Freedom and Liberty – Lesson 3

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I want to continue a bit with the topic we were dealing with—freedom and liberty—and really maybe I’ll just summarize. I distinguished between the concept of freedom, which is the absence of constraints, and liberty, which is autonomous action within constraints. I said that liberty is a value, while freedom is an asset. Meaning, freedom is not a value; it’s just good to be in a state of freedom, and you shouldn’t take that away from someone unjustly. But the value can only be liberty, not freedom. And in the course of that I said there are basically three models of conduct. One of them parallels freedom, one parallels liberty, and freedom itself has two shades. I spoke in terms of political elections. I said there are elections in Syria, which are basically something deterministic—that is, an illusion of choice. There is choice in Switzerland, which is basically a place with no problems, and therefore the decision of what to do or who will be president of Switzerland is completely meaningless, because it doesn’t really matter; nothing depends on it. You could just as well hold a lottery, so that parallels randomness. And then there are elections in a place where there are problems—that is freedom, or rather liberty; it is freedom that has value. The framework of problems that don’t depend on us is what gives value to our free choice among alternatives. I’m just saying this briefly because I only want to complete this line of thought, and here I want to distinguish one more important point that maybe completes the picture. Actually, in short, what I wanted to say is that constraints—the existence of constraints, that is, the absence of freedom—are not a contradiction to the concept of liberty but what constitutes it. Meaning, without constraints liberty cannot appear, because liberty, as I said, is autonomous conduct within constraints. The constraints are what give meaning to our freedom, because without constraints it’s freedom; with constraints it is really liberty. The question is how we solve the problems, what prices we choose to pay, and how. And the parable was really the giving of the Torah. I started with the Exodus from Egypt, which is celebrated as the festival of liberty, and I said there are at least two aspects that challenge that view, as though this is a transition from slavery to liberty. One aspect is collectivity—the Jewish collective that was created there when we left Egypt—and today it is commonly assumed that being part of a collective contradicts the concept of liberty. And the second aspect is the ideology, or religion, or commitment that we received at Mount Sinai. So until now I spoke about the dimension of binding norms, of the divine command that obligates, and I argued that this doesn’t contradict liberty but actually constitutes it. Only within that can there be liberty. I’ll get to the aspect of collectivism in a moment. I just want to complete the issue of liberty within constraints. Usually, what I’ve defined until now made it seem as though there are, as I said before, three mechanisms. That is, Syria is determinism, Switzerland is randomness—you could hold a lottery in Switzerland, it wouldn’t matter, because there are really no considerations there, and so the fact that we have freedom there also has no value. It’s nice that we decide whatever we want, but nothing really depends on it. You could just hold a lottery, so that parallels randomness. And then there are the places with problems, in which we conduct ourselves freely—that’s the concept of liberty. Now I want to go one step further and show that the second mechanism actually doesn’t exist. The Switzerland mechanism doesn’t really exist; it’s an illusion. To show that, I want to deal for a moment with a series of experiments conducted in neuroscience. They began in the 1980s and continue to this day. People are constantly trying to refine them and conduct more and more experiments. These are Libet’s experiments. Benjamin Libet was a neurologist, also an American, who decided to test experimentally the question of whether human beings have free choice or whether we are basically deterministic machines. Until him, this question was considered a philosophical one, meaning it was not accessible to scientific tools. You could think yes, you could think no, but there really wasn’t much practical consequence to these things. In fact there are hardly even philosophical consequences. The philosophical consequences are very indirect, contrary to what many people think—maybe I’ll devote a separate topic to that sometime. In any case, it was clear that this was only a philosophical issue. Benjamin Libet thought of a way to try to put it to an empirical test. What did he do? He takes subjects, sits them at a table, and on the table there is some kind of button, and in front of them there is a clock running. And now he says to them: look, whenever you decide, press the button. There’s a button here on the table; whenever you decide, press the button. But I want you to tell me when you decided. Not when you pressed. When you pressed I can also see—I can simply measure at what time they pressed. I’m asking the person: when did you decide to press? And look at the clock—the clock is running quite fast, to allow resolution—and tell me where the hand was when you decided to press. Why is that important? Well, twenty years before him it had already been discovered that before a person performs an action, some signal is awakened in his brain called the readiness potential, RP. And this readiness potential is basically some electrical signal that appears in the brain shortly before the person decides to do—or shortly before the person performs—some action. Which makes sense; that was already known before him. But in itself, that says nothing about the question of determinism. What Libet understood was that on the relevant timeline there is another event. Besides the emergence of the readiness potential and besides the moment of the action, there is the moment of the decision. Now the arrangement of these three events on the timeline is critical to the question of free will. Why? Because from the deterministic perspective, basically the readiness potential appears, and then afterwards I decide—or rather, I think I decide—

[Speaker B] Or maybe not, I don’t know, maybe you can decide and then decide.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, wait—that’s already the veto, we haven’t gotten there yet. One second.

[Speaker B] No, there are actually experiments by Benjamin exactly on these things.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, there are lots of experiments, but I’m saying—you’re talking about the veto, I’ll get to the veto. At the moment there’s still no veto. I’m describing the experiment as it was at the beginning. And then the point is that from the deterministic perspective, the order on the timeline is first the readiness potential appears, after that I decide—of course this is a façade of a decision, it’s not really a decision, I only think I’m deciding, because the readiness potential actually dictated the decision to me—but the experience or the awareness of the decision appears afterward, and then the action. That’s the order according to the determinist. The libertarian—the one who thinks a person has free will—switches the order between the readiness potential and the decision. In other words, the libertarian claim says that first there was a decision, then the readiness potential appears, because the decision triggered that signal, and the signal is of course the beginning of the path toward the physical action. Meaning, there is a command from the brain, and it is an electrical process, and in the end it concludes in some action. So what matters for determining empirically whether we have free choice or not is the question: what appears first, the decision or the readiness potential? Both appear before the action, but the question is what the order between them is.

[Speaker C] So when you say free choice, you actually mean not just a free decision but a conscious free decision.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I’ll get to that in a moment too.

[Speaker C] So why would it appear at all if it’s not a decision in the mind? What brings it about? Why should the readiness potential appear?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?

