Freedom and Liberty – Lesson 4
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- Freedom and liberty, multiplying constraints, and the meaning of action
- Amos Oz, “the full wagon,” and a room filling up with furniture
- “Switzerland,” the Libet experiment, and arbitrariness without rules
- Genre rules in art, modern art, and artistic liberty
- Invention versus discovery: Wittgenstein, “following rules,” and mathematics
- Newton, Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, chess, and the speaker’s Platonism
- The 613 commandments, reasons for the commandments, and Maimonides versus Saadia Gaon
- Zeitgeist, Einstein, and theories of relativity that never catch on
- Thomas Kuhn, the politics of science, and truth versus interests
- Conventionalism and essentialism in concepts, and Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
- Religion, creativity, and “do not read it as engraved but as liberty”
- Kashrut, taste, and creativity under constraints
- Mysticism, existentialism, and Kierkegaard
- Passover, the move from slavery to liberty, Torah, and the collective
- Secular Jewish identity, the “rabbit speech,” and the difficulty of defining Jewish values without Torah
- Conversion, Aristotle, genus and species, and why interpersonal commandments do not define Judaism
- Ethnic Judaism, the insult “you are not Jews,” and a hidden gap
- Imagined communities, Shlomo Sand, Palestinians, and Golda
Summary
General Overview
The speaker distinguishes between freedom as the absence of constraints and liberty as autonomous action within constraints, and argues that harming freedom is like stealing property, whereas liberty cannot really be harmed except indirectly through the addition of constraints. He rejects Amos Oz’s image of the “full wagon and empty wagon” as a kind of paralysis caused by too much “furniture,” and argues instead that rules and constraints are precisely what give action meaning and make liberty possible, whereas the absence of rules produces sheer arbitrariness, in the style of “Switzerland,” and amounts to flipping a coin. He extends this move to art, science, language, and Jewish identity, presenting a consistent line according to which meaningful systems of rules are not “invented” out of nothing but “uncovered” as something people recognize within themselves. Therefore collectivity and a value system are not enemies of liberty but conditions for its establishment.
Freedom and liberty, multiplying constraints, and the meaning of action
The speaker defines freedom as the absence of constraints and liberty as autonomous action within constraints, and states that liberty is a value while freedom is an asset or interest. He argues that harming freedom is morally problematic in the way theft is problematic, whereas harming liberty is impossible, because at most one can add more constraints, but one cannot control what a person does within those constraints. He adopts Yehuda Halevi’s statement that “the servant of God alone is truly free,” and presents the multiplication of constraints as something that reduces freedom but does not reduce liberty, and may even increase it.
Amos Oz, “the full wagon,” and a room filling up with furniture
The speaker describes Amos Oz’s claim in “the full wagon and the empty wagon,” according to which Judaism ossifies over the years because a kind of “Jewish space” was created at Mount Sinai, it keeps filling up with furniture, and at a certain point no furniture is removed anymore, so eventually everything freezes and there is no room to move. He replies that as constraints increase, freedom goes down but liberty remains and may even grow stronger. He illustrates this with the calculation of how many ways there are to arrange chairs in a room: an empty room allows only one arrangement, whereas adding chairs increases the number of possible arrangements, up to a certain point. He adds that where there are no rules, what one does has no meaning even if one can bring furniture in and out, because actions are not measured against any framework.
“Switzerland,” the Libet experiment, and arbitrariness without rules
The speaker uses the image of “Switzerland” to describe a situation in which there are no rules and no price attached to choosing one option over another, and argues that in such a case the choice is effectively a lottery even without an actual coin toss. He connects this to the Libet experiment and argues that action without rules loses its meaning, because meaning is determined in relation to conformity or nonconformity to rules, and when there are no constraints a person is not really “deciding” but acting arbitrarily. He defines “someone who decides the rules for himself” as someone acting without rules, so the action is meaningless even if it appears to be a decision.
Genre rules in art, modern art, and artistic liberty
The speaker argues that every work of art involves genre rules that cannot really be broken, because without them the work has no meaning and there is no way to judge beauty, originality, or differences between creators. He presents modern art and postmodernity as the illusion that one can throw away genre rules, and argues that someone who supposedly “throws them away” is not creating art. And if there is in fact meaning in such works, then by definition genre rules are present there too, even if they are loose and abstract. He distinguishes between artistic freedom, which he sees as nonsense and nihilism, and artistic liberty, which is unique self-expression within a framework of rules, and argues that the more constraints there are, the higher the art can become.
Invention versus discovery: Wittgenstein, “following rules,” and mathematics
The speaker argues that people do not invent meaningful systems of rules but uncover them, because if a system were completely subjective it would not “say” anything to the observer and would not be taken up by a community. He relies on Wittgenstein’s idea of “following rules” and argues that even apparently formal rules have to be “embedded in us” in order for us to follow them. He illustrates this with the question, “One, two, three, four, five—what is the next number?” and shows that one could justify bizarre answers like “minus seventeen and a third” by formulating some rule, but in practice everyone continues to “six” because the agreed form of counting already exists within us and the teacher merely helps reveal it.
Newton, Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, chess, and the speaker’s Platonism
The speaker argues that Newton did not invent laws but discovered truth, and that the same is true in art and also in Torah study, giving Rabbi Chaim of Brisk as an example of someone who created a method that caught on because people found its logic within themselves. He also presents chess as an example of something that looks like invention but is really the discovery of a pattern of thought that already existed, since the game resonates with a broad community. He declares himself a Platonist in mathematics and argues that mathematics is discovered rather than invented, and applies that also to new artistic genres: if they catch on in a community, they are resting on a shared inner substrate.
The 613 commandments, reasons for the commandments, and Maimonides versus Saadia Gaon
The speaker states that the 613 commandments are not a human discovery but a divine giving, yet asks whether the system is arbitrary or dictated by the “reasons for the commandments.” He inclines toward Maimonides’ view, according to which, given our world, this is the commandment-system that ought to exist. He cites Saadia Gaon, who wrote that one could in principle arrive at the commandments by reason, at least in the sense that their correctness is conceptually accessible. He argues that the claim “there are no reasons for the commandments” may refer to a different plane, in which the Holy One, blessed be He, could have created a different world with a different system, whereas on the plane of this given world the commandments are “something from something,” not “something from nothing.”
Zeitgeist, Einstein, and theories of relativity that never catch on
The speaker mentions the historiographical claim that if Einstein had not discovered relativity in 1905, someone else would have, and warns against taking this into extreme determinism, though he accepts the point that once a theory catches on it is clear that it rests on a historical and inner substrate. He tells an anecdote about a Vizhnitz Hasid named Chaim Shefler from Haifa who tried to develop “another theory of relativity” with the accompaniment of a professor from the Technion, and notes that every year 10–15 new theories of relativity appear in “physics abstracts” that interest no one. He concludes that a theory “catches on” only if it is absorbed on the basis of a shared understanding and intuition of what seems true, and not merely because of public relations.
Thomas Kuhn, the politics of science, and truth versus interests
The speaker presents Thomas Kuhn as someone who explains the acceptance of theories as a sociological and political process of persuasion, but rejects reducing everything to politics. He argues that there are political dimensions, but they also reflect an intuition of truth and of what seems reasonable, and that the postmodern claim “there is no truth, only interests” stems from the fact that those who hold it themselves operate from interests and therefore attribute the same to others. He adds that even if an initial intuition is mistaken, after examination and deeper inquiry people can come to see correctness, as happened with ideas like the Big Bang.
