Individual and Community – Lesson 7
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The motivation for the series and the puzzle of right and left
- The moral principles: the law of the pursuer and “be killed rather than transgress”
- The metaphysical-ontological debate: individuals versus collectives
- The two hats a person wears and the dualism between individual and collective
- Sodom, Abraham, and Maimonides: proportionality between collective judgment and individual rights
- Responsibility for harming non-involved people and the “either this or that” dilemma
- Historical examples: Normandy, Dresden, and bombings as a wartime necessity
- Collective rights, sovereignty, and the corporation as a useful fiction
- Martyrs, memorial patterns, and the interview with the fallen officer’s brother
- Changes in public culture: Memorial Day, the blurring of camps, and old communism
- Suspicion toward the state, investigations, and mechanisms
- The difficulty of defining right and left and the critique of social science researchers
- An analogy to poetry and art: mixed-up concepts and postmodernism
- Academic despair, politicization, and the crisis in the humanities
- Qualitative research and Yoav Rinon’s book
- Moving to the next series: economic right and left, and the need for a definitional framework
Summary
General overview
The speaker concludes a series on the individual and the collective, and argues that the moral dispute over targeted killings maps onto right and left not because the moral principles themselves are disputed, but because the deeper debate is metaphysical-ontological, about the nature of social reality: whether the conflict is between individuals or between collectives. He presents the law of the pursuer alongside the rule of “be killed rather than transgress” with regard to murder as an agreed framework, and explains that the practical gap arises from the question whether the “non-involved” are seen as part of the collective pursuer or as a third party. He illustrates the distinction between collective thinking and personal thinking through Abraham’s argument over Sodom, through models of punishment and collective responsibility, and through a radio interview in which the interviewer speaks in personal language while the interviewee answers in national language. He adds that modern reality mixes the categories, making it hard today to define right and left, and from there extends the point to the crisis of definitions in the humanities, to postmodernism, and to “qualitative research” as a substitute for organized claims.
The motivation for the series and the puzzle of right and left
The speaker presents the motivation for discussing the individual and the collective as an attempt to characterize a fundamental difference between right and left through the question of why a moral argument over targeted killings consistently splits along ideological lines. He argues that the correlation exists even though there are exceptions, and that it cannot be sufficiently explained as merely a matter of different moral preferences. He places the question within a broader context of political and security worldviews that dictate how moral questions are resolved in practice.
The moral principles: the law of the pursuer and “be killed rather than transgress”
The speaker presents two central halakhic principles: the law of the pursuer, which requires killing a pursuer in order to save the pursued, and “be killed rather than transgress” regarding murder, which forbids saving yourself at the cost of another person’s life. He says both principles are agreed upon and are not the focus of the dispute, even though there seems to be a contradiction between them, which he says he already explained is not really a contradiction. He describes the dilemma as oscillating between whether it is permissible to harm the “non-involved” in order to thwart a threat, and the prohibition against harming a “third party” who is not a pursuer.
The metaphysical-ontological debate: individuals versus collectives
The speaker argues that behind the dispute over harming innocents stands a metaphysical debate about how one sees reality: as a conflict between individuals organized in a society, or as a conflict between collectives with independent existence. He presents the left as a view that places the individual at the center and therefore sees the non-involved as a third party who is not a pursuer, and the right as a national view that sees the collective as the entity acting on the field, with individuals as its expressions. He explains that when the collective is the pursuer, any membership in the opposing collective strengthens the perception of threat, though conditions still apply, such as the possibility of “saving him by injuring one of his limbs,” and therefore there is no blanket permission to harm anyone who belongs to the collective.
The two hats a person wears and the dualism between individual and collective
The speaker argues that every person has “two hats”: an individual hat and a collective hat, and he uses this to explain the tension between public responsibility and the rights and lives of individuals. He gives examples such as Maimonides’ remarks about the judgment of Rosh Hashanah, in which a city, a country, and a person are judged, and the principle of “do not be intimidated,” alongside the IDF ethical code that does not send a soldier on a suicide mission even though it may command him to take risks. He warns against completely subordinating the individual to the collective and calls that fascism, and instead proposes a dualist view that recognizes both levels at once.
Sodom, Abraham, and Maimonides: proportionality between collective judgment and individual rights
The speaker returns to Abraham’s argument with the Holy One, blessed be He, over Sodom, and interprets it as a debate over punishing a collective when righteous individuals exist within it. He explains that the numbers Abraham proposes express a consideration of proportionality, because a significant number of righteous people increases the weight of the individual hat against the collective decision to destroy. He emphasizes that the possibility that there are righteous people in a wicked city illustrates the duality in which individuals can be good while the whole functions wickedly, and that the decision remains a dilemma with no algorithmic solution, only judgment, proportions, and common sense.
Responsibility for harming non-involved people and the “either this or that” dilemma
The speaker grapples with the sense of moral injustice in harming people who are not guilty on the individual level, and argues that the alternative is harm to non-involved people on his own side, so there is no clean option here. He says that when there is no “clean” way to survive, he is morally at peace with a decision made within the dilemma, because one cannot justify why “his” innocents are more deserving of death. He ties this back again to the distinction between unnecessary harm, which is avoided when one can strike only the pursuer, and situations in which the struggle itself creates unavoidable collateral harm.
Historical examples: Normandy, Dresden, and bombings as a wartime necessity
The speaker cites Antony Beevor’s book D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, which argues that bombings intended to block German reinforcements caused the deaths of sixty thousand French civilians, including the destruction of Renault factories and workers’ neighborhoods. He says Churchill opposed it and reduced the scope, but did not deny that it could be justified in principle. He distinguishes between harm to French people, which one might argue was part of a collective sacrifice for their liberation, and the bombing of cities in Germany such as Dresden, which today’s norms would view as a war crime. He notes that the framework of “the laws of war” hides undefined concepts, and that here too he does not claim to have a full solution for issues like the atomic bombing of Japan.
Collective rights, sovereignty, and the corporation as a useful fiction
The speaker argues that talk of “rights of collectives” is inherently right-wing in the structure he has presented, whereas the core of left-wing thinking has difficulty speaking about a people’s ownership of a land. He explains that sovereignty is the translation of ownership into the world of collectives, and brings a Talmudic example from tractate Bava Batra about a Torah scroll belonging to a city that was stolen, where the city’s residents are considered interested parties and are therefore disqualified from giving testimony, so two people are removed from the community in order to testify and then returned. He presents the left-wing view as a quantitative model in which the people are an aggregate of individuals and categories like state and corporation are useful fictions for efficient management, whereas a right-wing view can see them as ontically real entities that act and are acted against.
Martyrs, memorial patterns, and the interview with the fallen officer’s brother
The speaker describes an article he read about patterns of commemorating movement martyrs, and says he found that the right commemorates in a collective language of dedication to an idea and belonging to a chain, while the left commemorates in a personal language of describing the person, his character, and the emotional void he left behind. As evidence, he cites a radio interview in which Ilana Dayan tries to ground bereavement on the personal plane of relationship and emotion, while Eyal Gelman describes his brother as having “fallen in battle” within a “one-hundred-and-fifty-year campaign,” linking it to a continuum of fighters and to the ideal of “Israeli heroism.” He concludes that the stylistic gap reflects the two forms of looking at individual and collective, even when in practice both are mixed together.
Changes in public culture: Memorial Day, the blurring of camps, and old communism
The speaker argues that patterns of commemoration in the State of Israel have, over the years, shifted from early collectivism to personal emphasis, and he describes Memorial Day as having become “completely personal” through songs, family stories, and experiences. He says the public has become somewhat more right-wing, but that the new right absorbs individualistic elements, so the old definitions are less sharp. He recalls attending a father’s funeral in a deeply communist family from Yad Hanna, where they hardly spoke about the person but about his deeds, where “the party wreath” was laid down, and the atmosphere was one of collectivist leftism that he calls “real left” and an extinct species. In the same breath he identifies the phrase “oil on the wheels of the revolution” as communist, and presents “victims of peace” as a remnant of old collectivist discourse.
Suspicion toward the state, investigations, and mechanisms
The speaker accepts the claim that the difference also expresses itself in the willingness to accuse, attack, and investigate the system, and formulates it by saying that a left-wing person sees the state as an external force against him and as a “necessary evil” that threatens to swell beyond its role. He explains that left-wing rights discourse is based on preventing the collective from interfering with the individual, because the collective is “a golem that has risen against its creator.” He compares this to the response of the interviewee, who is not interested in friendly-fire mistakes at the tactical level because at the level of national meaning this is all “us,” and in that way connects once again the perception of the state as a substantive entity with moral and practical positions.
The difficulty of defining right and left and the critique of social science researchers
The speaker refers to a book by Ellinger and Hershkowitz on right and left, and argues that they arrive at the conclusion that the concepts “do not exist today,” which he rejects as a failure of researchers who become desperate in the face of a complex phenomenon and therefore declare that no such thing exists. He argues that there are “theoretical cores” of right and left even if reality mixes them together, and criticizes the tendency to replace systematic characterization with the claim that everything is context-dependent. He links this difficulty to the difficulty of defining other concepts in a complex modern world.