[Speaker C] If you’re not deciding in your mind?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For all kinds of reasons—other stimulations that trigger it. I mean, how does the determinist explain why I decide to do something? He also agrees that I decide to do something. The only claim is that the decision is not free—it is the result of some prior circumstances. So all kinds of inputs enter me, I see various things in the environment, I experience things, whatever, through all the senses and by all sorts of means, some kind of calculation is formed in my mind, yes, a neural process, and as a result some readiness potential is formed. And then an action is performed, and so on. That action of course creates—say I decided to punch someone, okay? So that punch is an input for that other person. Now that other person does another calculation, once again his brain produces some readiness potential from his point of view, and he decides whether to react or not react or do something else. And so the process is basically a process of cause and effect from the Big Bang all the way to each one of our tiny actions. Okay?

[Speaker D] Why can’t we imagine that the RP comes first, but the RP doesn’t tell me what to do, only that I need to act, and then I decide how? And the free choice is not whether to act but how to act? Meaning the RP is broad, not specific.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? But can several actions come out of the same RP in parallel? You’d have to ask neuroscientists. I don’t understand this well enough to answer.

[Speaker D] For example, a person senses immediate danger, so his body tells him: act now.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How will he act? Again, I don’t know how to answer because this isn’t my field. I know that from what I’ve seen in neuroscience, the claim is that there is some one-to-one relation: the RP determines a type of action. Yes, that’s the claim. Again, I don’t know—you need to ask people whose expertise this is. There’s some kind of uniqueness there. Okay. In any case, what this experiment tried to do—and I’m going back to the paradigm I described before—was determine the relation between the RP and the decision. Now, the RP we can measure with EEG, yes, connected to the head; we can check and see when the EEG signal emerges. We can measure when the action is performed, when he presses the button—that we can also measure. What we can’t know is when the decision happened, and therefore there we depend on the person’s report. The person has to tell me when he decided. Now, that’s not simple: to train a subject how to determine the moment of decision. Again, I’m not getting into that; there were many criticisms of that aspect of the experiment as well. But the claim is that with a clock running in front of him, and if the clock runs fast enough, it gives good resolution for determining the time of the decision. Right? If the clock runs fast, then even if the difference is only a tenth of a second, the hand will already be here and not there—that gives better resolution. Okay. So that was the experiment. They trained the subjects, and in the end they apparently managed to get results regarding the time of the decision. People succeeded in reporting when they made their decision. To Libet’s astonishment—he himself was a libertarian—it turned out that the RP appears before the decision. And we’re talking about a few tens of milliseconds, about thirty milliseconds or something like that, which is no negligible amount of time. But there were also all sorts of reflections about this, because the readiness potential is some kind of wave that takes a certain amount of time; it’s not a spike and not a delta function. So it takes some time, and the question is—but apparently it was significant enough: thirty milliseconds before the decision the RP was already sufficiently clear. That’s the claim. Meaning, those criticisms apparently don’t really hold water. There were a huge number of criticisms, by the way. This experiment generated hundreds of articles and follow-up attempts right up to today; they keep continuing these attempts, there’s an enormous amount of discussion around this topic. And Libet himself was sort of surprised, because he was a libertarian, and in the end it turned out that our decision is not really a decision. Meaning, the experimenter following the EEG can know, before we have decided, that we are going to do it. Now there are later experiments that got to differences of five, six, and even eight seconds. You have to understand: eight seconds is eternity in neural processes. I mean, we’re talking about knowing eight seconds before the person decided that he was going to do it. That just turns free choice into a joke. It’s not thirty milliseconds where you can argue about the tail of the signal. Eight seconds earlier—there’s just no question, it’s completely unequivocal. And then this sparked huge amounts of discussion among philosophers and among brain researchers: what do we do with these findings? Yes, their readiness potential caused them to discuss what to do with these findings and to deliberate and reach their own decisions, each one with his own readiness potential. You understand that this casts everything we say and all these contexts in a rather ridiculous light, but okay, that’s how it works there. And there were a number of reflections. I’ll take an example from what was said earlier. One of the reflections raised was, for example, maybe we do have some kind of free choice or free will, but it happens at the non-conscious stage. Before awareness of the decision arises, we have already decided. But even if that’s true—I don’t know how you would test that—even if it’s true, it empties our free choice of philosophical content. When we ask whether a person has free choice, we mean that he consciously deliberates and decides what he decides. The fact that some mechanism is operating within him that he is not at all aware of, and that mechanism is a lottery, not something produced by mechanical calculation, say—even if that were true, so what? In the end, moral responsibility, the connection we see between a person and his decisions—once it’s not conscious, it loses its meaning. Even if that reflection is correct, it doesn’t matter. For me that’s also determinism. And if it’s not determinism then it’s randomness, but it’s not free choice. Now Libet himself spoke about a veto. He himself already spoke about a veto, and many experiments down to our own day, as I said earlier, examine this issue. Quite a few experiments found it; others deny it. Again, I’m not familiar with all the details of all the experiments and all this discussion, but I’m describing it from above. Libet’s claim was that the RP is a necessary but not sufficient condition for action. Meaning, there will be no action unless there was an RP before it, but there can be an RP with no action following it—if the person imposes a veto. In other words, some signal arises, and then I’m supposed to press the button, or to decide and then press the button, but I can also decide not to—to veto that RP. And again all sorts of arguments arose: whether it’s possible to impose a veto, whether it isn’t possible. There are many experiments to this day that examine this issue.

[Speaker D] The question of the frequency of the veto also matters.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think the frequency is actually not an important question here, because the moment there’s even one case where it doesn’t happen, that means we are libertarians. That’s exactly the point. So in my opinion such an experiment can’t really determine the issue anyway, but that’s another discussion—I’ll come back to that point. What’s important for our purposes here—I don’t want to get into this whole topic—is one argument. In my book I discuss this a bit in one of the chapters, and there I try to show that these experiments, even if they are refined to the limit—and it’s not at all simple how to do that—will not be able to resolve the question empirically. That’s my view, and I try to explain structurally why that is. But one of the stages—I want to focus on one of the first or second, I don’t remember, I think the second—one of the stages is important for our purposes. My claim—and this isn’t only my claim, others said it before me too—is that Libet was actually testing a scenario of picking and not choosing. That is, pressing a button is really a trivial action. Nothing depends on it. In the Milgram experiment, say, pressing a button can be very meaningful. You know, experiments that tested how willing people are to obey orders even when they have morally problematic implications. There, if someone had done a Libet test on a Milgram experiment, that could have been more interesting. But here you’re pressing a button; nothing depends on it. What difference does it make if I press now, in another five seconds, three seconds earlier? It’s uninteresting. What happens in such a situation? In such a situation what happens is this: suppose some RP arises in me saying press the button now, or decide and press the button now. Why should I resist? Why not? After all, there is no preferred time—now or later. So if at this moment I have some urge or something pushing me to press, then I press.