Conventionalism and essentialism in concepts, and Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
The speaker presents a dispute between conventionalism, according to which concepts are arbitrary conventions, and essentialism, according to which concepts express a real essence or idea. He illustrates this with the question whether a “democratic state” is invented out of a collection of traits or discovered as an idea. He recommends reading Jorge Luis Borges and the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” from Fictions in the translation of the late Yoram Bronowski, and describes there an idealist world without nouns, in which any bundle of characteristics can be given a new name. He uses this as a critique of views in which everything is convention, and concludes that a meaningful genre, idea, and concept are grasped because they have an essence and not merely social agreement.
Religion, creativity, and “do not read it as engraved but as liberty”
The speaker argues that claims about “artistic freedom” repeat the same mistake of confusing freedom with liberty, and that without rules there is no art, only nihilism. He argues that religious creativity is not a problem but an opportunity, because constraints do not prevent creativity but establish the framework within which liberty is built. He interprets “the writing of God, engraved upon the tablets—do not read it as engraved but as liberty” to mean that the solid tablets are the framework that makes meaningful engraving possible, and without them the letters have no meaning.
Kashrut, taste, and creativity under constraints
The speaker says, as a kind of “mathematical theorem,” that the more kosher something is, the less tasty it is, because if a kosher restaurant had some advantage in taste or price, a non-kosher restaurant would adopt it, whereas a kosher restaurant cannot adopt non-kosher advantages. He concludes that a kosher restaurant has to be more creative because of the greater number of constraints, and applies this as another instance of his broader claim that liberty and creativity grow within limitations.
Mysticism, existentialism, and Kierkegaard
The speaker says in the name of Gershom Scholem that meaningful mysticism is not a collection of subjective hallucinations but an experience that resonates with many people who find something in it within themselves, and explains that parallels among different forms of mysticism around the world point to a non-subjective element, such as yin and yang, male and female, nukva and dokhra. He adds that this is similar to existentialist philosophy, in which ideas quarried out of a person become meaningful when they speak to others. He cites Kierkegaard, who described three stages—aesthetic, ethical, and religious—and ties his importance to the fact that people recognized this hierarchy within themselves once it had been formulated.
Passover, the move from slavery to liberty, Torah, and the collective
The speaker returns to two questions he posed at the beginning of the series about Passover: the giving of the Torah, which seems like a constraining system that contradicts liberty, and the birth of the Jewish collective in the Exodus from Egypt, which likewise seems to be the opposite of liberty. He argues that a system of rules does not contradict liberty but is a condition for it, and that collectivity is another system of constraints that reduces freedom but does not harm liberty and may even help establish it. He adds that a collective gathers around shared values, so collectivity and a value system are two sides of the same coin, and at Sinai the collective was created through the imposition of the commandments on a group, not through voluntary assembly.
Secular Jewish identity, the “rabbit speech,” and the difficulty of defining Jewish values without Torah
The speaker argues that the current search for alternative Jewish identities tries to preserve continuity with “what used to be,” but struggles to show what the shared value-content is between that and historical Judaism. As an example he cites Chaim Herzog’s response to Rabbi Shach’s “rabbit speech,” in which labor, agriculture, the army, and settlement were emphasized, and he argues that such features are not Jewish in principle, because they exist among other peoples as well, and even in the Land of Israel there are non-Jews. He concludes that secular Jewish identity is mainly an ethnic identity of language, lineage, history, and place, but cannot be a value-based Jewish identity, because universal values like “do not murder” and “do not steal” do not uniquely define Judaism. Reliance on them leads, he says, to definitions that are nonsense and empty talk, ending in “repairing the world,” which is not uniquely Jewish.
Conversion, Aristotle, genus and species, and why interpersonal commandments do not define Judaism
The speaker asks why in conversion the focus is on kashrut, family purity, and Sabbath, and not primarily on commandments between one person and another. He answers that this is a logical matter of definition, following Aristotle, by means of “genus” and “species.” He argues that universal commandments cannot serve to define a Jew because they belong to the human genus as a whole, not to the Jewish species as distinct, and therefore murder is very serious but does not define Judaism. He states that someone who murders is not “not Jewish” but “not a human being,” whereas defining a Jew requires reference to what is unique about the Jewish value system and not what is universally accepted.
Ethnic Judaism, the insult “you are not Jews,” and a hidden gap
The speaker says that ethnic Judaism is possible and legitimate as a factual identity, like Belgian-ness or Moroccan-ness, but does not allow one to demand value-based loyalty or accuse someone of “not being Jewish enough” in any binding sense. He notes that the shock of secular people at Rabbi Shach’s claim that they were “not Jews” hints that within them too there is some hold of value-based Judaism, even though they do not define it, and he interprets this as a condition of “hidden believers” who do not admit their belief.
Imagined communities, Shlomo Sand, Palestinians, and Golda
The speaker addresses the postmodern discourse on identity as the creation of “imagined communities,” citing Benedict Anderson and Yehuda Amichai’s line, “A man suddenly rises in the morning and feels that he is a people.” He argues that the Palestinians are an extreme example of an imagined nation and that “there is no such people” in an essential sense, and attributes to Golda the claim that she was right about that, while also recognizing practically that a shared identity now exists. He mentions Shlomo Sand’s book When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? as expressing the claim that everything is imagined and invented, and points to a contradiction in the way post-Zionists accept imagined nationality in others while undermining it in the Jewish case. He returns to his central claim that definitions without values remain at the level of facts and cannot generate any binding demand.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time I basically finished by talking about freedom and liberty. Just to remind you: I defined freedom as the absence of constraints; liberty is autonomous action within constraints. I said that liberty is a value, and freedom is an asset, an interest or an asset, yes. And harming freedom is morally problematic, like stealing money—taking somebody’s asset is a problematic thing. Harming liberty, though, is not really something you can do, because at most you can add more constraints, but you have no way of dealing with the question of what a person does within the constraints. That depends only on him. After that I went back to Yehuda Halevi: “The servant of God alone is free.” And at the end of last time I spoke about Amos Oz’s essay “The Full Wagon and the Empty Wagon,” and I tried to examine his argument, where he says that Judaism somehow ossifies over the years because there’s some room that was created at Mount Sinai—the Jewish space—and it starts filling up with furniture, and at a certain stage we don’t take any furniture out, and at a certain point we basically remain completely frozen; there’s no way to move inside the room. That basically freezes us and there’s no way to deal with it. I explained that the more constraints there are, the more freedom goes down—but not liberty—and to some extent it even increases liberty. I mentioned that calculation of how many ways there are to arrange chairs in a room. The more chairs there are, the more possible arrangements there are, up to half the room, yes. There are more possibilities for arranging them. An empty room can be arranged in only one way: just leave it empty. There’s no other way to arrange it. And I’d say more than that—I didn’t say it, but it follows from what I did say—that even if a room is empty and there are no rules, and by rules I mean the number of pieces of furniture in the room, the constraints within which I act, then of course I can bring furniture into the room and take it out and arrange it this way or that way. But the moment there are no rules, nothing I do has any meaning. That’s Switzerland. And I spoke about Libet’s experiment, and I tried to show that in a place where there are no rules, then first, actions lose their meaning, because meaning is always measured in light of the rules. You either fit the rules or you don’t fit the rules. Second, when there are no rules—and that’s what we saw in the Libet experiment—when you act without rules, then in fact you’re not really deciding for yourself at all, you’re just conducting a lottery. At least de facto it’s a lottery, because if it depends on nothing, then basically I’m just deciding arbitrarily who will be president of Switzerland. In the Switzerland experiment, by what do I choose whether the president will be this one or that one when there is no price to any of the choices? So it’s as if I’m performing an