An analogy to poetry and art: mixed-up concepts and postmodernism
The speaker says that he looked for the entry “poetry” in the Hebrew Encyclopedia and did not find it, and he interprets that as an unwillingness on the part of poetry scholars to define the concept once the boundaries between poem and prose had become blurred. He describes how, in the postmodern world, any text can be included as “poetry” and any object as “art” according to institutional context such as a museum, and gives an example from the Israel Museum of a work consisting of an “empty picture” with the title “wooden frame with a metal hanger.” He adds a story about a book by Kishon built almost entirely out of quotations from art critics, to show how many words can say nothing, and mentions an abandoned idea of using statistical measurement of correlations to distinguish between a planned work and spilled paint.
Academic despair, politicization, and the crisis in the humanities
The speaker argues that postmodernism is the other side of research despair that refuses to define boundaries, and therefore “art is whatever is displayed in a museum,” and everything becomes politics about who gets admitted into institutions. He describes a situation in which discourse about “schemes” reflects a world with no real justifications, so everything is interpreted as a hegemonic struggle, and he sees in this the loss of the concept of artistic value and of intellectual content. He accuses the humanities of having “cooked this up with their own hands” by turning the field into a livelihood mechanism of cliques and prizes, and suggests that the right approach is to try to define vague concepts and build a conceptual framework that allows for complexity without dissolving into zero meaning.
Qualitative research and Yoav Rinon’s book
The speaker refers to Yoav Rinon’s book on “the crisis of the humanities” and presents Rinon’s claim that the attempt to adopt quantitative models from the natural sciences destroys the humanities. He disagrees and argues that what destroys the humanities is “the inability to say anything,” and he presents “qualitative research” as a label that legitimizes personal impression instead of orderly research with groups and criticism. He describes a revolution in which research focuses on individuals and turns into scholarly writing based on a handful of interviews, and contrasts that with an approach in which research creates general tools and only the application is tailored to the individual.
Moving to the next series: economic right and left, and the need for a definitional framework
The speaker says that what remains is to explain how “the non-political right, the economic right” connects to the framework he has presented, and he states that this will be the first topic of the next series. He repeats the claim that current mixing makes it difficult to characterize right and left sharply, but that precisely for that reason the attempt to define concepts and distinguish between ideological roots and historical syntheses is, in his view, essential. He concludes that the conceptual framework he has proposed does not solve everything, but it improves our ability to discuss proportions, proportionality, and moral questions within a complex world.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is this? This is some interview that was on this morning. In a moment we’ll listen to a bit of it, because I think it illustrates very well what I wanted to talk about. It really caught my ear this morning. Basically, today we’re finishing this series, and I want to talk a little about what was really the motivation for starting to deal with this whole issue of the individual and the collective. It’s a kind of question of whether we can try to characterize or define the difference between right and left in general. I’ll briefly summarize where we were last time, and from there I’ll continue a bit, and maybe this will also somehow connect to the next series, or the series after that, we’ll see. What we saw, basically, I presented it through a question, or a kind of puzzle: why is the moral debate over targeted killings, or killings in general, split between right and left? In other words, why are ideological worldviews—political and other ones, even security-related ones—connected to a question whose essence is a moral question? Seemingly, the moral debate is independent of the political debate. You can support harming innocents or oppose harming innocents based on different moral considerations, depending on what your moral worldview is. And the question of how you relate to the Land of Israel, or what you think the political solution here should be, seems like a different question. What is the connection between those two questions? Why does the right generally support such killings and the left oppose them? Broadly speaking, of course there are always exceptions, and not everything of this kind is opposed by the left, and maybe not everything of this kind is supported by the right either. But generally there is quite a clear correlation between these questions. And my claim was that behind the debate over targeted killings, over harming innocents, there is not really a moral debate, but a metaphysical, ontological one. Of course at the bottom line there is some moral debate here, but the way to that moral debate passes through a combination of moral principles and metaphysical principles. What do I mean? The moral principles were basically mainly two—though they branch into many details—but broadly two. One of them is the law of the pursuer: if a pursuer comes to kill you, there is a commandment to kill him in order to save the pursued. The second principle—unless you can save him by injuring one of his limbs, and all the details, but broadly that’s the law of the pursuer. And the second principle is “be killed rather than transgress” regarding murder. Meaning, you may not save yourself by taking another person’s life. We discussed the fact that seemingly there is a contradiction between these two principles; I explained why there isn’t. But these are the two principles between which we essentially waver in all these dilemmas. Because these dilemmas revolve around the question of how to relate to the uninvolved people who are there in that same car, or in that same place at which I am shooting. Do they have the status of a pursuer, in which case it is permissible to kill them in order to save myself or save Israelis, or are they a third party, in which case it is forbidden to kill them because you may not harm a third party in order to save the life of a second party—unless that third party is himself a pursuer. And the third party—the pursuer is the first party, right? The third party is someone who is neither the pursuer nor the pursued. So that is forbidden. And my claim was that these two moral principles, which basically define the moral boundaries, are agreed upon. There is no dispute about them. The dispute is not on that plane. The dispute is over how I see reality. In other words: in the reality before me, do those uninvolved people sitting there, say, in the car for the sake of discussion, have the status of a pursuer or not? It is agreed that if they have the status of a pursuer, then it is permissible to kill, and if not, then it is forbidden. The question is whether they have that status. Now what does that depend on? I wanted to argue that it depends on the way one looks at the conflict—or at the world in general; the conflict is just the aspect we’re talking about right now. The question is whether this is a conflict between collectives or a conflict between individuals who are organized within a collective framework, where the collective is basically a kind of social definition but not really something that has independent existence. So if you see your enemies as a collection of individuals, then obviously the uninvolved people—if there’s a one-year-old baby in the car, he is not a pursuer. He is a third party. And not only a one-year-old baby; if he is not involved, then he is not a pursuer. Because the one holding the weapon is the one threatening me, and him I am permitted to harm. But someone else—that is harming one person in order to save my own life, and that is forbidden. So that is the left’s view, the view that basically sees the conflict as a conflict between individuals, because the left in its essence sees the individual as central. I’m speaking now about the contemporary left, not the classic left, the communist left, and so on—we may talk later about the connection. By contrast, the right’s view—the more national, more nationalist view, if you like, for those who want to use that as an insult—is a view that sees the collectives as the players on the field. The individuals are basically expressions of the collective, implementers of the collective conception or the collective goal, and in fact the conflict here is a conflict between collectives. Now once the conflict is between collectives, then anyone who belongs to the collective standing opposite me is my enemy, he threatens me, he is a pursuer, because my pursuer is not the one holding the gun but the collective; the one holding the gun is its hand, the hand pressing the trigger on its behalf. But basically there is some kind of organism standing opposite me. And then I do indeed see them as enemies, and therefore I understand, I perceive, that it is permissible to harm them if that is required in order to save my civilians. As I said earlier, we discussed that this of course does not justify now killing every member of the pursuing collective—not because he lacks the status of a pursuer, but because his killing is not necessary in order to save oneself. And in a place where I can save him by injuring one of his limbs, there is no permission to kill the pursuer. So if I can save myself by killing the one holding the gun, then there is no permission to harm the one who is not holding the gun, because it is enough for me to strike one limb of the collective in order to save myself, so I may not kill all of it or other parts of it. So in the end, that’s not because he is not a pursuer, but because his death is not needed in order to save oneself.
[Speaker B] Basically, when—what I wanted to ask you—the lesson, a question: Abraham’s argument with the Holy One, blessed be He, over Sodom—the collective was corrupted by this and He wanted to punish the collective, so Abraham came and argued, wait, but there are individuals there who aren’t like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So we talked about that, I think, in the previous lesson. Maybe Ezra even raised it.
[Speaker B] That—I don’t remember.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m almost sure, because I even remember the answer I gave, I think.
[Speaker B] I think—I
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] hope I still have it in my head.
