Kindness and Judgment – Elul 5783 – Lesson 3

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. This is actually the last session in this series. Up to now we’ve talked about the more abstract definitions of grace and judgment. I tried to present this both on the plane of the Kabbalistic sefirot, and through examples from our world, maybe even in Jewish law. And in the end the conclusion was that the mixture of grace—that is, the concepts of pure grace and pure judgment—both of them are abstract concepts that you can’t really

[Speaker B] encounter

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] and you also can’t really live with them. Even if you try to realize them, it usually leads to unbearable, unstable situations that you really can’t exist in. It’s either anarchy, if we’re talking about complete grace, or dictatorship, you might say, if we’re talking about complete judgment—communism, dictatorship, things of that sort. Meaning that in the end, say on the socio-economic plane, the compromise created from these two poles is called social democracy. Social democracy, in different dosages of those two extreme poles—that’s basically what the arguments in the world today are about: what dosage, or what blend, is reasonable to live with. But it’s clear that it has to be some kind of blend. It can’t be something that sits entirely at one of the poles themselves.

[Speaker C] The Rabbi kept saying that grace is something initial, and judgment is something that unfolds from it on the second level. Where does that fit into everything the Rabbi just said—that it has to be a blend? Why do I need grace—like, to get used to this idea that grace is something, okay, that this insight is that grace is some kind of free act that starts rolling some chain of events. Where does that fit? Why do we need that insight? How does that insight fit into the whole picture here? From what the Rabbi summarized up till now, I could have understood it well enough even without that insight.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I’m talking on the ontological plane. The distinction between grace and judgment—what I talked about until now—was really on what you might call the logical plane. Meaning, the question of axioms versus logic that derives conclusions from axioms, and so on. On the ontological plane, it’s the coming-into-being of something from nothing, creation as opposed to formation. Okay? Now clearly, you can’t—say, absolute grace on the ontological plane is prime matter. Matter without form. Meaning, the thing was created out of nothing, grace—the first step of the process happened—but that’s it. From there on it’s just something primeval, it doesn’t say anything, it has no meaning, there’s no difference between one place and another. You can’t really relate to such a thing as a kind of reality. And that’s why it’s called prime matter—meaning it precedes reality, it’s some kind of potential for reality. You need to give it form. Say, separate forms—I don’t know—Plato’s world of ideas, right? Separate forms also don’t really exist in the sense we know here. The existence we know here is some matter that has been given form. Meaning, matter with form, or matter with essence, with nature—I don’t know, you can call it by various names. Because without those two things, each one by itself is an abstraction. It’s not really something you can talk about. Now these are useful abstractions. Meaning, it’s important to know that these two poles exist, but in practice they will always appear in some kind of mixture. There are certain systems in which, say, the general idea is present, while the rules that try to characterize it or define it as judgment are very thin. And there are situations in which we are in very positivistic systems—say, in the legal world—where it’s all dictated principles, and every case that comes before you gets a deduction applied to it.

[Speaker C] Why is it always grace? I mean, if I understand that it’s something you grasp but can’t live with by itself, and it’s some approximation to it—why is the approximation to the idea I’m looking for, the initial one, in the sense of grace? Is every initial thing grace because—what? The Rabbi also talked about this point that judgment alone can’t—it’s always only an approximation to that, and therefore it can’t…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The real thing is basically the thing without the rules; the rules are an approximation of it. That’s what the Rabbi calls grace. Because grace is something that, in the abstract definition I spoke about here, is by definition rule-less. Maybe I’ll talk a bit more about that today, so I hope it may become clearer.

[Speaker C] The Rabbi also mentioned that whole business with the Chatam Sofer and with gevurah and with the Lag BaOmer move.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The claim there is that grace—absolute judgment—is grace. Judgment within judgment is really grace, because judgment alone cannot stand. The root of judgment is really grace. Meaning, if you go with it all the way to the end, what you really discover is that there’s nothing there. If, say, on the level of logic, someone accepts only things that have a logical argument proving them, then he won’t accept anything, because he won’t accept the premises. So what’s the point of accepting proofs if you’re not willing to accept premises? Okay, maybe I want to start—well, continue a bit—with… to illustrate this in other contexts or other examples, this point, and in the end get to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which is really the end point of our little journey. I’ll maybe start with contexts of art, maybe also art and faith in a certain sense. The point that first awakened me to this issue was an essay by Amos Oz. He has an essay called “A Full Wagon and an Empty Wagon.” It’s in one of his collections—Something-or-Other in the Land of Israel—one of the essays there is “A Full Wagon and an Empty Wagon.” And his claim there was that the Jewish world begins with some kind of big bang at Mount Sinai, and there some kind of space is created, like the big bang, and from that point on we fill that space with all sorts of furniture. Think of it as some room that we keep filling with more and more furniture, and we’re not willing to remove any existing piece of furniture. So more and more and more, and all the generations keep adding and adding, and in the end we reach some kind of suffocation that doesn’t let us do anything. We are completely bound by the collection of furniture, or rules, or constraints, that we’ve accumulated over history, and we’re left with some kind of fossilized, rigid Judaism, something like that. And as an antithesis he wants to argue that modern Hebrew literature, or something like that, can cope with reality better. He talks there also about the Holocaust, or the problem of evil, and things like that, because the formulaic responses that are forced out of the worldview to which we are so bound don’t really allow genuine confrontation. I think there’s something there that we all feel is true in that criticism, but there’s also some conceptual mistake here that I think it’s important to notice. It came to me when I was in Yeruham; I taught there in the yeshiva. Once a month someone would come—some celebrity or whatever—to give a lecture on the weekly Torah portion. Every time someone else. And people would come from all around—from the kibbutzim, from Be’er Sheva, from Dimona, from different places. And one time Amos Oz was supposed to come and didn’t show up, so they asked me to replace him and speak in his place. So I decided to use the opportunity to talk to him in his absence. So I responded to that essay I had read of his, and there I basically said what I’m going to say now. Let’s take a chessboard as an example. Okay, look at a chessboard, and I want to place on it—an empty chessboard—and I want to put one pawn on it. How many possibilities do I have? Sixty-four. Right? Now I have two pawns. How many possibilities do I have?

[Speaker C] Two pawns? Combinatorics…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, sorry, sixty—

