you let the constraints determine your path.
[Speaker B] He’s basically saying that then you get free choice, right? That’s the concept.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, right—to make use of free choice, yes.
[Speaker B] But your example with the numbers is very good, because it could be that there’s no way to get to 100 with those numbers. Meaning, not for every objective function within the framework of the constraints will you be able to get there. Maybe not, maybe not. Now here there is a solution, but—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter. I’m saying there are problems with no solution, fine. I’m saying that interesting problems, interesting puzzles, are puzzles under constraints. If there are no constraints, it’s not interesting.
[Speaker B] Going back to liberty: even within liberty you don’t do what you want, right? Why not?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the contrary, as I said—on the contrary—if you can do what you want, that’s freedom. In liberty you cannot do what you want, but within the given constraints you decide how to act inside them. Not that you can do what you want. I can’t fly. So within the constraint that I can’t fly, the question is how I behave on the ground, okay? The question is whether I train hard and become a runner, a very fast runner, or whether I reconcile myself to the fact that I can’t move fast anymore. The first is freer in the deeper sense than the second. The claim—I came back to Ari Elon at the end and said that I think Ari Elon, who contrasts the rabbinic Jew and the sovereign Jew, is looking only at half the picture. Meaning, Ari Elon’s claim is that the one who legislates values for himself is the sovereign Jew, and I said I don’t think he would see as a role model a person who legislates for himself the value of being a hired murderer. Why? After all, he legislates values for himself—and he is legislating negative values for himself. Meaning, in fact, it is not enough that you legislate your own values or choose your own path; it also has to fit some objective standard, a standard that does not depend on you and your decisions, which determines what is good and what is bad. Meaning, even if you choose to be a hired murderer, that does not make murder good. You have the ability to murder or not to murder, but that does not make murder good. The determination that murder is bad is a given determination; it does not depend on your decisions. And only because of that can I look at your actions, judge you, and decide whether you are behaving like a sovereign person or not behaving like a sovereign person, because I look to see whether in fact you are choosing good values, not just choosing, period. Two things are needed: you have to be a chooser, and you have to choose good values. And therefore from here a certain conclusion follows—I’ll just say it parenthetically—basically, because in order to evaluate a person who acts this way you need two parameters, both sovereignty and rabbinic-ness. Meaning, both the fact that he chose his path, and the fact that the path he chose fits some external criterion, that it is good and not bad. And good and bad are a system of constraints that he does not determine; it is given, and he acts within it. Therefore in that sense this is exactly an expression of what I earlier called liberty, because you are basically acting within some system that you do not determine. There is good and evil, and that is given. Now within that given framework, you decide how to observe it and whether to observe it and in what way to observe it and priorities and all kinds of things of that sort—then you can be free in the deeper sense. If someone chooses a good path—if someone behaves in a good way without choosing it, in my eyes that is to a great extent a failure, even though he chose a good path.
[Speaker E] You can be free and still fail.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. So I’m saying: if you choose a good path—if you go on a good path but didn’t choose it—then it’s a failure even though you’re going on a good path. And if you didn’t choose it, then a sheep also goes on a good path without choosing it, because that’s its programming. But on the other hand, if you choose your path in a sovereign way, but you choose a bad path, then here too there is some dimension of success, because after all you did choose your path yourself, but it’s not full success, because you chose a negative path. The judgment or evaluation of human beings has to be a complex evaluation: to what extent did they choose their path, and what is their path? Both things. And therefore if either one is missing, that’s problematic. And if I return to Ari Elon’s contrast—I’m closing the circle here that I opened with Ari Elon. We’ll still get to the Kuzari. So basically what I’m saying is that he simply got confused, confused the concepts. Meaning, he confused freedom with liberty. Because his contrast between the rabbinic Jew and the sovereign Jew does not parallel the contrast between a religious Jew and a secular Jew. It’s simply not the same thing. That’s what he tried to do. Rabbinic and sovereign are not two opposites at all. They are two cumulative conditions, both of which have to exist in order for me to judge the person favorably. He has to be, first, sovereign—to determine his path—and second, rabbinic in the sense of acting according to the right values, not that he determines what the right values are. Rabbinic in that sense: that someone determines for him what is right and what is wrong. Okay? And therefore in the secular context too there are rabbinic and sovereign people, right? Meaning, there are people who go after the herd, and there are people who determine their own path. And in the religious context too there are rabbinic and sovereign people. This identification that he makes between the division of rabbinic versus sovereign and the division of religious versus secular is, in my view, simply a mistake. You want to say that liberty is judged and freedom is not judged? Yes. Because freedom is an asset; there’s nothing to judge there.
