Deontic Logic and the Relationship Between Prohibitions and Obligations – Lecture 3

This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

This transcription was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.

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General Overview
The operational distinction and its failure
Maimonides, the sixth root, and duplications between positive and negative commandments
A positive commandment that tells you to refrain, and a prohibition that requires action
Aharon Shemesh’s proposal: a linguistic definition and the critique of it
Deontic logic, double negation, and the error of equivalence
Non-reducibility between the world of positive commandments and the world of prohibitions
The analogy to mathematics and science: model versus reality
Practical ramifications showing that positive commandments and prohibitions are not the same thing
The essential definition: a desirable state versus a negative state
Human dignity, passive omission, and preserving the intuition on an abstract level
Processes of abstraction in concepts and their implications
Formalization, general logic, and the goal of the halakhic model
Law versus Jewish law: the absence of essential positive commandments in civil law

Summary

General Overview

The speaker argues that the ancient distinction between positive commandments and prohibitions as an operational distinction of active performance versus passive refraining does not stand up to the facts, and he brings proof from duplications between positive and negative commandments as they emerge from the Talmud and from Maimonides’ sixth root. He presents Aharon Shemesh’s claim that in later generations the distinction became linguistic, but determines that language is at most an indication and not a definition, and he proposes an essential definition: a positive commandment depicts a desirable state, while a prohibition depicts a negative state. Therefore, there is no logical equivalence between positive and negative formulations that seem similar. From this he argues that the world of positive commandments and the world of prohibitions are two separate normative worlds that cannot be reduced to one another by means of logical manipulations, and he illustrates this through practical ramifications such as coercion, the obligation of a parapet, and implications for understanding human dignity, as well as through analogies to mathematical formalization in science and to historical processes of abstraction.

The operational distinction and its failure

The speaker formulates the old operational distinction as follows: a positive commandment requires action and is violated through omission, while a prohibition requires refraining and is violated through action, with an anti-symmetry between fulfillment and transgression. He states that this distinction does not fit the fact that there are content duplications between positive and negative commandments, because under an operational definition there is no meaning to a positive commandment and a prohibition that have the same content. He concludes from this that there are positive commandments that command refraining, and prohibitions that impose a duty to act.

Maimonides, the sixth root, and duplications between positive and negative commandments

The speaker brings Sabbath observance as an example in which there is both a positive commandment of resting and a prohibition of “do not do any labor,” and both formulations are aimed at the same concrete action of refraining from labor. He explains that Maimonides rules that two commandments are counted here, and that duplication between a positive commandment and a prohibition is not absorbed under the ninth root, which merges duplications. He emphasizes that another innovation in Maimonides is that the positive commandment is counted with the positive commandments and the prohibition with the prohibitions, and this innovation is needed in order to understand why there is no logical duplication here that cancels the count.

A positive commandment that tells you to refrain, and a prohibition that requires action

The speaker presents the Sabbath as a positive commandment that tells one to refrain from labor even though it is a positive commandment, and thereby breaks the identification between a positive commandment and action. He brings examples of prohibitions that expect action, such as “do not place bloodguilt in your house” alongside “make a parapet for your roof,” and also “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood,” which imposes a duty of rescue. He concludes that in later Jewish law it is impossible to distinguish between a positive commandment and a prohibition on the operational level.

Aharon Shemesh’s proposal: a linguistic definition and the critique of it

The speaker attributes to Aharon Shemesh the claim that in later generations the definition is linguistic: a positive formulation in the Torah creates a positive commandment, and a negative formulation creates a prohibition. He argues that language can serve as an identifying sign but does not explain the essential distinction, because the question is what the different halakhic status means in the case of “you shall rest” as opposed to “you shall not do any labor.” He notes that there are different halakhic implications between positive commandments and prohibitions, such as the limits of monetary expenditure and laws such as a positive commandment overriding a prohibition and human dignity, but he presents these as results and not as the cause of the distinction.

Deontic logic, double negation, and the error of equivalence

The speaker presents a difficulty: formulations such as “I want you to be wearing tefillin” versus “I don’t want you to be without tefillin” appear logically equivalent, yet they receive different halakhic classification according to the linguistic criterion. He argues that this equivalence is mistaken, because the correct negation is not the negation of the argument but the negation of the deontic claim itself, and in the formalism of deontic operators the difference between negation of the obligation and obligation concerning negation is not a “double negation” that cancels out. He concludes that the logical mistake stems from an incorrect formalization of the halakhic concepts, and that to formalize correctly one needs a semantics that prevents movement between the world of positive commandments and the world of prohibitions by means of manipulations of negation.

Non-reducibility between the world of positive commandments and the world of prohibitions

The speaker presents the position that in general deontic logic one can define prohibition and obligation in terms of one another, so that one of the operators is redundant, but in Jewish law this is not possible. He argues that every attempt to convert a positive commandment into a prohibition or a prohibition into a positive commandment through negations fails because the fields are not dependent on one another. He describes this as a “wall” between two worlds, and emphasizes that mathematical formalization must preserve the content structure and not impose equivalences characteristic of other systems.

The analogy to mathematics and science: model versus reality

The speaker explains that “two plus three equals five” cannot be empirically refuted, and illustrates through the addition of forces in physics that an apparent refutation of “ten plus ten equals twenty” is really a refutation of the arithmetic claim as a model for forces, not of mathematics itself. He concludes that whenever a formal “proof” of equivalence between positive commandments and prohibitions appears, the meaning is that the chosen logical model does not correctly describe halakhic reality. He states that the move from content to formalization is an assumption that requires testing, and the failure points to the need for a different logic suited to halakhic semantics.

Practical ramifications showing that positive commandments and prohibitions are not the same thing

The speaker presents a distinction through the parapet: one who buys a house that already has a parapet does not fulfill the positive commandment of “make a parapet for your roof,” but certainly does not violate “do not place bloodguilt in your house,” and from this it follows that the positive commandment and the prohibition do not overlap. He uses coercion to distinguish them: in a positive commandment that was not fulfilled due to coercion, there is still no “fulfillment,” whereas with a prohibition that was failed due to coercion, “the Merciful One exempts one under coercion,” and therefore there is no transgression. He mentions the example of reciting the Shema and of “remove leaven” when one has no leaven, and presents the question whether one must acquire leaven in order to destroy it as something sensitive to the normative definition of the command.

The essential definition: a desirable state versus a negative state

The speaker proposes a definition: a positive commandment depicts a desirable state that the Torah wants a person to be in, and a prohibition describes a negative state that one may not be in. He explains that a desirable state can be either a state of action or a state of refraining, and therefore “you shall rest” is a positive commandment even though it requires refraining from labor. He states that when there is both a positive commandment and a prohibition in the same area, doing labor on the Sabbath causes both a failure to remain in the positive state and an entry into the negative state, and precisely this non-equivalence explains the counting of two commandments according to Maimonides.

Human dignity, passive omission, and preserving the intuition on an abstract level

The speaker presents a discussion of human dignity and of the dispute between the Rosh and Maimonides over whether the criterion is positive commandment/prohibition or active performance/passive omission, and shows that the operational criterion does not overlap with the normative classification, because there are prohibitions that are violated passively and positive commandments that are nullified through active conduct. He argues that the intuition that “a positive commandment is passive omission and a prohibition is active performance” is preserved, but receives an abstract interpretation: nullifying a positive commandment means not being in a positive state, while violating a prohibition is a frontal clash with God’s will through entry into a negative state. He connects this to the idea that there is an “intermediate state” that is not a direct passage between the worlds, and formulates a model of one, zero, and minus one to illustrate why double negation does not necessarily bring one back to the same place.

Processes of abstraction in concepts and their implications

The speaker describes a historical abstraction in which concrete concepts become abstract, and brings examples such as the remembrance of Amalek, whose meaning is remnant and not mental memory, and the move in tort law from describing bodily categories like “horn, tooth, foot” to abstract qualities such as intent to damage and unusual behavior. He presents modernity as accustomed to applying abstractions, such as commerce in something not yet in existence, but warns against replacing the “thing itself” with the process to the point of denying its existence. He brings examples of demons being replaced by processes such as the second law of thermodynamics, and of religiosity as experience rather than entity, and advances the claim that religious experience points to something that generates it.

Formalization, general logic, and the goal of the halakhic model

The speaker describes the power of logic to identify recurring structures and turn fields into axiomatic systems, and gives the example of the idea that one can formulate a logical theory describing physics or biology once the laws are discovered. He explains that the problem is not in mathematics but in choosing the model, and therefore in halakhic deontic logic one must build a system that respects the semantics in which positive commandments and prohibitions cannot be mutually converted. He presents the move from the operational criterion to the linguistic criterion in Aharon Shemesh as a similar process of abstraction, in which passive omission and active performance become not operational concepts but concepts of being or not being in normative states.

Law versus Jewish law: the absence of essential positive commandments in civil law

The speaker argues that in Israeli law there are no essential positive commandments, only prohibitions, even when there is a duty to perform an action such as paying taxes or serving in the army, because the law is formulated and operates through sanctions. He brings the law of “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood” as an example where the innovation in legislation is the punishment for failure to rescue, and therefore it functions as a prohibition that imposes a duty to act. He cites a conception according to which the law does not forbid theft but merely states, “the thief’s punishment is such-and-such,” and presents the law as speaking to judges rather than citizens. He adds criticism of administrative law as sometimes lacking an effective sanction and therefore creating a “bet for gain only,” where at most the act will be annulled and the situation will return to what it should have been in the first place.