[Speaker C] sixty-four times sixty-three.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sixty-four times sixty-three is if they’re different. If they’re identical, then divide by two. So it doesn’t matter, but it’s much more, right? Much more. Sixty-four times sixty-three—or if they’re identical, sixty-four times thirty-one—but it’s thirty times more. Okay? Now three pawns? Sixty-four times sixty-three times sixty-two, and each time you divide by—it doesn’t matter right now, yes, it depends whether they’re identical or not. Right. Meaning, the more furniture I add to the room, or the more pawns to this board—yes, for me those are pieces of furniture in the room—the number of possibilities for arranging them in the room grows. And if someone talks about creativity in an empty room, he’s talking about nothing, he’s talking nonsense. There is no creativity in an empty room. In an empty room you can’t do anything. Okay? The whole meaning of creativity—creativity means you have a certain number of pieces of furniture. In our case, constraints, right? The furniture is just a parable. You have some number of constraints, and the question now is how you manage with them. And the more constraints you have, the more creative you have to be in order to manage with them, or in order to produce something new with them, something unexpected, something others haven’t done yet, and things of that sort. And as the number of constraints grows, creative freedom—or creative possibilities—grow, they don’t shrink. Meaning, the more furniture we put into the room, in his big-bang parable, the number of creative possibilities grows. Or in the analogy—yes, up to thirty-two. Right, after thirty-two, put holes in the place of furniture and you get the same number. Meaning, the maximum is at thirty-two. But for our purposes, his description of a room full of furniture misses, first of all, the point that the more furniture there is in the room, the more the number of possibilities rises and the number of options for arranging the room—that is, for being creative—increases. And therefore, someone who has a lot of furniture in the room and isn’t willing to give up the furniture already accumulated there actually has more options open to him, not fewer. Now what made him miss that point? I think it’s that he also treats an empty room as a platform for creativity. Meaning, he’s basically claiming that creativity means taking out this furniture, putting in other furniture, putting in one, putting in three, doing whatever you want. But if you look at this beyond the question of how many pieces of furniture we’re arranging and how—in a world with no constraints, there is no creativity. Meaning, how is modern Hebrew literature going to deal with theological problems like evil in the Holocaust? That’s one of the things he talks about there. It has nothing to deal with. It isn’t committed to God’s existence, it isn’t committed to His providence, it isn’t committed to His goodness. So it’ll reach the conclusion that there is no God, or that He isn’t good, or that He is good—it doesn’t matter, nothing forces it into anything. It reaches some conclusion, that’s all. Or it reaches the conclusion that there’s nothing here to grapple with. Grappling always exists only when there are some constraints you are committed to. Meaning, pieces of furniture you’re not willing to remove from the room, but somehow you still need to arrange them so that it works, so as to explain why the Holy One, blessed be He, is not evil in this Holocaust parable. So you have to not give up His existence, not give up His goodness, not give up tradition and Torah, and still try to understand why He is not evil. That is grappling. It’s not easy to do that. Usually the answers really aren’t all that convincing, but that’s what grappling is called—either you succeed in grappling or you don’t. But in a place where you have no constraints, you’re basically just doing whatever you want. You’re not grappling; that isn’t called grappling. It also isn’t called creativity; it isn’t called anything. You’re just doing whatever you want. If you think about it, I’ve always wondered why different artistic fields have genre rules. In the past it was much more rigid, right? A tragedy had to have three acts, the first act had such-and-such number of parts, the second act had such-and-such number of sentences, sections, whatever, and the third act like this. And as we know, the gun in the first act goes off in the second. So the question is, why do you need genre rules? If I want to make you cry with four acts, won’t it be a tragedy? What’s the problem? Why does it specifically have to be three? Or why does the number of sentences in each of these sections have to be fixed? But of course that’s only one example. Painting also has genre rules, sculpture has genre rules—there are certain rules that in recent times have been very much broken. But basically there are some genre rules in every creative field. And the question is: why do we need genre rules? Why is that important? Why is that interesting? And I think the answer is the same answer I gave before. If there are no genre rules, then when you look at the thing it won’t say anything to you. It won’t say anything. What does this mean? It doesn’t mean anything. You made something—I don’t know what to attribute it to, whether it’s different from or equal to something else, in what sense, what exactly—none of it has any meaning for me. I don’t know how to relate to it, how to compare it to something else, how to know whether what you did here is different from what someone else did, more creative, less creative. In order to judge something, it always has to be done בתוך some framework of given rules. And therefore every creative field must—must—operate within genre rules. And sometimes they can be arbitrary rules. That really doesn’t matter, because I don’t need them because they are the correct rules. I need them because that’s the system of constraints within which the story unfolds; those are the rules of the game. Now you can see whether the person did something creative or not. Basketball also has rules, soccer also has rules. Why are there rules? Just do whatever you want until the ball goes into the net. No—there are certain rules, and only eleven players, and not everyone puts on the field as many players as he wants. Right? Every one of us understands very clearly why you need those rules, because otherwise the game has no meaning, it isn’t interesting, it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t force you to think in some way, to think outside the box—nothing. Genre rules are something very important. Precisely the existence of rules is extremely important both for expressing creativity and for assessing creativity. And therefore this rebellion against genre rules—postmodern art—this rebellion against genre rules in a certain sense empties art of content altogether. When you do whatever you want, and who knows what he did there, and all sorts of people babble on about what it does mean and what it doesn’t mean—I don’t have much confidence that they themselves know what they’re talking about—but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t say anything. Once, when I was here doing my doctorate, we thought of doing—after all, Kishon really loved modern art, in quotation marks of course; he had a harsh criticism of it. There’s a wonderful book of his that came out after his death about modern art. So we thought of asking him to fund some research for us, to run correlation tests on modern painting, to see whether there is any structure here at all or whether they just splashed paint on it the way a kindergarten child can do. I don’t know what we would have found there; in the end we didn’t do it. I don’t know what we would have found there. The point is that even when I can understand the desire and the need to round off the corners, to bend the rules a bit, to understand that the rules are only an approximation, as I said before, there is something that sometimes compels you not to work with the rules, okay? But you have to be very careful about that. When you bend the rules, you have to be careful not to break them. You need to dance at two weddings at once. You have to preserve the rules but bend them a bit—but only a bit. Meaning, there’s a certain degree of creativity because I know that here you bent rule 13.3, okay? But if there are no rules, then you didn’t bend anything and you didn’t do anything; there’s no meaning to what you did. Meaning, you can bend the rules. The rules aren’t there in order to preserve them with orthodox strictness, but they do need to be there, because otherwise we lose completely the meaning of everything we do, both in art and in general.

[Speaker D] Why? You can break rules and create a new set of rules. Look at Picasso—he broke rules and…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you create the rules yourself, then it’s not called that you created rules. If everyone does that—then I’ll create them too—so how will they compare me with you? There’s no problem with producing a different system of rules, and then another game can be played within it. That’s perfectly fine. But those rules need to be more or less agreed upon and known, or understood by the community that consumes them, that engages with them, because otherwise it has no meaning. If everyone creates the rules, then they’re not rules. You’re simply doing whatever you want, and afterward you call it a rule. That’s not… Therefore all those paintings—Picasso and the like—there definitely are principles or rules there, and without that I don’t think I could enjoy it at all. By the way, I actually really like Picasso’s abstract painting, but not postmodern nonfigurative painting—rather that earlier kind of abstract art, cubism and Dali and Picasso and those sorts of things. And there really is there—what? Dali isn’t Picasso; Dali is something else. Yes, right. And there’s also some degree of figuration there, not just random paint splashing—smeared figuration, yes? Something, yes—not something totally anarchic. In my view that is utterly devoid of meaning. But okay, I don’t know, maybe it only depends on my lack of understanding, I don’t know. In any case, the point is that there’s something in the existence of rules that is precisely what enables me also to break the rules. If there are no rules, then you can’t break anything either. Meaning, in a certain sense judgment sustains grace, because if you want to act outside the rules, I ask you: outside which rules? Like the famous joke, right, where someone asks at a kiosk, “Do you have coffee without sugar?” And the guy says, “We don’t have sugar. Maybe you want coffee without salt?” But here I mean it seriously. Meaning, when I want to break rules, I don’t want to act in a world without rules. I want to act in a world with rules that I break, or round off, or deviate from in certain places. But if I completely abolish the rules, then I’m doing nothing. What I’m doing here has no meaning at all. It seems to me this shows up in a lot of places. Once, when I subscribed to Haaretz, before I simply couldn’t stand it anymore, there was some discussion there in which, among others, various parents wrote in—including mathematicians—saying, “My children come home from elementary school with math homework that I don’t know how to solve.” This went on for weeks there, with letters and articles and things of that sort. And apparently, from what I understood there—I don’t know what was happening in the schools at the time—it turned out they had decided to go with a concept of creativity. So the younger grades in elementary school were being asked thought-questions, but they didn’t know the multiplication table, and they were being asked all these reasoning questions—what do you say from here and there—and it’s simply nonsense. It means you give up the fixed and rigid, uncreative foundation, that given datum, and you try to jump straight to the dimension of creative thinking. But you can’t. Meaning, first of all you have to build the framework, the basic knowledge, which admittedly is rigid and admittedly involves memorization rather than thought—something very unpopular today—but you can’t do without it. Meaning, you need some framework within which creativity can operate. There’s also not much point in reinventing the wheel. Invent a wheel that hasn’t yet been invented—why invent a wheel that already has? So first learn the wheels that have already been invented, and then try to add a wheel of your own. To invent wheels that have already been invented is just—either you’ll invent it or you won’t—but what for? This reminds me that when I was in Bnei Brak, in my Bnei Brak period, I had a kind of sociological-anthropological way of looking at what was happening around me, and I saw that at that time—I think it was more pronounced then—there were two very central yeshivot in Bnei Brak: Slabodka and Ponevezh. There were two main differences between them. One main difference was that in Ponevezh the learning was terribly patterned, very, very structured, analytic, the concepts clearly defined, practical differences, and everything very, very structured. So much so that toward the end of my period in Bnei Brak there were always lectures by yeshiva heads during breaks; they would come give talks in different synagogues in the neighborhoods and so on. So I would go hear these lectures—I really enjoyed hearing them—and at a certain point I saw that when the lecture began, I could tell you how it would end. I knew it. He would raise an objection from here and answer it from there, and bring this practical implication, and then ask another question from there—I could tell you more or less what the lecture would look like.

[Speaker C] Ponevezh means to ask a question from Rabbi David’s notebook against Rabbi Shmuel’s notebook, and to answer it with Rabbi Shach’s notebook.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, usually I don’t think it works like that. Usually these notebooks are closed in on themselves. You can raise a difficulty from Rabbi Yosef Rozovsky against Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky—that you can do—but there’s something very, very formulaic there. Anyone who knows that world knows that the moment you say something that doesn’t fit the fixed cut, people’s ears start shaking—they just won’t hear you. They’ll say, this isn’t something people say, as if it’s not legitimate. Now, this isn’t conscious. It’s not that they simply say, fine, he’s talking nonsense, okay, let’s move on. Rather, they just don’t listen. If it’s not in the usual patterns, they don’t listen—that’s their defining feature. By contrast, in Slabodka, following the Chazon Ish—whoever knows the Chazon Ish’s books—the Chazon Ish is very non-formulaic. Very. The Chazon Ish was always very hard for me, as someone trained in the Ponevezh school. He was always very hard for me, because he’s such a ba’al-bos kind of thinker, meaning he learns like a layman. He checks a little more here and a little less there, and you say: where are all the structures, all the two-din distinctions, all the definitions, all the complex frameworks? There’s nothing there. It’s simply: there’s this case, and here it seems to me different from that one. It’s not an algorithm—very much like a ba’al-bos, like the Sema. The Sema also always bothered me; the Sema is like that too, very ba’al-bos-like. By the way, the Sema is the origin of the saying that the opinion of householders is the opposite of Torah opinion—the Sema in siman 3. But he also learns like a ba’al-bos. What can I do? Or rules like a ba’al-bos. So that’s Slabodka. In other words, in Slabodka basically everyone says what seems right to him. It seems to me this way, it seems to me that way—you don’t see any formulaic thinking. It’s very non-analytic. There was a period when I sat in the Chazon Ish kollel. I had been in the Ponevezh school, and afterward I also spent some time in the Ponevezh kollel, not for very long, and then I moved to the Chazon Ish kollel. There was some group there studying Choshen Mishpat, and they warned me in advance: listen, you’re not going to get along there. And I was sure it was just two frogs living in some puddle and convinced it was the Pacific Ocean. Meaning, okay, how much difference can there really be? These wear black and those wear black. What? Right? These do whatever their heart desires and those do whatever their heart desires. So what, how big could the difference really be? It turns out the difference is apparently very large. I really didn’t get along with them. It was that kind of thing—someone would say a chaburah, yes, it seems to me this way, maybe not, maybe a little more, a little less. What? Give me a definition, give me a category, a practical ramification, give me something, the way we like it. No—it works differently. And that’s one difference between Ponevezh and Slabodka. And the second difference is that almost all the roshei yeshiva came out of Ponevezh. Almost all the roshei yeshiva in the various yeshivot are Ponevezh graduates, not Slabodka graduates. It’s very rare to find a rosh yeshiva who came out of Slabodka.