[Speaker B] I don’t remember, I’m sure.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We talked about how each person has two hats, right? Like with what Maimonides says about the judgment of Rosh Hashanah, that the city and the country and the individual person are judged, and so on. And we talked about “do not be intimidated,” and about that IDF ethic, yes, the ethical code, which says that you don’t give a soldier an order to go on a suicide mission, even though clearly you do give him an order that will put his life at risk—but not a suicide mission. And then I explained that every person basically wears two hats: he has the individual hat and the collective hat. And in the case of “do not be intimidated,” no—I am not willing to obligate the judge, the halakhic judge, to enter a situation of certain mortal danger for the sake of preserving society, social integrity, the social fabric, social functioning. Why? After all, in the end he is an organ within that collective, and if the collective falls apart then he too is part of that. That’s true, but besides that he is also a private individual, and besides the fact that he is a private individual, I am not willing to completely subordinate the personal side of each individual—and there is such a side—to his collective side. The fact that I accept the existence of collectives does not mean that I do not accept the existence of individuals. That would already be fascism, and fascism subordinates the individual to the collective; it doesn’t really see the individual at all. He’s just oil on the wheels of the revolution. But the view I presented in earlier lessons was a view of doubleness, a dualistic view, which says that every person has two aspects; he is judged in two aspects. Now, many times when you harm a person as part of your struggle against the collective of which he is a part, you are also killing the individual within him, and that is seemingly unjustified. Now, sometimes maybe there is no choice. This is where questions of proportionality may come in. But it is a dilemma, and it doesn’t mean that the moment I see a collective in front of me, then there is no problem at all and I can kill whomever I want. It’s not like that. There are also people there; they also function as individuals. And if on the individual level, for example, they oppose what is going on there—if they support what is happening there, then maybe it is easier to see them as part—we’re talking now about the Palestinians, let’s leave Sodom aside for the moment, we’ll get back to it in a minute—then it’s easier to identify them as part of the pursuing collective that one may harm in order to save oneself. But if there is a person who opposes it—we talked about the people of Shechem, Maimonides on the people of Shechem, and about Stalin and the Soviet Union—so that we did discuss, right? The people of Shechem, yes. So I said that no one is guilty as an individual, but practically speaking the responsibility is a responsibility borne by everyone. You can’t impose responsibility on the collective and exempt all the individuals. Yes, it’s like my grandfather once said about someone, about a well-known rabbi—I heard it from my father, not from him directly, I heard it in his name—that he really loved the Jewish people as a whole, he just didn’t get along so well with the individuals. Meaning, very often reference to “the collective” is a wonderful escape hatch that empties everything of content if you don’t realize it through the individuals who make up that collective. So therefore, to impose responsibility for an action of a collective that I am not prepared to impose on the individuals but only on the collective in general, very often empties things of content. In the legal world they try to do this by relating to corporations. So there is a treasury of the factory or the company or whatever it may be, and you can sue the company or the factory without piercing the corporate veil, yes—without getting to the owners, but by dealing with the factory, because truly the factory has a treasury. Yes, because the factory has a treasury. In other words, the legal world created tools to deal with the corporation not through the individuals. But without really creating such tools—and even there it often doesn’t work, never mind, and many times it works in a distorted way, but never mind, that’s the goal of what they are trying to do there—when you don’t have those tools, harming the collective will in some sense harm the individuals. The collection of individuals is the collective. So when the city is judged on Rosh Hashanah to death because the city functions in a very morally corrupt way, clearly the individuals will suffer, because the city is the collection of individuals. If it were possible to strike the city but leave the individuals alone—for example, to dissolve the city. In the Tower of Babel, for example, that was the issue. In the Tower of Babel, what the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to do was scatter them. Why scatter them? Because basically the conception was that the problem was on the collective level, in the fluidity. Remember? We talked about the properties of the collective that don’t exist in the individuals. And the individuals may have been decent people, and if we separate them and each one lives alone, that would be fine. What I need is to put the collective to death—and as much as possible without harming the individuals. And we discussed that to put the collective to death means to disperse it. To disperse it. Therefore a judge must give up his life, or at least accept mortal danger, in order to judge, because otherwise it would be impossible to live here—not physically. Physically maybe you could still live here. Again, murderers maybe have to be dealt with. But thieves—you could survive that, except nobody would remain here, and it’s obvious that this would dismantle society. It is impossible to live in a place that doesn’t deal with thieves. So this dismantles society not in the physical sense that we stop breathing. Society stops breathing. The collective dies. And that is called a matter of life and death in the halakhic perspective. Even though nobody here dies, society dies here. So here too, when you speak about putting society to death as a sanction—not as a situation that must be treated because there is danger that society might die, but rather because you want to impose a sanction on society after judging it to death on Rosh Hashanah because society functions very badly—you can put society to death without killing the individuals. But sometimes you can’t. Meaning, sometimes harming society—harming society always harms individuals. It does not always kill the individuals, but dispersing the society also harms individuals. Except that sometimes it really harms individuals, and then you have to see whether it is justified or not. Because if on the individual plane they function properly, then they do not deserve that punishment on the individual plane. And then it is a dilemma. One has to decide what to do. On the collective plane it is one way; on the individual plane it is another. So it is a dilemma in which one has to decide what to do, which hat prevails here. Now it seems to me that Abraham’s argument with the Holy One, blessed be He—and now I return to the question of Sodom—was basically that there was judgment here on the collective. Maimonides says, Abraham our forefather says: fine, but there were private individuals there who were righteous. Now true, they did not prevent what was happening in Sodom. If there is no choice, then maybe you have to harm them. But perhaps, he says, spare the city for the sake of the righteous, leave them alive. Maybe it isn’t worth striking the city, because righteous people will also be harmed, and regarding their individual hat it isn’t right to harm them; they do not deserve to be harmed.
[Speaker B] Meaning, the argument was over the level of proportionality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, something like that. Meaning—and that’s also why the argument is about numbers. Why should the number matter? The number is simply this: look, if there is one righteous person, okay, he will suffer unjustly, but what can you do? The city has to be punished. Once it’s already, say, ten percent of the city—about an apostate city, the Talmud in Sanhedrin discusses how many people there are—so a city is one hundred people. Yes, a metropolis is a thousand, I think, and a city is one hundred. I don’t know how many people there were in Sodom, how many people there were in the world at all back then. When we hear the word “city,” we think of New York or Tel Aviv or Petah Tikva. Petah Tikva too is not exactly a small city. But a city in that language could be one hundred people. A Bedouin village of huts. I don’t know what it was there. So when there are ten righteous people in Sodom, that’s ten percent of the city. That’s already a macroscopic slice of the city’s population. That’s not just an anecdote. So there is something there. So he says: all right, then spare the city; there is after all some part there. Maybe scatter them, maybe do something else, but don’t destroy it. But if it’s just one—fine, then not. So that really becomes a question of proportionality. On the contrary, Abraham our forefather’s very perspective—after the Holy One, blessed be He, says that the city, going back to Maimonides, that the city is judged and the person is judged—the Holy One, blessed be He, says this is a wicked city that must be destroyed, and Abraham our forefather says, that doesn’t exclude the possibility—and the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t argue with him—that there may be ten righteous people there. How? A wicked city—how can it contain ten righteous people? Because on the individual plane there are righteous people; on the collective plane it turns out to be wicked. On the contrary, there you really see this dualistic perspective, this dual perspective, which says that there are situations in which the individuals can be fine while the whole looks very bad, or the opposite. Okay? Now the whole question is indeed—this is a dilemma whose answer I don’t know. Here one really does have to enter questions of proportionality and the like. Here I don’t have sharper solutions to replace this vague language of proportionality. Within this framework there is no choice: one has to make common-sense evaluations, and there has to be some conceptual framework within which we work. Maybe one more comment. Ezra isn’t here, because at the end he asked a question and I thought I needed to sharpen it a little more. There was a feeling that some moral injustice was being committed here. You’re taking people who in the end, on the individual level, are not guilty. They are part of the collective, but at the level of guilt, at the level where you judge the person himself, he’s not guilty. What do you want from him? How can you kill him? So here’s the point—I’m telling you this because I think this is what I should have answered there. The alternative is that I do not harm them, and then my people are harmed. And are they guilty? Let’s say there is a threat to Israeli civilians—not even soldiers, as far as I’m concerned that’s a threat in every sense. Not that soldiers’ blood is forfeit—sometimes people think like that. And there is a threat to Israeli civilians or soldiers, and now they tell me: look, but when you fire that missile at this terrorist, you will harm uninvolved people, and they are not guilty. And let’s assume they really are not guilty—a small baby, whatever, he is definitely not guilty. About others you can argue. So fine, they’re innocent—but are my people guilty? Are they also part of the collective that this person somehow belongs to and therefore deserve to die in order to protect him? Now I have to decide. There is no smooth option here.
[Speaker C] Again speaking about the collective—Antony Beevor, in his book D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, says that in order to prevent the movement of German forces, in every place where roads and routes passed through a settlement, they collapsed the houses onto the road, and this cost the lives of sixty thousand French civilians. That’s the number—sixty thousand French civilians, who from the Americans’ point of view actually belong to my collective.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Vichy government—that is, France was divided.
[Speaker C] And this was in the north. Okay. I don’t know the map, but it was in the north. In order to block German reinforcements, it cost the lives of sixty thousand civilians.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, I
[Speaker C] understand. I’m just saying that—plus destroying the Renault factories and the neighborhoods around them, where the workers lived. So you kill the workers so that they won’t produce tanks.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying, on the level of principle, if these really are people who are not part of the collective against which you are fighting, that is indeed a very problematic thing.
[Speaker C] In the Americans’ calculation—Churchill opposed it, tried to reduce the scope, but he did not think it was unjustified in principle.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It was a necessity of war, the focused consideration of the laws of war regarding the collective opposite me. The concept of the laws of war is some kind of rabbit, as I said before, that I don’t know how to deal with. It hides behind it a lot of things that are undefined.
