For the Perplexed of the Generation – Lesson 8

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[Speaker A] I wanted to ask a question about this approach of Rav Kook, which I don’t totally understand, but I’ll try anyway to put it into words. In Kabbalah there’s a concept called contraction. Meaning, as it were, the Holy One, blessed be He, had to withdraw in order to make room for our creation, with all its limitations and all its deficiencies. Which sounds to me, on the face of it, exactly the opposite of what Rav Kook is saying. The Holy One, blessed be He, is absolute perfection, but in order to make room for this creation with all its deficiencies and limitations and the fact that it isn’t perfect, then He had to, as it were, withdraw and make space. Why is that the opposite? If the Holy One, blessed be He, is infinite, then the world that was created should also have had to be in His likeness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sure, nobody disputes that the world was created in the likeness of the Holy One, blessed be He.

[Speaker A] The Holy One, blessed be He, is perfect, absolute perfection, and the world that was created is full of deficiencies and flaws.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I’m

[Speaker A] not learning

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] right now from the structure of the world to the structure of the Holy One, blessed be He. That’s not the point. I’m talking now about the question: I see the Holy One, blessed be He, in a certain way—not the world, the Holy One, blessed be He. I see Him in a certain way. Is that Him Himself, or is it only Him as I perceive Him? This is not a comparison between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world, but between His phenomenon and His noumenon, in Kantian language. Meaning, between how I perceive Him and what He Himself is. That’s the discussion he’s conducting here.

[Speaker A] Still, we’re not capable at all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. By the way, contraction too is a contraction of the infinite light, not of the essence. That’s something else.

[Speaker A] But all the time Rav Kook says, I want our world to have properties A, B, C, and therefore I also claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, has to have properties.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s how I perceive Him. That’s how I perceive Him. So he says, fine, you perceive Him that way—but who says He is that way? After all, desire and necessity don’t apply to Him; that’s what he said on the previous page. So how do you suddenly decide there that He has free will? So he says: I decide He has free will because that’s how I perceive Him. I don’t know what to say about Him Himself. That’s how I perceive Him. I have to perceive Him that way, just as I have to perceive this as brown. It’s not that it’s not true—it’s that I have to perceive Him that way. That’s my perception; that’s how it is seen. When I say this table is brown, am I mistaken? Meaning, was there a skeptical claim, what I said earlier? When I say this table is brown, it’s not really brown—that’s not a skeptical claim at all. It’s a completely non-skeptical claim. It’s just a claim that says: my language for describing this table is a language of brown. It’s not that I’m wrong because the table is really another color, not brown. The table really has no color. Color is entirely a claim about how I perceive things. So there’s nothing skeptical here at all. That’s an important point to understand, because with Kant too there were people who accused him of skepticism because of this. It has nothing to do with that; it has nothing to do with skepticism. On the contrary, Kant’s real accusers are those who accuse him of dogmatism, of not being skeptical. But that’s more on the philosophical side. Yes.

[Speaker A] I just want to ask whether the point is that what we hold regarding the Creator of the world—we don’t need to be troubled by what we attribute to the Holy One, blessed be He, because that’s how we perceive, and that’s fine?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And not what?

[Speaker A] And not a statement about Him?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is whether this isn’t a statement about His image as we perceive it. Even His image as we perceive it is supposed to satisfy certain conditions. If you perceive the Holy One, blessed be He, as a fan, that would be a problem, even if you say, that’s how I perceive Him.

[Speaker A] Fine, that’s how you perceive Him, but you worship fans. Ah, I perceive Him as merciful.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maimonides would tell me, no, He isn’t really merciful. Okay. But he says that my perception of Him—Maimonides would say—is not that He Himself is merciful. That’s how I would translate it. Again, I don’t know what Maimonides would answer. I’m saying how I translate these statements of Maimonides. Maimonides would say: in my own perception I understand that He Himself is beyond the concept of merciful, and I only see His conduct in the form of mercifulness. But all of that is located within my consciousness. The perception, and also what I say I understand that He is not what I see—even that is still a result, even that still takes place within me, within my perception. Okay? And this whole distinction—one of the criticisms of Kant—all the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal is a distinction that we make, so it itself exists within the phenomenal. Meaning, the whole distinction between the thing in itself and how I perceive it—I made that distinction too from within my perception. So that distinction itself is also part of that same perception. It’s obvious that this is built as some kind of chain like that. There’s nothing to do about it; there’s no other way to perceive things except through how we perceive them. What can you do?