[Speaker C] In Slabodka’s branch, Hebron, they do exist here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are a few. There are? Yes. And I think those two differences are connected to each other. Because once you raise someone on formulaic thinking, he doesn’t have to be a genius. If he learns properly, intensely, with devotion, and he’s talented too—but not necessarily extraordinary—then he’ll reproduce Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky. After enough time, he’ll reproduce Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky. You can give a general lecture on any topic you’re assigned. If you have the tools, you can apply them—it’s a pretty straightforward algorithm. And you give a general lecture on whatever topic you have, and it more or less looks the same. I’ll tell you a story. Once, when I was studying in a yeshiva called Netivot Olam—newly religious students in Bnei Brak, also a kind of Ponevezh-style school—we had a maggid shiur who was a student of Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky. And we were studying—I remember tractate Sukkah, but later I saw that it probably couldn’t have been tractate Sukkah. We were studying some tractate; I don’t remember which one anymore. Anyway, he gave his lectures, and in the middle of the year the first volume of Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky’s lectures came out. That was when it started coming out. The red ones? Yes. Not the red stencil ones—the printed red ones? No, something else, yes, the earlier ones. But once there was only Rabbi Yosef Rozovsky—that was the notebooks. Then there were stencils, and afterward there were the organized lectures, which Rabbi Michel Rozovsky, his son, arranged, both Shiurei Rabbi Shmuel and Chiddushei Rabbi Shmuel.

[Speaker C] What year was that?

[Speaker D] More or less 1985.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think, something like that, roughly. In any case, the book came out—again, I don’t remember exactly which tractate, but it was the first one to come out if I remember correctly. And we started flipping through the book, and it was embarrassing. Because we saw that these were exactly the lectures he had been giving us—he was simply copying Rabbi Shmuel without saying that all of it was Rabbi Shmuel’s lectures. Now, we didn’t know what to do; it was kind of awkward. By then I was already one of the veteran students there, so I decided to be bold and approached him. I said to him: You know, Rabbi, a book of Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky has come out. What do you say? He said: I hadn’t heard. And the lectures are really one to one. He said: Really? He was delighted—he almost jumped to the heavens from happiness. He said, listen, just so you should know—more than that—I didn’t even study this tractate with him. I didn’t study this tractate with him. But the lectures he gave on the tractate he didn’t study—I’m telling you, this happened to me personally—it was exactly, one to one, Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky’s lectures on those same topics that he hadn’t studied with him at all. And that was a wonderful example. That was when the penny dropped for me, I think for the first time, beyond the value question—whether this really is the model you aspire to, whether that’s what you want to become. I’m not so sure, but never mind—that can be debated. But first of all, factually: if you study in the Ponevezh school, then even if you’re a middling person, you come out a rosh yeshiva.

[Speaker B] On a formulaic scale?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, you come out a rosh yeshiva. Yes, yes, you could say Brisker—it’s not exactly that, but approximately. So some combination of Rabbi Shmuel, Rabbi Shimon, and Rabbi Chaim.

[Speaker C] And therefore there aren’t students—or let’s say students of the Chazon Ish?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, there were some, but certainly not in mass numbers.

[Speaker C] Meaning, and Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel—was he some kind of taster of the Chazon Ish? I don’t know. I don’t know, there’s no understatement there—that’s a Chazon Ish taster unto itself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s a Chazon Ish taster because the Chazon Ish—you know, the Chazon Ish said there are two—not that he said it, but there are two types of Chazon Ish people. You know, there are Chazon Ish people who do everything that’s written in the Chazon Ish’s books. And there are Chazon Ish people who do what they think, just as the Chazon Ish did what he thought. Those are the real Chazon Ish people—that’s Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel. Understand? Now, the Chazon Ish himself writes this. I heard—I think even from Rabbi Yogel—that he and Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel used to study as chavruta, and at the end of the week they would always come to the Chazon Ish to talk with him about what had come out. I think I heard this from him; I’m not sure. Rabbi Gedaliah asked the Chazon Ish: Wait, what you wrote here doesn’t seem right to me, for such and such reasons. He said: Fine, Gedaliah, so what do you want? Then do otherwise. What? You think differently? Then do differently. And he writes this too in siman 3, in siman 250 in Yoreh De’ah—that every person should do what he thinks. To be a Chazon-Ishnik means to do what you think, just as the Chazon Ish did what he thought. That’s the real Chazon-Ishnik. In any event, in Ponevezh it’s not like that. In Ponevezh it’s very formulaic. And the reason almost all roshei yeshiva come out of Ponevezh is exactly this. Because once you work in a formulaic way, even if you’re a person of only average talent, if you learn very seriously and invest in it and so on—of course talent never hurts—but I’m saying, you can reach the point of being a rosh yeshiva even if you’re not one of the greatest prodigies. You reproduce Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky and say his lectures on whatever topic you want. But in Slabodka, if you’re not the Chazon Ish, then you’ll remain Mosheh Zuchmir. Meaning, the Chazon Ish can grow there too, because apparently there was something in him that meant he didn’t need to receive his patterns from other people. But someone who doesn’t have that will remain like that. Why am I bringing this? Because it’s a parable for the same issue. In other words, the learning of Ponevezh is justice, the learning of Slabodka is kindness. They don’t work with rules. It seems to me this way, it seems to me that way. It’s not something that has reasons; it has logical justifications.

[Speaker C] You’re taking that a bit to an extreme.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? That’s exactly it.

[Speaker C] But the Chazon Ish will say in the end, after he analyzes the whole topic—for example, I’ll give an example about the Temple service of Yom Kippur, because I once thought about this point. In the end he says: when do I say “a fixed statute,” and when do I say “lack of the proper time”? After all, one service can invalidate another service—when do we say “a fixed statute,” and when do we say “lack of the proper time”? Clear example? No. When something precedes something else, it could be that this thing won’t be invalid because it says “a fixed statute”—it’s before that, like we know regarding the Yom Kippur service—or you can say it’s before that, so you can’t do it because its time hasn’t arrived yet, and therefore it’s invalidated. There’s a difficulty in the Reish Galuta about a ram that was offered before the whole service altogether—it doesn’t work. So the Chazon Ish says: I don’t know when it’s this; sometimes it’s this way, sometimes the sages said it’s that way, I can’t say anything definite.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Briskers have a method: if the Torah says “a fixed statute”—what? No, if the Torah says “a fixed statute,” then it is indispensable.

[Speaker C] When to invalidate, because—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can’t know when to invalidate. If the Torah says “a fixed statute,” then it’s a fixed statute; and if not, then it’s lack of the proper time. No—among all the Yom Kippur services, when do I activate

[Speaker C] my category of lack of proper time, and when my category of fixed statute? That isn’t written. He—the Chazon Ish—says that he doesn’t know when to activate it, because there are cases where he’ll activate this and cases where he’ll activate that, and in truth he doesn’t know when to do it. The Briskers have an exact explanation for this. Fine, but what do I want to say with this argument? It’s not that the Chazon Ish doesn’t analyze the topic. In the end he did analyze it and so on; it’s not that he just comes and says, I do this, I do that, whatever. He analyzed it from every angle; it was deep analysis.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But he doesn’t analyze it with the analytic tools I’m talking about. What you brought is exactly an example of what I was talking about. No, absolutely not.

[Speaker C] It’s just completely intuitive.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Absolutely not. The whole essence of the Chazon Ish is exactly this, exactly this. He has no templates, no rules, no—this is not analytic in any way.

[Speaker C] No, I can’t—it’s hard for me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say he does whatever pops into his head, Heaven forbid.

[Speaker C] These are two forms of thought. To infer from one topic to another—that I agree. But within each topic, the analysis isn’t totally different; it’s not essentially different.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Very different, in my opinion. Fine, but that’s already a different discussion. What you described here is exactly an example of what I said, so I don’t understand why it was presented as a question.