[Speaker B] But what they did then in the war—by today’s norms, the bombing of cities in Germany and killing hundreds of thousands of people, wiping out Dresden completely—that today is a war crime.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] נכון. Now it may be, by the way, that with regard even to the French there is perhaps more justification than in Dresden, in a certain sense. Because with the French you could say: look, they too would have wanted this. The French as a collective, of course—not the individual who was killed; he does not want it. But if you ask the French as a collective, they too were under occupation, they too wanted the Allies to win. Now this is the sacrifice they have to make in order for the Allies to win. So perhaps there was room even for a consideration like that which says: look, I am fighting for you, you need to make certain sacrifices. My soldiers are also dying here now. By contrast, Germans—if you look at them as individuals—what do you want from them? They are not involved. Why are you annihilating them in order to win the war? Anyway, here too I’m saying the map is not—I haven’t solved all the problems, yes, about—
[Speaker B] The atomic bombing in Japan.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, and I didn’t pretend to solve the problems here and say that from now on everything is mathematics and you can derive a simple answer to every question. But I’m saying that this is the conceptual framework within which we are discussing things. And now, of course, within that there are still questions of proportion, proportionality, common sense, and so on. That’s true. Apparently you can’t cover everything with a well-built theory alone, some kind of algorithm like that. But I do think it improves the situation. But I’m saying, with regard to Ezra’s moral question—he kind of rebelled against the fact that I’m building some metaphysical constructions and because of them I harm people who, when you look at them, are not guilty. What do you want from them, literally?
[Speaker C] What? As people said before us. Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So since we’re drawing analogies, let’s actually apply them. My answer to that is: fine, so what should we do? Do nothing? If we do nothing, then my civilians will be killed. Do my civilians somehow deserve to be killed more? Are they less innocent, such that it’s permissible to harm them in order not to deal with this terrorist? After all, if the dilemma is either this or that, I don’t have a clean option. If there is a clean option—if you can stop him by injuring one of his limbs—then you kill only the terrorist, no problem, and the dilemma doesn’t exist. But where there really is a dilemma, in my view I’m completely at peace with it, morally as well. The alternative is that uninvolved people on my side will be killed—why do they deserve to be killed? Okay, so that’s only regarding that question. And then I basically argued—and this was the concluding point—I argued that the outlook underlying the dispute is really a metaphysical outlook on the question of whether what stands before me is a collective or whether what stands before me is a set of individuals. And that’s why it maps onto right and left. Because right and left are really two such forms of outlook: the right tends to see nations, collectives, national thinking; and the left is a more individualistic way of thinking, which sees the nation as a kind of useful fiction. Of course, most of them don’t deny it. The more extreme writers even deny it completely—Sand and the like—but most don’t deny it. They say it’s a useful fiction; it’s good for organizing the world and life within such a framework; we need collectives to serve us. But I don’t really see them as legal entities in any true sense, except perhaps in a fictional sense. In the legal world, I don’t think left-wing people would necessarily object—on the contrary, they’re the ones who… actually I’m not sure—who like the concept of a corporation that neutralizes the responsibility of private individuals. They hate capitalists, so I’m not sure they like the corporate veil, but I’m also not sure every left-wing person must oppose a corporate way of looking at things in the legal world. Still, he’ll see it as a useful fiction, not as a metaphysical truth. Okay? Whereas a right-wing person can see this as some sort of metaphysical truth, an ontic truth. Meaning: there are entities here that I’m dealing with; the corporation really does stand before me, and not the people—not just the people alone. So if that really is the outlook of the right and the left, then we can understand this puzzle of how the moral dispute maps onto the political dispute. Because behind the moral dispute there really sits a mode of perception that also operates on the political plane. And now I’m moving over to our discussion: the political plane too revolves to a large extent around this very question. Do I see nations here, or do I see individuals organized in an efficient way? And if we find some more efficient form of organization, then what? Let’s divide things up, compromise, everything will be fine; the collective doesn’t interest us; each of us will live reasonably, nobody will be endangered, we’ll reach an agreement, everything will be fine. What does it mean, “our right”? The right of the collective? The right to the Land of Israel does not belong to the private individual. The private individual has property rights: if you bought a house here, you have a property right over it, obviously, and one must not harm that. But when you speak of the rights of collectives, that is speech which by its essence is right-wing, in our present-day division. When you say, “This belongs to my people.” Left-wing people are not really prepared to speak in that language. Now, I’m saying the real world is more complex. Left-wing people also speak in that language, but the core of left-wing thought doesn’t really see such a thing—except that none of us is located purely in the core of the right or purely in the core of the left. A mixture.
[Speaker F] Yes, exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m only defining the theoretical cores right now. The world is always more complex, so I’ll talk about that in a moment. But the core of left-wing thought doesn’t even hear this discourse—not because it denies the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh); the person could be religious. A religious person with a left-wing worldview would be the same in this respect: he doesn’t talk in terms of whether the Holy One, blessed be He, promised the Land of Israel to our forefathers or not; he’s not prepared to speak in the language that a land belongs to a people. Fine, fine. Right now there was a problem. So, okay, we need to find some solution. But it’s not some metaphysical outlook that says our collective inherently owns it. Because here, the concept of sovereignty is a translation of the concept of ownership into the world of collectives, into the ghostly world of collectives, yes? A collective generally isn’t an owner of a thing. Sometimes it is, but it generally isn’t—or not only an owner of a thing, let’s put it that way. A collective can also have ownership rights. We talked about the Torah scroll of a city in tractate Bava Batra, right? If a Torah scroll was stolen from a city—did we talk about that?
[Speaker B] No.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No? If a Torah scroll is stolen from a city, the Talmud there discusses who may testify. After all, all the residents of the city who testify about the theft are interested parties with regard to the scroll, and interested parties are disqualified from testimony. So who can testify? The Talmud says: remove two people from the community—meaning, for the purpose at hand, let them leave the community, testify, and then they can return. They are no longer interested parties. And from here the medieval authorities (Rishonim) begin to discuss whether perhaps this is a problem—presumably not against their will, but by agreement.
[Speaker F] Can you deny that you’re talking about a collective? Huh? Can you deny that you’re talking about a collective? “This day you have become a people.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does “you have become a people” mean? It means: here we constituted the fictional entity called the Jewish people.
[Speaker F] Whoever here emphasizes the aspect that performs kindness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. What, is that not true? You say it’s not true, but a left-wing interpretation would say yes. Yes. “The measure is full,” like in Sodom. “The measure is full,” and so we are exiled. But that is treating this collection of individuals as having too much wickedness in it. The Jewish people—that is, people speak about a people. No—no one denies that peoples exist. The question is whether you see the people as a collection of particulars—a quantitative model—or a substantive model. If it’s the quantitative model, then the people are only a collection of particulars, and it’s just convenient for me to relate that way. Even in international relations I relate to peoples. Most leftists are not anarchists. Meaning, they do speak in the language of peoples and claims and all that, but they see it as fiction. They see it as useful fiction. You speak to a group, so you have to speak to the group, like a teacher says to a class, “You are behaving badly now,” or a drill sergeant makes the whole class run because some people were late to formation or weren’t present—and of course he makes run those who were there. The ones not at formation are always spared; that’s the absurdity of collective punishment. But he punishes everyone not because he’s right-wing; he punishes everyone because it’s an efficient way to deal with social problems, with problems involving people. There’s no choice. Very often you have to address this through some group identity to which you belong. And still, behind that sits a quantitative model, not necessarily a substantive one. And therefore a corporation is a fiction in that outlook. But it exists; we create such fictions. It’s useful for us in the legal sphere to treat companies as corporations. So everyone agrees that useful fictions exist. But I still see it as a fiction, and therefore at root I don’t really see here a true justification. I’m in far greater dissonance than, say, a right-wing person would be, if I’m a left-wing person looking at such things. So that’s why the way one looks at the conflict and the way one looks at the problem of eliminating innocent people suddenly maps onto the same type of outlook. That’s why it’s no surprise this divides along right and left.
Now, one of the things I remembered after thinking about this point—I once read an article about patterns of memorializing movement martyrs. “Martyrs” are people who gave their lives for the sanctity of an idea. Originally it’s a Christian term, yes? People who were killed in sanctification of the Name, in sanctification of their god. So they’re called martyrs. But in general it means someone killed for the sanctity of an idea, someone who gave his life for the cause. Shahids?