[Speaker B] And what if you have an RP from the other side telling you to do something else?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but as far as I’m concerned, the RP is the sum of all the different RPs.

[Speaker B] No, on the way, on the 600 milliseconds or the 500 milliseconds, if another RP comes in, that’s just the implementation.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the end that’s the veto. The veto is also another RP. The point is that in a case of picking—that is, a trivial action, not an action of choosing, where you have to deliberate and decide between this or that, but an action of picking—it’s obvious that a person will act according to his RP, because he has no reason not to. Meaning, once I have to decide when to press the button, and I have no consideration at all—after all, what difference does it make when I press?—then once some signal like that arises in me, I press. Why shouldn’t I press? True, on the theoretical level, if I had this or that consideration, then maybe I could—I could also impose a veto, so the libertarian claims—but in this case there’s no reason to do that. Therefore the fact that it doesn’t happen proves nothing. It doesn’t happen because there is no need for it to happen. Test me in a situation where there is deliberation that could cause me not to agree with what the RP tells me. Meaning, if pressing this button were, I don’t know, killing a person—or at least I think it kills a person—then if some RP arose saying press the button, there it would be interesting to see whether the person would impose a veto and refuse to do what the RP says. There there’s a chance it could happen, because there the person has a reason why to do it and why not to do it. Therefore in actions that are inherently actions of picking and not of choosing, this whole experiment basically loses its significance. Now I know—I had some connections at the Hebrew University in the Institute for Neural Computation, I spoke there with several people around the time I wrote the book—someone there told me they are indeed trying to work on a Libet experiment in a situation of choosing. But that’s a very difficult business, because the question is how you put a person into a situation of choosing. You’re not going to kill a person for the sake of the experiment.

[Speaker E] An electric shock and a mouse isn’t enough?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so an electric shock and a mouse—but then it’s already a question of how problematic that really counts for you. Fine, but that’s the question.

[Speaker B] But on the other hand, if he has green and red, that’s completely choosing. Now there are people who have a red tendency.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. The fact that there are two buttons still doesn’t make it choosing, because the question is what depends on it.

[Speaker B] He chooses between green and red. What difference does it make?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But maybe I’ll just go with my RP, exactly. Maybe I’ll go with my own tendency, because why not? What do I care whether I press red or green?

[Speaker B] No, because there are people who like red more, people who like green more, so they choose that. There’s a choice here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think that’s—well, you’d have to see the details, I don’t know. To me it sounds like picking.

[Speaker F] But who decides that this is the decision? There are people for whom it’s picking and for whom it’s choosing, but the question is whether maybe for specific people it would be a case of picking and for others it would be choosing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are situations where typically it will always be choosing—where meaningful things depend on it morally. I assume that’s choosing.

[Speaker F] But there has to be something that makes me say: now is the time to switch into choosing mode and not stay in picking mode.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You give someone a button and say, listen, this button kills a person. If you press it on even-numbered minutes, it kills a person but you’ll get a million dollars; and if you press it on odd-numbered minutes, nothing happens but you also get nothing.

[Speaker F] There has to be something that now tells me: move from a state of picking to a state of choosing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course—that choosing itself, that whole phenomenon. I’ll have to get into this in the series maybe separately. But for my purposes here it’s just an example. But of course in the background of all this there’s what we maybe once discussed about the matter of choosing to choose, the choice whether to choose. That is, whether to be a chooser or to be dragged along, which is basically what you’re talking about.

[Speaker D] What does the Torah say about this question? Doesn’t that come into it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does the Torah—

[Speaker D] —say about this question?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Torah says there is choice. And I also think—yes, it’s written in the Torah that there is choice—but you know, if there are facts, then there are facts. Let’s be intellectually honest. I don’t know; we need to check what the clear facts are. When I examine reality, I examine it through experiment, not through the Torah. Meaning, as Maimonides says in the Guide of the Perplexed, if we arrive at some scientific or philosophical conclusion and it contradicts what is written in the Torah, we interpret the Torah creatively. The Torah is not, at least in my opinion, in my view, a source for clarifying facts. To clarify facts, you have to look at the world and see what the facts are. To impose the Torah on the world because that’s what is written and therefore that must be reality—I think that’s not intellectually honest.

[Speaker D] But specifically on our issue it’s different from saying whether the sun is at the center. Because here there is a basic faith commitment.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s very important, of course, of course, certainly. But if the facts are that we have no choice, then what can you do?

[Speaker D] Did Maimonides mean what you’re saying now? I think he also discussed creation.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maimonides talks about the creation of the world and about attributing corporeality to the Holy One, blessed be He. He said that if we had scientific findings that said that, then we would bend the text accordingly. For him, creation of the world is a major foundation.