[Speaker C] That the Rabbi described the Chazon Ish and took him to an extreme.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not to an extreme. What you described is what I said. That’s exactly what I said. The Chazon Ish doesn’t work with these Brisker rules; rather, he looks and sees: here yes, here no; he has one line of reasoning here, another line there. There isn’t all that formulaic structure—that’s exactly my claim. I didn’t say he does whatever he wants and draws lots. That’s not the claim. There are two forms of approach here, two forms of thought. But those two forms of thought are clearly distinguished from one another. And in that sense I think this is kindness and that is justice, completely. The very fact of working according to rules is justice; working not according to rules is kindness. Right? Analytic work is justice; non-analytic work—let’s call it synthetic—is kindness. And in that sense I think these two examples show that, and to my mind the lesson is that neither side is operating correctly, in my view. Slabodka’s mistake is that they begin with Slabodka. Ponevezh’s mistake is that they end with Ponevezh. What you need to do is begin in Ponevezh and end in Slabodka.

[Speaker C] Something in the middle.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Begin in Ponevezh and end in Slabodka. Exactly like with mathematics for children. First of all, learn the patterns, learn what people have done. Smart people already worked on this issue—don’t reinvent the wheel. First look at what was done. After that, look on your own; see what seems right to you and what doesn’t; add your own layers—but that’s at the end. Don’t start that way. If you start that way, nothing will come of you. There was once in Yerucham, students from one of the first cohorts came back—there was a terrible crisis there in the middle of the year. It was an excellent cohort, and in the middle of the year suddenly there was a terrible crisis. To search for it means someone already did it, and now come give it to me, I want it. You are apparently supposed to be part of what creates it, if you believe there is such a thing. There’s this feeling of looking for something else instead of what has been done until now. I say: do it—learn what has been done until now properly. On top of that, add another floor; maybe that’s what you can call the Torah of the Land of Israel. Many times we have a tendency to put the cart before the horse, or to try to do the ideal thing right at the beginning, and that’s very non-ideal. And in that sense I think that in the area of study, for example, you first have to begin with justice and afterward add kindness, not the other way around. Like studying in an ulpan—I talked about the example of the ulpan—like learning in an ulpan, first you learn the rules of how to speak, and after you understand the rules, you slowly also understand where one departs from the rules, and when it’s not quite right to speak according to the rules but rather otherwise. You acquire the natural feel that doesn’t come through the mediation of the rules. But you have to start with the rules. And therefore—and I said that this goes in both directions, I think I spoke about this last time—in the process of formation, we begin with the raw material and then give it form. But in the process of interpretation, yes, we begin from the form, and slowly understand that the form is only some kind of approximation, and we look for the real thing standing behind that approximation. So these are two movements, two movements of progress, but in the end it has to be some combination of the two. Meaning, you have to work with the rules, but not take them too seriously. That is, you can round off a few corners, understand when it applies and when it doesn’t, but this has to be within a world, or within a framework, of rules. Yes, the Talmud in several places is very dismissive of rules. There are quite a few rules in the Talmud too, but there are several places where you can see that the Talmud is dismissive of rules. Two examples always jump to mind for me in this context. One of them is in Bava Kamma, where the Talmud says there: the Mishnah says, “There are four primary categories of damages: the ox, the pit, the grazer, and the fire,” okay? “What is common to them is that their way is to cause damage, and their supervision is upon you, and when they cause damage, the damager is obligated to pay compensation from the best of his land.” On page 6 the Talmud says: “What does ‘what is common to them’ come to include?” Now, you tear your hair out when you see this passage. Because the Mishnah already formulates itself in such an illogical way—the Mishnayot in general formulate themselves in a very illogical way. Instead of giving me the rules, tell me what we’re talking about. You tell me there are examples—there’s an ox, a pit, a donkey, or I don’t know, all kinds of things—now you derive from that some rules, understand what this business means, whether yes or no. Some kind of wild induction that you have to extract from these examples. Yes, it’s a casuistic method. The Talmud works on the basis of cases, cases. Okay? And from them we try to extract rules; the commentators and everyone after them try to extract rules in order to understand. Why don’t they just tell us the rules directly? Give me the rule, and don’t rely on the inductions I’ll make from the particulars to arrive at the right rule. Give me the rule! Now, for once the Mishnah in Bava Kamma actually does me a favor and gives me the rule: “What is common to them is that their way is to cause damage, and their supervision is upon you, and when they cause damage, the damager is obligated to pay,” etc. That is, in one line, the laws of damages. Wonderful. I ought to have kissed Rabbi on the top of his head for finally doing me a favor and giving me the material properly. So on page 6, I would have expected the Talmud to ask: “The four primary categories of damages—what do they come to include?” Why do I need the examples if you already gave me the rule? But the Talmud asks, no: “What does ‘what is common to them’ come to include?” I have the examples—why do I need the rule? Meaning, the Talmud has much more confidence in learning from examples than in learning through rules. In the legal world, as you know, this is divided. The British system is common law, a more casuistic method, based on cases. They legislate very little. Lately that’s changing a bit, but they legislate very little; it’s much more precedent and analogies to previous precedents, and so on. German law, for example—or continental law in Europe generally—is much more inclined toward positivism. Meaning, there are rules, and from those rules we derive judgments for the particular cases that come before us. So in the Talmud, the Talmud is very casuistic. The Talmud—yes, the Mishnayot and the Talmud—speak about cases, not about rules. There is one exception—I don’t know if I mentioned this—“one benefits and the other does not lose.” The Talmud in the second chapter of Bava Kamma says: if someone lives in another’s courtyard without his knowledge, must he pay him rent or need he not pay him rent? And then Rabbah bar bar Chana says to him: Were you not with us in the evening? You missed out; there were excellent discussions in the study hall. What was it? So he says to him: yes, one who lives in another’s courtyard without his knowledge. And what’s the discussion there? Whether in a case where one benefits and the other does not lose, is he liable or exempt? The Talmud itself—it’s relatively rare—the Talmud itself does the conceptualization. It begins with a question about a case: someone lives in another’s courtyard without his knowledge—must he pay rent or not? And then it conceptualizes: wait, really this is a general question—what happens if one person benefits and the other does not lose? Must the one who benefited pay the owner, who suffered no loss? This is already a very general formulation. You can see it in many other cases as well, not only in the case of living in another’s courtyard without his knowledge. Now, you understand that if I want to be casuistic, then I formulate the first formulation: one who lives in another’s courtyard without his knowledge. And then future courts may perhaps make an analogy to this case, or perhaps not. But ostensibly it makes much more sense—forget it, why are you bringing me the case? Tell me the rule: in a case where one benefits and the other does not lose, is he liable or exempt? And we’ll reach the conclusion, either liable or exempt. No—the Talmud begins with the case. In this particular sugya, it also conceptualized, meaning it itself formulated the principle under discussion. And then the discussion also proceeds more properly—you can bring proofs, because it’s a general principle, so there are additional examples through which to test the principle.

[Speaker C] Right, that’s the rule, that’s the rule, that’s the rule.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are, but not many. I would have expected many more.

[Speaker C] And then they say this rule is worth nothing, because—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s an exception, always. So I’m saying that extracting rules is always the commentator’s role—the Talmud relative to the Mishnah, the medieval authorities (Rishonim) relative to the Talmud—and therefore more and more and more rules are created throughout history. At base, they are really talking about cases, and we talk about cases because we have no faith in rules. Which is, again, exactly kindness versus justice. It basically means: I give you the case, and from it understand intuitively what I’m really trying to tell you, and know how to apply it elsewhere. If I give you the rule, then basically I’m spoon-feeding you, in an almost logical or mathematical way, the conclusions—and that doesn’t work, because no case is really just a simple specification of a rule. That doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. Every case is some kind of thing with something unique in it. You can’t simply deduce from a rule and derive the law of a particular case. And therefore I think that to a large extent, with good reason, the Talmud chooses the casuistic direction, because it is a more correct direction—even though ostensibly it is less defined and more open to error. But that isn’t true. One is more prone to error in the direction of justice than in the direction of kindness, because in kindness you are actually giving the essence of the matter through a case. You are teaching me how to think. And when you teach me how to think, then basically—you know, this is a bit similar, I’m dealing with this a little now—but it’s a bit similar to the difference between artificial intelligence and classical programming. In classical programming, when you want an answer, you say: if this, then do that; if this, do that. There’s something very, very linear about it. In artificial intelligence, you have no idea what the connection is between what you do there and the result it gives. One of the great riddles there is how this whole thing works at all. The people operating it don’t understand how it works—the people who wrote it, I mean, don’t understand how it works. Because the connection between input and output is very, very indirect—it goes through all kinds of weights in the network, never mind—but you can’t really see how you get from here to there. In words, by the way, it is much more similar to how human beings think. When human beings think, they don’t begin from rules. You begin from examples, and the examples build the neural network in you in one way or another, and once the neural network is built that way, in light of many examples, you can also infer from it a conclusion regarding a new example. That is exactly how we work too, and I think the Talmud works exactly that way. The Talmud works by that method, not by the classical method of: give me the rules and I will deduce from them the conclusions about particular cases, as in German law, for example. That means that justice is some kind of approximation to kindness, as I said. It too is some kind of approximation to kindness. It must not replace kindness—that’s a mistake. It’s the first stage. It’s the ladder you use to climb the tree. After you’ve climbed the tree, throw away the ladder; now try to understand what is really happening here. Another example beyond “what does what is common to them come to include”: there is a passage in Kiddushin. The Talmud brings there: every positive commandment dependent on time—women are exempt, except for a list of four exceptions or something like that, okay? The Talmud asks: but what about assembly, or something else? And the Talmud says: “One does not derive law from general rules, even in a place where an exception is stated.” Now this is really something very—