[Speaker B] So who judges liberty?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, who judges? Anyone can judge however he judges.
[Speaker B] No, you said earlier that the world judges liberty.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, the world doesn’t judge. The world dictates—it can judge if it wants—but I’m saying, I don’t care who judges. There is a system of constraints within which a person conducts himself. Now I ask myself whether this person is free in the deeper sense or not. You can ask yourself, and maybe your answer will be different—it doesn’t matter. That’s why I’m not getting into the question of how objective the answer is. But this type of judgment—whether he is free in that sense or not—is a judgment made within a system of constraints.
[Speaker C] Not to share his bread with someone else. So he also decided sovereignly and didn’t do anything bad.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s true to a certain extent. I think maybe I talked about this once. Obviously, even when I don’t decide, I decided not to decide.
[Speaker C] No, he decided. He decided to survive.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He decided not to decide in the sense of not doing the action we might have expected.
[Speaker C] He didn’t do anything bad. I didn’t say he took the bread.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, even taking the bread is a decision. I’m saying, these are all decisions.
[Speaker C] Don’t say that it’s sovereign and not good.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So again, if you’re challenging the question of what counts as good and bad, that’s a different argument, I don’t care, I’m not dealing with that. I understood you to be challenging the claim that there can be a person who does not choose.
[Speaker C] There’s no such thing as not choosing, because if he didn’t choose, then he chose not to choose.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that too is a choice. No, so he is sovereign, because he chose not to give the bread, and he is also rabbinic, because there was nothing wrong in what he did. And they are equally free.
[Speaker C] The second question doesn’t matter to me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The first question matters to me. Because the second question is only a question of what is right to do in the situation and what isn’t, and that’s a moral debate; it has nothing to do with us. Right now I’m talking about the logic of freedom. In the logic of freedom, the first question is the important one. After all, when he decides not to decide, is that also a decision? So if that’s the case, then there is no such thing as a person who is not sovereign. What does it mean, a person who is not sovereign? Every person, even if he decides to go along with the circumstances, to do what the constraints tell him to do, that too is a decision. And he made that decision too. Right, obviously. So I talked about this—I think I talked about it once. I said that this is a second-order choice. This gets into the paradoxes of weakness of will. I think I spoke about it once. That basically a person hands himself over to the circumstances. Now it’s true that this handing over is some kind of decision; he could have decided not to do that, to stand his ground and decide on his own path. But still, the outcome—that is, what comes out of the situation—is not his decision. The circumstances determine it. His decision is only to hand himself over to the situation. Okay? That’s why I call it a second-order choice, but you’re right. Behind every decision we make there sits some dimension of choice. But I call such a situation a lack of liberty. Because otherwise it just remains empty. There is no situation that isn’t like that. A person always chooses, I completely agree. But a choice not to do something, an omission too is an omission. Meaning, non-action too is a kind of omission for which you bear responsibility.
[Speaker E] Okay? And according to that, someone who is free doesn’t feel enslaved, because every time he decides anew—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, wait, that’s where I’m heading. I’ll get to that; I don’t think that’s right. On the contrary, my goal is to show why it isn’t right. In just a moment. So this contrast that Arieh Elon makes between the sovereign Jew and the rabbinic Jew—in my view that’s a contrast between heads and tails of a coin. They are simply two different sides; there’s nothing to oppose between them. The coin is both sides together. When you judge a person, you need to judge him by how sovereign he is and by how rabbinic he is. Meaning, both together can lead to some judgment about this person, and it’s not some opposition between the two things.
Now I want to continue and say one more thing. At the end of the 1970s, in the previous century, there was an American neurologist named Benjamin Libet, and he began conducting experiments that tried to check whether a person—we didn’t talk about this last time, right?—he began experiments that test whether we have free choice, whether a person chooses freely or not. How did he do it? He tried to test it empirically. Until then this had been a philosophical question. So there were people who thought yes, and there were those who supported determinism and thought no. He argued that one could try to test it empirically, scientifically. How do you do that?
So basically he says this: he sits a person down—wait, maybe a preface. It had already been known twenty years earlier, in the 1960s, that before we perform some action, you can see on an EEG some electrical signal in our brain that precedes the action, heralds the action. Meaning, I see the signal, and I know the action is about to come. That signal is called the readiness potential, yes, RP. And that was already known.