[Speaker F] He talks about the Arab philosophers who determine reality according to their religious principles, according to their theology.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, for our purposes, I want to get back to the point, because notice that there’s a very important point here. Basically, when I talk about a picking situation, how would we define it? It’s Switzerland, right? Switzerland means that basically nothing depends on it. You can press now, press later, not press at all—it doesn’t matter. So you’re basically doing a lottery. But the truth is, you’re not doing a lottery. We never really do a lottery. What do we do? We act according to our readiness potential. Meaning, when we have some inner urge to do something, then we respond to it. We don’t veto it, right? That’s what happens when there are no surrounding considerations. If there were surrounding considerations, I’d veto it. If there are no surrounding considerations, then I go with what I feel should be done, meaning, with what arises in me. But what does that actually mean? It means that in Switzerland, contrary to what I described until now, Switzerland is not a state in which I draw lots. Switzerland is a state in which I act on the basis of instincts. Whatever arises in me, that’s what I do. As opposed to places where judgment is required, where what arises in me might carry problematic costs, so I’ll veto it, I’ll decide something else. But in places where there are no costs, no rules, no constraints, no framework within which I act—in those places it’s a mistake to identify that with a lottery or with randomness. That’s not right. That’s determinism. Or in other words, the three models—two of them are deterministic. It’s not determinism, free choice, and randomness. Both Syria and Switzerland are determinism. Only the third is free choice. And what I’m basically claiming is that a person who acts outside a framework of rules or constraints that don’t depend on him is ultimately not free either—not just not autonomous. Until now I said: if there are no limitations on you, or no constraints, then you’re free, but you’re not autonomous. An autonomous person has to be someone who behaves autonomously within limitations. Now I’ll say more than that: someone who acts outside a framework of limitations is also not free; he’s a slave of slaves. He’s a slave of his RP, meaning his urges. Whatever he feels like doing, that’s what he does. So that’s not called being free to choose whatever you want. You’re just enslaved to your internal constraints rather than your external constraints. But you’re a slave in every sense. The difference between Syria and Switzerland is simply the question of what system dictates to you what to do. Is it an external system, like in Syria, or an internal system, like in Switzerland—that’s all. There is no other option. Therefore the only alternative to determinism is not randomness; the only alternative to determinism is free choice. Because where there is no free choice, we do not conduct lotteries. Real lotteries exist only in quantum theory.

[Speaker D] A person doesn’t do that. Was there anyone who didn’t press the button?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? Libet claimed yes. There are all kinds of interpretive disputes. Libet claimed yes, meaning that there were cases of veto. Meaning, there was an RP and he didn’t press. Okay? It’s not a simple question; there are various averages and things like that there.

[Speaker G] Some people claim that quantum theory introduces something random.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but those are scales that apparently aren’t really relevant to the problem. It gets washed out at larger scales. Quantum effects don’t happen on the scale of more than a few electrons. And therefore—we talked about this once in the context of evolution too—both in evolution and in this context, the accepted view is that quantum effects don’t occur even at the level of a neuron. A neuron itself is huge on the scale of quantum theory. Even at the level of a single neuron, quantum processes don’t occur—or rather, they don’t have an effect. Everything happens at the level of the individual electron, but it gets smeared out when you average over huge numbers of electrons and by the law of large numbers. So in the end it doesn’t affect anything. You have to understand: if quantum theory showed up at the macroscopic level, then the whole world would be Schrodinger’s cat. In that case, you wouldn’t need to make such complicated preparations in order to do an experiment on a situation like Schrodinger’s cat.

[Speaker G] There are conditions where something starts small and then reaches…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: yes, but you have to build that experiment in a very delicate way. Meaning, it’s such a special experiment—it doesn’t just happen in life on its own. That’s exactly the point. And not at our temperatures either—it just doesn’t happen in real life. You have to build some very, very special construction. That is exactly the Schrodinger’s cat experiment: they’re trying to construct some experiment that will succeed in showing a quantum effect at the macroscopic level. That usually doesn’t happen in life, okay?

[Speaker G] Brownian motion is the result of… again? Brownian motion?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, of course not. Brownian motion is not—that’s classical randomness, not quantum.

[Speaker G] It’s an averaging.

[Speaker B] Of the quantum, where they were supposed to be. What? It’s an averaging of the quantum.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Brownian averaging of the quantum is classical. Classical mechanics is an averaging of the quantum. But there are no quantum effects there; that randomness is classical randomness in the original problem. True, Einstein 1905 as well, like relativity and like black-body radiation.

[Speaker D] Is there a person who thinks he’s deterministic in the Swiss sense? There’s a person who thinks he’s deterministic in the Spinozist sense, and does that even exist in reality? Or is it just external behavior? I didn’t understand Spinoza. The idea that Spinoza acts out of determinism because in practice all his instincts are realized—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And he has no reason to veto them.

[Speaker D] But there is no such person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course not. I said that. There is no person who acts without… That’s why I said the Swiss thing is metaphorical. There is no place without problems, no place without environmental constraints. I’m only saying it as a model that explains the point.

[Speaker D] So on the theoretical plane, if determinism is the answer, then there is no need for Torah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I agree. And indeed, if the result really were determinism, then there would be no need for Torah. That is the straightforward conclusion we’re supposed to draw from this. The question is whether that really is the conclusion or not, and that has to be examined honestly. Meaning, it’s not enough to say: “Well, the Torah says otherwise, so those can’t be the facts.”

[Speaker E] That’s not what Maimonides says. What does Maimonides say? Maimonides says: “If, hypothetically, there were no free choice…”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. I completely agree with that claim. And therefore… But on the other hand, I have no problem saying: as long as you don’t have a scientific or philosophical basis saying otherwise, no problem—the Torah says it, I accept it. But where people tell me, “Look, science has proven otherwise,” I can’t say, “Okay, but the Torah says yes.” That’s not honest. Fine.

[Speaker G] There are medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim) on this. There’s Rashba, on the six days… a month from its formation, and that’s Torah. I don’t care what experiment you do—the Torah cannot be mistaken. And if you do an experiment, then there’s a problem with the experiment. Okay, fine. And we also talked there about the Jerusalem Talmud, that a girl of three regains her virginity…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Fine, but there I already explained that issue too. Yes, in short, I don’t agree, I’m not… fine. So that’s the point I just wanted to complete: in the end we really have only two models and not three models. Meaning, in a place where—if I go back to our analogy—where you don’t have a value system dictated to you, the sovereign person of Aryeh Elon, if you don’t have a value system dictated to you, if there is no Mount Sinai, in the end we remain slaves. If we’re not slaves to Pharaoh, then we’re slaves to our stomachs. That’s all. In the end we remain slaves. The only way to move people from slavery to liberty is to give them Torah. And that’s why Rabbi Yehuda Halevi says, “Only a servant of God is truly free,” and here that is taken quite literally. Meaning, even freedom does not exist without it—not just liberty. So that goes even further than what I said last time. Freedom is an illusion. There is no such thing as freedom. There is either liberty or determinism.