[Speaker B] What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Shahids, yes, exactly. Those are martyrs. Shahid is, in effect, a translation of martyr, I think. So the article compares the memorial patterns of the right and the left with respect to movement martyrs, yes? Emil Grunzweig is the martyr of the left, and although of course he didn’t give his life voluntarily, they have the same kind of nonsense as the right has—that he died for the idea. He died for the idea, but not because he decided to sacrifice himself; someone threw a grenade at him and he died. And similarly, yes, right-wing people who gave their lives in the army or for the sanctity of settlement or whatever, and they are movement martyrs of the right. And the article shows the memorial patterns and says that the patterns of the right are very distinctly collective patterns. Meaning, when you commemorate a person, when you eulogize him, you describe how much he gave his life for the idea, how devoted he was to the idea, how important the idea is, how much he was part of the group. You speak in collectivist language. And when left-wing people commemorate the movement martyr, they tell you how nice he was and what a good person he was and how much we loved him and what a void he left behind. In other words, the outlook is more personal, often more emotional too. By the way, incidentally, people often attribute excess emotion to the right and reason to the left; in my opinion it’s often the opposite. But in any event, that’s what the article shows. It shows this through various sources; it quotes sources that deal with such martyrs and shows how these patterns operate.
Now here I need the thing I heard this morning. I’ll just give the background. This morning there was an interview by Ilana Dayan on the radio with the brother of the officer who was killed yesterday at the Gush Etzion Junction. His name was Gelman, I think, yes.
[Speaker B] His brother—he’s married to the sister of…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Baniah Sarel, Baniah Sarel, Baniah Sarel.
[Speaker B] Baniah Sarel, yes, married to his sister.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, there was an interview with his brother, and it was just amazing. I was sitting there with my mind already on tonight’s class, and I said, wow, they just handed me exactly what I needed. The point was—and right afterward, incidentally, I heard on Reshet Bet, no, not on 103, I think—Rina Matzliah interviewed that same brother. Right afterward. I don’t know, there was another radio on in the house tuned to 103; we’re fond of that station, it’s totally insane. And there too the same thing: he repeated himself, he had some sort of partly prepared speech, so he literally repeated the same words. And there you can see that Ilana Dayan, who is a clearly left-wing woman, keeps trying to look at the personal layer: who was the person? what was your relationship with him? how much do you miss him? where did your bond develop? And he keeps talking about the meaning of the person in terms of how much he gave his life for an idea, how he is part of the chain of generations and fighters for Gush Etzion. It was just classic. So maybe let’s listen now for a few minutes.
[Speaker D] Almost two years ago I came to a small spring in Gush Etzion, not far from Hadora. It was during filming for a movie about the three soldiers from the Givati Reconnaissance Unit who were killed in battle during Operation Protective Edge near Rafah, among them the commander of the unit, Baniah Sarel. And a little late, Eyal joined us for the meeting; he is married to Baniah’s sister. We talked during and also a bit afterward. He was very open, very honest. Everyone there was still living with the image of Baniah, who was stormy and unconventional. And Eyal too was close to him. Yesterday it struck him too, very close to home, when his brother, Major Eliav, was killed while trying to foil an attack at the Gush Etzion Junction on his way back home while serving in the reserves. Eyal, hello.
[Speaker H] Hello and blessings.
[Speaker D] I wish I had words of comfort, but since yesterday I’ve been thinking about the reversal of roles between you and me now.
[Speaker H] Without a doubt. We’re both about the same age, and now we’re also both part of the family of bereavement. But now the roles have changed.
[Speaker D] Did you manage to get to Shaare Zedek yesterday?
[Speaker H] Yes. I heard about it while I was in reserve duty. I left to go get my parents. I heard about it by virtue of my role; I heard about it very quickly. I took my parents and got to Shaare Zedek; the whole family got there, and also Rinat.
[Speaker D] And on the way in the car, you and your mother and father—did you talk among yourselves, or was there that kind of silence?
[Speaker H] I understood—I understood from the medical condition where we probably stood, but of course I still didn’t want to believe it. And my parents didn’t entirely know what the condition was.
[Speaker D] And you also preferred that they not know?
[Speaker H] Yes, yes. My experience in these areas.
[Speaker D] And when you got to Shaare Zedek, did you still have some hope left, or deep down in your heart…?
[Speaker H] We all still prayed intensely. And we know the team made extraordinary efforts, but today we also know that in the end he was killed on the spot. The resuscitation efforts were indeed enormous efforts, but he was already killed there on the scene.
[Speaker D] You know, what your father said last night at the funeral—that in great pain we accept the judgment upon ourselves—and you said… “As far as I’m concerned, he was killed in battle.” Meaning, the fact that he was hit by our own fire is secondary in this matter. Still, do you want to know more about what happened there, to understand in the end why the soldiers mistakenly shot your brother Eliav?
[Speaker H] Look, by virtue of my role I investigate and debrief every event here in the sector in order to learn and improve and understand how to do it better. But here, in battle, that interests me less, no question. In the end, on the personal level and also on the national level—not on the tactical level of the forces on the ground, because I’m stepping out now from the tactical level as a force in the field—so both on the personal level and on the national level, Eliav fell in battle, and he shot at the terrorist during that battle, and a bullet struck him, a bullet struck him. But in the end, in this campaign—a campaign of 150 years, as I said yesterday—from the first casualty of Israel’s wars in 1873 until our own day, Baniah is in it, Alon Ben-Dodi is in it, who fell in Duvdevan twelve years ago. And it is a campaign, a military campaign, a civilian campaign, that this people has been fighting ever since it left the walls, ever since it decided to be a people that builds its land and builds for itself a state and builds for itself independence and nationhood in order to achieve its realization.
[Speaker D] Tell me, Eyal, when did you speak with Eliav for the last time?
[Speaker H] Eliav was in reserve duty now; he was very busy. We spoke last week.
[Speaker D] And is there something you can tell me
[Speaker H] that will manage
[Speaker D] to convey to me the bond between you?
[Speaker H] Eliav is the brother right after me.
[Speaker D] How many siblings are you altogether?
[Speaker H] We’re six siblings in the family.
[Speaker D] Is he younger than you?
[Speaker H] Four boys—he’s younger than me—and two girls. And ever since we were kids, we were basically always together: to judo class together, to school by shuttle together. For yeshiva he went to Mekor Chaim like Baniah.
[Speaker D] That’s the yeshiva where Baniah studied.
[Speaker H] Yes. He was one class above Baniah; he was a friend of Baniah and close to him. After that, for advanced yeshiva in Gush Katif, he went to the yeshiva where I also studied.
[Speaker D] And there you had an opportunity for more time together.
[Speaker H] For quite a long period. But then I enlisted in the army faster than he did.
[Speaker D] You went to Givati and he went to the Paratroopers, and during Operation Protective Edge, Eyal—Baniah in Rafah with the Givati Reconnaissance Unit, Eliav, who had already become a company commander in that campaign, was an air support officer for an armored brigade. Did you get to talk about what he did there, about the dramatic events his brigade commander described last night at the funeral?
[Speaker H] Eliav was already leading soldiers in Operation Cast Lead; he already had a very, very complex period there. During Cast Lead we met in the field. We were very connected then too—also my older brother Ra’anan and I—from the period in the Givati Reconnaissance Unit. And afterward in Cast Lead too, there was also Baniah and also him, and I meet both of them in the field. And later in Protective Edge, Eliav is inside the field and we don’t really understand what he’s doing.
[Speaker D] But for example, one of the stories the brigade commander told last night was about his insistence on landing a helicopter when an armored company commander was wounded there in one of the battles. Did he later get to meet that company commander, for example?
[Speaker H] I don’t think so; we don’t even know. Eliav and Baniah, if we’re already speaking about the two of them, express for me some ideal of Israeli heroism together. Baniah with the charisma, with the Israeli audacity of daring and moving forward. And Eliav was a quieter type, more calm. Eliav—the humility. He was an enormous Torah scholar. He was always sitting and learning, sitting and learning, really a little King David. He was meticulous in light and weighty matters alike, an outstanding sharp commander. And each of them separately, and both together, in my understanding express some supreme Israeli heroism.
[Speaker D] And is there something, Eyal, is there something you’re already tormenting yourself over that you didn’t manage to do together? Or haven’t you yet had time to think about that?
[Speaker H] Look, on Thursday we had a family gathering of the siblings after a very, very long time, with our parents of course, and it was too short, but it was too short. I think the greatest loss, first of all, is a national loss, and also the loss in the immediate family. But Rina—about Yair, about Yoav, the children, about the baby, the youngest one, who in another month and a half will come into the world without a father, but with a lot, with a lot of strength and with a great legacy from his father.
[Speaker D] Eyal Gelman, thank you very much for speaking with us this morning. May you know only good things. Thank you very much.
[Speaker H] Thank you very much. Goodbye.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So she is basically taking him all the time to the personal plane. What did you feel? Where did you meet him? How were the bonds formed? Who was he? And he—sometimes yes, it’s his brother, I mean, he’s still within the realm of human feeling—but he keeps taking it to the plane of: this is a national loss, not only a loss for the family. He is one link in a 150-year chain of fighters and so on and so forth. In the interview with Rina Matzliah too, he said the same thing: fighters of Gush Etzion, and ’48, and here and there. And he and Baniah represent national figures of the Jewish people, things of that sort. And despite the mixing that has happened over the years—where even right-wing discourse has become more personal—you can still see very clearly the two directions here. She keeps looking for what I might even call the “yellow” aspect, meaning: “How much does it hurt? Start crying here in the interview.” I want to see the personal level. Who was he? Maybe make us cry too. In other words, the point is identification with the person. And he is speaking about identification with ideas. Again, it’s his brother, obviously it hurts him, and he does also speak a bit about the person, but he keeps taking it there. Maybe he also did it consciously because he understood this was a radio interview and he wanted to get certain messages across, I don’t know. But clearly, that’s the discourse. There’s a difference here.