Full Transcript

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the discussion about the relationship between a prohibition and a positive commandment, I said—and I brought a Tosefta article by Aharon Shemesh—that in the earlier generations of the Talmud, in the earlier layers in the archaeology of the Talmud, the distinction between a prohibition and a positive commandment was a distinction on the operational level. Meaning, a positive commandment imposes on us an obligation to do something, while a prohibition imposes on us an obligation to refrain, or an obligation not to do something. Or in other words: a positive commandment is fulfilled through active performance and violated through passive omission. A prohibition is fulfilled through passive omission and violated through active performance. Okay, so basically there is this kind of anti-symmetry between them. The problem is that this doesn’t—I’ll say it in yeshiva-bochur language—it doesn’t stand the test of the facts. In Aharon Shemesh’s language, we’d say that in the later generations the definition changed. And the proof of that was Maimonides’ sixth root, which talks about—well, an indication of the proof already appears in the Talmud of course—which talks about duplications between a prohibition and a positive commandment. For example, in Sabbath observance there is a positive commandment to keep the Sabbath, to rest on the Sabbath, and there is a prohibition: “do not do any labor.” Their content is identical. Resting also means refraining from labor, and the prohibition also means not doing labor. And Maimonides says about this that one must count two commandments here: the positive commandment with the positive commandments, and the prohibition with the prohibitions. The ninth root does not apply in such a case—the ninth root says that when there is duplication among commandments, they are counted only as one commandment. But if the duplication is between a prohibition and a positive commandment, then yes, you count both. Now the very fact that there is such a sixth root at all, or that there is duplication between a prohibition and a positive commandment whose content is the same, means that the operational definition is incorrect. Because under the operational definition there is no such thing as duplication between a prohibition and a positive commandment. If the commandment is to do something, then it’s a positive commandment. If the definition is not to do something, then it’s a prohibition. How can there be duplication between a prohibition and a positive commandment that command me to do the same thing? If it commands me to do something, then both belong among the positive commandments. If it commands me not to do something, then both belong among the prohibitions. How can it be that there is a positive commandment and a prohibition that duplicate each other, that tell me the same thing? That means either that a positive commandment can also command me to refrain, or that a prohibition can command me to do something, or both. Okay, and indeed the answer is: both. Meaning, there is a positive commandment that commands me to refrain, and there is a prohibition that commands me to get up and do something. A positive commandment that commands me to refrain—what’s the example? Sabbath. Right, what I said before: resting on the Sabbath is a positive commandment, “to rest” is a positive commandment, and it commands me to refrain from labor, not to do labor. Even so, it is a positive commandment. A prohibition that commands me to do something—among the duplications we know there is “do not place bloodguilt in your house” and “make a parapet for your roof.” If there is a house without a parapet, then I have to get up and make a parapet. So the positive commandment of “make a parapet for your roof” is no problem—that commands doing something. But the commandment “do not place bloodguilt in your house” is a prohibition that in effect expects me to do something. But this exists not only in cases of duplication. For example: “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood.” “Do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood” basically tells me that if I see my fellow in a dangerous situation, I need to save him. But that’s a prohibition that imposes on me a duty to act. Not a duty to refrain, but a duty to act. Okay, therefore, at least in what he calls the later generations, in Jewish law as we know it today, it is not correct to distinguish on the operational level between a positive commandment and a prohibition. And then the question returns: so what is the difference? So I brought there that Aharon Shemesh argues that in the later generations the definition is linguistic. If the Torah says it in positive language—do something—then it is a positive commandment. Like “you shall rest.” The Torah doesn’t say “do not do labor,” rather it says “you shall rest.” It uses positive language, so if that’s the case, it’s a positive commandment. And if the Torah uses negative language, then it’s a prohibition. In other words, the definition is linguistic. I said that the linguistic characterization can be a characterization, but it cannot be the definition. In other words, the characterization, the indication of whether this is a positive commandment or a prohibition, is the language of the Torah. But the question still remains: why does the Torah itself see these things as positive commandments? When it tells me “you shall rest,” why does it see that as a positive commandment? The fact that it says it in positive language only teaches me that that’s how it sees it. But when I ask, okay, what does it mean that it sees it as a positive commandment? What’s the difference between “you shall rest” and “you shall not do any labor”? The Torah—now, there are all sorts of indications: for a positive commandment one needs to spend up to a fifth of one’s assets, for a prohibition one needs to spend all one’s assets. A positive commandment overrides a prohibition. Human dignity overrides only positive commandments and not prohibitions. There are all sorts of halakhic implications to the difference between a prohibition and a positive commandment, but implications too—as we discussed all this—cannot really be the crux of the matter. The implications are a symptom. The implications are because this is a positive commandment and that is a prohibition, therefore here you must spend up to a fifth of your assets and there all of them. That’s a consequence of the difference. But there has to be some difference that is the cause of all these consequences, and the question is what that is. I formulated it a bit differently—I think this is where we ended last time—that basically we are dealing here with logic. You can present it in a logical way. Because what is the difference between telling me “I want you to be wearing tefillin” and telling me “I don’t want you to be without tefillin”? Double negation takes me back to the same place. Now ostensibly, according to the linguistic criterion, if you tell me “I want you to be with tefillin,” the Torah tells me “I want you to be with tefillin,” that’s a positive commandment because it’s a positive expression. If the Torah says “I don’t want you to be without tefillin,” that’s a prohibition, right? I don’t care that it imposes on me an obligation to act, to be wearing tefillin; the linguistic formulation is negative. But how can it be that there are two formulations that are logically equivalent and yet have different halakhic status? They say the same thing in different language. It’s like saying that if it were written in English it would be a prohibition, and if it’s written in Hebrew it would be a positive commandment. What difference does it make what language it’s written in? The question is what it means. After all, if the content is the same content, how can one be a positive commandment and the other a prohibition? So I think I still managed to say this last time: the logical formulation may be a hint to the answer, because it’s not true. It’s not a logical equivalence. To say “I don’t want you to be without tefillin” is not the same thing as saying “I want you to be wearing tefillin.” It simply is not logically equivalent. It’s just not true. If I want to do double negation, then I need to say, for example, “I want you to be wearing tefillin”—that’s a positive commandment. “I want you to be without tefillin”—that isn’t—its negation is not “I want you to be wearing tefillin,” and not “I want you to be without tefillin.” “I want you to be without tefillin” is not the logical negation of “I want you to be wearing tefillin.” The logical negation of “I want you to be wearing tefillin” is “it is not true that I want you to be wearing tefillin.” In formal language—say we have a page here maybe—fine, let’s use this. Let’s say we talked about deontic operators, so let’s say I write—good, thanks. There is an obligation, can you see? There is an obligation to do the act P. Or this is obligation, as we discussed: an obligation to do the act P. Okay? The negation of that looks like this: negation over the fact that there is an obligation to do the act P—it’s not true that there is an obligation to do the act P. But when I say this—the third one, sorry—is not the negation of the first. Agreed? It’s not the negation of the first. I negate the argument, what’s inside; I don’t negate the whole claim. So it’s not a negation at all. Therefore if I now say this, the fourth one, you understand that it’s not equivalent to the first? It’s not double negation. Double negation is to negate twice in such a way that one cancels the other. But here that’s not the case. This thing is not a negation—it is negation of the sentence. This thing is negation of the argument. Negation of a sentence over negation of an argument is not cancellation. That’s just to show formally why this whole business… So what is a negation? Either this or this. The last two are double negation. Okay? That’s double negation, so they cancel each other out.

[Speaker C] That’s a minus inside the function.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, a sort of minus-minus, right? That’s double negation. But what comes before them—the fourth expression—is not double negation. So first of all, on the logical level, there is a logical mistake here. But what does this really mean beyond the formalism? We’ll come back to this, because this is a major root of halakhic deontic logic. This is really where the root of the matter lies. What does this mean in human language? It basically means that saying “I want you to be wearing tefillin” or “it is not true that I want you to be without tefillin” is not the same thing as “I want you to be wearing tefillin.” Right? “It is not true that I want you to be without tefillin” is not the same thing as “I want you to be wearing tefillin.” “It is not true that I want you to be without tefillin” is the fourth one, okay? “I want you to be wearing tefillin” is the first one, okay? The fourth is a prohibition, it’s a prohibition on being without tefillin, because the formulation is a negative formulation. For the moment I accept the linguistic criterion, not the operational one. Okay? If the criterion is operational, then basically this thing—O of not-P—is a prohibition. Agreed? If the criterion is operational, then they are demanding that I refrain. Not-P—let’s say P is an act—then not-P is refraining. When they demand omission from me, that’s a prohibition. I’m claiming that it’s a positive commandment. It’s a positive commandment that tells me to refrain, like resting. Do you understand? Therefore it’s a positive commandment, not a prohibition. According to the operational criterion, this is a prohibition, but according to the linguistic criterion—after all, here it’s defined as “to rest”—this thing is the formalization of the verse “to rest.” Okay? “To rest” is a positive commandment because the formulation is positive, never mind that it requires me to refrain. But the demand is a positive demand, therefore it’s a positive commandment.