[Speaker G] If someone believes in determinism, then all Torah is worth nothing, so why are you listening to him?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay. I agree. Sampolinsky—you know, from the Hebrew University—despite the fact that someone… we have a mutual friend, and from time to time we’ve crossed swords, so my friend

[Speaker B] said

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] to me that he’s starting to back away from it a bit. I don’t know how well-founded that is. But he really does present a deterministic religious view. That’s his claim. I think it’s inconsistent, because he also has an appendix in the book. I think it’s inconsistent. But anyway, for our purposes, when we say: what is a religious view? That brings us back to…

[Speaker H] There were some philosophers long ago who went that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hasdai Crescas—there are contradictions in Or Hashem, the earlier and the later parts, the first half of the book and the second half. Right, that’s part of the problem. It’s part of the problem of what you call deterministic Jewish thought. To my mind that’s an oxymoron. Meaning, there is thought by Jews that is deterministic—I agree. So what? There are a few other things like that too. What’s written in Rashi script is Jewish thought—that’s the claim. Fine. In any case, that’s the first point. Now I want to move to the second aspect, and this really fits these days exactly. It worked out nicely; I didn’t plan it in advance. The aspect of collectivity. Yes, I said that in the Exodus from Egypt there are two aspects that challenge the view of it as a transition from slavery to liberty. One aspect is entering a collective system, which also ostensibly seems to deny us freedom or liberty, right? To be free is to be completely alone, as the poet says. And the second aspect is the giving of the Torah. So the giving of the Torah is what I’ve spoken about until now. What about collectivity? So here too, when people talk about being part of a collective as something… the collective as something enslaving, and the aspiration to freedom as basically freeing yourself from the collective or becoming an individual, they too are really talking about freedom and not liberty. Meaning, the collective is simply another element that limits me or places constraints within which I act. My belonging to a collective is also a kind of constraint. But as I said with regard to the giving of the Torah, it’s true here as well. Meaning, here too, if you’re talking about freedom, then you’re right. Meaning, the moment you are part of a collective, you are not free. But if you’re talking about liberty, then there are some far-reaching statements by Rabbi Kook that many people quote. I don’t fully identify with this, but maybe it’s something in that direction—that the collective enables you to express your more authentic self or something like that. To me these sound like Hegelian statements. I think it would be more accurate to say that within the system of constraints of the collective you can express your selfhood. Not that what the collective dictates is what you really want. That’s Rabbi Kook’s description, yes—that basically the Torah is my true inner will. Meaning, it only reveals it to me. I’m not always aware of it, and it reveals this matter to me.

[Speaker B] Actually that’s one of the advantages of this thing. And there are other advantages too. What? Within freedom and liberty inside those constraints, the Torah is one option. If the Torah isn’t the only one, that’s not what he said.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he talks about the Torah as something unique. He just claims that the dissonance you feel between what the Torah demands of you—which is a constraint—and what you want to do, is a temporary dissonance. Meaning, if you continue with it and improve and connect more to what the Torah demands, you’ll suddenly discover that this is actually exactly what you want.

[Speaker B] That’s how it is

[Speaker E] when you grew up in it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. When you learn, everything will be fine. Various ideologies like that.

[Speaker B] So the Torah is the optimal option, the best one you have within those constraints?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m saying more—no, I’m saying more than that. The Torah is not only the constraints; the Torah is the constraints themselves. But on the other hand, when you submit to those constraints, you actually discover that this is also what you want. In various places that seems to be what Rabbi Kook is saying. So I’m saying: that seems too far-reaching to me. Maybe it’s true, but it doesn’t help me. It doesn’t help, because you’re talking to human beings who live and feel the dissonance. You can’t always explain to them: look, this dissonance is accidental and temporary, and in the end you’ll see it’s nonsense. Either yes—or when you reach nirvana. Yes, in the end you’ll see everything is nonsense.

[Speaker B] By the way, aren’t the constraints part of your choice?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Constraints are the framework within which I choose.

[Speaker B] But you can choose not to belong to the collective. Yes, right, the free person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not part of the choice. It’s a framework standing before you when you choose. Part of the choice is whether to go along with it or not. But you can’t choose—and I defined this the first time—you can’t choose whether that framework is correct. You can choose whether you do what it wants from you.

[Speaker B] And belonging to the collective? Same thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As far as I’m concerned, belonging to the collective follows the same scheme. Meaning, you belong to the collective; the Holy One, blessed be He, tells you: you belong to the collective, you are obligated to observe commandments. The Holy One, blessed be He, tells you that. After that you can choose.