And in that article—I’m returning to the article I mentioned earlier—he said that the pattern of memory and commemoration has in fact changed in the State of Israel over the years. Meaning, in the early years of the state the pattern was very collectivist. Everyone was a hero, gave his life for the idea, for the importance of the whole thing. Today people still keep saying that because there are already set formulas you can’t really get out of, because since ’48 it’s already been established what you’re supposed to say on Memorial Day. But all in all, Memorial Day has become totally personal. Totally personal. What kind of person was he? Let’s hear songs he wrote. There’s that Army Radio project, yes, of songs by fallen soldiers and all sorts of things like that, and interviewing people and his wife and what she says. That wasn’t how it used to be. Once it was: what did he do, what did he contribute, where was he, what was his role, maybe what heroism did he show in battle—because that’s also very important to educate us how to act—but everything was directed toward looking at the collective, not the private individual. And little by little it shifts and becomes more in a left-wing pattern. People say the public has become more right-wing over the years—which is true to some extent. But that right-wingness already includes quite a few components that have entered from the left-wing outlook. It’s like in Huntington’s book—what’s it called there? About civilizations?
[Speaker I] Yossi, do you remember?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Clash of Civilizations. So he talks there about how people thought the world would become more universal and nationality would matter less, but that has been disproven. In recent years the national conception, the national feeling, has returned and grown. People are less willing to give it up, unlike the avant-garde voices in public discourse, where that still continues. The public isn’t willing, and often it’s a reaction, by the way—a reaction to that cosmopolitanism of the avant-gardes. And that’s true to some extent. But I think the nation itself has still become more cosmopolitan. In other words, the process is more complex. It’s become more right-wing, but right-wing discourse is already less distinctly right-wing than it once was. Meaning, today you’ll hear very different tunes even from people who belong to the right—things you would never once have heard from the Mapai people—even on the plane of how much attention is paid to particulars. Individualism is already very strong there too. Today it’s no longer true that there is no individualism in the right-wing world, as though it were all some kind of herd-like collective, as people used to accuse it of being—and rightly so, once. That’s no longer true today. The whole thing has become mixed.
[Speaker I] So it’s a kind of Hegelian model: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Yes, and now we’re returning to the first thesis.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s something here—it’s a very interesting process. It’s like a fractal where you increase the resolution. Lovingkindness within strength, strength within beauty; then there’s lovingkindness within strength within beauty. I once saw in Leshem—he makes a very interesting claim, I think in Sefer HaKelalim—that we don’t find individual sefirot of a third order. Meaning, I think up to “lovingkindness within strength within beauty”—yes, that you do find. But a fourth order—that is, third order or fourth order, whatever, by the fourth you no longer do. And he wants to claim that it’s the same thing—I think he writes this, maybe it’s just my own association, but for some reason I remember him writing it—that a father’s compassion for a son is also only up to the fourth generation. The Talmud says the bond between a great-grandfather and a great-grandchild—or the child of a great-grandchild, I don’t remember exactly where it stops—is no longer the same. Up to son, grandson, yes. Great-grandchild is already something else; it’s not the same. That’s what the Talmud says, and he wants to claim it’s the same phenomenon. Meaning, the force of a force, and the force of the force of the force—at the fourth stage it already stops there. Or drops significantly. Not that it stops completely, but it drops significantly. So here too, there’s some division into sefirot and sub-sefirot and sub-sub-sefirot, and at some point we apparently stop. Meaning, the resolution is no longer strong enough. In any case, what I’m saying is: precisely because the process is such a process, it’s harder for us—certainly for us today. Once it was terribly easy to define what left and right are. Today it’s very hard to define. Why? Because a lot of aspects of the left have entered into the right, and maybe also a bit the reverse—less so, in my opinion, but a bit the reverse as well.
Incidentally, before I continue: I was at—as I told someone here, this was on Thursday—I was at the funeral of the father of my brother-in-law, who is married to my sister. They’re a deeply rooted communist family from Yad Hanna. I think I told this story. And there you saw a classic right-wing funeral. A collection of burning communists. Not just left-wing people. From their perspective, Shelly Yachimovich is a filthy capitalist—in other words, yes, this isn’t left, this is extreme right. I mean, we’re talking about communism, communism, really as it once was. It’s an extinct species, by the way. It once existed. The funeral was now, a few months ago.
[Speaker B] A punctured inner tube is common.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But it’s an extinct species. Who was there? More or less the entire old left that still exists—which is a few hundred people. Matzpen and exactly all those people. They were all there, Sivan and all those people, because it’s one group. They were all one group, and it keeps shrinking. And it was actually very depressing to see. Broken people.
[Speaker B] Could be broken people, that…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, because they understand it’s an extinct species.
[Speaker B] It…
[Speaker E] Was the real left.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Was one of my lecturers at the Technion a repentance story? Not at all—on the contrary. Much more sharply. You heard there very clearly: the world is crazy; only we are right; the few hundred people there, that’s it. There was of course a wreath from the party; they placed the party wreath on the grave. A party that hasn’t existed for who knows how long, but it’s still there. And they hardly spoke about him. They spoke only about his deeds. It was classic. You could have inserted them into this interview here on the interviewee’s side. Ilana Dayan wouldn’t fit there. That’s a different left. That’s not an ideological left. It’s an individualistic left. It’s the left I talked about earlier. The ideological left has many characteristics of the right because it really does function collectively; yes, the idea comes first; yes, there is less attention to the individual. “Grease for the wheels of the revolution” is not an expression of the Nazis; it’s an expression of the communists. Meaning, they see the private person as a means to advance the cause of the collective. Not at all—these are the sacrifices that have to be made to advance the revolution of the global proletariat. Sacrifices of peace, exactly. “Sacrifices of peace,” by the way, is a leftover from communist discourse. Really, left-wing people like Ilana Dayan wouldn’t say that; they won’t say it. The phrase “sacrifices of peace” is basically a right-wing term. It’s a term from that left which was collectivist and willing to sacrifice victims for the collective idea. That is right-wing discourse, “sacrifices of peace,” and that’s why you hear it from older people; you don’t hear it from younger people. You hear it from the old left—from Peres you would hear it, from people whose leftism, though very rooted in today’s individualistic left, still preserves that discourse. But still, it seems to me that there is a difference after all. I still want to insist on…
[Speaker I] The defining factor I noticed in the public sphere is the ability or willingness to accuse, attack, and investigate the mechanism. Also in the case of the three boys, the families refused to attack the police blunder that happened there, and also in this case, and in a few other cases. Because it’s us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Because it’s us.
[Speaker I] Yes. Whereas if this were the Shin Bet of the 1990s—oh, wow—lawyers from here to eternity, investigations, throw people out, dismiss them. Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because a left-wing person sees the state as against him. The state is his, but he doesn’t see the state as an entity. The state is a necessity, a necessary evil, a useful fiction to the extent that it is useful. But on the principled level, all rights discourse—how all of that folds into the same point. Meaning, basically any collectivism whatsoever is against me. Sometimes there’s no choice; we have to conduct ourselves with nations and collective arrangements, because it’s a useful fiction—you can’t do otherwise. A citizen of the world can’t speak at the UN; there need to be one or two hundred representatives, there can’t be eight billion representatives at the UN. You can’t run the UN that way. So you need “UN-shmoon.” So you need to establish these sorts of fictions—that there are peoples, and they have representatives, and we speak in the international arena, and we divide ourselves into groups. But tomorrow morning we could divide ourselves into different groups; the main thing is that the business should continue to function properly. There’s nothing essentialist here. It’s a matter of useful fiction. And therefore left-wing rights discourse is always of this kind: you have to prevent the collective from interfering with the individual. Because the collective is really a golem that rose up against its creator. We created this golem—it’s a golem. Remove the Name from it and it dies. There is nothing there. We created it, and one has to be careful that it not take too much power for itself, that it not interfere, that it not harm us—because we are the real things. It is only the fiction.
By contrast, for the right, this is us. What do you mean? That’s why he also says: I’m not interested in who fired, in the interview, whether it was friendly fire, and seeing what happened. Not only is it less important to me on the personal plane what he went through.
[Speaker C] But that’s a right-wing approach? What? The approach of free-market economics, which is actually connected…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, we’ll get there. In a moment we’ll get to economic freedom, because that seemingly contradicts this.
[Speaker C] Economic freedom and political freedom are connected.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In what sense?