[Speaker D] And the second one also isn’t a prohibition.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Which second one? No, none of them is a prohibition. None of anything that appears here is a prohibition. That’s the beauty of the whole thing. A prohibition—exactly—is another conceptual world; it has no connection to a positive commandment. Meaning, if you remember, one of the definitions I proposed in general deontic logic was that a prohibition is an obligation not to do. Right? In other words, I can define the operator O in terms of the operator F—F was prohibition, forbidden, right? So the operator O on P is the same thing as F on not-P, and vice versa. In other words, one of the operators is redundant. I can formulate one in terms of the other. It adds nothing. In Jewish law that’s not how it is. In Jewish law there is no way whatsoever—any manipulation you do with O will not bring you to prohibitions. This is a closed language. The world of positive commandments cannot, by means of negations and positive commandments, by means of logical manipulations, bring me into the world of prohibitions, and vice versa.

[Speaker C] Is that only because of the whole conception of it, though? Because of the fact that words have meaning? In logic it should be true.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. I’m claiming that the logic is different. It isn’t a logical equivalence. What I showed you here is that it’s not logically equivalent.

[Speaker C] No, I agree. I’m only saying that if you want to say in Jewish law that with positive operators you can’t generate a negative act, define something negative when all your operators are positive, that’s only because in mathematics there is no meaning to what stands behind it. Meaning, I can define it. You can define in mathematics two negations that arrive at something positive.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but here it’s not two negations.

[Speaker C] Right, here because of what it represents. Because it represents something within Jewish law, because words have meaning, right? That’s really the problem. That when you say “I want you to do something,” I’m expressing some desire, some state I want you to be in. When I say “I don’t want you to do something,” I don’t care what you do, as long as it’s not that. Right? In mathematics you don’t have that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In mathematics you don’t have that. In mathematics you have nothing. Mathematics formalizes propositions without meaning. Give them meaning, and I’ll find the mathematical formalization.

[Speaker C] So why can’t one in Jewish law create positive commandments from prohibitions or the other way around?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because you can’t. Because in truth you can’t define one in terms of the other.

[Speaker C] Because you can’t translate it into the language of mathematics?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, you can translate it into the language of mathematics, but the language will have to stand up to the criteria of the semantics. Meaning, that’s it—the semantics. If I can’t move from positive commandments to prohibitions, then the mathematics too—the logical formalization—will have to be built in such a way that it is impossible to express O by means of F and vice versa with negations. It won’t be possible to pass from one to the other. The formalization will have to preserve the structure of the content.

[Speaker C] Is it impossible to define mathematical operators that will describe the… define something new?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s possible to define them, of course, of course. We’ll do that too. We’ll do that too. But we’ll have to make sure that this definition doesn’t allow passage from the world of positive commandments to the world of prohibitions.

[Speaker C] That there is no dependence between these fields.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. No dependence. Okay? You won’t succeed, with logical tools, in moving from this world to that world. Two worlds that don’t talk to each other. And that solves a lot of problems that deontic logic doesn’t know how to solve, because in my opinion the mathematicians missed this point. Now why do they miss this point? Because the problem is not in mathematics. The problem is in the formalization. A logician—a logician—it doesn’t matter. Can one formalize semantics?

[Speaker B] What? Can one formalize semantics?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Yes. That’s basically what one does in logic.

[Speaker B] No, but the claim—it’s not—meaning the meaning of what I’m saying.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the semantics. Once you define a different semantics, then you can formalize it appropriately. I’ll maybe give an example we’ve already discussed, just to sharpen the point. I think I told you that when I used to teach mechanics, I asked the students whether, in their opinion, the claim “two plus three equals five” is refutable—whether that is a scientific claim that can be subjected to a test of refutation. Some said yes: take a bowl, put two apples in it, add another three apples to the bowl, and count. If you get five, then it was corroborated or at least not refuted, and if you get thirteen, then it was refuted—so the proposition “two plus three equals five” was refuted. It doesn’t matter right now whether that would happen or not, but they said you can subject it to a test of refutation, and either it will pass or not. You can propose an experiment that would subject it to such a test. My claim was that they’re wrong. That’s not true. You can’t subject it to a test of refutation. Here’s an example, and that’s why I did this in a mechanics course: I take some body, apply to it a force of ten newtons in this direction, okay? Now apply another force of ten newtons in this direction. What’s the total force acting on the body? Fourteen-point-something, right? The resultant force is fourteen-point-something in the diagonal direction, not twenty.

[Speaker C] Yes, but that’s only because concepts are being mixed here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no concepts are being mixed here. Pay attention. No, no, let me explain, and then you’ll see what the point is. So what happened? Did we refute the claim that ten plus ten equals twenty? Here, we ran an experiment and refuted it. No—what did we refute? We refuted the claim in physics, not the claim in mathematics. The claim in physics that the addition of forces can be described by arithmetic addition—that isn’t true; you need vector addition for that. So arithmetic addition is not the correct model for adding forces. Meaning, if we ran an experiment and refuted something, we did not refute arithmetic. Mathematics cannot be refuted. So what did we refute? The claim that that mathematics, arithmetic, is a model for this reality of adding forces—that’s not true, it’s not the right model. But that’s a claim in physics, not in mathematics. Mathematics itself cannot be refuted. So that’s exactly the point. When we use mathematics, it has extraordinary power, tremendous power, but it also has an Achilles’ heel and you have to be very careful with it. We are captive to the mathematics. Once we move into mathematics, we are captive to the mathematics. But the move from physics to mathematics is itself a physical assumption. The assumption that this kind of mathematics can correctly describe reality is an assumption in physics, and therefore one has to pay attention—not necessarily true. And sometimes when we refute it, we’ll say, wait, that can’t be, this is mathematics—how could it have been refuted? No. What was refuted here is not the mathematics, but the assumption that this mathematics is the correct mathematics for describing the physics that we have here. Okay? Same thing here. People formalize something in logic and then prove all kinds of mathematical proofs, and then if so of course it all must be true—for imposing on you an obligation not to do something is just like a prohibition on doing it, what difference is there? I can show you it’s equivalent. No, you can’t show me that. If you show me that, it only means that you formalized the prohibition and the positive commandment incorrectly. You didn’t find the correct mathematics that describes what a prohibition is and what a positive commandment is. And in order to formalize this correctly, I need to build a logical theory that preserves the fact that you can’t move between the world of prohibitions and the world of positive commandments. Okay? Then that theory really will be correct, and if I manage to prove various things with it, fine, then it’ll be fine. But if I prove all sorts of things with an incorrect theory, that doesn’t help at all. It just means your theory is incorrect; it doesn’t correctly describe the field it came to describe.

[Speaker D] Why isn’t O of not-P like a prohibition?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? O of not-P—why isn’t it like a prohibition?

[Speaker D] What I’m saying is, since it’s like “to rest.” “To rest” is O of not-P, right? Right, and that’s a positive commandment. Right. And I want you not to eat pork, so O of not-pork. Yes, so I say no, and I show you a counterexample to show why that’s not true. You’re bringing me examples where I get tangled up; I’m showing you a counterexample in order to prove to you that it’s not true. One counterexample is enough.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What happens with “you shall rest”? “You shall rest” is an obligation not to do something, right? An obligation not to do labor, and it’s defined as a positive commandment. So that means that O of not-P is not a prohibition. So now if I tell you that the Torah tells me: you are under an obligation to be in a state in which you are not eating pork—I don’t know exactly how to formulate it—that would be a positive commandment, not a prohibition.

[Speaker C] But I can rescue that, because when you say “you shall rest,” you’ve inserted a minus into the word. Meaning, the word “you shall rest” itself is kind of doing the action of not doing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so—

[Speaker C] It’s double negation inside it too. So when you call it a positive commandment—no, no, no—to actively get up and rest.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, to come and rest is—

[Speaker C] No, no, there is an obligation not to do labor, right? No problem. No, because when you say it’s not doing labor, that’s active performance, as if I’m required not to do labor. Okay, so that’s when…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not active performance. I moved away from active performance.