[Speaker A] According to the verse that the Sages say: “Just as He is merciful, so you too shall be merciful.” Yes, the correct interpretation is: just as you perceive the Holy One, blessed be He, as merciful, so too derive a demand for yourself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s what he says. And here he turns it into an ideology, actually, this passage. He basically says: look, I’m not talking about His essence. I’m talking about the question of how we perceive Him. How it is right to perceive Him. It’s not that there is no right and wrong. There is right, and there is also wrong. Again, he’s not expressing skepticism here. It’s very important to understand that point: this is not skepticism. It is recognition of a certain language, of the limitations that our language imposes on us—and those limitations are not limitations that interfere. Because if we didn’t have those limitations, we wouldn’t perceive anything. If, say, we weren’t bound by the laws of color, then we wouldn’t perceive this table at all. So it’s not that this thing limits us; rather, this thing is what makes it possible for us to perceive tables. If we didn’t have this tool that paints electromagnetic waves in the form of colors, then how would we perceive them? Unless we had another tool. It doesn’t matter—if we perceived them through sounds, then fine, we’d perceive them through sounds—but some means of translating reality, from reality into consciousness, has to exist, because otherwise we simply wouldn’t know anything. Therefore this medium should not be viewed as a limiting medium, as something that ought to arouse skepticism. It’s just the opposite. It is the medium that enables me to know something about reality. Someone who thinks this is real—he’s actually the one who should be somewhat skeptical. Not the person who is aware that this thing is subjective. Meaning, what I say, that this table is brown, is an absolute truth. There’s nothing doubtful about it. What is the truth? That in our perceptions, according to how we define brown, this table is brown. Which, if you translate it into objective language, means that it has such-and-such a crystalline structure, and you can write the equations in physics that describe it. Which would be, let’s say, the plane that—even they, of course, those equations too use our language and our forms of thinking. Meaning, there is no—we can’t escape that. It’s not that we have some description that can avoid using human tools, human tools of thought and cognition. We don’t. Even what I described earlier as objective reality is relative objectivity. When I say that the crystalline structure is something objective—what does objective mean? Crystalline structure is a conceptual world of mine. That’s how I perceive what exists in reality itself.

[Speaker A] Out of this tool that we had—or if we had more than that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. And because of that, you can’t escape it, and you also don’t need to escape it, because escaping it means not knowing anything. And there are people who think that in order to get out of…

[Speaker A] But one plus one is always the same thing. What? There are things that are…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s logic, not physics. That’s logic, not physics. I’ll get to that in a moment. Those are two different things. So really, the point I wanted to sharpen here is that this is not a skeptical view. It’s a view that understands our modes of cognition and knows how far one can go with them—really, how far one can go with them. It’s not some pessimistic, narrowing view that says: we can’t perceive things correctly, no choice, let’s make do with what we have. It’s not “no choice”; there is no other way. There cannot be a perfect creature that would be free of this on the principled level. There isn’t one. At most it would have a different system of tools for perceiving the world. But the world has to be perceived through some system. You are not the world itself. You are someone else standing opposite the world and wanting to perceive it. And if you want to perceive it, you have to do it in a system of concepts, of tools of perception, because without that you haven’t perceived anything. So therefore, when I say this table is brown, when I say there is sound in the forest, I mean that there is sound in the forest; that isn’t skepticism. But you need to understand what that statement means, that there is sound in the forest. Basically the meaning of that statement is that the air in the forest moves. That’s what it means. Sound is only the language of my consciousness, the language that serves me in describing these physical phenomena. That’s all. But that’s perfectly fine. I’m aware of that, and that’s how I work with it. It’s like languages describing concepts; words in a language describe objects or concepts. So I know the words are arbitrary. So what? Because of that, do I fail to perceive the object correctly? Of course not. I assign a name to the object and I say: this is now a pillar. “Pillar” is an arbitrary word; I could also call it “kaspod.” If that’s what had been decided, that’s what it would be called. Would that change anything? Does that mean there’s something relative here, something that should make me skeptical? Of course not. I perceive the pillar as it is and I decided to call it that. That doesn’t make anything here relative. This is the language in which I perceive things, that’s all.