[Speaker B] By the way, that’s the basis of all neurological systems, neural networks, that are built on these things.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not sure, but okay.
[Speaker B] In epilepsy you can see it beforehand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah okay, that’s something else, yes. Diseases—ah, neurological diseases. Ah, that could be; I don’t understand that field. But now that you’re talking about systems—let’s continue. In any case, the claim—or what Libet said—was basically that the question is where this signal is located, where it appears on the timeline relative to my decision. Meaning, we know that the signal appears before the action. We also know that the person decides and then performs the action; the decision also comes before the action. But the question is: between the decision and the signal, which comes first? And that’s very important. Why? Because if the signal comes before the decision, then in effect someone looking at the EEG can know that I’m going to decide and act before I myself have made the decision. Therefore, in effect, it isn’t really a decision. It’s a façade of a decision. Okay? Because basically I have some feeling that I am deciding, but someone looking at my brain already knows I’m going to do it before I’ve decided. That’s if the readiness potential really precedes the moment of decision.
On the other hand, if the decision comes first, and then the signal appears, and then the action is done, then there is no problem. Why? Then the libertarian picture is still valid. Why? Because the person decided, and the way that gets carried out is by triggering some signal in the brain which is then executed in the form of an action. Fine. But in the end that isn’t what matters—the decision is what generated this process, and therefore this is basically a libertarian picture. So he tested what comes first: the decision or the signal.
[Speaker C] What he really tested was awareness of the decision.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that’s what I call a decision. A decision is—there are many criticisms of Libet; oceans of ink were spilled on this. Some of the criticisms talk about the question of what happens with an unconscious decision. But I say that for our purposes I don’t care about an unconscious decision. For our purposes, when we talk about free choice, we are talking about a conscious decision. A person’s unconscious decisions are not interesting here; that is, he doesn’t bear responsibility for them, so it’s irrelevant. Therefore, when I speak about a decision, I mean a conscious decision.
To his astonishment—he himself was a libertarian—to his astonishment he discovered that indeed the readiness potential appears before the moment of decision. Without going into the details of the experiment, that’s what he discovered there. In his case it was, I think, something like thirty milliseconds earlier, which one can argue about a bit, though it was probably still fairly significant. But in later experiments—being done to this day, by the way—various experiments that keep refining this more and more, and I think there are hundreds of such experiments, they have already reached a difference of five, six, and even eight seconds. A difference of five, six, eight seconds is simply a huge amount of time. Meaning, if five, six, eight seconds before I decide a person already knows that I’m going to do it, then nothing remains of our choice. With thirty milliseconds maybe you can still play around, because the signal isn’t just a spike—it has width—so maybe you can start after…
[Speaker B] It’s not a flat line, okay? The first protrusion—signals are there all the time. Okay? Meaning, I’m not—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t want to get into the neurology of this. Even the little I know about neurology, I could add quite a lot here. But it doesn’t matter to me; I want to describe it only for my purposes, because I want to infer something from it for our discussion. So that was the claim. Libet tried to argue that we have the ability to veto. He wanted to preserve his libertarianism, so he said: true, this signal basically drives us to act, but we can veto it. We can decide that despite the signal, we won’t do what we’re expected to do. And therefore, even though there is always a signal and it comes before the decision, since we can veto it, that still means we have free choice.
You can argue about that too endlessly, and again I won’t. I’m not a professional in this field, but even I can argue with that on several levels. And that’s basically how it continues to this day. I wanted to argue, also in the book—there is a chapter that deals with the experiments—why these experiments can never lead us to a decision on the question of determinism. I built it as an argument of four or five stages to show that even if you refine the experiment more and more, you will never be able to decide this question empirically—at least not through this channel. Maybe someone will think of another channel, then maybe. But not in this kind of experiment.
What I want to present here is the first level out of the five. The first level out of the five basically says that an experiment of this sort—what did he do there? He sat a person next to a table with a button. He told him: press the button whenever you want, just tell me when you decided to press it. It doesn’t matter how he knows; there’s a clock, and he has to identify the moment when he decided, and then he presses, okay? So tell me when you decided, because the experimenter can’t know—that happens inside him. Fine. We know when he pressed, and the EEG picks up the readiness potential, and that too we know. So basically we have three events. We can draw the timeline and see what happens on it, which comes before which.