[Speaker C] Fine. “To rest”—when you tell me “to rest,” the word “to rest” itself contains a minus, a so-called minus. Meaning it’s a positive term that has a negation on it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, the word “to rest” doesn’t contain—

[Speaker C] In practice you’re not required to perform and do something. What do you mean?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because the criterion is not operational—that’s what I’m saying. The criterion for prohibition versus positive commandment is not operational. Once again you’re continuing to assume that a positive commandment requires me to do something. No. The criterion is not operational; the criterion is linguistic. Linguistic. If the Torah says it in positive language, it’s a positive commandment. But I’m trying to look for the meaning—what does the language mean? The language expresses an idea; it’s not just language for its own sake. Why did the Holy One, blessed be He, decide that this thing is a positive commandment if in the end what He is asking from me is not to do? There has to be some rationale behind it. So I’m now going backward. I’m saying: from the logic I show first of all that it’s not the same thing. Now I’ll try to explain what rationale lies behind it. So why indeed isn’t it the same thing? To tell me that I require you to be in a state of rest is not the same thing as saying I forbid you to do labor. Right? That’s basically what I’m saying. Why isn’t it the same thing? What’s the difference between them? Let’s try to think in plain language. Why isn’t it the same thing? I talked about this when we discussed Maimonides’ eighth root. Right? There we brought the term gezeirah, a shared expression for prohibition and command. Right? And Maimonides says that in Hebrew there is a shared term; in Arabic there isn’t. In Arabic they use the word command because they don’t have a third word that would describe both prohibition and command. In Hebrew there is the word gezeirah. Okay? That’s Maimonides’ claim, and therefore gezeirah contains both things. But within gezeirah there are two kinds: prohibition and command. Meaning, Maimonides distinguishes between prohibition and command irrespective of what the prohibition says or what the command says. Meaning, prohibition and command are two different worlds. It’s on and off, right? Two different operators, no matter what they say. So here too, same thing. Now what’s the idea? Let’s say the Torah tells me to build a parapet. That’s a positive commandment. And the prohibition is “do not place bloodguilt in your house.” What’s the difference between these two things? The difference is that if, say, I have a house with a parapet—I bought the house with a parapet already. Okay? So did I fulfill the positive commandment? No. I didn’t need to, but I did not fulfill the positive commandment, right? But did I violate the prohibition? Obviously not. So here’s the practical distinction. In a case where I—meaning, in a case where I bought a house that already had a parapet, you can’t say that I fulfilled the positive commandment, but obviously I did not violate the prohibition. So there is the difference. If it were written “make a parapet for your roof”—if it were written as a positive commandment, let’s say there were only the positive commandment “make a parapet for your roof”—if I bought a house with a parapet, it doesn’t apply to me. But if it were written only “do not place bloodguilt in your house,” and I bought a house with a parapet, it would apply to me; I simply fulfilled it, right? Because I did not place bloodguilt in my house. Okay? Meaning, there is a difference between—or for example if I fulfilled something under coercion. Let’s say I fulfilled something under coercion. Let’s say I was walking by the riverside and I see my friend drowning. Now someone tied me up and wouldn’t let me save him. Fine? So if there were a positive commandment to save him, then that positive commandment I did not fulfill. “The Merciful One exempts one under coercion,” right? The fact that I was coerced doesn’t make me someone who did it, okay? But if I did not do it under coercion, then “to the girl you shall do nothing”—“the Merciful One exempts one under coercion”—meaning, I did not violate the prohibition, right? Meaning, if it were the prohibition “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood,” that’s a prohibition, okay? I violated it under coercion—if I violated it under coercion, then I didn’t violate it, because the Merciful One exempts one under coercion. But if I had a positive commandment to save him and I was coerced and did not save him, then I did not fulfill the positive commandment, right? Let’s say I had to discharge my obligation through reciting Shema. Fine? So if I was coerced and didn’t recite Shema, then I still need to recite it; it’s not considered as though I fulfilled it, right? But if there were a prohibition against not reciting Shema and I was coerced, then I did not violate the prohibition. But I wouldn’t need to recite Shema again in order not to violate the prohibition, right? I didn’t violate the prohibition because I was coerced.

[Speaker B] And what about “remove leaven” if you don’t have any leaven?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the removal of leaven—we discussed that in the lecture before Passover—that was really the trigger that started this whole topic. There I said that it depends on how you define that prohibition. I suggested there four definitions of “you shall remove.” The question is how you define it. You can define it as a positive commandment, you can define it as a prohibition inferred from a positive commandment, in various ways. The question whether I need to buy leaven in order to destroy it—Rav Chaim—we discussed that there in the lecture before Passover. So basically all these things—notice that these aren’t practical ramifications in the same sense as what I said before, that for this you spend a fifth of your assets and for that you spend all your assets. These are practical ramifications of the difference. Here I’m pointing to the difference itself. The positive commandment and the prohibition are not the same thing. They simply aren’t. Saying “I want you to be wearing tefillin” and saying “I don’t want you to be without tefillin” is simply not saying the same thing. If I end up without tefillin under coercion, then the positive commandment I did not fulfill, but the prohibition I did not violate. If it were a positive commandment, it isn’t considered that I fulfilled it. If it were a prohibition, then I didn’t violate the prohibition. Okay? So it’s not the same thing. Now what does that really mean? Let’s translate it into more understandable language. Basically, a positive commandment imposes, or points to, a desirable state. It says to me: I want you to be in this state. That’s the definition—now I’m giving the definition. That’s what stands behind the linguistic definition; that’s the essential definition that the language merely expresses. A positive commandment means that they depict for me a desirable state in which the Torah wants me to be. That is called a positive commandment. If I’m not in that state, then I was not in the desirable state, but I am not in a negative state. I’m simply not in the positive state. What is a prohibition? A prohibition sketches, or points to, or describes a negative state. If I’m in the negative state—if I violated the prohibition—then I’m in a negative state, not merely not in a positive state. When the Torah describes a positive state, that’s a positive commandment. When the Torah points to a negative state, that’s a prohibition. That’s the definition.

[Speaker B] If Sabbath were only a positive commandment—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To rest—there would be no problem at all with doing labor.

[Speaker B] And if I did labor, then I wouldn’t be in a negative state, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You just didn’t do it—you just weren’t in the positive state. If there were only a positive commandment regarding Sabbath—there are both there—but if there were only a positive commandment regarding Sabbath, then doing labor on the Sabbath wouldn’t be problematic in itself; rather, you simply wouldn’t be in the state of rest, which is a positive state.

[Speaker B] The Torah describes itself, or—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Through yes, or through no, or its opposite? No, you won’t succeed—that’s exactly the point. I’ll explain now why. Look, if the point is that now—pay attention—I’ve completely neutralized the performance-based criterion. Meaning, the positive state can be a state of cessation or a state of action. From the Torah’s standpoint, that’s called a positive state; it’s the state in which the Torah wants me to be. That state can be a state of refraining or a state of doing—it makes no difference at all. As long as the Torah tells me this is a positive state, the state in which you do something is positive, or the state in which you do not do something is positive—as long as it defines a state as a positive state, that is a positive commandment. It doesn’t matter whether that state requires me to do something or requires me not to do something. Therefore, when the Torah tells me to cease, then the Torah is telling me: the state in which you cease, in which you do not act, is a positive state, so that is a positive commandment. Why does it matter that it imposes on me an obligation to cease? The obligation to cease is really to be in a positive state, and therefore it is a positive commandment.

[Speaker B] But here too there’s also a positive commandment.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And also a prohibition. Is this a positive state or a negative state? So the Torah says both things are true. Cessation is a positive state, and doing labor is a negative state. If there were only action here, only a positive commandment, then the Torah would tell me that cessation is a positive state, but doing labor is not a negative state—it is only not being in a positive state. If there were only a prohibition—do not do any labor—then doing labor would be a negative state; cessation would not be a positive state, it would only be escaping the negative state.

[Speaker B] Meaning that if you did labor, then you both descended into the negative state and also failed to attain the positive state. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When there is both a prohibition and a positive commandment, what happens is: you also nullified a positive commandment—you are also not in the positive state—but you are also in a negative state, and that doesn’t have to be the case. Since it isn’t equivalent—pay attention—this is Maimonides, the sixth root. What Maimonides says is that a positive commandment and a prohibition are not redundancy, because to say that you should cease and to say that you should not do labor are not logically equivalent. It’s not saying the same thing. So why should that be duplicative? Why should that be a redundancy? It doesn’t belong to the ninth root at all. There is no logical redundancy between them. That’s what Maimonides says in the sixth root. What Maimonides is really saying is exactly this point. He says: to tell you that I want you to cease, or to tell you I do not want you to do labor—that is telling you different things. They do not overlap in content, so why should that be counted as one commandment? It is certainly two commandments. That’s why Maimonides also added his second novelty—I said he has a second novelty. First, that the ninth root does not apply here, and we count two commandments here. Second, there is another novelty: the positive commandment is counted among the positive commandments and the prohibition among the prohibitions. That too is a novelty. Why? Because according to the performance-based criterion, even if you counted two commandments here, I would count two prohibitions. Because the commandment of cessation on the Sabbath tells me not to do something. From the standpoint of the performance-based criterion, that is a prohibition. What difference does it make that it is phrased in positive language? It imposes on me an obligation to refrain, not to do something. So even if you count two, that’s one novelty—but I would still count two prohibitions. And Maimonides says no: you count two, with the positive commandment among the positive commandments and the prohibition among the prohibitions. An additional novelty. Why? Because the first novelty is built on the second. Because the positive commandment really is not a prohibition—it is a positive commandment—and precisely because of that, there is no redundancy here. Therefore we count two commandments here: the positive commandment is a positive commandment and the prohibition is a prohibition. In other words, you need the second novelty in order to explain the first novelty. You need to understand that the positive commandment really is a positive commandment and not a prohibition, and precisely because of that, the duplication between a prohibition and a positive commandment on the Sabbath is not duplication. Therefore we count two.

[Speaker D] So how does that explain coercion? What? How does that explain the double coercion?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?

[Speaker D] No, the Rabbi said that this is what underlies the practical difference.