[Speaker D] Wait, I’d like to stop this. I’m going back to this—we’re not getting into internal debates. So there is here… if we could get an answer, please.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. So belonging to the collective, as I said before, basically gives some sort of framework. And again, I’m saying—not in this romantic view, as though it expresses what I really want. Rather, it gives me a framework within which I can conduct myself and do what I want, which is not dictated by the framework. Rather, within the framework there are several possible ways to conduct oneself; there are also dilemmas, and human beings choose in different ways how to do it. As I already mentioned last time, there are many ways to be religious. There is only one way to be secular. Meaning, there are many kinds of secular people, obviously. But there is only one secularism: simply the absence of commandments. Everything else you do beyond that is other stuff, but it doesn’t belong to your secularism, okay? In contrast, religiosity has many, many possible forms, as we know. There are almost no two people—and certainly not two groups—who conduct it in exactly the same way, even though they all operate more or less within the same framework. Now it’s not despite that, it’s because of that. I spoke about these calculations of the furniture in the room using that Amos Oz example. And I showed that the moment you have a system of constraints and rules, it increases the number of your possibilities and the variety you can choose from; it doesn’t diminish them. In a place where you have no chairs in the room, there is only one way to arrange the room. In a place where you have two chairs in the room, there are already many ways to arrange it. If there are five chairs, many more. Okay? With 32 chairs, which I said was the maximum in an 8-by-8 room, you get something with 55 zeros. The number of possibilities is simply astronomical—precisely when the system of constraints is richer. And therefore, for example, if you compare religions: Judaism or Jewish law imposes far more constraints than the usual religions, far more halakhic details and so on. There are many religions that aren’t halakhic at all. There are religions that have a few elements, but only a few. But the greater the number of constraints, the greater the number of possible ways to realize them—not smaller. And that’s an important point. Therefore I’m saying that also in the context of the relation to the collective—not only in the context of the relation to halakhic constraints, to Torah—the collective too can provide some sort of framework, so long as it allows various modes of conduct within it. But this thing—and that brings me to the next step—this thing tells us that we need to proceed carefully between two poles. One pole is that there is some freedom, that a person can choose his path even within the collective framework. And the second pole is that this freedom has limits. Because otherwise there is no collective, no limits. Meaning, you still need to define what the framework is that nevertheless defines all the different options as options within it. And if I move now to the analogy—and I said this is really timely these days—then Amos Oz, in that same article I mentioned last time, I’ll read you a few excerpts from it, because he really writes it much more beautifully than I can formulate it. So he says this: Democracy and tolerance are bound up with humanism. Humanism is bound up with pluralism. That is, with recognition of the equal right of human beings to differ from one another. The differences among people are not a passing evil but a source of blessing. We differ from one another not because one of us still has not seen the light, but because there are lights in the world and not one light, beliefs and opinions and not one belief and opinion. The Jews have no pope. If a Jewish pope were to arise, everyone would come, pat him on the shoulder, and say to him: listen, you don’t know me and I don’t know you, but your grandfather and my uncle once did business together in Zhitomir or in Marrakesh, and therefore give me two minutes to explain to you once and for all what God really wants from us. Of course there are all sorts of pretenders, and some people follow them blindly. But throughout its history the people of Israel do not like to obey. Ask Moses our teacher. Ask the prophets. God Himself constantly complains that the people of Israel are not disciplined, but argue about everything. The people argue with Moses, Moses argues with God, even tenders his resignation. In the end he retracts his resignation, but only after negotiation, and only after God yields and accepts the main parts of his demands. Abraham haggles with God over Sodom like a used-car dealer: fifty righteous, forty, thirty, and even hurls at God the sharp accusation, “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” And we have not heard that fire came down from heaven and consumed him for those terrible blasphemous words. The people quarrelled with the prophets, the prophets quarrelled with God, the kings quarrelled with the people and with the prophets. Job accused Heaven; Heaven refused to admit they had wronged Job, and nevertheless granted him personal compensation. And even in later generations there were Hasidic rabbis who summoned God to a religious court. Israeli culture has a certain anarchic core. They do not want discipline, they do not merely carry out orders. They want justice. A seeker of donkeys and a shepherd upon whom the spirit rests can rule Israel or compose the Psalms. A dresser of sycamores rises and prophesies. The shepherd of Kalba Savua’s flock, or some shoemaker or blacksmith, teaches Torah and interprets interpretations and leaves his mark on the daily life of every Jew. And yet always, or almost always, the question circles around him: who appointed you? How do we know you are the man? Maybe you really are great in Torah, but on the next street there is another great one, and he disagrees with you and offers the opposite conclusion. And often both these and those are the words of the living God. Usually the question of authority to interpret was decided by the force of some partial consensus, not unanimously. The history of Israeli culture over the last thousands of years is a chain of bitter disputes, passionate disputes, fruitful disputes. Usually there was no formal authoritative decision-making mechanism, except for the Sanhedrin. Usually Rabbi So-and-so was greater than his colleague because he was considered greater than his colleague, and that was that. At its best, Israeli culture is a culture of give-and-take, of back and forth, of this side and that side, of sharpness and power of persuasion, of dispute for the sake of Heaven, of argument in order to magnify Torah and glorify it, of “the opposite seems more reasonable,” and also of powerful passions disguised as disputes for the sake of Heaven. This is a spiritual foundation that fits well with the idea of democracy as polyphony, as a multiplicity of voices. A choir of different voices orchestrated by a system of agreed-upon rules. Lights and not one light, beliefs and opinions and not one belief and opinion. Indeed there were and are enclaves of blind obedience in Israeli culture. There were such things. In my view those enclaves are a deviation from the tradition, even when they pretend to be the embodiment of the tradition. Despite all the differences between the Lithuanian rabbi who held sway, Rabbi Shach in his time, and the Messiah from Lubavitch, and between both of them and the holy man from the town of Netivot, for example, all three radiate papal obedience around them. Those subordinate to them accept discipline. Blind obedience cannot be moral. “We will do and we will hear” means: we will do on condition that we hear. In short—and in the disputes and so on he continues and describes it—I think there’s a certain beauty there in the way he does it. But there is one point that he misses here, and misses badly, and I spoke about this a bit last time too. Amos Oz forgets the other side of the equation. And I’m entirely with him in this polyphonic perspective, the arguments, the lack of authority, not recognizing anyone who can tell me what to do—all fine, all true. But this whole business has to be conducted within some sort of framework, because otherwise—fine, then Christians are Jews too, Buddhists are Jews too, I don’t know what—even the camels in the yard here are Jews. So what exactly defines this whole polyphony as a collection of shades of the same thing? And here I come to the question of secular Jewish identity, which is really very much the issue of these days. In my view this is an oxymoron: secular Jewish identity. There is no such creature. And there is no such creature not because—as Amos Oz tends to accuse me, and that’s what he’s basically trying to push in this article—not because, unlike what people accuse someone who argues this of, that you’re only willing to hear one voice, that you recognize only those who are like you. Rather, simply because I’m not willing to accept that someone who deals in sociology will tell me that he’s a mathematician. It’s just not true. It’s not a dispute among mathematicians; you simply work in another field. And there has to be some limit to the diversity or the different options, and the framework dictates that. Within the framework we can set such a course, another course, this opinion, another opinion—all true. When I argue against a prevalent position, I try to use sources, reasoning that comes from within the system. But Amos Oz is outside the system. What exactly is he arguing with me about? He is arguing with me over whether to respond to this system and be committed to it or not. He is not offering another interpretation of this system. Between Amos Oz and a non-Jew who doesn’t speak Hebrew there is nothing except language. Nothing, no—

[Speaker D] thing. He broadens the canvas. He says broadens it—why? He says that the Jew, Jewish identity, is a whole, a whole of what? Of Jewish values.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What are Jewish values? Give me one example.

[Speaker D] Preserving life, the dignity of preserving life.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Every non-Jew agrees to that today. Next—another Jewish value.