[Speaker C] In freedom—in its subtext…
[Speaker E] Or what right and left even mean.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that’s what I’m trying to say now. But I’m saying it cautiously, because this has already gone through such a process of mixing that a thing can have a right-wing side and a left-wing side…
[Speaker E] And our left—is it different from what it is in the rest of the world?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t think so.
[Speaker E] The left in the world isn’t necessarily political; it’s economic.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ours too. And in the world as well. In my view, the phenomena in Israel—contrary to what people think—are very similar to what happens all over the world, the division between right and left. What?
[Speaker E] All the rich people…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not all the rich people, but there are quite a few rich people, all right? In the United States too there are quite a few rich people on the left. Yes? Yes. There are rich people on the right too, and unlike our rich people, they’re not embarrassed about it. But certainly—very much so—the strata that don’t really need the left are the left-wing strata, also in the United States. We talked about it—there was an article, I even quoted it in the book. Someone commenting on the last elections said: what idiots the lower classes are, acting against the people who care about their interests. They vote for Bibi, when Bibi hurts the weak and favors the rich, because he’s a capitalist, instead of voting for Buji or Shelly or all those people who will care for the weaker classes. And then a journalist wrote—I think he wrote it—that by the same logic the rich are idiots too, because they vote for the left, even though the one who looks after their interests is Bibi. Why are only the poor idiots? The rich are idiots to the same degree.
[Speaker J] No, a poor person could ostensibly say, if you really believe in some ideology…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you truly believe in some ideology…
[Speaker J] then they’re willing to give up a little in order to help…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The rich too, the poor too—they’re willing. They’re willing to give up their economic interest because they think that ideologically Bibi suits them better.
[Speaker J] Economically?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in other respects.
[Speaker J] No, I’m saying on that side too…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter. But the logic is the same logic. I’m willing to hurt my own interest, and I know I’m hurting my own interest—I’m not an idiot—because I think it’s important for other goals and I’m willing to pay the price, exactly like the rich people on the other side. And you can appreciate both sides as people who are willing to give up, and you can also say… this one is willing to give up and that one is an idiot. Or the opposite. Or the opposite, yes.
[Speaker E] Giving up indicates collectivism. Giving up…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So here I’ll get to it. I’ll get to that in a moment. We’ll see it shortly. It’s interesting. Because as I said before, the processes are very mixed-up processes, and because they are mixed-up, it’s very hard to give a characterization. Today it’s even— I read that there’s a book I have about right and left by Zisser from Bar-Ilan—what’s his name?—from political science there, Zisser and someone else. The former Haredi? Ellinger, exactly. The former Haredi. From Hebron.
[Speaker B] No, no, not Zisser—that’s Ellinger. And who’s the second?
[Speaker C] Berel Hershkovitz. They wrote a book.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, not now—that book came out years ago.
[Speaker B] No, now—Ellinger and Hershkovitz.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, no, I misunderstood. No, no—about right and left. It’s a book about right and left that tries to define what right and left are. A book whose course is very similar to one I once described—I think the book by Gideon Ofrat on art—which tries to define what art is. It has twenty-six chapters, if I remember correctly. In each one he proposes a definition, refutes it with counterexamples, and in the end arrives at the conclusion that art is what is displayed in a museum. Sort of an anarchic definition… in short, I have no definition. That’s what he says, and they say the same thing. The concepts of right and left, in practice, no longer exist today—that’s the claim. I don’t think they’re right. There’s a classic failure among scholars in the social sciences and humanities: when they encounter a complex phenomenon, they’re unwilling…
[Speaker B] There’s no such animal.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. So they’re unwilling to see the pure ideological root, and then understand how it gets mixed and becomes more complex. But there still is…
[Speaker C] Like archaeologists who find something that doesn’t fit and say, “It’s cultic.” Biologists, when they find something that doesn’t fit evolution, say, “That’s the handicap principle.” Every profession has its…
[Speaker B] True, but I think that in…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I talked about this once.
[Speaker C] I talked about this once in the context of some experiment—not only in an experiment.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, well, in an experiment…
[Speaker C] There are endless jokes about mathematicians, physicists, economists, and so on.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying the point is—I said this in the context that maybe we’ll talk about at some stage later on—that I needed to speak here in Munkatch about poetry. And on the Sabbath of Shirah I went to the Hebrew Encyclopedia to look up the entry on poetry, to see what they said about it, and it turned out there is no such entry. Poetry? None. There is no entry on poetry in the Hebrew Encyclopedia. Unbelievable.
[Speaker C] Wait, was there—and what’s in Britannica? No, I didn’t find it at all.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t check. I didn’t do very in-depth research. It’s completely done—it’s not the Talmudic Encyclopedia. The Hebrew Encyclopedia is finished. In every sense, yes. Of all encyclopedias, yes. In any case, there is no entry for poetry. And in the end the reason was—after that I looked around a bit in books too, not in other encyclopedias, admittedly, but in books—and I really found that almost nobody defines the concept of poetry. There’s a slim book by Shimon Sandbank in which he tries a bit to give some definitions, but even there, in my opinion, he doesn’t get very far. And I think the basic reason is that the concept of poetry also went through the same mixing I talked about earlier with right and left. So if you say poetry and prose—once it was terribly clear: there had to be rhymes and so on, it was very clear what a poem was. And prose—you know what prose is, you write what you want to write. But today there’s poetry without rhymes, and postmodernism, and no meter, and none of that—you already can’t know. And there’s prose written in such a way, and there are plays and this and epics and a million things. You no longer know. And there is literary writing; an encyclopedia too is not the same kind of prose. In literary writing there is some poetic dimension. There’s something there beyond just conveying information. In encyclopedia prose, what’s written is the information they want to convey to you. In a story, they don’t want to tell you that so-and-so went from here to there—that’s not the point. Rather, through that they want to create a mood, to convey some atmosphere, an idea—I don’t know exactly, something. “Idea” is sometimes a dirty word in literary interpretation, but never mind. They want to convey something through the words; it’s not just… So the types of prose are also very diverse. And I once did a little work around this issue after I saw there was no entry and got annoyed. I got annoyed because all kinds of poetry scholars are freeloaders; they get a salary for doing nothing. All they do is write all kinds of things that are mostly nonsense, instead of doing some serious work and characterizing the concept they deal with—the most basic thing there is. Characterizing it, giving it some kind of framework.
[Speaker C] It’s also not that hard. What? Defining mathematics is also hard.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But in mathematics there are enough definitions that serve as substitutes. Meaning, every mathematical field is defined all the way through. So you know… my sister once told me she studied criminology, and she said that in about three or four courses they opened by defining what science is. And I told her that in physics no one did. No one spoke to us about what the definition of science is. Unfortunately, by the way, I think it would have been appropriate to deal with that a bit, but no, they don’t talk about it. Sometimes when you don’t talk about it because it’s obvious, you don’t need to. The whole thing collapses together.
[Speaker B] Yamber, yes. Why? Why? Because it’s clear, it’s sort of self-evident.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This is some kind of apologetic discussion, of course; afterward it’s obvious. It’s like “the unification of the groups and kibbutzim” when there is no unification, and like a “targeted elimination” when it isn’t targeted, and similarly “a complete gentile” when you’re talking about a Jew, and all sorts of things like that. So I’m saying: since the concepts keep getting tangled up within themselves, because life is very complex, and the world of the humanities and social sciences is more complex than the natural sciences. That’s one of the problems there. So because of that, the despair of the humanities and social-sciences researcher is a kind of despair that says, okay, so there isn’t any definition. So whatever is displayed in a museum is art, because who can even know today what art is after Duchamp and after all those pests—you already
[Speaker E] can’t define anything.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so art is whatever is displayed in a museum, and that’s it. Poetry is—I don’t know what—“A wave beat in the cloud, you built me a city of brick.” It’s a kind of what’s called ars poetica. It’s as if the poet defines, in a poetic way, what poetry is. A self-referential treatment of poetry is called ars poetica. That exists. There’s quite a bit of it. But you won’t be able to extract any definition from it. It may give you a bit of a feel for poetry, maybe, if it’s a good poet. Today a poem doesn’t even have to rhyme. Right, so that’s what I’m saying. Since it’s a more complex creature, people say, okay, so there’s no definition. A poem is whatever appears in a poetry collection. That, basically, is a poem. And it doesn’t matter right now—it could be a story, it could be an encyclopedia entry. Today, in the postmodern world, there’s no problem putting an encyclopedia entry into a poetry collection and it will be some kind of poem. Just like the picture in the Israel Museum—I was there once, so I think I told this story—there was a completely empty picture. Up above it was written: “wooden frame with a metal hanger.” That was the name of the work. I don’t know how much they paid that genius creator, but he really was a genius.
[Speaker E] They paid him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think that creator was a real genius. I mean, to compare him to Picasso is a joke. Right, but he was a genius. To market something like that, to get people to pay for something like that, and to come up with such an uncreative title and market that too—that’s genius.
[Speaker F] Huh?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I assume—I didn’t take the guided tour, because I decided, all the same, not to sleep completely through it. Huh?