act of choice here—I’m not tossing a coin—but the truth is I’m just tossing a coin, and this is just another way of tossing a coin. Because if it depends on nothing, then basically I’m just deciding arbitrarily who is president of Switzerland, and in general, let’s say, someone who decides the rules for himself—that’s called acting without rules. Meaning: it has no meaning whatsoever, it’s still meaningless. That’s more or less what we’ve seen so far. Today I want—I hope today I’ll finish this topic—I want to make basically a few remarks, somewhat long remarks, but still, a few remarks to complete this topic. The first remark is to notice again that basically this whole line of thought can be made not only in the ethical sphere but also in the aesthetic or artistic sphere. Aesthetics and art are not the same thing—people will stone me for saying that—but in the artistic sphere. What do I mean? There’s some puzzle that bothered me some time ago. What bothered me was: why is it that in the various artistic fields people define genre rules? Did we talk about this? I don’t remember. Yes? Okay, so basically in the artistic context the claim is that in every kind of creation there are some genre rules that are always there. People think you can break them, but you can’t. I mean, nothing will help, you can live under that illusion. But the question is really why genre rules are needed. So if I already spoke about it, I’ll say it briefly. Basically the claim is that genre rules are the framework within which artistic creation and judgment of the work take place. Meaning: if there are no rules, then the work loses its meaning, there’s no way to judge it, and it has no meaning at all. You need to be creative when you’re supposed to submit to rules and within them find some special path. That’s what it means to be creative. But where there isn’t any—then what does it mean to be creative? You put in whatever you want there,
[Speaker C] Meaning, what is modern—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is modern art? So modern art is one of the great illusions of people who think—or maybe it’s part of postmodernism—it’s the illusion of people who think you can throw away genre rules. Now, someone who really throws away genre rules is not creating art. Assuming I believe them—and I have my doubts about that—that they really see meaning in those bizarre works, which by the way I greatly doubt, but assuming that they do, that means by definition that there are genre rules there. Because if there weren’t, then how do you judge whether a work is beautiful or not beautiful, how did he do it differently from everyone else, how original is he? You always have to assume something in the background and say: how did he manage with those constraints? Meaning, how did he do it differently from what other people would do—why is he creative? Right? Otherwise it has no meaning. Now again, I don’t understand anything about this matter. I’m not sure, as I said before, that there’s even anything to understand. I’m more inclined to think there isn’t. There’s a wonderful book by Kishon, by the way, if you know it. It came out after his death. It’s like Rabbi Akiva Eiger, where they say he’s sitting under the National Library and still bringing out more books, unpublished manuscripts. With Kishon it’s like that too. I don’t know—it seems to me Kishon wrote a lot more books than Rabbi Akiva Eiger—but he has a wonderful book about modern art. He hated modern art, and there’s a wonderful book of his on the meaninglessness of the whole thing, where he brings absurd statements by various artists and critics and makes fun of them in a very entertaining way. Fine, but I don’t know—maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t understand, and really there is something there. I’m not sure. I mean, it could be that there is something there that I don’t understand. But I’m just saying: even if there is something there, then by definition there are genre rules there. Since I don’t know what they are, I don’t know how to understand it, but if there is something there then there are genre rules. So someone who lives under the illusion that he can make art without genre rules—that’s nonsense. There’s no such thing. At most these are abstract genre rules that you never actually defined anywhere and they’re looser, less rigid. But still, within that framework you have to distinguish: who did it this way, who did it that way, what’s the difference between this artist and that artist; otherwise you’re just splashing paint on paper, which is what it usually looks like to me. No, I’m saying—that’s my opinion, but I’m saying I’m an ignoramus in this field, maybe I don’t understand. I’m saying, whichever way you slice it: if I’m right then it’s obviously nonsense, and if I’m not right then that means there are genre rules there that I simply don’t know. But there is no such thing as art without genre rules; that’s a postmodern illusion.
[Speaker D] But there’s always some genius or something who invents something outside the rules, or invents new rules, or something.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but like—
[Speaker D] Like we said, the art of today isn’t what it used to be, Picasso or something.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, I completely agree. With Picasso, in my opinion, it really doesn’t belong to the abstract art I’m talking about. They call it abstract, but it’s not abstract—there’s figuration there. Picasso, in my opinion, doesn’t belong to that category at all. I think he’s wonderful. But I do want to talk about what you said, about inventing the rules. Because I said before that someone who invents the rules for himself is not called someone who acts within rules. But clearly rules change. Meaning, people do produce systems—even if I’m right that there are some rules here, then it’s another system of rules. My claim is that people do not invent systems of rules, they uncover them. They uncover them. Meaning, suppose somebody were to invent a system of rules and act within it. Now from his point of view it’s totally subjective, yes? He invented it out of his own world, his own culture, his own tendencies, whatever. How would I interpret that work? What would it say to me? Nothing. And if someone succeeds in producing a new system of rules in which the community of artists and consumers of art operates, that basically means he did not create the system of rules—he uncovered it. There is some system of rules that he discovered, and that we too find within ourselves, and only because of that are we willing to enter this game and say: you did it well, you did it less well, because we understand what he’s talking about. At some point—I don’t remember in what context—I spoke about Wittgenstein’s “following rules” argument. And I said that even rules that look to us like formal rules—if we don’t understand them, we won’t be able to act according to them. Meaning every such rule is already embedded in us, otherwise we couldn’t really follow the rule—yes, follow the rule. And I gave several examples there, I don’t remember if you recall: one, two, three, four, five—what’s the next number? Psychometric test: what’s the next number? Six, right?
[Speaker B] Six, six, six.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but the truth is I can justify just as well that it’s minus seventeen and a third. No problem at all. I can show you the rule. At n equals one it gives one; at n equals two it gives two; three, four, five, minus seventeen and a third. That’s a rule I can write down and justify that answer. Now when you convey information to someone, or teach him mathematics, say, and you tell him the rules of exactly how this works, then you’re teaching him to count. So he counts one, two, three up to ten; then you tell him twenty, thirty, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. At some point you stop, right? You don’t go all the way to infinity in the classroom, if there even is such a thing. So at some point you stop, and you say to him “and so on,” right? Keep going like that. Now okay, let’s say we got in class up to ten thousand, and you say, okay, student, let’s see you keep counting. So he says minus seventeen and a third after ten thousand. I don’t understand—one, two, three and so on, ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, ten thousand and one, two—the student says, I got it. Now ten thousand, twelve thousand, a hundred thousand, a million. Okay, now say: minus seventeen and a third. Now in fact he’s right. Meaning, he can show me that the next number is minus seventeen and a third. I can show you a formula that gives one, two, three, four up to a million, and the next one will be minus seventeen and a third. At n equals one million and one it will give minus seventeen and a third. There’s no problem making such a formula, in principle. It’s a bit complicated solving a million equations, but in principle there’s no problem creating such a formula. But then why do all of you answer the same thing? I would answer the same thing too. Why? Simply because we are built in such a way that the agreed rule in mathematics is already inside us. We didn’t learn it from the teacher. The teacher helped us discover it within ourselves, because if it weren’t within us, we would all be saying different things. One would say minus seventeen and a third, one would say ten, a third would say pi—each person according to his own crazy head. Why do we all say six, or one million and one after one million? Because we are already built in such a way that within us there is already this way of thinking, this way of counting. And therefore when the teacher teaches us this, we understand. But if the teacher had invented it, then we wouldn’t manage to understand it. He’d explain to us up to a million and we’d say to him, after that comes minus seventeen and a third. Meaning, I have to understand the logic behind it in order to understand how I continue the examples he gave me. Genetic?