[Speaker B] It’s an example of a practical difference.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes,

[Speaker D] So why does the positive state and the negative state explain why in coercion you count only…?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because if you are in a negative state under coercion, that is not called being in a negative state—you are not in that state. But all in all, you still didn’t do it; you are not in the positive state. Factually, you are not there. It could have been a dispute between Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish, whether one who was coerced is regarded like one who acted or not regarded like one who acted. The Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud reverse the views there between Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish. There is a view that one under coercion is indeed like one who acted. Fine. But there is a halakhic principle that says: if you are in a negative state under coercion, that is not called being in a negative state, because you did not do it—so it is not a negative state. All right? A positive state, in the end, is a factual question; meaning, you were not there. Even if it was under coercion that you were not there, bottom line, you were not there. Okay? And now pay attention: the point is that “one under coercion is not regarded like one who acted” also does not depend at all on the question whether this is an act or an omission. There too, the criterion is not performance-based. We usually understand “one under coercion is not regarded like one who acted” to mean that in the end you didn’t actually do it. I say no—the difference is in the question whether it is being in a positive state or being in a negative state. If there is a prohibition that involves omission, then regarding that prohibition too I will say that the Merciful One exempts one under coercion, and “the young woman shall do nothing.” All right? If the prohibition requires me to do something—yes—“do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood.” Fine? “Do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood”—so that is a prohibition, right? Now I didn’t save him under coercion; in practice I didn’t save him, right? Is coercion considered like one who acted? No. Not true. Here too the criterion is not performance-based; it is a criterion according to the state. And I am not in a negative state; if I am in the negative state under coercion, that is not called being in a negative state. The practical difference—all these criteria—or human dignity. On this there is a Noda B’Yehuda, and Kehillot Yaakov discusses it too: there is a dispute between the Rosh and Maimonides regarding human dignity. Human dignity—“great is human dignity, for it overrides a prohibition in the Torah,” says the Talmud—but that is only the prohibition of “do not turn aside,” only rabbinic law; meaning, a Torah-level prohibition it does not override. But a positive commandment it does override through passive omission—sorry, not a commandment—through passive omission it does override. Now they discuss there what this means: what is called the difference between passive omission and positive action? Is the difference between prohibition and positive commandment, or is the difference between positive action and passive omission? And now we already know that it’s not the same thing, right? Because there are prohibitions that one violates through passive omission, and there are positive commandments that one nullifies through positive action. Okay? Like cessation on the Sabbath, or “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood.” Okay? Now the question is whether human dignity overrides “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood,” or cessation on the Sabbath, or various things like that. That is a dispute between the Rosh and Maimonides. Now why? Why can there be a dispute at all? Neither of them contradicts what I’m saying, but the very existence of another opinion proves what I’m saying. Meaning, whoever says that regarding “do not stand…” that human dignity does not go by positive commandment or prohibition, but rather by the question of actions, is basically saying that passive omission and positive action are the criterion—the criterion is the practical criterion. But whoever says that it is prohibition and positive commandment is basically saying that even if the prohibition is done in the mode of positive action—meaning, one violates it through passive omission—still human dignity does not override it. Because in the end you are in a negative state. It is forbidden to be in a negative state because of human dignity. It doesn’t matter whether you perform an action here or not. The question is whether you are in a negative state or you are simply not in a positive state. That is the question of human dignity. Now there are others who say no, it depends on the question of positive action and passive omission. Fine—that doesn’t contradict what I’m saying. The existence of the second opinion proves what I’m saying. Okay? Just to conclude regarding the parameters of human dignity, I’ll say one more sentence. In practice, we still have an intuition that positive commandments are fulfilled through positive action. Prohibitions are fulfilled through passive omission, right? We have that intuition. That intuition is correct. But passive omission and positive action are not physical. Meaning, this intuition that says that violating a positive commandment is through passive omission is a correct intuition. But it is passive omission in an abstract sense, not passive omission in a performance-based sense, because not being in a positive state is, in essence, passive omission, even though it may be done by means of physical action—for example, if I do labor on the Sabbath. Because conceptually, all that happened is that I was not in a positive state. I did not collide head-on with the will of God. To violate through positive action means to collide head-on with the will of God. To collide head-on with the will of God is to be in a state that the Torah defines as negative. That is to go directly against the will of God. Not being in a positive state is, in essence, passive omission. Because in practice I am not colliding head-on with the will of God—I’m just not righteous. I’m not in the positive state. That doesn’t mean I am in a negative state. So this is not a head-on collision with the will of God; it is a transgression through passive omission. Therefore what we really have here is a change, or an abstraction, of the concepts passive omission and positive action.

[Speaker C] A transgression through passive omission. Exactly. That’s completely different.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nullifying a positive commandment is a transgression through passive omission, but it is not performance-based passive omission; it is abstract passive omission. Do you understand the point? Meaning, the intuition remains intact—it’s a correct intuition. But it has to be abstracted. Now there is—this in general is a process—I spoke about this not long ago, not here, right? I spoke somewhere else, I don’t even remember where. I spoke about this with regard to memory—I spoke on Memorial Day. What I wrote about it, yes, some reminder I posted on the website. Usually people understand memory as a mental process. Meaning, we remember something or someone, so that person’s image stands before our consciousness. Basically, we bring up some picture of him. That’s a mental process. But in the Torah, when it says “you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek,” remembrance there does not mean memory. After all, there is a commandment to remember and it is forbidden to forget. So what does “blot out the remembrance of Amalek” mean? To forget Amalek? It is forbidden to forget; there is an obligation to remember. “The remembrance of Amalek” means the remnant of Amalek. To blot out the remembrance of Amalek means not to leave any part of him. The remembrance of Amalek means a part of Amalek. So to remember someone basically means that some part of the person I remember is present with me. This is not a mental act. It is ontic—that is, a matter of being. Meaning, something from the person I remember is present with me. Therefore the value of memory—all the pathos people speak about regarding memory, how deeply offended people are when someone does not honor memory—this is an extremely sensitive matter for human beings. What is the great value in remembering? It is the value of life. Because to remember someone who died is to keep him alive. Something of him is still alive. Not literally alive, because it is his soul, not his body. Even when a person is dead, perhaps the soul still exists; the body is dead. Still, to leave him existing in some sense. This is derived from the value of life—the value of memory. And therefore this is basically—why am I saying this?

[Speaker D] I was reminded of it because what does “blot out the remembrance of Amalek” mean?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Blot out the remembrance of Amalek” means to kill him. Meaning, not to leave anything of him, no trace.

[Speaker D] Not in memory?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, of course not. Of course not. There I do have to remember. “Blot out the remembrance of Amalek” means destroy every part of him. But I’m saying that when we speak about remembering someone, that too is not detached from the meaning; mental remembering is also not detached from the meaning of physical remembrance. It basically means that something—of course spiritual—something of his soul, of his spirit, is present with me. That is called remembering him. If we are dualists—and not materialists—then that is not such an absurd thing. Meaning, if a person really has a soul and not only a body, then remembering a person means basically leaving something of him with me. Not his molecules, not cells from him of course—that’s true—but still leaving something of him present with me. Therefore the value of memory is basically to keep him still alive. Meaning, it is to prevent his death a little bit. In a certain sense, it grounds the value of memory in the value of life. That may be the meaning people see in the value of memory. Because very often we talk about this in metaphorical language. Meaning, it’s as if this is a metaphor of memory—we say some part of him is still here. But people mean it as a metaphor. I do not mean it as a metaphor—literally. Meaning, something of him is here if I remember him. Meaning, I keep him alive in some sense—a somewhat borrowed sense, but not a metaphor. Really, something is happening here. Now why am I bringing this here as an example? Because many times there is a process in which concrete things undergo abstraction over the generations. Also, by the way, in the move from the Mishnah to the Talmud—one of my students once did a doctorate on this in the laws of acquisition. In the laws of acquisition, the Mishnah’s conception is more concrete, and the Talmud transforms it. The four primary categories of damages—the four primary categories of damages are tooth and foot and horn, say—or anyway, yes, not all four primary categories of damages, but three of them are tooth and foot and horn, the primary categories regarding an ox. Fine? So from the Torah’s perspective, if I saw it literally—and maybe in the Mishnah it’s also like that—horn is literally horn, and tooth is tooth, and foot is foot. In the Talmud, they abstract it. Horn means intentional damage and unusual behavior. Tooth and foot mean its normal way of causing damage—where tooth is damage from which it derives benefit, and foot is its normal way of causing damage without benefit from the damage, yes, in the course of walking. Fine? Now that can be a dog that bites—now that is horn. What does that have to do with a horn? Because it is an abstraction of the concept of horn. I turned horn into something abstract. Fine? Now there is a certain modern tendency—or not modern, but generally over the generations: the more modern you are, the more abstractly you think. Today we have moved entirely into a virtual reality; we are already very accustomed to abstract thinking.

[Speaker E] To acquire something that has not yet come into the world. What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To acquire something that has not yet come into the world—for example, today it sounds strange to us that you cannot acquire something that has not yet come into the world. What’s the problem? Today we constantly trade in barrels of oil that will be pumped a hundred years from now; people trade on the stock market in that kind of thing.

[Speaker E] There’s some Rabbi Meir here who says it’s permitted, that you can.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rabbi Meir, that’s true, and in Jewish law we rule that you cannot.