[Speaker F] To say that it’s a parody.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe, yes, you can say anything. No problem. You can also put nothing there and say it’s a parody. There’s a book that came out now by Kishon—I saw it אצל פחו. There’s a wonderful book, by the way, I recommend it.
[Speaker F] Kishon
[Speaker E] is still putting out books?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Kishon is still putting out books like Rabbi Akiva Eger. Things are coming out from his hidden archives. From Rabbi Akiva Eger all sorts of writings of his come out from various manuscripts. So a collection came out about art. But it’s a work he wrote about art; I don’t know why it only came out now—maybe it was republished, I don’t remember, but it doesn’t matter. Very timely.
[Speaker C] Very timely?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I said I don’t remember what the book is called, but it’s a book that came out long after his death. It came out a few years ago, maybe three years or something, four years, something like that. Wonderful. I was on the floor. I was literally on the floor. And in the whole book there’s hardly a word of Kishon’s. Almost none. It’s all quotations. He just quotes art critics—you wouldn’t have been able to breathe. I feared for my life. On nothing—he just quotes. I mean, it’s unbelievable. This man, you see how the art critic speaks there, pouring out words; the words say nothing, simply nothing. It means nothing. It’s unbelievable. Really, it’s wonderful. Along the way he includes photographs there—I don’t know, there must be all kinds of copyright issues there, I don’t know whether they paid or what exactly happened. The book is full of works of art—“art” in huge quotation marks—but very important things by the greatest artists. I mean, with all sorts of—you see things there and you just can’t believe it. You simply can’t believe it. I remember when we were doing our doctorate, we thought of proposing a project for Kishon to fund. He was a wealthy man. Nadav and I wanted to propose a project to Kishon. There are mathematical techniques for finding correlations within some body of data. It can be all sorts of data, also visual data. Yes, to try some algorithm that computes—I don’t know—how to convert visual values…
[Speaker C] The facial-recognition technology they have today in Google, for example.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? No, facial recognition is something a little different. I’m talking about trying to look for whether there is some sort of order, without characterizing it, or whether it’s something completely random. When you check long-range correlations between parts of a picture, you can see whether someone thought when he made this thing—whether there’s something planned here in some sense—or whether he just spilled paint. Now, I don’t know what he was thinking about; this isn’t a technique that can reveal what he was thinking. What?
[Speaker I] You’re talking about measuring entropy.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can call it that, doesn’t matter—long-range correlations. Any kind of information that you can translate into those terms. And then it’s an indication, a pretty decent indication—this is accepted today in many fields—of the question whether paint was spilled there or whether someone thought.
[Speaker C] I took one of my grandchildren, smeared his feet—the soles of his feet—with finger paint and let him walk on the walls a bit. Afterward I formatted it and tried to arrange it, but it was clear that if you did a statistical survey on it, it would indicate that there are correlations there, everything is coordinated and systematic.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so there are correlations that are produced not by the creator’s intention but by the process of creation itself, unconsciously. Fine. In any case, in the end it was an idea that was shelved, but that’s in connection with Kishon, because we knew his attitude toward modern art; that was common knowledge even before the current book came out. In any event, I’m saying this goes hand in hand, and it’s somewhat connected to an article I wrote in Makor Rishon about the methodology of the humanities a few weeks ago—it was published then. My feeling is that postmodernism is the other side of the same despair of the research world: that the world of research in the humanities and social sciences despaired of characterizing the field, is unwilling to make any effort to define it. So now what’s the problem? If that’s the case, then everything gets in. Whatever gets into the museum is art. So now, for example, getting into the museum was always political, of course, right? But today that’s legitimate. Because today art is politics; that is, if politically you succeed in getting your work into the museum, then you’re an artist.
[Speaker I] Unless you’re Miri
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Regev—unless you’re Miri Regev, politics from the correct side of the matter. There are people who are so political that all they protest all the time is that with you everything is political, and with you everything is political, and with you everything is political—when of course the root of it all is that for them everything is political. There is nothing except politics for them, so everyone else is schemes, political schemes. Because these are people who don’t believe in real reasoning in the postmodern world, and then everything is schemes. But once that’s the case, you really do open the door and also grant legitimacy to schemes. They’ll say—if you push them into a corner—they’ll say, yes, we’re a scheme too. After all, the fact that we protest against schemes is also our scheme; we protest against schemes in order to convince you to throw them out, because that too is part of our scheme. No problem, everything is fine, and everything is legitimate, because there is no real art; it’s all schemes. Hegemonies of this camp or that camp—it’s just political takeover, it has no value. The very concept of artistic value is lost in this kind of way of thinking. And then that means that academic research despair on the one hand gives rise to the wildness in the field on the other hand—or the reverse, I don’t know what gives rise to what—but they’re two sides of the same coin. Because when you’re unwilling to define things and say, okay, this is in, this is out, this doesn’t belong—now sometimes it really is good that way, because definitions that are too sharp make the fields and the thinking too rigid, and that’s perfectly fine. You need to let this thing form a bit, become more complex. But once you do it this way, it’s not complex; it’s simply nonsense, simply stupidity, and you lose the whole point. So this is a very delicate tension between going with my principles and fighting for my principles, while being willing also to accept other conceptions and be more complex, and to bring a little left into the right and a little right into the left, but still to work with principles, and for it to be derived from a certain worldview, while understanding that my worldview is not the fullness of all the world’s glory, and that there are other people who also understand, and there are certain aspects in which maybe I failed and it would be worthwhile to correct them and adopt them from the other side. And then the world becomes more complex—that’s the positive side of it. But that side is not postmodern; it’s mistakenly called postmodernism. It is a completely modernist side. Postmodernism is taking that thing and turning it into some sort of mixture that has no meaning, in which no one fights for anything, there is nothing to die for in any sense. And this academic breakdown in the humanities and social sciences, that everyone laments—how terribly the humanities and social sciences are going bankrupt—they cooked this with their own hands. They cooked it with their own hands. The moment it ceased to be something of value, it simply became a means of livelihood, a means of livelihood in which people come along who choose words and fashions of one kind or another, and cliques that organize and give prizes to one another for all sorts of nonsense, and these are closed cliques like that, and all of it on a professional basis, of course. If someone criticizes it, then how can you interfere at all? It’s all professional. The decision about which play to fund and what will appear in Ktavim—everything is professional. There is nothing professional there, simply nothing. It’s unbelievable—Ktavim, I’m talking about. I don’t think that’s the situation everywhere, but in Ktavim, those same people who talk all the time about schemes are the people who have nothing in their world except a scheme, and nothing beyond it. And therefore I think that the attempt to define vague concepts is a terribly important attempt, and it seems to me that the humanities need to retreat a bit to that conception. It can be adopted there too. And that’s what I talked about there, and for that I also took some hits over what I said there in that article.
[Speaker C] And in Yoav Rinon’s book, a book called The Crisis of the Humanities or something like that—Yoav, Yaakov Rinon, a similar name, Yoav Rinon—first of all, he argues that the attempt of the humanities and social sciences to adopt for themselves all kinds of research models, quantitative models from the natural sciences, that’s actually what ruins them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, of course, I know. And that’s why you get qualitative research, as it’s called today—you know, it’s a new ideology. And what is qualitative research? That’s already Lieblich; it’s existed for about twenty years or something like that, but today it’s really a basic term. What is qualitative research? It’s personal impression. Qualitative research. You come, you interview—Amia Lieblich interviewed, I don’t know, some number of former prisoners of war, or I think she has a book about prisoners of war, she has—doesn’t matter—she talked with several people, and she writes her impressions. A therapist speaks with a single person, a psychological therapist, one individual. You treat a person; you don’t treat a group. But the technique you use is supposed to be developed on the basis of orderly research with groups, control groups, trying to see—and afterward you try to apply it thoughtfully to the particular individual in front of you. Here there’s been a revolution: the research is done on individuals, not the application. Meaning, you talk with three people, you form an impression, and you write a research book about it. You’re a professor. Not just some ordinary book of impressions—fine, you’re allowed to write a book of impressions. No, this is research. Only now they don’t call it “my individual subjective impressions”; they call it qualitative research, as distinct from quantitative.
[Speaker C] Yes, of course, and the quantitative is even worse.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This thing is what completely ruins the humanities. In my view it’s exactly the opposite of what he writes; this is what ruined the humanities. What ruined the humanities is the inability to say anything—simply anything. When you say that everything goes, then you say nothing, so every
[Speaker E] thing you say doesn’t
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] say anything, isn’t worth anything. What can they say? What? I think it’s possible to say things. And I thought maybe that’s what we’ll open the next series with: how one can say complex things in a somewhat more orderly way—about definitions, about…
[Speaker I] We still have, within this framework, to explain why the non-political right,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the economic right, is also connected to…
[Speaker I] That will be the first topic in…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And therefore I—that’s the seam. I said that would be the seam into the next topic, so I’m saying I’ll take right and left, I’ll continue what I did today but as the new topic, as the first part of the topic.