[Speaker B] What? Genetic? Cultural, some combination of lots of things. Yes, you learn it. What? No, you learn it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But it gets produced in all of us. In the end everything is genetic. Because culture too, in the end, is the impact of the environment on the genetic substrate within us. So in the end the claim is that this is found in all of us. What exactly the source is—that’s for the psychologists or the biologists.
[Speaker D] I also think that it’s like—you gave the example of Newton. Now everybody knows Newton’s laws or something, and in his time that was against Aristotle, and it was something new for everyone.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but afterward—but that’s what I’m saying—
[Speaker D] After someone hears whether it goes straight or whether you have to stop it or something, Newton said something, everybody said something.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But after Newton—but after Newton discovered those laws, we all understand that he was right. He didn’t invent laws.
[Speaker D] Maybe that’s part of education.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, not because of education—because it’s part of the truth. Not because it’s part of education, but because that’s the truth. We all see that this is how it is. The only thing is, you have to be a genius to formulate it. That’s exactly it—actually that’s a good example. Because Newton didn’t invent these laws, Newton discovered them. So what I’m saying is that the same is true in art, not only in science. In art too, that’s how it works. By the way, also in learning. Rabbi Chaim invented some method—“invented,” more or less, whatever—but yes, he created some new method in learning. Rabbi Chaim of Brisk created a new method of learning. Why did it catch on? Why in the yeshivot did everybody suddenly somehow begin learning according to what he created? Not only because it works, but because we find that logic within ourselves. He hit upon something that was already in us. He was simply talented enough to formulate it, to conceptualize it. So I claim that Rabbi Chaim did not invent that form of learning and thinking; he discovered it. And I claim the same about art. If a certain kind of art takes over, becomes dominant, speaks to people, even if it’s new, that means that the one who created it, or the group that created it, didn’t invent it but uncovered it. Meaning, there was something here, and he basically managed to put his finger on it, and after he formulated it or conceptualized it and defined it, suddenly we all understand that there is something meaningful here. It starts speaking to us. Because otherwise there are a hundred thousand people, each inventing something else, and none of it speaks to me in any way, and none of them would manage to produce a discipline or an artistic genre. “There is nothing new under the sun.” What? “There is nothing new under the sun.” Yes. Truly essential novelty just can’t exist. Meaning, it always has to be something that is somehow already in us.
[Speaker E] What’s the definition of invention?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It depends in what context. There are cases of invention—you know, I’m even unsure, say, for example, about a game. Someone invented chess, right? Now that really doesn’t look like discovery, right? It looks like invention. You invent such-and-such a game. I claim that it’s discovery. I claim that it’s discovery. The fact that a great many people suddenly become captivated by it means—not the specific rules themselves—but it means that he hit upon some thought pattern or some mode of thinking of ours that is within us, that was already within us beforehand. And with his talent he managed to put his finger on it, to devise it, and define the game.
[Speaker B] Or like a cellphone, which is very convenient and therefore catches on.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter, then convenience is also part of the issue. Why is it convenient? Because there is some structure within us that is already there, and because of that this thing is convenient. You understand?
[Speaker B] But not everyone connects to it. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t have to be totally universal, but the fact that it appeals to a sufficiently broad community means there is something like that. Not everyone connects to it either because not everyone really has it, but only some do, or because some are more talented and some less. You know, in many fields—not everyone connects to mathematics either. Does that mean mathematics isn’t true or isn’t within us? It is within us. Some people are more talented at it and some are less. Chess is the same. But still, there is something here that is not invention but discovery. Clear? I’m a Platonist in mathematics too, and I claim that mathematics is discovered, not invented. I say the same thing about art. Even when a different set of rules is produced—even in one second, even in the postmodern world, where I say that even there there are rules, assuming there is some meaning there—then that means that there too, apparently, someone discovered something. I don’t find it within myself, or I’m not talented enough for it, or I don’t know exactly what, like with chess, as we said before. But still it’s clear that there is some system of rules that he discovered, and it exists somehow in a broad community, and that’s why they succeed, that’s why it catches on.
[Speaker B] So in the matter of the 613 commandments—the 613 commandments—is that discovery of truth, or is it innovation?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nobody discovered the 613 commandments; the Holy One, blessed be He, gave them. If you mean: could He have given a different system of commandments, as if it were arbitrary just because He decided so? Look, that’s the question of the reasons for the commandments. I tend toward Maimonides’ view—that Maimonides says no. Meaning, given our world, this ought to be the system of commandments. Saadia Gaon also writes, after all, that we could even have arrived at it by reason, at the commandments, as he writes in the introduction to Emunot Ve-Deot. I’m not sure that’s true, but that’s what he writes. What stands behind his approach, even if we couldn’t actually have gotten there on our own, is not necessarily that one can practically get there alone, but that it really is something that is correct in principle: if we were thinking properly, we should have been able to get there on our own too. That’s the claim. Someone who says there are no reasons for the commandments is saying this is arbitrary—the Holy One, blessed be He, could have established any set of laws He wanted. But I’m saying one has to pay attention to the fact that of course the Holy One, blessed be He, could have done whatever He wanted if He had created a different world. Given that this is the world, that He decided this would be the world, then for this world this should be the system of commandments. Of course, since He created the world, He could have created a different world, and there there would have been a different system of commandments. Angels—I don’t know whether they have commandments at all—they have different commandments. Meaning, every world and its own contexts. After all, in our world too, under many different circumstances there are different applications of the commandments, and things vary according to the circumstances.
[Speaker C] Maybe that’s exactly what’s called creation ex nihilo, and therefore we can’t create something from nothing, while the Holy One, blessed be He, can.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The world, yes. But I’m saying that after the world already exists, then the commandments are already something from something, not something from nothing. That’s what I’m saying. Therefore—and therefore—I’m not even sure there is a dispute between the views that say there are reasons for the commandments and the views that say there aren’t. It could be they’re simply speaking on two different planes. Those who say the commandments are arbitrary and one could have done whatever one wanted mean to say that one could have created a different world with a different system of commandments, and those who say there are reasons for the commandments, that they’re not arbitrary, simply mean that given this world, there needs to be this system of commandments.
[Speaker B] “He looked into the Torah and created the world.” According to these rules He created the world.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Possibly. I’m not sure I agree with that. But there is some sort of fit.
[Speaker B] What’s the difference between that reverse approach and what you said before?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, because it’s not certain that He created the world in order that there be such a system of commandments. It could be that it works in reverse. He created the world because He wanted to, and the system of commandments is what fits the world here. The question is what is cause and what is effect here. Very often people quote this rabbinic midrash, but I don’t think that’s its meaning either, as it seems to me.