[Speaker E] Yes, the Talmud says there about that: why is the Jewish law not in accordance with Rabbi Meir? Because his colleagues could not grasp the depth of his reasoning.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, indeed. Meaning, once we advanced, suddenly we can grasp the depth of his reasoning? Indeed. Meaning, there is something in the modern mindset that is willing to accept things as abstractions. It translates concrete things into abstractions. But I think there’s a drawback to that—I’m just saying all this parenthetically. It has a drawback. Why? Because many times people replace the concrete with the abstract and then already deny the existence of the concrete. For example, when you remember someone—today we think this is a mental process; it is not really that something of him is present with me. And then we become materialists. We basically say there is no soul. When we remember someone, nothing of him exists with us. A person has no soul, he is only a body. And we view memory as something mental. The mental has replaced the abstract. And now all the things that we once called soul, today we call mental processes—but these are the results of our physiology, yes, of our neurons. It’s not really—we do not really accept the soul as a being. We accept it as an abstraction, as a process. Okay? The being has turned into a process, like remembrance. Remembrance, which is a kind of being, has become the process of remembering. Okay? Take all of psychology, for example, Freud’s psychoanalysis. He speaks about it in language as if we have parts in the soul, right? Today people no longer see it that way. I don’t know if Freud saw it that way, but at least his language is like that. But when we look at it today, for us those are abstractions. There are certain processes and other processes within our soul, but there are no parts in the soul. It’s not that the id and the subconscious and all those parts, the whole psychoanalytic map he describes, are really parts located in our soul. Rather, these are abstractions; they are forces, modes of operation. At least that’s how people see it today. Okay? Now I don’t know what is correct here; I have no idea. I think nothing is correct—neither as abstraction nor as… Freud is just a heap of baseless speculation. But I mean, on the principled level, many times abstraction also has a drawback because it leads us to deny the existence of the thing and replace it with abstractions. When we are afraid at night, in the past people saw that as demons wandering around here, right? At night, in the wilderness, yes, demons wander in the desert. Where there are people, there are no demons. Right? Where there are people there are no demons. Demons wander in dark places, in places that… Now when you walk alone at night you’re afraid. How did people explain that once? There are demons around; you’re afraid; they can harm you. What do we say today? We have some kind of psychology that causes us to fear the dark. Maybe because robbers attack you in the dark because they can’t see you, I don’t know. It underwent a kind of abstraction, and now we already deny the existence of demons, and for us it has now become a psychological process. From a being it became a process. Or the Talmud—the Talmud in Bava Kamma says, yes, that there is a demon named Shaya, about the demon that causes houses to crumble. Right? That houses that no one… it’s like the movie Monsters, Inc.—have you seen the movie Monsters, Inc.? Monsters, Inc. is a wonderful movie. Monsters, Inc. describes how the monsters who terrify the children are actually terrified to death of children. So the moment that little toddler arrives—Boo—whoever saw the movie, did you see it? It’s a masterpiece, worth seeing. Really, it’s amazing, that movie. So this tiny little baby arrives, barely anything, the size of a token, and all the terrifying monsters run away as if some terrible thing is happening to them—they’re afraid of children, I don’t know. And that’s exactly the same as the demons; it’s a marvelous parable. The demons basically are not found where there are human beings. We are terrified of them, but everywhere we are, they flee. Where there are people, they flee; they are found only where there are no people. The point is that we turned beings, demons, into processes. So once the Sages said: who is it that crumbles houses? Why do houses that no one lives in crumble? Why would they just crumble? No—there is some demon that causes them to crumble; his name is Shaya, yes? That demon. What do we call that demon today? The second law of thermodynamics. Right? Meaning, things deteriorate over time. Fine—but who causes this deterioration? The second law of thermo… what is the second law? The second law of thermodynamics describes a process. But who causes that process? There is some entity whose mode of action is described by that process. Okay—that disappeared. Today we have replaced beings with processes. Okay? Or when people speak about the Holy One, blessed be He. Once people believed that God exists. Today there are many atheists who have very deep religious feelings. But for them, that is an experience. It is not a being. And the Holy One, blessed be He, is not an entity; He is an experience. People have a religious experience. People can speak about the Holy One, blessed be He, with marvelous pathos, describe all their feelings and their interactions with Him, and be complete atheists. By the way, that was probably Einstein. I think that in this sense Dawkins is right, even though it’s ad hominem—he recruits Einstein to show that he too was an atheist, just like the great outreach rabbis: look, he also believed; the greatest scientists think like us. So Dawkins does the same thing. What difference does it make what Einstein was, right? But I’m saying that Einstein really does represent a type of discourse: he speaks about God in an extremely believing way, he describes religious experiences, and he is an atheist. Probably, at least personally, he did not believe. And for him this is some kind of religious experience when he studies science. Artists also report things like this—that they go through a kind of religious experience when they create, or when they see great art, or something like that.

[Speaker C] So that’s a religious experience. What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They undergo some sort of religious experience. What other people go through when they encounter the Holy One, blessed be He. But once people understood that what generated this experience in them was some kind of something. They were encountering something. Today I still think that’s true. Someone who has a religious experience is a religious person. I claim that Einstein was a believing person—he simply did not understand it. Because he underwent the modern process in which he abstracts the… he turns the being into a process or an experience. But I do not accept that. I think that if you undergo the experience, that is a sign that you are encountering something. Something generates that experience in you.

[Speaker D] A deist. What? One who believes in a being. A deist.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so a deist—for me, yes, a deist. I meant that he was a deist, not that he was a theist. For me that is called a believing deist. He does not think God commands—that doesn’t matter; that’s another discussion—but such an entity exists, called God. Because otherwise what causes you that excitement—are these just words? And people are so… look at how Dawkins writes about this; he doesn’t believe a word of it. So I wrote this, I think, in God Plays with Dice, if I remember correctly, I think I wrote it there: that Einstein really was like that, but he was an unconscious believer. Many times people do not interpret themselves correctly, in my opinion. Meaning, they believe. In my view, moral people are believers. All of them. Ask them—complete atheists—they are moral because they think there is moral obligation. In my view, there is no such thing as moral obligation unless it has a source. Meaning, what is moral obligation? In a materialist world, moral obligation is simply nonsense. A collection of molecules—what are norms in such a world? It’s absurd. There has to be some source for norms. Now people have become so accustomed to this abstraction that they go on speaking in the language of norms and leave aside the source of the norms. There’s no need for a source of norms—these are all experiences, all feelings, there is nothing real, nothing objective that generates all these things. And this modern process causes us to turn beings into processes and experiences. Now in a certain sense sometimes this really refines the conception, but on the other hand sometimes we throw out the baby with the bathwater. It refines the conception in the sense that the being does not have to be a concrete being; it can be an abstract being, but it is still a being. There is something there. Otherwise what does it? Okay, so fine—I’m not committing myself to there being demons that cause me to be afraid at night; I’m not that sure. But I don’t know—maybe yes. I’m not ruling it out.

[Speaker D] Someone who doesn’t have a religious experience—is it also true in the opposite direction, that he is basically an atheist?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] About that I’m not sure. I hope not, because I don’t. Not really—I don’t.

[Speaker D] Meaning someone who doesn’t have the experience is simply not sensitive enough?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Not truly, right. So that’s a certain lack of sensitivity. Meaning, there are things you don’t manage to encounter. Like a person who doesn’t see sharply enough and has dull vision, fine? So he needs glasses. So I too probably need some kind of emotional—or not emotional, I don’t know exactly what—epistemological, epistemic glasses, in order to encounter something that I am not managing to encounter, and then maybe that too would affect me somehow. I don’t encounter it. I believe it exists; I think I believe, but I don’t encounter it. But the other direction—I think that if it happens, then something generates it. If it doesn’t happen, then I’m dull. But if I see something, then there is something there. Otherwise how do I see? If I don’t see, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there, because maybe I don’t see well. But if I see something, then there is something that I see, no? That is the asymmetry, the relation between feelings and the ontic and the cognitive.

[Speaker C] There are glasses like that today. What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are such glasses. Today you can already do that—you can get glasses. By the way, those are the advantages. The advantages are that once we know how to make abstractions, we really can imitate it and create virtual reality with nothing behind it. Because we really have begun, we have succeeded in understanding how to abstract this being. But I’m saying, this has its advantages. The computer, yes? We talked about this before too, I think. When Aristotle, in the Organon, formulated logic—after all, he didn’t invent logic; he formulated it. Obviously people before him also understood that there is logic. What was Aristotle’s innovation? That he made it into a system of rules. And suddenly he understood that behind many of our forms of thought in many different contexts, there really stands a rather small set of rules that appears everywhere in the same way. Yes? Zomberguyzer—the logician I work with, I worked with him on Talmudic logic—he told me that in his lectures he always says that the Holy One, blessed be He, goes around like this scattering crumbs of logic everywhere. He’s a logician, he lives this stuff, he loves it. So he says: the Holy One, blessed be He, goes around scattering crumbs of logic everywhere, and therefore everywhere you engage in logical work, it’s all the same thing. It makes no difference what you are looking at; the structures are exactly the same structures. Therefore, if you are a logician, you are completely indifferent to content; you immediately see the structures, and the structures are the same structures. Suddenly, from the perspective of a logician, you see that you don’t really need to know biology in order to understand what is going on there in biology. You don’t need to know physics in order to understand what is going on in physics—what is going on at the principled level. You won’t know the facts, but you understand the principles.