Now, the decision to press a button is, of course, a decision not accompanied by value-laden deliberation. Right? Pressing a button is a meaningless action. What difference does it make if I press now, in another half-minute, or a minute ago? There are no considerations this way or that. So what do I do it on the basis of? On what basis do I decide now or later? I say: on the basis of the readiness potential. I have a readiness potential, so I press. Why fight it? Why quarrel with it? I have no consideration for or against doing it. In other words, is the act of pressing the button an act of picking or of choosing? Meaning, I’m not choosing, I’m not weighing different values or different considerations and reaching a decision for one side or against another. Rather, what am I doing? I’m simply deciding to do something.
Now, if that is indeed the case, then an experiment of this kind cannot test the question of determinism at all. Why? Because the decision to press the button is basically driven by the readiness potential. We talked about Libet’s veto, right? If I have a readiness potential, it tells me to press the button, because it essentially creates an urge to press the button. And now let’s say I can resist, I can veto, and therefore I really am free, I really do have the ability to choose—but there is no reason to veto. Why not press the button? What’s the problem? Is there something against this signal?
[Speaker B] There is a concept called attention, right? That you’re distracted from it. You built—you have an excitation function that rises, okay? And there’s the off-ramp or whatever it is, right? And you have an attentional bias, and then suddenly it’s like—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A veto, but it doesn’t matter. Take attention too, include it inside. All of that is the electrical signals driving me. After the attention, after the offsets, after everything—now I ask, bottom line, do I have some kind of urge or drive to perform the action. Now the question is whether I veto or not. That’s the question a libertarian asks himself—not in terms of signals, but in terms of my free choice. So I say: even if I am a libertarian, and even if I believe that a person can veto his total neural setup, still, in a case like this I have no reason to do so. Why not press? I have some urge to press right now, so I press right now—why not? If this button, as in the Milgram experiments, would kill a person, then of course, if I have free choice, even if perhaps I have an RP, I will veto and I won’t press, because I have a consideration not to press. But in Libet’s experiment there is no such consideration at all. This is picking, not choosing; it’s not choice. Okay?
So basically the claim is that this kind of experiment—that’s the claim at the first level—this kind of experiment does not test situations in which we are talking about choice at all. Since here, even if in principle I can veto, I have no reason to veto. There is no counter-consideration that I weigh, and then decide whether to go with my limitations, with my inner drives, or to resist them. And therefore this really proves nothing.
Why did I get into this penny’s worth of neurology? Because if I now return to Switzerland, where I enter the voting booth and freely choose among several slips of paper and there are no costs—yes, Switzerland, where there are no problems, so basically I act in a vacuum—the claim I make is this: now I ask, suppose Moishe and Yankele are running for office, okay? Two people running for the presidency, and I decide in favor of Moishele. Now there are no costs; nothing depends on it; I could really have drawn lots, right? Because it doesn’t matter who gets elected. So why did I really choose Moishele? What caused me to choose Moishele and not Yankele? There are no considerations, right? If there are no costs, there are no considerations. So if there are no considerations, why did I choose him? Because I had an RP to take Moishele’s slip. That’s all. Do you understand? Again, I’m speaking in academic language, but the point is: because that’s what I felt like doing. That is, it isn’t the result of considerations; it’s picking, not choosing.
And then my claim basically is this: the elections in Switzerland, as I said before—you have the freedom to choose, and you choose freely, but the choice is devoid of meaning. Because the moment there are no costs to this path or that path that you chose, then what difference does it make? De facto you could also have tossed a coin. This isn’t really a meaningful choice. You have choice, but it isn’t meaningful.
[Speaker B] Wait, wait. So if that’s the case, then with the goats on Yom Kippur, which are completely identical, right? Not the high priest’s—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The goats on Yom Kippur are completely identical. Right, exactly because of that this situation is meant to illustrate a case where it isn’t the situation that determines which one will be what, but the lot. The lot is the expression of my choice. The claim is that it isn’t the situation that determines which goat goes here and which goat goes there, but only my choice. So this is meant precisely to sharpen the concepts of liberty. The claim is that everything depends on me—which in that context, of course, the lot reflects—but—
[Speaker B] But in effect the result would be the same if he chose according to the—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, only the lot determines what is correct, because the lot supposedly comes from above. So in the analogy, my choice is supposed to be a choice of the right thing. But it is my choice that determines it, not the difference between the goats. Not whether one is prettier or less pretty, superior or less superior. Exactly for that reason. Because they want to say that those are not the considerations—only my choice is. I talked more than once about the two goats when discussing this issue.