[Speaker D] No, but the fact that others agree doesn’t mean you’re not unique. But why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In what are you unique? If the whole world—if you’re talking about universal values, and after all he speaks only about those—if you’re talking about universal values, they are universal, that’s their very definition. Now, I’m not claiming—and I spoke about this once—I’m not claiming universal values are unimportant. Of course they’re important. But they cannot serve as a defining characteristic of Judaism. That’s ridiculous. It’s like all those claims—for example, I’ve encountered this so many times—that someone who doesn’t eat kosher is not Jewish, but someone who murders can still remain Jewish. Like around Yigal Amir, people kept making those statements, which supposedly sounds absurd. And to me it’s not absurd; it’s exactly right. Not because murder is a less serious transgression than eating pork—it is a much more serious transgression than eating pork. But murder is not a transgression that defines Judaism. The whole world is supposed to be obligated not to murder. Defining a Jew by the fact that he has two legs and two ears is a logical mistake, even though it is true that every Jew has two legs and two ears. Why? Because when you define something, you have to examine a characteristic that is unique to the group or person you are defining, or to the idea you are defining. Now I ask Amos Oz in what sense he is Jewish. So he says he speaks Hebrew, he reads the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). There are Hebrew speakers who are not Jews. There are readers of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)—far more non-Jews than Jews, and some of them are even more committed to the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) than Jews are. So what? What interpretation of Judaism are you offering? Therefore I say that many times people lose one of the two poles of this tension. This tension of liberty—very often some people emphasize the limitations, those are the conservatives, and others emphasize the freedom within the limitations. But whenever you emphasize one of them, you throw the baby out with the bathwater. In other words, the concept of liberty is a concept that contains tension within it. On the one hand, you are committed to a system that you do not dictate; it is given to you. And on the other hand, you preserve for yourself the liberty to interpret it, or to conduct yourself according to it, or how to conduct yourself according to it, whether to conduct yourself according to it—sometimes even that; there is also conscientious rebellion. But conscientious rebellion—a Hasidic rebbe who summons the Holy One, blessed be He, to a religious court, as he described here—that’s an impressive act. Because he believes in Him. But when Amos Oz summons the Holy One, blessed be He, to court, I die laughing. He is summoning the holy vacuum to court. He doesn’t believe in Him. You can’t summon the Holy One, blessed be He, to court when He doesn’t exist. We once talked about that famous joke about the couple who, after the Holocaust, abandoned and lost their faith, and the husband starts cursing Heaven. So his wife says to him: Berl, how can you speak that way to the Holy One, blessed be He, merciful and gracious and slow to anger? How can you speak about Him like that? So he says to her: Yocheved, do you remember? We don’t believe in Him anymore. So she says: yes, yes, but the Holy One, blessed be He, that I don’t believe in is merciful and gracious and slow to anger. How can you speak to Him that way? Amos Oz is trying to play the game of that couple. You can’t speak in the name of liberty while actually being in a world of freedom. You can’t say: I’m another interpretation of Judaism, you don’t have a monopoly on Judaism—which I agree with—but not accept any limits on the playing field. There are rules to the game. Someone wrote—I wrote some series on my website—and someone brought an example there, I don’t remember in whose name, of a teacher who comes to his student and says: okay, let’s play a game. He says: fine. He says: you go first, start. The student says: what are the rules? What are the rules of the game? He says: what, you want me to impose rules on you? Start. Why should I impose rules on you? You understand that that’s absurd? But that’s what Amos Oz wants. Amos Oz is not arguing with me—or it doesn’t matter, with all of religious Judaism—within some framework that has rules and he interprets them differently; sometimes he rebels against them. Fine, rebellion too is part of the whole thing. The root of rebellion, the root of this—there’s some sentence of Rabbi Kook, I think, I don’t remember anymore. A strong sentence, actually. In any case, even when you rebel against something, you have to believe in it. Meaning, you have to do it in the name of something. When Abraham our father rebelled against the Holy One, blessed be He, he did so in the name of moral principles that he also understood he received from the Holy One, blessed be He, principles that the Holy One, blessed be He, was supposed to obey. He didn’t rebel against Him by saying, “I don’t recognize You, leave me alone.” That’s what Amos Oz is offering. It’s simply a mistake. Now all these concepts of secular Jewish identity—this is an oxymoron. When you ask people: in what sense are you Jewish? By the way, this was Rabbi Shach’s “rabbits speech,” which in my view was simply amazing. An amazing event. I may have told this once; I don’t remember. I was once in Bnei Brak in some Haredi yeshiva where I studied, and everyone had of course gone to Yad Eliyahu where he was speaking, and the coalition depended on it, and the press from all over the world came there waiting to see whether he would say Likud, Alignment, or something like that. And then he started talking about the kibbutzniks, the rabbits, and Yom Kippur, and in what sense are they even Jewish? And I’m sitting there hearing this live on the radio. Surely you remember this already. What does this old man want? Doesn’t he understand where he lives at all? People are going to die laughing. What are Yom Kippur, rabbits, and all that? Then I was in the army, and the kibbutz guys said: sure, the rabbits are tastiest on Yom Kippur at the beach. What do you want from them? What did you accomplish? Now maybe you saw it, but when I was there in the yeshiva—it was a yeshiva for newly observant people—you won’t believe what happened there the next day. The next day there was a rush. Dozens of people became religious after that speech. I’m telling you, there was a wave that broke all the barriers. And there were various articles in Sdot, the kibbutz journal, with an honesty worthy of appreciation. They asked themselves: tell us, maybe the old man is right—what exactly makes us Jewish? What, the fact that we’re kibbutzniks? That we speak Hebrew? Druze speak Hebrew too. I don’t know what—does that make you Jewish? Why is a Jew abroad who doesn’t know Hebrew also Jewish? What is Jewish about us? Nothing. A collection of universal values, a bit of socialism, like other good non-Jews. That’s perfectly fine—good values, wonderful values, everything lovely. It’s just not Judaism. In what sense is it Jewish? Now this was obvious to me from the outset; I just didn’t think it would bother people. But it turns out there is a very deep point in people: when you tell them they’re not Jewish, it throws them completely. All the no—really, it’s a fascinating phenomenon.

[Speaker F] Fascinating.