[Speaker A] Okay. The further assumption that a person can be known is connected to essence. There are two interpretations of that: one, that the name indeed remains across generations and they continue calling it by the same kind; and there’s another added interpretation that says the name a person chose indeed represents the essence of that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the claim being made there is that in the holy tongue, say, in biblical language, the connection between the word and the object is some kind of connection that is not arbitrary, unlike what we usually understand about languages. That doesn’t change what I’m saying. It doesn’t change it. The word still isn’t the thing; it’s just that the attaching of a word to a thing is an attachment that isn’t in my hands, it’s something that stems from some property of the thing itself. Okay, so what? But still, in the linguistic function it’s the same thing; it doesn’t matter. In the linguistic function, whether I call it a pillar and someone else calls it “kaspod” in another language, it changes nothing. “Column” in English, right? So it changes nothing. They attached to it an arbitrary word, and I attached to it an essential word, but both of us are pointing to the same object—there’s no difference in that. Only the connection between the words and the objects may have a different character in the context of biblical language.

[Speaker A] And if according to Rav Kook, in everything, in every living creature, in every object in the world, there is a divine element from above—and on the other hand…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who said that in everything there is a divine element from above? You said that according to reasoning or according to

[Speaker A] Rav Kook’s words.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Where does he write that?

[Speaker A] Not here. I’m saying things I heard. Okay. That in each and every thing there is some element from above, and maybe I’m mistaken, maybe that isn’t true. Now, what still isn’t clear to me is: that particular thing, that animal—it’s only my translation. Who says that’s reality?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, your translation?

[Speaker A] I mean according to the filters

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] of mine. Yes, certainly. It’s not that there is no table; there is a table. What you call a table is some kind of object that exists, but the properties you attribute to this table—the brown color, the squareness, the height, the hardness—all these properties are properties stated within a conceptual system that exists only in you. But again, that isn’t because you don’t perceive the table correctly, but because this is the language in which you correctly describe it; that’s what it is. It’s perfectly fine, there’s no… That’s exactly what I wanted to sharpen, because with Kant many people make this mistake in interpretation.

[Speaker A] But to arrive at an understanding of the Holy One, blessed be He, regarding His image, to recognition of the Holy One, blessed be He, that is according to the depth of my translation…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what Rav Kook says. That’s what Rav Kook says. But he says this is true of every object, not only in relation to the Holy One, blessed be He. He is simply saying: therefore one shouldn’t be troubled by it. The fact… How do I translate it, correctly? Right. He says that the problem from which he started was: how do we attribute to the Holy One, blessed be He, human predicates such as desire or vitality or whatever it is we are trying to investigate here—whether He is this way or that way, what is all that? These are human predicates; what do they have to do with the Holy One, blessed be He? So he says: in any case, he is not talking about Him; he is talking about His image as it is formed within me. And I of course operate in a conceptual system of obligation or desire, so that’s perfectly fine—that’s how I perceive Him, there’s no need to panic about it. That’s exactly what he says. Okay? So therefore there is a second side, by the way, to this coin. The other side of the coin says that, for example, if a contradiction is created in my perception of the Holy One, blessed be He—on one hand, there’s no problem at all with how you see the Holy One, blessed be He; that is the Holy One, blessed be He—not because that is He in Himself, because that in any case doesn’t matter; we are looking at the question of how He is perceived by us. So in that sense he sort of lowers the Holy One, blessed be He—or at least calms us when we lower the Holy One, blessed be He. But on the other hand, there are people who want to say: well then, if so, I don’t need to be troubled by contradictions, because the Holy One, blessed be He, is above everything; the contradiction only arises because of my perception, right? So what’s the problem? So the fact that there are contradictions in our perception of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not something that should trouble us—that’s a very tempting conclusion from such an argument. I think that’s wrong.