In any case, my claim is—and now what I want to argue is one step further. When you enter the voting booth in Switzerland, up till now what I said was that you choose freely, only your choice has no value meaning, because there are no costs; what difference does it make? I could have tossed a coin. Now I’m claiming more than that. In a situation where there is no value meaning and there are no costs, you are not choosing at all. It’s not that the choice is… you are not choosing. You are simply actualizing the initial impulse that comes up in you. If Moishele comes up, then you put in Moishele. Why would you put in Yankele if your impulse is to put in Moishele? There is no difference between them. That is exactly the difference between picking and choosing.
And then my claim is basically that when you enter the voting booth in Switzerland, that’s like Syria. It’s like Syria. It isn’t freedom in the sense that you decide what to do, except that the decision has no value meaning because only in a place with costs is there value meaning. No—you don’t decide what to do at all. Since you don’t engage in any consideration, there are no considerations in favor of Moishe or against Moishe, right? You simply do—I don’t know—you do what you feel like. So basically your readiness potential is operating, not you. And therefore, in a state of freedom, not only is the choice devoid of meaning—there is no choice. No choice takes place. Because in a state of freedom you basically conduct yourself as free. And there is no reason not to—again, this isn’t criticism. There is no reason not to. Why not do what I enjoy if it has no cost? There is no problem, so what’s the issue? Why not go with what I feel like? Right?
What am I really trying to say? Now I close the circle back to Rabbi Yehuda Halevi. Rabbi Yehuda Halevi says two things. He says: “Slaves of time are slaves of slaves, and the servant of God alone is free.” I think this has a very, very simple explanation, and in my view it is completely true—not George Orwell, not anything of that sort, and not the slogans I rejected earlier. “Slaves of time are slaves of slaves” means: someone who has no constraints in his world, okay? Suppose there were such a situation, hypothetically. He is a slave only of time. Time just flows. Nothing—he does whatever he wants, there is nothing that limits him. Then he is a slave of slaves. Why is he a slave of slaves? Because that’s Switzerland, right? Meaning, he has no considerations, that is, there are no considerations in his world, no costs, no right and wrong. So clearly he chooses nothing. He simply does what his RP tells him to do. That’s all. And that’s fine in his world, because there is no issue—it isn’t problematic there. Yes, exactly.
Therefore, if earlier I divided between determinism, freedom, and liberty, my claim now is that freedom belongs on the side of determinism. Because basically, in a state of freedom, in a state where there are no constraints, it isn’t that I choose and it has no value or no value meaning. I don’t choose. I simply do the first thing that comes into my head, the first thing I feel like doing. That’s what I do. So Rabbi Yehuda Halevi says, “Slaves of time are slaves of slaves.” They think they are free; they are the greatest slaves there are. They do not decide a single step on their path.
[Speaker D] Yes, free but not free persons.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? No, that’s what I’m saying. They’re not even free. Because in the end the inner impulse determines what they will do; they do not decide. Free in the sense you defined.
[Speaker D] In the definition of free, there are no constraints.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Right, you’re correct—not free persons. By contrast, “the servant of God alone is free.” What does that mean? The servant of God—and now I’m speaking in the logical sense; this doesn’t have to be specifically Jewish law or even specifically Judaism. But once you have some system that determines what is right and what is not right, what is good and what is bad, and it is given—not you who determines that system—it is imposed upon you, there is a system of constraints within which you act, in such a system he alone is free—again, in my translation, he alone is truly free. Fine? I said, there are those who use the word “free,” but what he means, it seems to me, is the concept of liberty, not the concept of freedom. And it’s really true that “the servant of God alone is free” is in fact true. It doesn’t seem Orwellian. Without that, you are a slave of slaves. Not because it reveals your true will, and not because of anything like that—simply because logically, that’s how the situation is defined. Okay?
[Speaker F] But that’s assuming from the philosophical angle: if I get up in the morning and feel like staying in bed, and on the other hand I know I need to get up for prayer, to hear your lecture, all these things—then in Elon’s view, I take those constraints—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, in Elon’s view there are no constraints. There are no constraints. He doesn’t recognize that he needs to get up for prayer. That’s exactly the point.