[Speaker B] And in a certain sense that’s like physics—that we reached a point where in the end physics is just a not very large set of laws. Right. All the phenomena in nature that seem totally unrelated—in the end they’re all… Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, as a physicist you have to work hard to discover those laws. Once you discovered those laws, you don’t need to be a physicist at all; along comes a logician or a mathematician, solves the equation, and tells you what happens here without knowing at all what it means, without understanding anything in physics. Because the logic is the same; the equations are solved in the same way in every context.

[Speaker B] Like most lecturers at the university. What? Like most lecturers at the university.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, that may be.

[Speaker B] And you can do it like a mathematical function, make a physical function, take the equation…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And there are—they did it, they did it. I have a book by Tarski at home—not by Tarski, by Carnap—in which he creates a logical system that describes physics, a logical system that describes biology, and once you take that logical system you don’t need to know anything. That’s his claim. In my opinion he doesn’t really manage to do it all the way, but that’s what he’s trying to do there. He’s trying to formalize, and of course he could not have done it without observations. Once observations revealed the laws, now I can formulate a closed mathematical, logical theory such that if you operate it correctly, you can know all of biology, all of physics, whatever you want. An axiomatic system. To create one axiomatic system that is biology, another axiomatic system that is physics, and that’s it. From that point on you need to be a logician, not a physicist. The physicist is needed to discover the system. From then on it’s a logician or a mathematician—yes, for me that’s no difference, it’s the same thing. Fine? Basically, if I return to what I said earlier, the physicist’s role is basically to find which logical model describes the relevant reality. That is the statement in physics. Once he has found it, from then on it is only mathematics. Meaning, it’s already the mathematician; it’s no longer his field. And engineering too, in the end.

[Speaker C] What? That’s what people want in engineering—to find the model that fits reality.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. From there on it’s already… Okay, so the… how did I get to all this? I got here through abstraction, yes. So what I tried to show is that this process Aharon Shemesh describes—that in earlier generations people looked at the performance-based criterion and in later generations they looked at the linguistic criterion—according to the interpretation I have now proposed for the linguistic criterion, this is once again a process of abstraction. It is the same process. I take the concepts passive omission and positive action, which originally were performance-based, very concrete: if you do something, that is action, and if you don’t do something, that is omission, that is inaction, that is passive omission. Now they are put through a process of abstraction, and now we discover that you can keep the same conceptual system of passive omission and positive action. But now passive omission does not describe a physical act at all. Passive omission means not being in a positive state. That is called passive omission. Positive action means being in a negative state. Or being in a state—being in a state, that is positive action; not being in a state, that is passive omission. Fine? Now, being in a positive state is positive action—that is, it is the fulfillment of a positive commandment. Positive commandments are fulfilled through positive action. One is in a positive state even though I may get there by not acting. Being in a state is positive action—being in a state, whether positive or negative, being in a state is positive action. Being in a positive state, fine—that is fulfilling a positive commandment. Being in a negative state is violating a prohibition. Okay? And therefore both of them, conceptually, are really positive action. Violating a prohibition and fulfilling a positive commandment are both done through positive action—but through abstract positive action, not through concrete positive action, and similarly for violating them. So maybe there is actually a third state, which is not—

[Speaker D] Entering into… Exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the wall, the great wall that does not let us pass from the world of positive commandments to the world of prohibitions, because there is a state in the middle. When we negate the positive commandment, we do not move over to the prohibition—we remain in the middle. Like I once spoke about this negation of one, zero, and minus one. So there is contrary negation and nullifying negation, nullifying with an aleph. Meaning, to nullify something, that is, to cancel it. So the nullifying negation of one is to bring it to zero. The contrary negation of one is to bring it to minus one. Okay? Now basically when there is one, minus one, and zero, you cannot, by negation, move from one to minus one—you get stuck in the middle. From one, you negate it, and you get to zero. If you negate zero, where do you get? I don’t know what it means to negate zero at all. Maybe to one, maybe to minus one, I don’t know exactly. But it doesn’t return you to the same place. There is no double negation here. Double negation doesn’t work in such a case. Right? And therefore all these arguments about zero. You nullify, you…

[Speaker C] To nullify is not negation.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it is negation, because negation is moving to minus.

[Speaker C] I didn’t understand how you move to zero.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s simply two kinds of negation. Aristotle already distinguished between these two kinds of negation. There is nullifying negation and contrary negation. For example, I’ll give you an example. There are two kinds of oppositions: opposition like one and zero, a nullifying opposition, and a contrary opposition. For example, there is the famous inquiry: is light the absence of darkness, or is darkness the absence of light, or neither? Or cold and heat, or all kinds of opposites of this sort. There are opposites where neither is the absence of the other; both have existence and yet they are opposites. There are opposites where one is the absence of the other. For example, light and darkness. Darkness is the absence of light. We know this from physics too, right? Meaning, light is photons, and darkness is when there are no photons. Darkness is not… there is no darkness flashlight, no flashlight that emits darkness. You can only block light, and then darkness is created, right? There is a light-maker. “Who forms light and creates darkness,” it says. Fine, there are all kinds of homiletic interpretations.

[Speaker B] There are silence speakers. Silence speakers?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? That they…

[Speaker B] That they cancel out, because of destructive interference.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can do that with light too. You can do that with light too.

[Speaker C] But that itself is positive action, yes—rock wool instead of rock wool. But what he’s saying is a positive commandment, because silencing darkness is producing waves.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is producing light that through destructive interference cancels out this light. Obviously. It did not create darkness. Now look where the indication is. Take light and darkness, combine them—what do you get? Light. Meaning that light is one and darkness is zero, right? One plus zero is one. Okay? Now take cold and heat and combine them—cold water and hot water.

[Speaker D] So what is contrary to light, then? You’re basically saying darkness…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What Yossi said. Minus light. Meaning light with such a frequency that when it interferes with that frequency it destroys it and darkness is created. That is what is contrary to light. It is basically light at another wavelength.

[Speaker B] No, at a different phase, a different phase, right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Does that exist? Yes, of course.

[Speaker B] Of course. You can do, say, two beams of light, like with noise, same thing. Simply opposite phase.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s say the light is a sine wave. Now take another light shifted by a phase of 180 degrees. So every peak of one will be the negative of the other, right?

[Speaker C] Cosine is ninety degrees; that’s exactly the opposite.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So when you cancel them out—when you add them, sorry—you get complete zero. Each one simply cancels the other. That’s what active noise cancellation does. If you combine light and darkness, you get light, right? That means it’s one and zero. But what about cold water and hot water that you combine? It comes out lukewarm. They cancel each other out. So that means cold and heat are one and minus one, not one and zero. Together it comes out zero. Yes, right. At least in the model where you say that combining them is addition, in that model it’s like one and minus one. Okay? And that one is like one and zero. Now the transition from light to darkness is extinguishing. Fine? Since that is a transition from one to zero. The transition from heat to cold is not extinguishing heat—it’s cooling. Meaning, doing something active. Right? Moving it to the other side. Okay? Now in a place where I have a zero state—say lukewarm, between cold and hot; light and darkness—if the relation between positive commandments and prohibitions were like light and darkness, then maybe there would be room to build a model that connects them to one another. Assuming it’s possible to extinguish darkness and get light—yes, the question is how you build the model—but suppose, at least, some such definition. But with cold and heat, when you extinguish the heat you get lukewarm, not necessarily cold, right? And if you extinguish the lukewarm, I don’t know what it means to extinguish lukewarm—depends whether you take it to become hot or to become cold. In short, cold and heat do not speak to one another. There is no way to pass from one to the other. If you nullify this by negations—I mean, no way to pass from one to the other. If you negate heat you get lukewarm. There is no way through negations to get to cold. Right? It is another world. Lukewarm is basically a wall that separates these two worlds. They do not speak to one another. Therefore, the world of positive commandments and the world of prohibitions do not speak to one another; there is no connection between them.

[Speaker B] With cold and heat it’s not like that. What? Heat is ultimately the movement of molecules.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, those are the models.