[Speaker A] It’s not right. What? There are those who say that we, on the contrary…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] you need a mind that can tolerate it. Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers, right? He says: I believe because it is absurd. Not despite the fact that it’s absurd, but because it’s absurd.

[Speaker A] There are several

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Jews like that. I think it’s a new phenomenon among Jews, a new phenomenon.

[Speaker A] The One who created my translation, the Holy One, blessed be He, also created me, and the Holy One, blessed be He, also created the tools, those who translate,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so

[Speaker A] the Holy One, blessed be He, also created for me the scope of cognition and the scope of translation, right? So what am I supposed to expect from this? Or what is there above me?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who are you? The one who expects—the Holy One, blessed be He, created him too. So who exactly is doing the expecting here? In the end you are a creature of the Holy One, blessed be He, and this is what you have, and with this you work. What’s the problem with that? It’s perfectly fine. That’s how you perceive Him, the way He created you to perceive Him. And that’s fine. Listen, this is the world—the whole world is a creation of the Holy One, blessed be He.

[Speaker A] He also lowered measures, and I’m in measurements.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not like that. If He had created you that way, then you’d be right, but He didn’t create you that way. That’s what you decided to do. And that is exactly the point. Not everything I do is automatically good because the Holy One, blessed be He, made it, so what. Rather, the point is: I make the maximum effort that I can. There is a glass ceiling. The glass ceiling is where the Holy One, blessed be He, placed me. Up to there I reach. Fine. So all is good—what’s the problem with that? The problem is that you can’t say that now everything is a glass ceiling, because then we’re back to necessity. Right? Rav Kook here is trying to escape necessity; he says that in fact we are in freedom. Good. I started talking about contradictions. So with contradictions too there are people who comfort themselves in the same way: the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time, above logic, above who knows what. And since that is so, there is no problem, there’s no need to be troubled by contradictions. Religious people can live peacefully with anything. And I think that is a serious mistake. A serious mistake that stems from that same mistake I spoke about earlier. The mistake that says that we are not talking about the Holy One, blessed be He, but only about how we perceive Him—and that, after all, is in place of a limited perception, and therefore in fact we can’t perceive correctly. But if I say this is not a limited perception—this is the true perception. In our terms, this is the Holy One, blessed be He, just as this table is brown. It’s the same thing. So if that’s so, and a contradiction arises in me—here is the practical implication of what I said earlier, right?—then once a contradiction arises in me, I can’t say, well, the Holy One, blessed be He, is above contradictions; only the way I perceive Him is limited, and therefore contradictions arise. Why? Because if a contradiction arises in me, then the Holy One, blessed be He, in whom I believe is an empty set. I don’t know who He Himself is. But the Holy One, blessed be He, in whom I believe does not exist. Because let’s take an example: if I see the prior knowledge of the Holy One, blessed be He, and free choice as a contradiction. Let us assume for the sake of discussion right now that this is truly a logical contradiction. Fine? So now I can say—and many say this, yes?—then let’s believe that He knows everything in advance and also believe that we have free choice, and the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent and above logic and everything, and therefore everything is fine, there’s no need to be troubled by anything. Rudolf Otto, in the introduction to his book on holiness, writes that the unity of opposites is the refuge of the lazy. Whoever doesn’t want to think says, yes, the unity of opposites, and I’m really very pious too, and there’s no problem, we’re above logic, and there’s no need to think about anything, everything is fine. Sit and learn, it’ll be fine, as they say—that’s Rabbi Nachman. Meaning: don’t think, it’ll be fine, everything is fine. That’s laziness. The unity of opposites is not something possible, and the reason for this is very simple. Because if, for me, divine foreknowledge contradicts freedom of choice, then when I said that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance, for me I thereby said that I have no free choice—that’s a logical inference for me, right? So what did I really say by that? That I have free choice and do not have free choice simultaneously. And now they tell me, okay, live with it and relax. What does it mean, live with what? Live with the fact that there is and is not free choice? I can relax with a pill, but what does that mean? Can I really say that I believe there is free choice and at the same time I also believe there is no free choice? Wonderful, no problem—I hold the correct beliefs and everything is fine. You know, in elementary logic, from a contradiction you can derive anything. We talked about this last year. From a contradiction you can derive anything. So from here I can also derive that Jesus is—Heaven forbid—the messiah. Fine? Because no problem: if there is a contradiction, then you can derive anything. That’s the true believer, the one who is above contradictions.