[Speaker B] So is this basically a kind of determinism? You’re saying we only discover, discover, discover a reality that already exists; we don’t invent.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In a certain sense, yes. It’s not determinism in the sense that of course not everyone will necessarily discover it, but yes, it is deterministic in the sense that what gets discovered and catches on is probably something true. Meaning, it’s not just some invention out of nothing.
[Speaker B] In that sense, the saying “whatever an accomplished student will one day innovate—”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe, yes, maybe. There are—you know—they talk about the zeitgeist, and all kinds of historians of science. There’s a book, for example, by Feuer, Einstein and His Generation, by Lewis Feuer, and he writes there that basically there are claims by philosophers and historians of science that when Einstein came up with the theory of relativity in 1905—the special theory of relativity—if he hadn’t come up with it, somebody else would have. It was already in the cultural atmosphere, not only Lorentz.
[Speaker C] In history there are lots of Leibniz and Newton cases.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s the claim of the zeitgeist, that’s the claim. Of course if you take it very far, then the zeitgeist basically says Einstein isn’t even relevant. In any case there would have been someone there at that time and he would have discovered it, whether it was Einstein or somebody else. That takes it too far, but it is true—
[Speaker B] Not exactly relativity and the Rema—
[Speaker C] Yes, although—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They didn’t discover exactly the same thing, yes, but—
[Speaker B] There would have been somebody else, and they wouldn’t have called him Albert Einstein either.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly, and at the same time it’s also true that his name wasn’t Albert Einstein. The claim is that something in the circumstances, the atmosphere, the culture, the history, somehow leads us to discover something. Now, again, I’m not sure I identify with the deterministic view—that is, that the theory of relativity would definitely have been discovered, and if not by him then by someone else. I’m not sure about that. But I do agree with the de facto view. After he already discovered relativity, it’s clear that it existed in some sense somewhere—within us too, within the era too—and that’s why it caught on. I’ll tell you an anecdote. Once I met a Vizhnitz Hasid; a friend of mine showed me a newspaper article when I finished my master’s degree, and he said to me, look, there’s an article here about a Vizhnitz Hasid named Chaim Shefler from Haifa who invented another theory of relativity that solves various problems, open problems in the existing theory of relativity. And there was an article about it in the paper. Now, this was interesting because I was just looking for a doctoral topic. I said, that’s interesting, because clearly he has no contact with academia—he’s a Vizhnitz Hasid, he never studied any of this, he doesn’t know how to speak with academics, so it’s not really advancing. I said, let’s see if it’s interesting; maybe I’ll do something on this. I went to meet him, and he had a professor from the Technion who was accompanying him. And I spoke with him. He said to me, listen, this is a serious guy. Meaning, there are integrals there; it’s not just words, not all the usual things you hear about science, where someone pulls relativity out of the Torah and the Zohar by equidistant letter sequences. Rather, he did serious work, with integrals, with everything, he defines things—but what he calls a photon has nothing to do with what I call a photon. Meaning, it’s a completely different world; you have to enter his conceptual framework. It’s something very strange. At a certain point I said, this sounds interesting, and I started looking through Physics Abstracts—once upon a time these were thick books; today it’s all on the computer—big books like that which collected all the articles published all over the world in every subject. In physics there were two or three huge volumes where each article was one line for each year. I looked there and saw that every year at least 10 to 15 new theories of relativity are created, and they too solve all the problems that Einstein’s theory of relativity still hasn’t solved. And nobody has heard of them, and they interest no one. Now, this—I don’t know, it could be that some of these theories have potential
[Speaker B] Fine, and they simply
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] because of the sheer number of articles, so it’s impossible—you don’t manage, you somehow need people to get to know your work, but that doesn’t always happen, and all sorts of things like that, which are well known. But on the other hand, it could also be that people understand that it isn’t right. They understand that it isn’t right, and therefore it doesn’t progress. Meaning, there also hasn’t been some full check all the way through. And that basically says again that for a theory to catch on, it has to be absorbed somehow; that is, it has to rest on some substrate that exists in all of us. Now Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, would explain this as a sociological process. He says this is the politics of science—that is, if you manage to persuade people. I don’t buy that. Clearly there are political dimensions, as in any social group, but I don’t think that’s the whole story; I think he’s mistaken. Meaning, there’s also something here that’s rooted in what is true. The politics also reflects some intuition people have about what I connect to and what I don’t, what I find within myself and what I don’t find within myself, what makes sense to me and what doesn’t. And of course sometimes you can miss it. But there’s something here such that if something catches on, that means it exists within us in some form. That’s how it gets accepted. That’s what I also argue regarding… new artistic genres. Meaning, basically the claim is that there are always genre rules. And not only are there always genre rules, but these are not just formal rules where someone wrote ten rules on the board and now everyone is playing the game. If we chose דווקא these ten rules and not any other collection of rules, that means those rules rest on something within us, something we understand is there… like that. I think I once spoke about the meaning of concepts, about conventionalism and essentialism regarding concepts. There is a dispute among philosophers of language about how to relate to a concept. Is a concept a convention? A community of people agrees, defines some concept in a dictionary, and then there is a concept. Or does a concept have an essence—that is, it has a nature? Meaning, a concept that is created actually expresses something in the world itself—again, Platonism—some Platonic idea, and people who adopt a concept understand that there is such a concept. Let’s take an example: a democratic state. A concept that is, all in all, relatively new in our culture. Is that an invention or a discovery? That’s really the question. So the conventionalists will say: it’s an invention. We decided that this kind of state will be called democratic. Why? It’s a cluster of features: democratic elections, separation of powers, civil rights, several basic characteristics of what a democratic state is. We could just as easily have defined an xyz state, one located on a seashore, with up to three million inhabitants, and free elections too, and that’s what we call an xyz state. Or a state where, I don’t know, the skin color of the people there is black, there are clouds above it and watermelons below, and that’s an abc state. We could have defined a million concepts; any collection of characteristics can be a concept in the conventionalist view. If it’s all convention, then we can gather any collection of concepts, define it, and that will be a concept. In contrast, in the essentialist view, that means this set of concepts expresses some idea or something that really exists. Meaning, this set of features that we call a democratic state is not accidental. We didn’t just happen to gather three or four features, put them together, and give them the general name democratic state. Rather, there is something—there is such a type of state, and this collection of features distinguishes it; it has meaning. There is such an idea called democracy, even though until one or two hundred years ago nobody knew about it. That doesn’t matter, but when it was created, that was an exposure and not an invention—a discovery of the concept of democracy, not an invention of the concept of democracy. That’s the claim. I very much recommend that you read—there’s a writer named Borges, Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges. He’s a genius. I don’t know a writer about whom I can simply say “genius” just like that without… it’s obvious; he wasn’t a genius with a diploma. So he really has brilliant stories. There’s a collection called Fictions in Hebrew, in the translation of the late Yoram Bronowski. And one of the stories there is called “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which tells of some imaginary planet, of course—the man is wild, it’s fantasy. Some planet inhabited by a collection of idealist philosophers. Idealism is a view that denies the existence of an external world. Everything exists only in my consciousness; there is nothing outside, it’s all just my perceptions. Berkeley, basically—Bishop Berkeley held such an idealist view, and he really is the president, the president of that planet, Berkeley. And Borges tells there what happens there—wonderful things—but he has a few descriptions there that are simply unbelievable. One of the things, for example, is that he says that on that planet, when they want to say that the moon shone above the river, they can’t say it that way because in the language of that planet there are no nouns. Because there are no things in the world; there are only things I see, only qualities, no things.