[Speaker D] Strange.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, if you tell me: every positive commandment dependent on time, women are exempt—I can understand: fine, that’s a generalization, there are some exceptions, it didn’t go into detail. But in a place where it says “except,” then what are you telling me? Every positive commandment dependent on time, women are exempt, except for A, B, C, and D. Meaning, it has already gone into all the exceptions—the most precise formulation imaginable. And then it tells me: but what about E? There’s one more. Don’t make such a fuss—so there’s one more, so what happened? Meaning, even the “except” is already—

[Speaker C] No, yes, meaning even—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even when the formulation of the rule is a precise formulation, so that you would say maybe there can’t be another exception, after all we’ve already entered the exceptions—even there, there can be another exception. Don’t make a fuss. By the way, I think people don’t sufficiently understand the force and importance of this rule—not this rule, this meta-rule that stands behind it: don’t take rules too seriously. Why? Think, for example, there’s a rule in the Talmud—in Jewish law—in disputes between Abaye and Rava, the law follows Rava except for Ya’al Kegam. Right? An acronym for six topics in which—from “despair without awareness” to “a witness proven false” to “a beam standing on its own,” and so on. So there’s the acronym Ya’al Kegam. Now in Maimonides, at least in two places, and in my opinion there are more, he rules like Abaye in other places besides those six.

[Speaker C] And in other places that aren’t in Ya’al Kegam, can he also rule like Abaye?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Say that again?

[Speaker C] Also in places that aren’t like Ya’al Kegam—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said in at least two places—at least two places that are not the six exceptions, sorry, not the six exceptions—where he definitely rules like Abaye. But he says that aside from the six exceptions, in other places too he rules like Abaye. At least two places that I remember: one is the rule of “do not form factions,” with two study halls in one city—there he rules like Abaye. And the second place is “if he did it, it is ineffective,” where there is a dispute because of the contradictions in Maimonides, but at least some of the commentators on Maimonides understand him as ruling like Abaye there as well, in “if he did it, it is ineffective.” Now what do we have? Not only is there a rule, they also count a list of six exceptions. How can it be that Maimonides rules like Abaye in other cases? And all the supercommentaries on Maimonides really do wonder about this. They come up with this explanation, that explanation. Along the way they create some sub-rules too, saying that in disputes between Abaye and Rava when they are arguing according to earlier Amoraim or earlier Tannaim, the rule does not apply. Why not? Who knows why not? Because that’s what they decided. Where did this rule come from? I don’t know where from—from thin air. Which is really exactly how it looks: totally lacking any basis.

So what is it? You have an exception that you need to explain. What is the truth? The truth, in my opinion, is that Maimonides understands the rules of the Talmud the way I’m describing to you here. What does that mean? If you don’t have a position of your own as to what the Jewish law should be, based on proofs, based on whatever, then there are rules: the Jewish law follows Rava except for the six exceptions, where the Jewish law follows Abaye. If there is a passage where it is clear to you that the Jewish law ought to follow Abaye, then rule like Abaye. The rules come to guide you in a place where you don’t know what to do. So there is a rule that substitutes for your own thinking. It tells you: instead of reaching a decision yourself, do this—if you have no position of your own. And if you do have a position of your own, then you don’t need rules.

Yes, it’s like the famous story—one of the millions of famous stories—about Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz. All the good stories are about Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz. A priest comes to him and says: why don’t you go with us? After all, the Torah says, “follow the majority.” We Christians are the majority, so you should go after us. So he tells him that you follow the majority when you’re in doubt. If I’m in doubt, I follow the majority; if I’m not in doubt, I don’t follow the majority. By the way, that’s not a joke—it’s completely true. Meaning, if you find a piece of meat in the market, and there are nine non-kosher butcher shops and one kosher one in the city, okay—but this piece of meat has a kosher seal on it. So what are you going to say? Since most of the shops are non-kosher, the piece is non-kosher? No. Because if it has a seal on it, then I’m not in doubt. If I’m in doubt, I follow the majority. If I’m not in doubt, I don’t.

What does that mean, what stands behind it? What stands behind it is that the rule of following the majority was stated for a case where you do not know the truth. If you have no position of your own, if you have no way of knowing what the truth is, then they give you some rule for what to do in such a case. In fact, all rules are rules for situations of doubt—that’s the claim. All rules are rules of doubt. Meaning, if you are in doubt, then go with… For example, when there is a dispute among halakhic decisors, people often say you have to follow the majority—Shulchan Arukh, section 25 in Choshen Mishpat, yes, that you should follow the majority in a dispute among decisors. I don’t agree with that at all. What do you mean? If I have a position of my own, then I’ll do what I think. If I don’t have a position of my own, then we can discuss whether there is such a rule or not, maybe they were only counted together—that’s all the discussions there in the Shakh and in the Rema and others. But all of these discussions deal with someone who has to make a decision when he has no position of his own. Because otherwise, according to this, there could never be a majority and minority. Do you understand how a majority and minority come about? The moment one person thinks one way, and the second one is uncertain, then it’s one against zero, so he has to go with the one. The third doesn’t know, so he has to go with the two. So really a group should always form in which everyone thinks the same thing. How can a dispute ever arise? Maybe they hadn’t heard one another and then it happened to come out? No. There are disputes between people even if I heard others say otherwise—I still think otherwise. This happens every day in Jewish law, and this is not my innovation at all.

That means the rules—or the law—are meant, and here I return to our topic, for a situation in which I don’t know what to do on my own, from my own intuition, from my own judgment, or something like that. Then the rules come to my aid: go with the rules and do what they say. But if I know what to do, then I’m not disturbed by the fact that I deviate from the rules. The rules are only an approximation—an approximation for someone who can’t do otherwise, like grammar rules in an ulpan.

In general, in the context of Jewish law and halakhic ruling, the number of rules throughout history keeps increasing all the time. Why does it keep increasing? Exactly because every time someone deviated from the previous rules, someone comes along and asks, wait a second, he deviated from the rules—so then he creates a sub-rule, little epicycles and deferents like in Ptolemaic cosmology. They assumed that everything had to move in circular paths, because a sphere is the most perfect shape. Now, nothing works with circles; it’s ellipses. Today we know it’s ellipses. But they said it has to be spheres. Now it isn’t spheres, so what do you do? So they added two more spheres at the edge of the sphere, and then two more spheres—you see, it’s already starting to look like an ellipse. But it’s not exact, because here there are some little deviations. So they added two more little spheres and two more little spheres, and slowly, after enough spheres, you’ll get an ellipse. The more precision you want, the more epicycles and deferents you need to add. Why? Because you are trapped in the conception of circles. If from the outset you hadn’t worked with circles, you wouldn’t need rules and sub-rules and sub-sub-rules—you would just say right away: it’s an ellipse, that’s it. But you assume it’s a sphere. So now there’s a rule that everything goes by spheres—what do you do? Add another sphere and another sphere and another sphere and another sphere. Don’t go with that rule, because that rule is an approximation. In reality it’s an ellipse, not a sphere.

Now the same thing in the halakhic context. There are decisors of two kinds. There are decisors of justice and decisors of kindness. Not necessarily lenient and stringent—that’s not the issue of leniency and stringency. Rather, there are decisors who work with rules. Sometimes they count precedents and follow the majority, whatever. In the Shulchan Arukh: there is one opinion and afterward “some say,” and then an anonymous ruling, or the reverse, anonymous and then “some say”—all kinds of rules, and I have no idea who publicized them or where they came from. There is no sense to all those rules, inventing all kinds of rules in the Shulchan Arukh, and now it becomes a difficulty—if someone rules not according to the rules of the Shulchan Arukh that somebody circulated from who knows where, now that’s a problem against him. There are no rules and nothing. These rules were created to resolve various things that didn’t fit for you. But who said that behind what didn’t fit there is actually a rule? Who said so? Rules are just our way of handling a chaotic reality. We don’t know how to handle a messy reality. We need to impose some system of rules on it so that we can think about it. We don’t know how to think without rules.

That’s why, as I said earlier, I’m not in favor of throwing away the rules. I don’t think we can throw away the rules, and even if I were in favor of it, you can’t think without rules. When you make an analogy between one thing and another, you’re really looking for what they share in common. Implicitly, you’re thinking about the rule behind it. You don’t just make an analogy between case A and case B for no reason. Behind it sits some general conception. But that general conception is some kind of formulation or conceptualization that you propose. It’s not certain that it hits the truth. Sometimes the analogy will remain correct even though the rule that stood behind it and led to it is not correct. Because the analogy doesn’t really rest on the rule. Very often the rule comes and explains the analogy after the fact, the analogy that you already made. But first of all I know there is an analogy. After that comes an additional example of this.