[Speaker D] You could define a Jew as one who belongs to the Jewish collective.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can define anything. Definitions can tolerate anything. But I’m saying—and this is an important point, because I’m conducting a very telegraphic discussion here about secular Jewish identity—but this is simply a consequence of what we discussed. Because identity in this sense is also liberty. It’s not freedom and not randomness. Meaning, it has to be something—freedom within a framework, or different options within a framework that can argue. But if that framework doesn’t exist, then you are no more Jewish than, I don’t know, a resident of Indonesia. In what sense? You speak Hebrew, okay, so what? Many Jews don’t speak Hebrew either. The point is that there is a confusion here between two planes of discussion, and that brings me to your comment. Many people who talk about secular Jewish identity are talking about identity as a fact. And as a fact I don’t deny it. Clearly people have some factual belonging somehow to the Jewish people; they feel some connection to our forefathers, some connection of one kind or another. They speak Hebrew, live in the land. In other words, yes, there is some sort of Jewish thing there—a peoplehood identity, a national identity, even an ethnic identity. These are very hard concepts to define; they’re made up of many, many components. But the important point is that none of this has any relevance on the value plane. Meaning, if I’m such-and-such, then I’m such-and-such—there’s nothing to argue about. If you feel identified with it, then you feel identified with it. But when you speak in the name of the value of being Jewish, and say that your neighbor is not Jewish—if you then say, “Well, I am Jewish, period,” then why are you getting upset? In other words, so he thinks you’re not Jewish. If this were merely a fact, then it would be something neutral. If someone were to tell me, “You’re not six-foot-five,” and I say, “I am.” Fine, so what is there to get upset about? I think I am and he’s mistaken; he thinks I’m not—so what? When people get upset, when they build study halls to produce secular Judaism, when they do things like that, that means they don’t perceive Judaism as a fact—they perceive Judaism as a value system, a system that obligates. Now in that sense there is no such thing as secular Judaism. None. You can talk about factual identity: if you read Amos Oz, pay taxes, serve in the army, and speak Hebrew—fine, then you’re Jewish in some national-ethnic sense of one kind or another, or more accurately Canaanite, but Israeli. But when you speak about Judaism in the value sense, not in the factual sense—and when there are disputes about identity, what is there to argue about in facts? Disputes about identity assume that the concept of identity belongs to the value sphere, not the factual sphere. Now what values are shared by me and Amos Oz? Nothing. Meaning, there is a lot in common, but no more than with any other non-Jew. Nothing. There is no difference between him and a non-Jew; even with a microscope I don’t see any difference, except for his mother—that Amos Oz’s mother was Jewish. That’s all. Meaning, we’ve gone back to racist criteria. In other words, in the end secular Judaism, secular Jewish identity, is a racist criterion, because nothing except race separates them. They are really speaking about universal values. And why do I connect this to our discussion, as I conclude? Because this too is connected to the same type of mistakes I’ve been talking about all along. You’re trying to present the different possibilities, the freedom, but not within some dictated framework inside which the game is played. There are no boundaries to the field. When you can bring furniture into the room and take it out as you wish, as Amos Oz suggests in his example, then there is nothing there. Then you’re not doing anything—you can do whatever you want. What makes you unique? In what sense am I more connected to you than to my neighbor from Jenin or from Indonesia or from Australia? Nothing. I don’t see any difference. There are good people and not-good people; everywhere there are smart people and not-smart people. What’s the difference? That you speak Hebrew? Fine, that’s nice; it helps me communicate with you more. There are many Jews who don’t speak Hebrew; I communicate with them too, good communication, maybe even better. Speaking Hebrew, to me, is a completely technical matter. Therefore this talk about secular Jewish identity really ignores the fact that this coin has to have two sides in order to define it. On the one hand, the defining framework; and on the other hand, in order not to fall into the problem of fundamentalism or excessive conservatism, the options that this framework allows within it. In other words, the number of chairs in the room is given, but the number of ways to arrange them is very large. And the greater the number of chairs, the greater the number of ways to arrange them. But they all arrange the same number of chairs in the same room, as opposed to people who are arranging tables in a different room and not chairs in this room. Therefore this confusion between freedom and liberty, between the absence of constraints and autonomous conduct within constraints, expresses itself in this context too. And if we conclude the issue of the collectivity that was created in the Exodus from Egypt—yes, we are actually not long after the Exodus on the calendar—the collectivity created after the Exodus, once again, does not negate the liberty that constitutes it. Rather, it does so on condition that within that framework you truly find your own way to conduct yourself, and do not let the framework dictate the bottom line to you. And in that matter I join Amos Oz—but I join him from the inside, from within the room. And when you stand outside, all this criticism is empty of content.

[Speaker D] In the Exodus there was a mixed multitude—what were they if not Jews?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in the cultural sense, no. They were not ethnically Jewish. Amos Oz is also ethnically Jewish—his mother is Jewish. But Judaism—when I speak of secular Judaism, I’m not speaking of secular Jews. Of course there are secular Jews. I’m speaking of secular Judaism. Secular Judaism—tell me what defines it, what describes it.

[Speaker F] A synagogue I don’t go to, a synagogue I don’t set foot in.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A synagogue I don’t

[Speaker F] step in.

[Speaker C] And again, we should say this discussion is a bit externalized, because it speaks only about conscious awareness. But all in all, a person also has a body and soul, and he has a large component that is not…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so I said: identity as a fact I’m not arguing with. Clearly there is factual identity, just as there is Belgian identity, there is Jewish identity, Moroccan identity, Filipino identity. Fine, I agree—but those are facts, so there’s nothing to argue about.

[Speaker C] But there is also personality, part of it unconscious, and that personality is really what we’re talking about. Amos Oz supposedly says, “I’m outside the room,” but when we read his books, he speaks exactly like Abraham our father. He is inside the room, and he’s just…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be that he’s in the room unconsciously, unintentionally. It could be. But then again we’ve returned to facts. I judge a person by his choices, not by what he is. I’m not interested in what he is. Therefore all the talk about the unique virtue of Israel and the lofty point that exists in every Jew and all that nonsense—I don’t know, I’m not… it doesn’t speak to me. Both because I don’t believe in it and because I don’t think it’s important.