[Speaker C] Do I exist in the world?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, I’m not arguing with idealism right now; you know what I think of it. But then how do they say it in their language? “Above the ongoing flowing, it mooned.” I see that there is some ongoing flowing, but there is no river and no moon; meaning, those are objects, and they do not exist. But in our context he argues that in their language, since there is nothing outside, it’s a brilliant idea—in their language, since in their philosophy there is nothing outside, then of course concepts are convention and not essence. I’m translating; I’m speaking in my own language. It’s a story; he isn’t doing philosophy there. But right—now what happens in such a situation… is that every collection of qualities defines a concept. Because there is no essence. That is, if there is an external world, then that means there is in the world an idea called a democratic state; if so, then I define that collection of characteristics and I give it a name: democratic state. That is the concept. But if there is nothing outside—not states, not democratic and non-democratic ones, not ideas, not anything—then basically any collection of data in my experience can be gathered and defined as a concept. Right? So he says: the bird’s cry in space together with the color of the third cloud from the left is called Yanaleh. The collection of those two things—that is, because it has no meaning. After all, neither the bird exists nor that; it’s only a collection of experiences, it’s all convention. Again, that’s an analysis in the language I defined here with convention and essence; he only describes. But it’s a devastating critique of idealism; I mean, it’s really wonderful. But here too you see exactly the same thing: when you create a concept, or when you create an idea, or when you create an artistic genre, you are basically discovering. It has an essence. It cannot be convention alone. It cannot be convention alone, because otherwise it would not catch on. The alternative is of course Kuhn’s alternative, which says everything is politics. It has no meaning at all; it’s simply a question of who has better public relations—he takes over, he becomes art, he becomes everything. I don’t want to agree with that. I don’t agree with it, although in modern art there is often a feeling that that’s how it works. And of course they always accuse all the others of this. “One who disqualifies does so with his own blemish.” And because for them there really is nothing else—someone who says there is no truth explains that everyone operates out of interests. Right? That’s the postmodern discourse: everyone operates out of interests. Why does he say that? Because he operates out of interests. Meaning, he knows of nothing else. Because after all there is no truth; there are only interests. He isn’t willing to accept that I operate because that’s what seems right to me. That’s also true in the artistic context: when you go to sociology and politics instead of essence, it’s simply because of your worldview.
[Speaker D] There are many theories, say in physics, that everyone said were nonsense, and over the years they were accepted—even the Big Bang and things like that. It was accepted; at the beginning it went against what we feel.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. What we feel at first glance isn’t always really what exists within us. That doesn’t mean our initial intuition is always correct. What I am saying is that after people worked on it, checked it, thought about it again, and it went through a process, suddenly we do see that it is true. Meaning, that doesn’t mean we can’t make mistakes when we have some intuition. Of course we can be mistaken; very often we are. I’m only saying that if something is accepted, if something is grasped as true, that means there is something genuine in it; in my view it’s not just politics.
[Speaker B] But that’s only in retrospect, right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you want indicators, then clearly it’s only in reflection or only in hindsight. Yes.
[Speaker D] That’s what happened with the idea of the Big Bang. Everyone believed that the world was infinite, primordial; that there was a beginning was not obvious to everyone.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And infinite in space too, right? Infinite in both space and time. Yes, right.
[Speaker D] But that was obvious to everyone.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. And there are mistakes, fine, but we discover mistakes, and after we discover them, then we understand that this is what is true. That’s the point. Meaning, we’re basically digging inside ourselves. Scientific discoveries, in a certain sense, are going more and more deeply into ourselves, not only into the world—together. It goes… Fine, so the claim—what I want to say—is that people who talk about freedom… let me summarize for a moment the artistic comment. People who talk about the value of artistic freedom are basically making the same mistake as Ariel Hirschfeld and Amos Oz and everything I spoke about last time. Artistic freedom does not produce art. Artistic freedom is nonsense. It is nihilism. What one can talk about is artistic liberty. Artistic liberty means that the question is how you manage to express yourself in a unique way within the general system. And therefore here too, the same mistake and the same alternative—we need to speak about the distinction between freedom and liberty. Everything I said in the ethical and religious context and in every other context is also true in the artistic context. And therefore, for example, people speak about religious creativity, which is a problem because religious people have all kinds of limitations; they can’t do certain things in the artistic context. In my view there is no problem in that at all. On the contrary: the more constraints you have, the more, in my opinion, you can express higher art. Now, that doesn’t have to be; you don’t need to limit yourself on purpose just to get into trouble. But on the other hand, it doesn’t prevent you from being a great artist at all—quite the opposite, it may enable you to be a greater artist. And again, it’s the same mistake: people think that in order to create art you need freedom, but that isn’t true. In order to create art, you must have rules; you just need liberty within the rules. That’s what is written: “The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.” Do not read “engraved” but “liberty.” “Do not read engraved but liberty”—when there are stone tablets and you engrave letters into them, that is liberty. Why is that liberty? Because the stone is very solid, and within it you manage to produce unique letters, okay? But without the stone tablets that constitute a framework for the letters, it has no meaning. That is not liberty. Fine, that’s one point.