Once I wrote about the giving of a bill of divorce—this was the article in the weekly page of Bar-Ilan, back when I was still a doctoral student, one of the first things I wrote. So I wrote there about giving a bill of divorce. It was the Torah portion of Ki Tetzei, just two weeks earlier. So I wrote there about giving a bill of divorce. And the Talmudic passages about giving a bill of divorce are very strange. There are dozens, many dozens, hundreds I think even, of cases of valid giving and invalid giving: the bill is in her hand but the string is in his hand, and he declared the bill ownerless and did not declare this ownerless, and he stands by the side of the courtyard and she is asleep and the slave is asleep and bound and lame and mute, and I don’t know exactly, all sorts of things like that. Millions of cases. He wrote it on a gold plate and declared it ownerless, and forbidden-benefit items, and a million things. Sent it to her in the hand of a monkey. Tons and tons and tons of examples.

Now the Ketzot starts discussing how to define the rule: what is valid giving of a bill of divorce? So he says maybe you could say it’s a transfer of ownership, but he rejects that, because if it was written on forbidden-benefit items it is valid, and forbidden-benefit items, at least according to some of the medieval authorities (Rishonim), cannot be transferred. So therefore it can’t be a transfer of ownership. So maybe it’s an act of giving. But that also can’t be, because when you write a bill of divorce in your courtyard and transfer the courtyard to her, the divorce is valid—but you didn’t give anything, you performed no act of giving. So he starts getting tangled up in it, with epicycles and deferents and all kinds of things like that, and nothing really works with all the examples. Every example you add adds another epicycle—I don’t know how to say that in the singular—another deferent, and another example, and then a new theory, and then another example and another new theory and another example, until the number of principles in your general theory is more or less equal to the number of examples. And usually, what is nice about a theory, what is useful about it, is that the number of principles in the theory is smaller than the number of examples. Because otherwise I could just stay with the examples. When I want to explain the examples by means of a theory, I say: I have ten examples, I can explain them with one principle or two principles, so I gained something. But if I explain them with a theory that has ten principles, then just count the ten examples—it’s the same thing. You can simply list the ten examples and that’s it. Okay?

Why do they do this? And in Kehillot Yaakov there are two huge detailed sections there in tractate Gittin, where he continues this too and grinds away at it, and you’ll see the conclusion he reaches at the end—what is giving a bill of divorce? It’s something much more complicated than the passages themselves. So what did we gain from this whole theoretical explanation if the theory turns out more complicated than the cases and more complex than the cases? And the answer, in my view, is that this is negative theology—that is, the value is in the process, not in the product. The product is not the correct definition of giving a bill of divorce. But the process—we don’t know how to think without rules. How do we examine the cases and compare them? We see that this is not similar to that in terms of this principle, so that principle probably doesn’t quite work here, so it needs to be fixed. But if I fix it, then that other case no longer fits, because this doesn’t fit, so I have to fix that too. Slowly, in the end, what comes out is not the correct theory. In the end I have thoroughly internalized the examples, and I know exactly, without formulating it to myself, what valid giving of a bill of divorce is and what it is not. If you ask me now what it is—after I’ve gone through all the cases and tried to fit rules to them and so on and in the end didn’t really succeed—but that is my way of comparing the cases and understanding what is yes and what is no, and arranging my neural system in such a way that when a new case comes before me, I’ll know how to rule correctly: is this valid giving of a bill of divorce or not? Therefore the process is really the point, not the product. The product in the end is some kind of theory that is worth nothing, but the path to the theory is an attempt to propose a rule and throw it away, propose another rule or another sub-rule and throw that away too, and then little by little I understand what is yes by means of all the things I discarded as no. This is really Maimonides’ doctrine of negative attributes, okay?

And therefore the story of rules is that without them we cannot work. It’s impossible to work without rules. On the other hand, you have to be careful, because the rules are an approximation; they are not the thing itself. We are searching for the thing itself. The rules are our way of approaching it or reaching it, but they are not the thing itself.

The same applies to principles of morality. Many times you see analyses of moral issues in which people try to construct a moral theory—I don’t know—to maximize the overall good, the general utility, or all kinds of definitions of that sort. Then you put it to some test: wait a second, what happens if there are ten people who got stranded, I don’t know, yes, Manchester United there in the Andes mountains—was that it? I don’t remember where—their plane crashed there and they were stuck there in winter, nobody could get to them, they didn’t even know where they were. They couldn’t get out, and they had nothing to eat because everything was frozen, and they had to draw lots and eat one of their friends so that the rest could stay alive. Now the question is whether that fits moral principles or not. If you say the overall good, or maximum good for the maximum number of people, seemingly that is the required result. And there are many people who say: wait, if that is the required result, then it’s a sign that the rule is not correct. That can’t be the result—it just doesn’t fit, okay?

So on the face of it, that sounds absurd. If that is your rule, what do you mean, if there is a case that doesn’t fit then it’s not the rule? If that is the rule, then fine, that’s what you should do in this case. No. Because many times I have an intuition of what is morally right and what is morally wrong, and the rules come to try to approximate the intuition that I have. The rules are not the thing that is truly right. The rules are some formulation or conceptualization of the intuitions that I have; the intuitions are the thing that is right. That is really what guides me morally, and by the way I think this is true for everyone. In the end, the moral decisions we really make are not made from rules; we make them from intuition. Very often we use rules or think with rules in order to distinguish between cases or compare cases, but in the very end the decision is not because of the rules we arrived at. The rules only helped us organize the picture for ourselves; in the very end we make the decision with intuition.

And therefore this game, or this delicate dance, between rules and intuition, or wisdom and understanding, yes, kindness and justice, justice and kindness—that is a game in which both sides are necessary. That means we cannot give up either one of them. Kindness is the true thing, but justice is us. We cannot deal with kindness without some mediation of rules, without thinking through rules. It is impossible to think without rules. To think means to derive rules—that is what thinking is. I don’t know a human being who can think without rules. But our initial intuitions are not rules; they tell us directly what is true in this particular case, not through rules. Here it seems to me that it is such and such, this is permitted, that is forbidden, things of that kind. The rules come to help me put this into a framework, to rule in places where I have no intuitive position of my own, to help me generate my intuition through various rules and this kind of thinking as I described earlier. But sticking to the rules—sticking to rules is a great mistake. Just as sticking to justice, we talked about the Soviet Union and all those examples, sticking to justice is a very great mistake, and in that sense Amos Oz is right. When he says we cling so tightly to the furniture in the room that we end up bound and completely petrified. That is true not with respect to precedents, and not with respect to the texts we have, but yes with respect to rules. And to cling to rules is a mistake. Clinging to rules really does prevent creativity. But abandoning rules also neutralizes creativity. Meaning, Amos Oz’s alternative, where there are no rules at all and he believes in nothing, also does not allow creativity. Creativity exists only where there are rules, but I understand that the rules are an approximation to the real thing. Then I understand where one can deviate from them a bit and where not, and I still justify it through rules because that is how one thinks, that is how we work. We have no other way to work.

Many times, in the context of the legal world for example, there are the contemporary arguments about legal imperialism from the school of Aharon Barak, about what is called judicial legislation. That is, when a judge is actually doing things that in essence are legislation rather than interpretation. And then the claim, seemingly a justified one, says that a judge cannot legislate; he was not chosen to legislate, he was chosen to interpret the law and apply it. The legislator is the legislator, the one elected to be a legislator. But that is naïveté, or innocence. Because there is no such thing as interpretation without a speculative dimension, a dimension of legislation. The law never tells you in an unequivocal way what is supposed to be done in a given case that comes before you. Because reality is always more complex than the rules of the law. Applying the rules of the law to reality always requires some sort of interpretation, some sort of understanding of where yes and where no and to what extent yes and to what extent no. And therefore in Jewish law too, we spoke about the fact that there is an entire category of acting beyond the strict letter of the law. If the Torah wants us to do it, then let it write it. Why does it leave it outside? Because there are things you cannot put inside. Reality is much more complex than our cognitive patterns. And in order to apply our cognitive patterns to reality, this is not a deductive machine. You cannot simply derive from those rules what applies to the private case and implement it. It does not work that way. That means you also need to be, in a certain sense, a legislator.

Now it’s a question of dosage and a question of how much, and of course whoever doesn’t like a given ruling will say that it is judicial legislation; he’ll come out against judicial legislation. But if the judicial legislation favored him, then he would support it. So of course we also come to these discussions with positions. But at the principled level, apart from positions, you have to understand: there is no such thing as interpretation without legislation, and vice versa. There is no such thing. It doesn’t work. If you think the legislator can determine rules and the judge will merely apply the rules and that’s it, then you don’t know what you’re talking about. It is impossible to apply rules. There is no such thing. Every case is a different case. This pretension of putting everything into a system of rules is a childish pretension. There is no chance whatsoever of doing it. Of course, you can say that everything has to come out of the rules, and what doesn’t come out of the rules is a legal vacuum, a lacuna. And then the law has nothing to say—do whatever you want. But then everything will come out as a lacuna. The law will say nothing. So if someone thinks there is another option, in my view he is deeply mistaken.