[Speaker B] Meaning, if you’re not Elon and you do recognize that you need—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To get up for prayer, and you don’t get up, then you acted as a free person—maybe as a free person with whom I disagree—but only then are you acting as a free person. If there are no constraints in your world telling you that you must get up for prayer, then in what sense are you free? It has no meaning. You stay asleep because it’s comfortable for you to sleep—that is exactly the RP. The RP keeps you in bed. Okay.
But it seems to me that that’s what he is talking about—the rabbis versus the sovereign. Yes, but I say that for that very reason it is a mistake. It’s a mistake. That’s exactly the point—it is not secular versus religious. That’s exactly the point. Rabbinic versus sovereign is not secular versus religious. There is a secular rabbinic and sovereign person, and there is a religious rabbinic and sovereign person. But the fact that someone tells me, or dictates to me, how I should behave—dictates what is right to do—what you actually do, only you decide. That’s exactly the difference; that’s exactly what he misses. Meaning, and this is always true, that what is right and what is not right is dictated to you from outside, even in a secular world. You are obligated to morality. So what does that mean? Do you decide whether murder is good or bad? Do you legislate values for yourself? That’s utter nonsense. Of course not. What you determine is whether in practice you will murder or not, whether you will do the act. But whether murder is bad or good is given. So this is just nonsense.
I’ll say more than that. This is a statement that in some contexts may sound provocative, but I think it is completely correct. There are many ways to be religious; there is only one way to be secular. Secular in the sense that one is not committed to the religious system, yes—that is the definition of secular. Beyond that there can be many other things he chooses, but those are already other things. To be secular means that he is not committed to the religious system. And not being committed to the religious system can happen in only one way: simply not doing what it says, that’s all. Okay? After that, what he does in other contexts are additional things. So basically there are not only many kinds of secular people—there is only one kind of secularity. Secularity is only one thing: simply not being committed to the religious system.
By contrast, if you are committed to the religious system, there are many ways to behave within it. No two Jews behave in exactly the same way, even if both are committed to that system. And why? Because only when there is a system of constraints do possibilities begin to appear for how to maneuver within them. When there is a world empty of objects, motion is not defined within it, because motion is always relative to something. In an empty world, every place is the same place. There is no difference between this place and that place, right? So in a world devoid of constraints, it is an empty world. It has no meaning. So the claim is that the constraints don’t so much constitute liberty as that without them there isn’t even choice. Meaning, even freedom itself is not really freedom.
But everyone chooses the external values. No—everyone chooses what he does with the external values, not the values themselves. No, there are values of this group and values of that group. It isn’t that you choose. I interpret it differently, I describe it differently. I do not choose the religious values; I simply think they are correct, that they are binding. Not the same thing. Meaning, choosing is the question: assuming these are, in my opinion, the correct values, and someone else thinks otherwise, yes—then the question is what I do with that. That is a decision; in that I choose. Okay? How I behave within it. But the fact that these values are correct values is not a choice. The fact that these values are correct values is a recognition. I simply think that’s the truth. I think someone who does otherwise is mistaken.
But there are two values, two policies of values. I think this is not a choice—it is a recognition. As I said before, we spoke about this in the series on morality. We talked there about how, if one wants to attribute meaning to morality, I think one has to assume there is some idea we contemplate when we look at what is moral and what is not moral. That is not a decision; it is a recognition. Meaning, as far as I’m concerned, when I reach the conclusion that the religious values are binding, then that is the truth. It’s like deciding that murder is evil. So what, there are people who advocate murder—so they decided differently? They didn’t decide differently. Murder is evil, period. So it doesn’t depend on me or on them. They decided not to behave according to that value. Fine. So in this context too, it’s the same thing.
And of course, I’m not claiming there are no disputes. I’m only claiming that these disputes are like disputes in physics. Meaning, the disputes are about what is correct; they are not decisions there. The decisions are, given a system of constraints, the question is how I decide to behave within it. I think I gave the example of—yes, Amos Oz has an essay called “A Full Wagon and an Empty Wagon.” I brought here an interesting passage; maybe I’ll send it to you by email so you can read it. He says this: “The world of Jewish law, like the universe itself, begins with a big bang—the giving of the Torah, the revelation at Mount Sinai. From then until today, or from yesterday and the day before, Jewish culture is a culture of expanding ripples, of interpretations, layer upon layer. But the farther one moves from the giving of the Torah, the interpretive space shrinks and shrinks because it becomes more and more populated.” Meaning, basically, with the creation of Jewish space at the giving of the Torah—the big bang, right?—they begin to bring in furniture. Now, the Orthodox, so he claims, don’t take any furniture out. So all the furniture that enters stays inside and obligates us. And slowly, slowly you remain in a situation where you can no longer move.