[Speaker D] Maybe you could say the same about taste. There are those who say: either tasty or kosher.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So here—actually, that’s just a theorem in mathematics; it’s obvious. It seems to me it has to be that way: the more kosher, the less tasty. Because if it were tastier, then someone who eats non-kosher would eat it too. So a kosher restaurant is by definition less than or equal, in taste and in price, to a non-kosher restaurant. It has to be. Because the moment the kosher restaurant has an advantage, the non-kosher restaurant will do that too. But if the non-kosher restaurant has an advantage, the kosher restaurant won’t be able to do it. Right? And therefore it’s obviously less than or equal, always. And the more constraints there are, the less you can achieve what you want. Okay. That doesn’t mean it isn’t creative. The kosher restaurant has to be more creative than the non-kosher restaurant, because it has more constraints. No, really. And that’s exactly the same point. So if you want what tastes best, go to the non-kosher restaurant. If you want what is most creative, go to the kosher restaurant. Fine, maybe I’ll just finish this remark with one point. In a book by Gershom Scholem, he tells there about some mystic; he speaks about what mysticism is. He brings something from a story by Agnon—never mind whom—Gershom Scholem, I think. He basically talks about what mysticism is, and he says: mysticism too sounds to us like a collection of someone’s subjective hallucinations. He says that’s a mistake. I think he’s right. A collection of someone’s subjective hallucinations has no meaning. It says nothing to anyone except him. Meaningful mysticism—and there are meaningful mysticisms—is mysticism where after the person beholds his “hallucinations,” in quotation marks, everyone grasps something in it; that is, everyone understands that there is something there. That is meaningful mysticism. Because otherwise—not everyone, but many. That is, there is a sufficiently significant group that sees that there is something there. And then he becomes a meaningful mystic. The fact is that there are fascinating analogies between different mysticisms in completely different places in the world. It’s always dual, it’s always yin and yang, male and female, female and male principles, or all kinds of things of that sort; there are many, many parallels. Why? Because mysticism is some kind of thing that is not subjective. You quarry it out of yourself, you understand it from within yourself, but if you are a talented mystic, if you are a significant mystic, then when you bring it out, suddenly everyone finds it within themselves too—or many people find it within themselves too—and then suddenly they understand that there is something meaningful here. The same is true of existentialist philosophy. There too it works that way. Some of them are just talking nonsense, but others are actually finding certain ideas within themselves, yet it is grasped as something that speaks to me, that taught me something new, that I understand he discovered something interesting there, and then it becomes meaningful philosophy. Yes, take Kierkegaard, for example, one of the fathers of existentialism. He speaks about three stages in his biography, from which he formulated three stages in the development of a religious person. And he was a religious Christian. He said that the first stage is the aesthetic stage, the second is the ethical, and the third is the religious. The aesthetic is a kind of hedonism, where a person simply lives the world. The ethical is when a person overcomes the hedonism and lives by the rules—yes, a kind of Kantian ethics, meaning there are rules and you obey the rules and overcome all the aesthetic hedonism. And the religious, the third stage, is the stage in which you overcome even ethics. Meaning, you bend even ethics before some religious command, and in that sense you have actually advanced one more stage. And he described this out of his own life, and afterward formulated it in his books, in several of his books—also Fear and Trembling, which is the well-known one about the Binding of Isaac, but also in other books. And why did it catch on? Why is he considered an important philosopher? Because people truly found this hierarchy within themselves too, this path that one goes through, that there really are these three successive stages. Meaning, it is true that he quarried this out of himself, but after he formulated it and defined it, suddenly quite a few people understood that he had captured something real here. Meaning, he grasped something meaningful. Okay. A second remark: I began this series with two remarks about Passover. That is, I said that on Passover we celebrate the transition from slavery to liberty, and basically what happened there challenged that perception in two ways—to see it as a transition from slavery to liberty. The first thing is that we received the Torah. Once we received the Torah, then we didn’t go from slavery to liberty; we received a very restrictive, very demanding, very detailed system, telling us what to do and what not to do at every stage—so ostensibly that is not liberty. So about that I explained what I’ve been explaining until now, and I argued that only once there is a system of rules within which you act can you become a free person. Not only does it not contradict it; without it you cannot be a free person. The second thing that arises there, and this is what I want to touch on now, is collectivity. What the Maharal writes, and others write too, is that when we left Egypt, the Jewish collective was essentially born. Now today, the common view is that when you are part of a collective, that is the opposite of liberty. Meaning, to be free is to be completely alone, as the song says. When you are limited, or you see yourself as part of a collective, then basically you are not free. And again, I don’t need to dwell on this; I think it’s exactly the same thing. The collective is simply, first of all on the first level, just another constraint on my way of life. And if I see myself as part of a collective, clearly that limits me, and therefore I am less free. But on the other hand, clearly this does not harm my liberty; maybe quite the opposite. And the question is how I direct myself within the collective framework, and in that I can express my liberty. Someone who lives as a lone pauper—then sure, Robinson Crusoe and Friday, they were completely free but they were not free persons. There was nothing upon them, no limitation in that sense of course, maybe other limitations. So therefore, again, exactly the same move I spoke about earlier, I am saying here too: collectivity merely adds another system of constraints, and in that very way it actually helps constitute liberty rather than restrict it. It restricts freedom; it reduces freedom, but not liberty. But there is something beyond that. When we speak about a collective, we are really speaking—after all, around what does a collective gather? And all those anarchists, yes, who oppose collectivism—why do they oppose collectivism? They oppose collectivism because they are not willing to accept collective values. Meaning, when you define a collective, it is usually some value system for whose sake we all act or in which we all share, and therefore a collective is created. Because otherwise what—just because we live in the same neighborhood? That’s not a collective. There has to be something that binds us or defines us as a collective entity, and that is apparently some shared values. And therefore, when I operate within a value framework, there is always a collective in the background. These are not two different aspects of what I said earlier—that on the one hand we received a value system, and on the other hand we entered a collective. It’s not a second aspect; it’s two sides of the same coin. Meaning, the moment there is a binding value system, everyone bound by that value system is by definition more collective. Therefore, the moment you act within a value system, you are also acting within a collective framework. Sometimes that collective gathers itself—say, communism; everyone who identified with communism came, and thus the collective was formed. At Sinai it worked the other way around: the Holy One, blessed be He, created the collective by means of the group upon which He imposed the commandments; not everyone who was interested gathered together. But still, in the bottom line, whenever there is a value system within which I act, I am also acting within a collective framework. And therefore these two aspects I spoke about—the collectivity and entering the value system, the Torah—are two sides of the same coin. They are not two different things, and therefore the way to treat them is the same. And this has several interesting implications that are current, and I want to linger on that a bit now. Today it is very fashionable and accepted to seek alternative Jewish identities. So a secular Jewish identity, this Jewish identity, that Jewish identity—and in certain respects Amos Oz’s article also deals with this issue; this brings me back again to that article. And there are various definitions. One of the points, one of the interesting situations in which this came up—and I already told this once, I don’t remember—was in Rabbi Shach’s “rabbits speech.” Rabbi Shach with the… yes?
[Speaker B] So
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If so, the claim basically is that it’s probably very important to people to be Jews; when you tell them they are not Jews, it hurts them. Okay, so the question now is what exactly the alternative definition is. Chaim Herzog, who was then president at the time of Rabbi Shach’s speech, said: what do you mean? Their hands are calloused—about the kibbutz members whom Rabbi Shach said, in what sense are they Jewish? So he says, what do you mean? Their hands are calloused from work and labor and agriculture. And the army and settlement—and how can you say they are not Jews? The Land of Israel. Huh? The Land of Israel, yes, all the… This is a strange definition of Judaism. I think there are many people in the world whose hands are calloused from labor; there are quite a few people who serve in various armies and other armies. I don’t see any of those characteristics as a characteristic that is essentially Jewish.
[Speaker B] He spoke about the Land of Israel. What? He spoke about the Land of Israel, Jews in the Land of Israel, therefore it’s Jewish. No, no, he didn’t say only that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are also Druze in the Land of Israel and Arabs also in the Land of Israel. That’s not—I don’t think that’s a Jewish characteristic. Maybe I’ll sharpen in a moment why; I’ll sharpen it more in a moment. The point is that there is some inherent problem in this search for a secular Jewish identity. And it touches everything we’ve been talking about until now. Because once you define an alternative identity, you need to define for me in what sense this is still a continuation of what existed before. Right? Otherwise this isn’t alternative Judaism but something else. I’ll get up and say Uganda—good for you. After all, if you want to say that you are the contemporary Jew and that you are continuing what until now was called Judaism, then explain to me in what way. So in what way are you continuing? What do you share with what came before? Now when people try to look for what is shared—speaking Hebrew? There are lots of other people here in the country who speak Hebrew. There are many good Jews abroad who don’t speak Hebrew, so that’s hard, and I don’t think these people thereby nullify the fact that they are Jews, including those who are not religious. So I think speaking Hebrew is not relevant. And reading Hebrew literature is also not relevant. You can read Hebrew literature if you speak Hebrew, and you can read it in English translation if you want it in English. Connection to the Hebrew Bible certainly not—the Christians are far more connected to the Hebrew Bible than the Jews are. Military service—there are Druze, and there are armies among other nations too. What I basically want to say is that a secular Jewish identity, even if such a thing exists, is an ethnic identity. It is an ethnic identity in the sense that it is a collection of factual characteristics. I am the son of Jews; I am the descendant of all the previous generations, of course, right? The Land of Israel, if you want, or all kinds of things of that sort. But what you will not succeed in finding there is values. There are no values in a secular Jewish identity. Not because secular people have no values—I spoke about this once in this series. I said there is only one kind of secularity; there are many kinds of secular people, but only one kind of secularity. The same is true here. There really is no such thing as a secular Jewish identity in the value sense. Because what does this identity share with the set of values that until now was defined as Judaism? So you’ll say universal values: do not murder, do not steal, help others. That’s true throughout the world. That’s true throughout the world. You can hear all these people sitting on beanbags in study halls explaining to themselves that their Judaism is this and that and… my ears ring when I hear these things. It’s simply a pile of nonsense and absurdity.