[Speaker B] I’m talking about cold.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And heat as I perceive it, the way I feel it. Not its physics. I’ll explain even more now what this is about. It’s actually a good analogy for what you’re saying. There’s an American Jewish philosopher named Robert Nozick, and he once asked an interesting question. When I wrote this book on deontic logic, I went to speak with some law lecturer at the Hebrew University, Alon Harel, who has somewhat of a philosophical orientation. So they referred me to him. Why did I go talk to him? Because I suspected—I argued—that in Israeli law there are no positive commandments. There are only prohibitions. I wanted to ask legal scholars what they thought about that statement. I asked him, give me an example of a positive commandment in the law. He said: paying taxes, military service—you have to pay taxes, you have to serve in the army, these are obligations to do something. Okay? I argued that in terms of halakhic categories, these are prohibitions. There’s a punishment. Exactly. These are prohibitions that impose on you a duty to act, like “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood.” How do I know? Because in the accepted legal conception, there’s no such thing as a law that doesn’t have a punishment attached to it. The whole debate around the “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood” law with Hanan Porat revolved around this issue. Why suddenly impose a sanction on someone who stands idly by his fellow’s blood? Morally, we all agree that you should save someone in distress. That was true even before they passed the law. What changed when they passed the law? What changed is that from now on, someone who doesn’t do it will be punished. Well, that means that this law, despite imposing on you an obligation to save, is a prohibition, right? There’s no reward. A reward would have been the opposite: before that, if you saved someone you’d get a reward, you’d get a citation or a President’s Award because you saved someone, you invested something you weren’t obligated to do, so you get a reward—that would be a positive commandment. The moment it entered the law, it became a prohibition. Did he agree with you? Once I explained that those were the definitions, he agreed with me, yes. He didn’t know those definitions, because in law the definition is an operational one. And once you define it operationally, then at the operational level there are positive commandments in law. But I think that at the essential level there are no positive commandments in law. Because at the essential level, the legislator does not see himself as having the right or the legitimacy to educate the citizen. Who is he to educate the citizen? He has to make sure the citizen is not in a negative state. He can’t demand that the citizen be in a positive state. I decide what’s positive and what isn’t positive. Don’t tell me stories. You just make sure I don’t cause harm. First do no harm, like in the physicians’ oath.

[Speaker D] There’s a law to put an Israeli flag on a private house on Independence Day. But they don’t enforce it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s such a law? Really?

[Speaker D] I nearly fell off my chair. So supposedly from that—you see? I only saw that they don’t enforce it. No, not enforcing it is a different matter. There are lots of laws they don’t enforce, whether it’s a public matter or whatever, but in law there has to be a punishment attached to it. If they don’t catch you without a flag,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the fact that they enforce—it means

[Speaker D] that they see it as not de facto canceling the law. But the point is that… no, it’s not a positive commandment; they’ve simply de facto canceled the law. There’s the lost property law. A positive law—it says return lost property, it doesn’t give you some punishment if you do… theft by finding—is there such a concept? No, that’s law, no, that’s law. Law gives you, gives rules. I think the law—the only sanction in the lost property law is—that’s an interesting question. The only sanction in the lost property law is that you won’t receive

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the lost item after four months. If you didn’t do what the law requires, you won’t receive the lost item after four months, but really I think there’s no sanction. Right, it seems to me that there’s no sanction there.

[Speaker D] I don’t know—in the accepted legal conception there’s no law without a sanction, meaning

[Speaker B] That’s…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I know. I thought about it and wrote here that there’s one exception that really infuriated me, but that’s what happens there—administrative law. In administrative law it infuriated me terribly when we were waging struggles against the head of the local council in Yeruham, an international-level crook, and he did nothing; the law didn’t interest him at all. As far as he was concerned, the law wasn’t even a recommendation—it simply didn’t interest him. Now what turns out? When a person does—if it’s criminal, fine, then you can punish him and so on, but how are you going to prove it’s criminal and work for five years with lawyers and all that, and after five years maybe in the end you’ll manage to convict him? The guy did ten such acts in an hour. Meaning, go work on every one of those acts, invest in a legal struggle for five years, get all the way to who-knows-where, and of course first exhaust procedures and everything—it’s not practical. In short, he does ten of these an hour and that’s that, nothing interests him. Now what happens when he doesn’t cross the criminal threshold? Personal liability and all sorts of things like that, and somehow he stays under the threshold, in the administrative sphere? So what happens if, say, he takes some action without a tender, okay? Suppose I went on some quixotic struggle against him, and after a year I managed to prove he was in the wrong, and I also paid a lot of money to a lawyer to help me with this, and in the end I managed to prove he was wrong—what do they do? They cancel the tender, they simply—cancel the award, that is—and go out to tender, right? So this law is merely a recommendation. I mean, that was the situation anyway. He was required to hold a tender regardless. So what does he say? Let’s try an experiment: I’ll do it without a tender. At worst they’ll catch me, after five years they’ll manage to prove it, so then I’ll hold a tender. I had to hold a tender anyway. What did I lose? I lost nothing. Meaning, by its very nature this law is only a recommendation. There’s no sanction at all. Now when a person does ten times—ten such acts an hour, do you understand? It’s a gamble with profit only. Meaning, either he profits or nothing happens. Who wouldn’t make that gamble?

[Speaker B] That’s not true, I think there’s breach of trust here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It depends. In most—I checked this there somewhat,

[Speaker B] Whoever is responsible for that, nothing will happen. Suppose they do things without a tender, several people…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying in most situations,

[Speaker B] I’m not talking now about whether it will be carried out

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] or not—in most situations, not only whether it’s carried out—in most situations there is no sanction in administrative law. Certain conditions have to exist for it to be radical enough that they’ll impose personal liability on him or some monetary punishment or even imprisonment, but that’s already a criminal threshold. Without that, they just nullify the act; the act is simply void because it’s illegal. It’s not… yes, the difference is, as they always say, that for the authorities, anything the law doesn’t permit them is forbidden to them to do; for the citizen, anything the law doesn’t forbid him is permitted to him. Okay, so at most you succeeded in showing that he did something the law did not permit him to do. Okay, so his act isn’t valid. That’s all, you go back to square one. And that’s what he did—it was a gamble with profit only. The guy did thousands of such things all the time, at every turn. Now what’s the problem? At most we’ll prove that all these acts are illegal. That will happen, of course, after roughly a billion years; you’ll manage to prove it through countless efforts, and people work, they don’t have time to invest in this, while for him this is his occupation. There’s no chance, it’s a hopeless struggle. And at most, what will happen—even if there are such Don Quixotes who go out to fight—is that okay, it’ll be canceled and they’ll issue a tender, as the law required him to do anyway. So he tried to gamble and failed; he lost nothing, he just failed. It’s simply like someone offering you a gamble: either you’ll earn a billion dollars or nothing will happen—wouldn’t you buy the ticket? Why not? That’s what he’s doing; it’s a gamble with profit only. You wouldn’t buy it? You’ll get the ticket for free. So yes, why wouldn’t you take it? Of course you would. That’s administrative law. By the way, I later wrote an article about this for Haaretz, and they didn’t publish it; I don’t know why.

[Speaker C] Can’t you put an appointed committee over him?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We tried, we tried, but he puts on a show. Ofir Pines.

[Speaker C] Finished, finished, the Interior Ministry is the problem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Never mind, them too. They kept giving backing all the time. Never mind. In any case, so to our matter: what I want to say is that in principle, in law—as opposed to Jewish law—and this is a reflection of deontic logic, we’ll come back to this when we talk about halakhic deontic logic—in law, essentially, there are no positive commandments. There are only prohibitions. Even when the law tells you to do something, what it’s really saying is that if you don’t do it, you’ll be punished. That’s what it says. It doesn’t say, do it. It says that if you don’t do it, you’ll be punished. Whether you do it or don’t do it is your business. I once brought a passage from Haim Cohen in his book The Law. That means that Israeli law does not forbid stealing. It doesn’t forbid stealing. It only says that the thief’s punishment is such-and-such. Because the law does not find in itself the legitimacy to coerce—this is a liberal conception—meaning, the person decides about his actions. The law only tells judges what they may do and what they must do with citizens in different situations. The law speaks to judges, not to citizens. To citizens, the law can’t really say anything. A citizen can do whatever he thinks is right. The judge, of course, will do what the law imposes on him. So the thief’s punishment is such-and-such. As for that, well, it’s an interesting conception; I’m not sure I agree with it. But it is true that this is the wording of the law. The only question is whether that’s merely a form of expression, or whether, in the essential conception, the law really does not command you to do anything. Law is not—there are no positive commandments in law. There are only prohibitions.

Deontic Logic and the Relationship Between Prohibitions and Obligations – Lecture 3

Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

The operational distinction and its failure

Maimonides, the sixth root, and duplications between positive and negative commandments

A positive commandment that tells you to refrain, and a prohibition that requires action

Aharon Shemesh’s proposal: a linguistic definition and the critique of it

Deontic logic, double negation, and the error of equivalence

Non-reducibility between the world of positive commandments and the world of prohibitions

The analogy to mathematics and science: model versus reality

Practical ramifications showing that positive commandments and prohibitions are not the same thing

The essential definition: a desirable state versus a negative state

Human dignity, passive omission, and preserving the intuition on an abstract level

Processes of abstraction in concepts and their implications

Formalization, general logic, and the goal of the halakhic model

Law versus Jewish law: the absence of essential positive commandments in civil law

Full Transcript

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Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

The operational distinction and its failure

Maimonides, the sixth root, and duplications between positive and negative commandments

A positive commandment that tells you to refrain, and a prohibition that requires action

Aharon Shemesh’s proposal: a linguistic definition and the critique of it

Deontic logic, double negation, and the error of equivalence

Non-reducibility between the world of positive commandments and the world of prohibitions

The analogy to mathematics and science: model versus reality

Practical ramifications showing that positive commandments and prohibitions are not the same thing

The essential definition: a desirable state versus a negative state

Human dignity, passive omission, and preserving the intuition on an abstract level

Processes of abstraction in concepts and their implications

Formalization, general logic, and the goal of the halakhic model

Law versus Jewish law: the absence of essential positive commandments in civil law

Full Transcript

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