Fine, and in that context he advocates for the sovereign Jew, not the rabbinic one, yes? Meaning, someone who takes furniture out, brings other furniture in, and so on. So first of all, here too I really brought this example last time, if I remember correctly, and I spoke about the question of how many ways there are to arrange a room with one chair, with two chairs, with three chairs. Meaning, the more chairs there are, the more possibilities there are for arranging the room too, right? Meaning, the larger the number of pieces of furniture in the room, the smaller the free space or the empty space I have in the room, but the number of possibilities—the entropy—increases. What? There is an asymptote. What? There is an asymptote. At 32 it’s the maximum—say, if there are 64 squares, then at 32 it’s the maximum. But up to 32, the more furniture we add, the more the number of possibilities for arranging the room increases, not decreases.
An empty room is like the empty space I talked about before. In an empty room you have absolute freedom, you can do whatever you want, but whatever you do will be the same thing, because the room is empty. What is the difference? An empty room can be arranged in only one way—like secularity, yes? It can be arranged in only one way: simply leave it empty. When there is one chair, there are already 64 possibilities for placing the chair—it’s 8 by 8—so there are 64 ways to arrange the chair. Meaning, all kinds of possibilities for arrangement are created because there is a chair inside. When there are two chairs, multiply the number of possibilities by roughly 30. That is, the number of possibilities for arranging them grows much more, and so on up to 32. Okay?
This basically means that the more furniture you bring into the room, the number of possibilities for arranging it grows rather than shrinks. And therefore, in fact, Amos Oz too is mixing up freedom and liberty in this context. Amos Oz says: the more furniture there is in the room, the less free I am—which is true—but the more liberty I have, or in this context let’s call it creativity, in analogy to liberty, because in effect I can express my taste more if I arrange the chairs this way or another way. But in a world where there are no chairs, what is the difference between my taste and your taste? The room will look the same. Therefore the point is that, if we are looking at freedom and liberty, the distinction is very, very significant.
I just want you to notice the analogy to—I have been talking about the ethical sphere until now, and I want to speak about the aesthetic sphere, maybe for just a few more minutes. In the aesthetic sphere exactly the same confusion happens, in my opinion. Because the question I asked myself many years ago, back when there were still genre rules in the world of art, was: who needs genre rules? Why do we need rules about how to write a tragedy, or how to paint an expressionist painting, or things like that? Meaning: let me write a tragedy in four acts, not three, and let the gun appear in the third act and not the first. Fine—why do I have to make a tragedy according to some fixed procedure in advance, what are called genre rules?
And my answer after I matured, my answer was: because without genre rules there is no creation. In a vacuum creation has no meaning. Meaning, when there are genre rules, then if a creative person comes along, within the genre rules he will show me some mode of conduct that had not been done before his time. And that’s beautiful, that’s interesting, that shows he is a creative person, right? But in a world where there is no—meaning, in a world of genre rules, the creator and the viewer are both speaking within some given conceptual framework, within a given language. I have a way to interpret what he is doing. I can show whether he is interesting or not interesting, creative, whether he does something different from what his predecessors did. Because this riddle has constraints. I told you: use one, two, three, and four to get to one hundred. Don’t get to one hundred however you want. And then let’s see whether you succeed; those before you didn’t succeed. Let’s see if you will. That means you are creative.
But in a world without genre rules, as postmodern art at least deceives itself into thinking it operates without genre rules, in such a world creation has no meaning at all. Because how am I to judge your creation? How do I know what you did differently from those before you? When I ask what you did differently from those before you, I need some standard within which the whole thing operates. And then I say: you solved the riddle this way, he solved it differently—interesting. Meaning, you can see that you’re a creative fellow. But in a world where there are no rules, everyone does whatever he wants—what am I supposed to do when faced with a work of art? Nothing. It says nothing.
Now why do I say this is an illusion? Because clearly, once things do say something—even in a postmodern world, when people have positions about different works—then that means there too there are genre rules. They just don’t admit it. There are genre rules, only they are different from what existed before. They are willing to change the genre rules, but there is no such thing as artistic creation without genre rules. Artistic creation without genre rules is not art. It’s just nonsense.