All right, I nevertheless want to move closer to our conclusions. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—Rosh Hashanah is the Day of Judgment. And Yom Kippur is usually associated with kindness. On Yom Kippur, the Holy One, blessed be He, forgives us, pardons us—that is the attribute of kindness. What exactly is the connection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, between justice and kindness? What is the movement that goes from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur? Why does Rosh Hashanah come first and then Yom Kippur?

I think that in creation, as I said in the first Rashi on Genesis, one of the first ones in Genesis, he says that the Holy One, blessed be He, thought to create the world with the attribute of justice, and saw that it could not endure, therefore He joined to it the attribute of mercy. So regarding the way creation works, it is clear that first there was an idea, and then there are rules that implement the idea, right? Also when you come to carry out some task, you need to define what the task is, and then you look for the ways to get to that task. You begin with the idea itself, and then you build certain rules that will implement or reach that task, right? Therefore it is clear that… in the coming into being, kindness precedes justice.

But in deciphering, it works the other way around. In deciphering, first of all you try to understand the ways, the rules, and from that perhaps you can also try to understand what the idea was. Yes, in the context of interpreting Talmudic passages for example, or also in science, you begin first of all by trying to describe. What in philosophy of science is called a phenomenological theory and an essential theory. A phenomenological theory is simply a formula that describes what happens, the relation between variables. What happens factually. After that you try to find an essential theory that explains the relations that you found. The relations are basically just a generalization of the facts and producing from them a general law. But that is simple induction. When you move to explanations, that is what is called abduction. Abduction is an attempt to produce a theory that explains the inductive product, the general law that you—yes, in black-body radiation this was very prominent. The first stage was, I think Einstein didn’t even do this stage—the first stage was some formula that showed how the radiation of a black body is distributed according to wavelength. Meaning, which kinds of radiation, how much comes out at each wavelength. And then suddenly Einstein says: wait, I can actually explain this formula by assuming there are photons, particles of light. Okay? And that is basically how his discovery worked. First there was a phenomenological law, a formula that describes. Because until then they only knew that radiation of one wavelength comes out like this, of another wavelength like that. Someone generalized and said: this probably obeys this formula. There is some general formula—plug in the wavelength and it will tell you how much comes out, what energy comes out at each wavelength. And then Einstein comes and says: okay, now I have a general phenomenological formula, behavioral, a description of the actual behaviors. And then Einstein comes and tries to look for a theory that explains this phenomenological theory, right?

So we first of all examine what happens, the rules of what happens. But the theory that explains this is basically trying to understand what is really there behind those rules, what those rules are describing. Okay? Now the theory too can be explained with rules, and behind them one can also try to look for rules. Einstein dreamed of a unified field theory too. So of course one can continue this process further as well. But in principle, in the process of deciphering nature, the Holy One, blessed be He, created nature and therefore there were rules that implemented what He wanted. When we decipher it, it works the other way around. We try to understand what the laws of nature are, and then from the laws we try perhaps to understand what is actually happening behind them, and perhaps even, for someone who wants, to guess where they are aiming, what they are trying to achieve. Maybe—and that is already really very speculative.

So too in Jewish law. The sages created something, and they created it because they thought that this is what is right. And afterward, of course, in order to implement what is right, they established some kind of rule. A rule that also often has exceptions, there are “they did not distinguish,” there are all kinds of things like that, but they established a rule. We do not know what the sages wanted, or what the Torah wanted in the reason behind the verse, okay? We try to understand the rule, and from that rule we try to understand what stands behind it. And of course one must always remember that the rule is some kind of approximation, and therefore it will not always truly lead us straightforwardly to what stands behind it. We have to maneuver between kindness and justice.

In the context of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we begin with Rosh Hashanah, which is the Day of Judgment. Then Yom Kippur comes, which is kindness. Yes, meaning when in the end we try to understand where we stand, when we try to understand where we stand or to correct our ways—let’s talk about the Ten Days of Repentance as a process. When we want to correct our ways during the Ten Days of Repentance, we basically have to begin with justice. What does that mean? There are rules. The kingship of the Holy One, blessed be He. The king basically determines the rules, and we are subject to His authority. And all we know is what He demands of us; Him Himself we cannot grasp. And this acceptance of the yoke is basically the coronation of Rosh Hashanah. Now what does that coronation mean? In principle, it means giving force to the system of the Holy One’s desires, to Jewish law. Let’s talk right now about transgressions in the halakhic sense. On Rosh Hashanah I basically recreate the commitment to Jewish law. Is that justice or kindness? On the one hand, I am creating something ex nihilo, not on the basis of what came before; somehow that is called kindness. On the other hand, that is where I create justice—the commitment to rules. That is basically the Day of Judgment. On the Day of Judgment you seat the Holy One, blessed be He, on the throne of judgment; you basically acknowledge His kingship. Okay? After that you begin to repent. Why? Because once there are rules and you know that you are committed to them, once you have internalized that you are committed to them, now you check: did I follow them, did I not follow them, yes okay, not okay. You try to return to that commitment that you accepted upon yourself on Rosh Hashanah. That is the Ten Days of Repentance.

What happens on Yom Kippur? After all, it says: anyone who says the Holy One, blessed be He, is indulgent—his insides will be given up. The Holy One, blessed be He, gives up nothing. So how does that fit with the idea that the Holy One, blessed be He, inclines toward kindness, forgives us and pardons us and so on? This is the famous question, and all kinds of answers have been given this way and that way. I don’t know them, but I think the explanation is quite simple. The Holy One, blessed be He, deviates from the rules when He forgives us. We violated the rules, we did something that was not according to Jewish law, we broke the rules. According to the rules, we should get punished. When the Holy One, blessed be He, forgives us, He is going beyond the rules. In that sense it is an inclination toward kindness, because it is leaving justice and moving toward kindness. But “whoever says the Holy One, blessed be He, is indulgent…” because it is not indulgence. If you think the rules are the thing that is truly right, then deviating from the rules really is indulgence—the rules are the right thing. But if you understand that the rules are not the right thing, that the rules are an approximation to something that really is the right thing and it does not always fit the rules, and when someone repents then truly he deserves to be forgiven—he deserves to be forgiven. True, according to the rules, you committed a transgression and you deserve punishment; there are no games with the rules. But on Yom Kippur the Holy One, blessed be He, inclines toward kindness, and that is not indulgence; it is the real thing. That is what He wants. What He wanted was that; the rules He made as an approximation, because we need to live within rules.

Whoever tried to give up the rules and do what seemed to him to be what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants was left with nothing. Those who gave up the formal halakhic system familiar to us were ultimately left with nothing from Judaism. Their Judaism is roughly what people say today: my Judaism is democracy, humanism, and the brotherhood of nations. Nothing remained of the actual thing. So clearly you cannot be exempt from the rules, but at the same time you have to understand that the rules are not the thing itself. Therefore when you say kindness, it does not mean a deviation from what is true. We usually think that kindness is a deviation from justice, from what is right. No. It is a deviation from justice, but justice is not what is right. What is right is kindness. Justice is the approximation; justice is the deviation. All year long we have to live with that deviation because we have to work with rules, like with anything else that we try to understand through rules because that is our way of understanding things. We do not know how to work without rules. So therefore they defined rules for us, halakhic rules that keep thickening over the generations, as I said before. But all these things are approximations. In the end, the real thing is what those rules are trying to approximate. And when you really want to do the real thing, it does not come out fitting the rules. Therefore when we speak about deviating from the rules, that is not a synonym for indulgence. That is not correct. When you deviate from the rules, that is not indulgence. When you deviate from the rules, that is truth itself. The rules are a kind of indulgence—they are an indulgence to human nature. Human nature cannot live without rules that tell it what yes and what no, without justice. But that is not the right thing.

The Holy One, blessed be He, saw that the world could not endure with the attribute of justice, so He joined to it the attribute of mercy. But clearly, originally, at the base of justice sits the attribute of kindness. Right? Mercy is already after there is justice—I then show mercy, I deviate from justice. Kindness precedes justice. Mercy comes after justice. Mercy brings you back, after there is justice, back to the kindness that was really the basis on which justice was built. And therefore when we ask this question—how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, gives in, after all it says that whoever says the Holy One, blessed be He, is indulgent—there is a mistaken assumption in the question, so I am not looking for answers. The question is not correct. Deviating from justice is not a deviation from the truth. On the contrary—justice is not the truth.

Many times, in the context of Purim, this issue comes up for me. On Purim, the halakhic authorities write that Purim is like Yom Kippur—really Yom Kippur is like Purim, meaning. About Purim it says in various halakhic authorities—this starts with Maharil Mintz, who gathered many such things—that there are all kinds of things that do not fit the law. It became customary to wear rabbinically prohibited mixed fabrics on Purim. Now usually we understand that it became customary to permit wearing rabbinically prohibited mixed fabrics on Purim. I think the intention is that it became customary to wear rabbinically prohibited mixed fabrics on Purim, not merely to permit wearing them. There is an idea specifically to wear rabbinically prohibited mixed fabrics on Purim. “Until one does not know the difference between cursed is Haman and blessed is Mordechai.” All kinds of things that are basically seen as either forbidden or very inappropriate during the rest of the year are fine on Purim. Damages—yeshiva boys running about who caused damage—there is Shulchan Arukh about this, all kinds of things. There is a whole list of things. Costumes too—where ordinarily it is forbidden to dress as a woman, or to dress in various ways of that sort. All kinds of things that involve prohibition, or at least things that are not proper, are done on Purim. Why are they done?