[Speaker B] In the end they all arrive at tikkun olam.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah yes, exactly. So tikkun olam—everyone is repairing the world, each one in the same way too. Usually the ways in which they repair the world are borrowed from the mouth of the nations. And by the way, that’s fine; I’m not rejecting it. I’m not claiming it’s bad. I’m claiming it’s not Jewish. The point is that once you take a universal value, you cannot use it to define Judaism. And there are all kinds of such questions that come up in various contexts. Why, for example, in conversion do they look for whether the convert eats kosher, observes family purity, observes the Sabbath, and not commandments between man and his fellow? Why, if he is a murderer, can he be a Jewish criminal, but if he doesn’t eat kosher, then he won’t be a religious Jew? Why is that…? Murder is more severe. As I already said once, as I recall, I claim that this question is a logical mistake. It’s not a question about Judaism at all; it’s a question of logic. Aristotle explained to us how you define something. How do you define something? You always give the genus and the species. If you want to define a human being, then we say: a speaking animal. Animal is the genus; that is, it is the collection of things of which the human being is one species. Now you need to define within that genus what distinguishes the human from the other species. You have to give the species and the genus, right? That is the way to define things in the plant world, in the animal world; that is always how things are defined. Therefore there are families and subfamilies and further subfamilies; that is always how taxonomy is built, both for plants and animals. Now, clearly, if you define… clearly murder is a very severe prohibition in Jewish law, the most severe prohibition there is in Jewish law, no question. That’s not the issue. The question is whether murder is an element that distinguishes Judaism, because in order to define a person as Jewish, it is not enough to examine whether he observes the most severe commandments, because if all the gentiles also do that, then it does not define him as Jewish. Again, that does not mean that if he is a murderer he is righteous. If he is a murderer, then he is not a human being, not that he is not Jewish. Meaning, a Jew must be a human being who fulfills a set of commandments—not specifically the universal commandments, because the universal commandments are supposed to apply to all human beings.
[Speaker B] Therefore as a definition
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As a logical definition of the concept “Jew,” it is simply a mistake to define it on the basis of universal values. But non-universal values are by definition the values of the religious. So how can a definition of secular Judaism exist? On the face of it, it cannot exist; it is simply impossible. And all the definitions you hear will always be either universal or nonsense. We said it’s either nonsense or nonsense. Or maybe genetics. Yes, that’s the lowest level, the ethnic. What can remain? You can of course remain with ethnic Judaism. You can say: we speak Hebrew, we are descendants of the previous generations, we are connected to Jewish history in some way—which is all true, perfectly fine. That is identity in the completely ethnic, technical sense, exactly like there is a Belgian identity and a Moroccan identity and an Australian identity and whatever else you want. Right, everyone has his own history, his own ancestors, so we do too; that’s obvious. And in that sense, the Land of Israel is the same thing. For them, the Land of Israel is like Belgium for the Belgians. What’s the difference? It cannot constitute Jewish identity in the value sense. For example, as an ideological secular Jew, you cannot accuse me of not being Jewish enough. Right? If I’m not Jewish enough, then I’m not Jewish, so what’s the problem? If you’re not talking on the value plane but only on the factual plane, then it has no meaning to come to someone and say, listen, you’re not Jewish, that’s not okay. But when Rabbi Shach accuses them of not being Jews, that accusation is because of the Jewish value system. Not because of ethnicity; clearly he agrees that ethnically they are Jews—that’s not the question. Rather the question is in the value sense. Now, what surprised me there was that they were really shocked by it. Meaning, basically, in a certain sense, within themselves apparently—although they don’t admit it—there is probably also something of value-based Judaism and not only ethnic Judaism. But they didn’t manage to define it for themselves. They didn’t manage. They are simply hidden believers. Meaning, they just don’t admit that they really believe.
[Speaker B] Maybe everyone
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] has his own spark. Yes, yes, that’s true, but it’s true and in my opinion it changes nothing. But it is true, yes. Meaning, that’s probably why it disturbed them, and it really surprised me very much. And this is actually a very important point for all kinds of discussions taking place today about secular Judaism. So very often when you see these arguments—what do you mean, you don’t have a monopoly on Judaism, we have this Judaism, there is that Judaism—beyond this empty postmodern discourse where everyone does whatever he wants, yes, what’s called Marshall McLuhan—not the global village—Benedict Anderson on imagined communities. Imagined communities means supposedly that any group of people that decides that a group is a group… suddenly a man rises in the morning and feels that he is a people and begins to walk, as Yehuda Amichai writes. So yes, like the Palestinians. There really is no such people, that’s clear. Rather, they created for themselves some imagined identity, and now fine, they really do have some shared identity now. You can’t argue with that identity, with that factual feeling. What Golda said, and everyone laughs at her, she was right: there is no such people. There is no such people in the essential sense. Fine, but there is a group of people here who are now defining themselves as a group, and now we need to see what to do with them. I don’t know, I’m not talking right now about the practical question of what to do with them. But in the essential sense it is clear that this is perhaps the most extreme example of an imagined nation. And by the way, one of the things—there is a book by Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University, the communist, what’s it called? When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? So he writes there that basically all of this is imagined and there is no Jewish history at all and it is all based on nonsense. Meaning, a collection of people who invented a history for themselves and decided they are a nation. While he is an extreme leftist and supports the Palestinians, which is the most extreme example of a people that is exactly that in this sense. And this contradiction among the post-Zionists is very interesting: they are willing to accept imagined nationality only when it exists among others, and they are not willing to accept imagined nationality when it exists among themselves, and certainly not to recognize that theirs is not imagined. But my claim is that beyond that, even if you succeed in finding such a definition, it will be a definition on the factual plane and not on the value plane.
[Speaker B] Hamas also defines us now.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Huh? Yes. Hamas too. After all, that’s a well-known definition. But I’m saying that very often in these arguments, when you try to think about it again in this language, then you’ll actually see that, as I said earlier, a collective is supposed to express values. That is the meaning of my liberty when I am one—when I am an individual within a collective. A collective that is not based on values—fine, you can define it as a collective; I’m not arguing about definitions. But you cannot demand anything in its name. You cannot say, look, you are not faithful to your Judaism or your Belgian-ness. Why do you care what I am faithful to and what I am not faithful to? So I don’t want to be faithful to my Judaism or my Belgian-ness. What difference does it make? I am ethnically Jewish or not Jewish, and that is my business alone; it doesn’t interest anyone. If you come to…