And that means that in the world of liberty there is creativity better than the creativity of freedom. Just as liberty is higher than freedom, exactly parallel to that. I argue that the concept of liberty—
But that’s subjective. It’s like the other one. One can argue about subjectivity in evaluation and artistic judgment or not, but never mind. Let’s speak systematically for a moment, even if you judge differently from me—I ask myself this question. So what I basically want to say is that this confusion between freedom and liberty in the ethical context repeats itself in exactly the same way in the aesthetic or artistic context. Aesthetics and art—there are people who would stone me for identifying those two things. So this confusion—artistic freedom has no value. Artistic liberty has value. And that is exactly the same as ethical freedom having no value, no meaning, while ethical liberty has meaning. It is the same confusion.
So in the postmodern world, just as they break aesthetic values, they also break ethical values, and they are sure this will generate a better world. It generates a meaningless world. Because in a world where there are no values, then you cannot even argue with anyone. There is nothing. Everyone does whatever he wants. I very much want there to be a world with values, even if those values are opposed to my values, because then at least I have something to argue with. Meaning, a world with no value framework—artistic or ethical, doesn’t matter—is devoid of all meaning. You can’t even object to anything. You just can’t do anything. In a world where everything is permitted, in a world with no constraints, in a world where your judgments have no meaning, your conduct also has no meaning.
And therefore I think Rabbi Yehuda Halevi is very right when he says that “the servant of God alone is free,” in the sense that for there to be meaning to choice, for you to have choice and for your choice to have meaning, you must be acting within some framework that you did not legislate. You must be rabbinic in order to be sovereign. And that is the point. Both in the artistic context and in the ethical context. So I think that is the meaning.
Maybe in one sentence let’s return to Passover, which is also in the background. If we left Egypt, then we went from slavery to freedom in the language we defined here, right? Because the constraints came off. “We were slaves; now we are free persons.” “Now we are free persons” means: now we are free, now today we are free persons. But I say that when we left Egypt we were free, relatively speaking—that is, Pharaoh’s servitude was removed from us. After fifty days we reached the revelation at Mount Sinai. After fifty days we receive the right and the wrong that are dictated to us, not our own decision—“the mountain held over them like a barrel.” Why? Because without that we will not be free persons. If we are Amos Oz, who can bring furniture into the room and take furniture out of the room as we please, then there are no constraints, so that isn’t called arranging the room. You do whatever you want; I have no way to judge you at all. I want to see how you deal with a situation in which there are five chairs in the room. That’s it. You can’t take out a chair, you can’t bring in a chair—let’s see what you do with that. That has meaning. But if you decide whether to take out or bring in the chairs to the room, then there are no constraints, so it changes nothing.
It’s like Amos Oz later in this same essay. There he makes all kinds of strange claims. He claims there that the Judaism of Jewish law, or Torah thought in general, did not cope with the Holocaust. Only modern Hebrew literature succeeded in coping, or tried to cope, with the Holocaust. That’s simply utter nonsense. Because modern Hebrew literature… modern Hebrew literature cannot cope with the Holocaust for the simple reason that there is no problem. In a world where you don’t believe in God, you’re not supposed to grapple with the question of why God did this to us, because there isn’t any God there. Meaning, I say: you can grapple, and maybe fail, but you can only grapple with the question when in your world there is a question—when you are committed, you believe in God, you are committed to His being good, you are committed to what He says you need to do, you have faith in Him—then you ask yourself: wait, so why did He do this? That’s not a simple question, and either you succeed in dealing with it or you don’t.
But in a world where you put furniture into the room and take it out as you please, then don’t tell me you’re creative, that you’re arranging the room however you want. That isn’t creativity. That’s the creativity of someone who gets to the number one hundred without constraints. Okay, very creative. You can do it in a thousand ways. You can just put one hundred there, you can do ten times ten, you can do fifty times two—there is nothing creative here. Simply all possibilities are possible. You need constraints in order to reveal creativity. Therefore, coping requires struggle. When you struggle with a problem, when you are committed to both sides of the dilemma, then you need to search for a solution. But someone who is committed to nothing—again, it’s the same confusion between freedom and liberty—the entire essay is threaded by this description.
So you say there is no grappling? You say potentially there is no grappling, but he says they already grappled. Okay, but modern Hebrew literature could not even grapple; that’s the question, not that it did grapple. Fine. Now the question is whether they grappled with it or not. I’m not sure they didn’t grapple, maybe not enough, but I do think that only there can one grapple. It’s simply a comparison that, again, mixes up freedom and liberty. This thing keeps recurring.