The sages, I think—the sages say, right? It’s not the Zohar or something—that in the future all the festivals will be nullified except for Purim. And the Hebrew Bible except for the Scroll of Esther. Okay? What is the idea? Because all the rules that we know, the entire world that we know, is a world built on certain rules, including rules of nature, including rules of Jewish law, all kinds of rules of that sort. In the future, we arrive at some corrected world in which what truly ought to be conducted will actually be conducted, not the approximations within which we lived until then. Therefore what will remain there is only Purim. Because on Purim they really signal to us that that justice to which we are supposed to cling so strongly all year long and try not to deviate from one bit to either side—on Purim they tell us: know that this whole story is only because we cannot function otherwise. But a truly repaired world—what will remain after our whole world has passed, what will remain in the future—will be entirely Purim. In the end what will remain there is truth itself, not the juridical approximations to which we were accustomed all that time until then, yes? in our world.

And on a smaller scale, I think this is also true for our daily conduct. It comes to teach us something also on days that are not Purim. When we conduct ourselves day to day, we need to understand that on the one hand there are rules, and Jewish law works with rules, and we are supposed to act according to the rules. On the other hand, one has to understand that there is judicial legislation even in the application of rules. Meaning, there are situations in which a person has to understand that the rules are not the truly right thing that should be done here, or that they need to be applied differently or interpreted differently, because the rules are not the real thing. We cannot avoid clinging to them; it is impossible to function in the world without rules. But we do need to remember all the time that the whole thing is only an approximation, and the truth lies at the base. It is the approximation of something that itself is the truth, and not the rules themselves.

Therefore very often the attitude that if someone did something not according to the rules then he is a criminal or something like that—you have to see the circumstances, you have to understand the meaning of the situation. Maybe one example—since I still have a little time, I’ll give that example. There are quite a few examples where one can see a halakhic ruling in a very extreme situation, a ruling that does not fit the rules, the rules of Jewish law. There are several contexts.

For example, there was once a series of articles in Yated Ne’eman that I saw about someone named Rabbi Gibraltar, who was in the Kovno ghetto, survived the Holocaust, and afterward was a rabbi in Italy. His son wrote a series of articles about what happened there in the ghetto. And Rabbi Gibraltar held that there are no monetary laws in the ghetto. None. Meaning, there is no theft, no private property, nothing. He would lend money to people, for instance; after the Holocaust they came to repay him, and he said, that money is not mine, you do not have to return it. Meaning, there is no ownership of money in the ghetto. That was his claim, and there are all kinds of implications, really crazy implications there, but that’s not our issue right now. Why? That was his claim.

Now on that there came out some contrary article by someone who dealt with monetary law, and he argued: well, maybe he didn’t have books there or whatever, but it’s not exactly… it doesn’t work according to the rules of Jewish law. It isn’t correct according to Jewish law. I’m not judging him and all that, but it isn’t correct according to Jewish law. And that really irritated me, because I think that as a matter of conception—and there the penny dropped for me—if someone is living in a very, very extreme situation that is very far from the place where I stand, I cannot know whether what he did was right or not. Because you need to live the situation itself in order to understand what is really right to do in that situation and what is not.

And my claim, afterward I tried to fit it directly into the frameworks of monetary law, to explain why it is really also correct. But for me the starting point was that Rabbi Gibraltar’s description was testimony, not an opinion. Meaning, he is testifying before me what someone who lived inside that situation thinks. I, who cannot imagine what it means to live inside such a situation, have no way to express a position as to whether he is right or not. All I can do is try to understand or conceptualize the considerations he made and try afterward to fit them into familiar halakhic frameworks. But I cannot tell him, no, you weren’t right because it doesn’t fit the rules. Again, if it’s an ignoramus, that’s something else. But if a halakhic decisor is sitting inside a situation—even in less extreme cases—think about women’s singing, all right? Women’s singing. If you ask decisors, usually they will tell you it is forbidden to go to a female singer’s performance. Now I assume those same decisors are honest people, and they themselves have never been to a female singer’s performance because in their opinion it is forbidden, okay? So they don’t know what it is. They don’t know. Someone who does not live in the culture in which this whole thing takes place does not understand why people go. Now when you ask decisors, it is obvious to them that you go there because there are sexual impulses there and you want to stimulate your desire. That’s why you go—why else would you go hear a female singer? Try explaining to them that you go to hear her because she sings beautifully, she simply has a beautiful voice, her songs are wonderful, and I really love hearing them. Musical enjoyment. That’s all. And not because I am completely indifferent to sexual stimuli, but that’s not the reason I go, and it won’t always even be aroused. Because when a person is inside that situation, someone who is detached from that situation sees everything as some terrible arouser of passions. But someone who lives within that situation does not look at it in the sexual aspect; many times he looks at it in the musical aspect.

Now try explaining that to someone who has never experienced it. And here it isn’t something as extreme as the Holocaust, but still it is far from the world of the average older decisor, sitting wrapped up in his room. So he cannot express a position about it; he cannot say what is forbidden and what is permitted because he does not understand the situation. He does not understand the situation—you cannot express a position on such a thing. What does that really mean? After all, seemingly what is the problem? He knows the rules of Jewish law, he applies them. Describe the situation to him and he will tell you what the rules of Jewish law say. The answer is that this is not correct, because applying the rules of Jewish law to a situation is not deduction. The rules of Jewish law are an approximation, and you need to understand the situation very well and directly in order to know how and whether to apply the rules of Jewish law to it. Applying the rules of Jewish law is not simply deduction: I have the rules, there is a private case, boom, I apply the rules to the private case and that’s it. It doesn’t work that way.

If you do not know the situation and do not understand it from the inside—yes, the best example of this, you know it, there is an example called Mary’s room. Whoever wants can see it on Wikipedia. Mary’s room means: Mary was a physicist, she worked in optics. This is of course a thought experiment. She worked in optics and was a genius who knew all of optics backward and forward, and every wavelength, what it does in every situation and how it disperses and everything that happens to it, okay? Now she went out—rather, she lived her whole life and functioned inside a black-and-white room. Black and white. There was anti-what’s-it-called, not what’s-it-called, not anti-what’s-it-called. Then at some point she left the room and suddenly saw something red. And the question is whether she learned something new. Obviously yes, right? She had no idea what red is. We said red is an electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength—that’s red. But she had no idea what red is, even though she is an expert in optics. Because the wave is what produces the experience of red in my consciousness when it hits my retina. But red is not something you can learn in a physics class, what red is. You can understand what a wave of such-and-such a wavelength does in every situation. That is, there is some kind of direct acquaintance with things: you can completely understand the rules that operate regarding them, but you don’t understand the situation itself, what it really means. What is this situation? What is red? I know everything that an electromagnetic wave of such-and-such a wavelength will do, but I don’t know what red is.

Likewise, you know all the laws of monetary matters, all correct—but you do not understand the situation of a ghetto where any child can shoot you in the head and nobody will do anything to him. So what relevance does ownership even have in such a situation? Think about—I gave the example there—think about two people in an elevator and the cable snaps. Now the elevator is at the height of 40 floors, okay? The elevator is hurtling downward, and it’s obvious that within 10 seconds they will die, be completely smashed, there is no chance whatsoever. Fine? Now one of them asks the other—or the other has a pen in his pocket—he asks him for the pen: I want to write a farewell letter to my family. The other says no, absolutely not, that’s theft, don’t take it. He takes the pen, writes with it, thereby steals the pen from him, and sends that letter to his family as a letter. Did he commit theft? According to the rules of Jewish law, yes. But it seems to me that someone who lives inside such a situation can feel directly: what relevance is there to talk about theft here? Ten seconds from now he and the pen will be crushed together; he has nothing to do with that pen. In such a situation it makes no sense to speak of concepts of ownership. I don’t know where this comes from, I have no source to say such a thing, but it may be that when you live inside such a situation, if you are a Torah scholar and a decisor and you are consciously thinking through all the halakhic aspects, then you can decide that in such a situation there are no laws of ownership, and therefore there are no laws of theft either. And that is basically the situation of the ghetto, okay?

And therefore many times the application of the rules to the situation before us is not deduction. There is something in understanding the situation that tells me intuitively what is right and what is not. And that is the real thing. The rules are an approximation, and the approximation does not always work; in extreme cases it certainly does not work.

[Speaker C] Could a machine ever say something like that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I’m writing about now on my website. I wrote one column, and now I’m writing the second. Okay, we’ll stop here. May you be inscribed and sealed for good.

[Speaker C] People once said that someone who issues halakhic rulings about elevators on the Sabbath should live on the seventh floor and not on the first floor, so that he feels the need.