[Speaker A] But if the rabbi said that… going down from the point that this is objective—you said we don’t have to go… a logical contradiction?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s why I said, I

[Speaker A] showed some kind of perspective like that, that the Jew also refused… the Holy One, blessed be He, is good and there were six million in the Holocaust.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, that’s something completely different. That confusion is also very common. Something completely different. And in both directions there’s confusion there. There are things I don’t understand. Things I don’t understand—the Holy One, blessed be He, has plenty of them. I can give you another long list. Even with me, I don’t know, I don’t understand a lot of things about the Holy One, blessed be He. That’s no problem. It’s clear to me that there will be many things I don’t understand about the Holy One, blessed be He. I’m talking about something that is a contradiction in the logical sense. Not something I don’t understand. Even tefillin—I don’t know why one puts them on. Fine, so I don’t know. What happened? It doesn’t contradict any other concept. Exactly. But here I’m talking about a situation where there is an internal logical contradiction between two of my beliefs at the straightforward logical level. For the sake of the discussion, just to sharpen the point. You can’t live with that, no matter what. All you can do is mumble. You can say, I believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything and I also believe that I have free choice. The mouth moves, that’s obvious. The only question is: what does that statement mean? Because it means nothing.

[Speaker A] What he says is that this is not a logical contradiction. Right, that it’s not a contradiction that there is evil and good.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that’s a contradiction that you try to resolve; that’s a logical contradiction. Therefore many times it’s just a lack of understanding. A logical contradiction is not just that I don’t understand.

[Speaker A] A logical contradiction is—and I don’t understand. A logical contradiction is something you can’t live with.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When you say that… let’s suppose that this is a logical contradiction. If it’s a logical contradiction, then when you say that He knows in advance, by that you said that you have no free choice, right? So you are basically saying: I have free choice and I don’t have free choice. So what are you trying to resolve here? There’s nothing to resolve.

[Speaker A] After all there can’t be… there cannot be a logical contradiction between the concept of good and the concept of a murderer, that’s not a contradiction…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not a logical contradiction. If I show you that this murder was justified, then it wouldn’t be—what do you mean? It’s not a logical contradiction at all. Not at all. That’s exactly the point. There’s a difference between logical contradictions and what are usually called contradictions. And many times people resolve various contradictions regarding the Holy One, blessed be He—contradictions of this sort—by using some kind of three-valued logic, Łukasiewicz and all kinds of things like that. There are all sorts of people who really enjoy doing that. And that’s the other side of the same coin—it resolves nothing. So you say there is three-valued logic—so what does that help? Is it still contradictory or not contradictory? Just because you gave it a name, did you solve the problem? You gave it a name. I now believe both this and that because I live in logic… what does it mean, live in three-valued logic? When you construct a truth table of three-valued logic, you do it with binary logic. And you think with yes-or-no logic. So why should I care what names you give it? You can’t solve it on the logical plane if it is a logical contradiction. It has to be solved on the real plane, by understanding: if he is a murderer, then how can it be that he is good? Apparently here it was justified to kill, or I don’t know what—something like that. But then I don’t need all the slogans of three-valued logic; I have an explanation. And that too is, once again… the refuge of the lazy. Sometimes logic too is the refuge of the lazy. He thinks that if he declares this to be some other logic, then he has solved the problem. Yes, I have a problem; the solution is that we operate with a different logic. And that’s it, everything is fine. It is completely equivalent to the previous solution—simply nonsense. So as long as you don’t understand what the solution is, what does it help me that you tell me there’s someone here who made some other kind of truth tables? Why is that interesting? It solves nothing. One has to distinguish here between a logical contradiction and other contradictions, physical contradictions. I talked a bit about this last year too, when we discussed with Yehuda Ronen there about knowledge and choice. Okay, there is… you know, maybe just one more remark about this at the level of worldview. The mainstream among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) is that there is no such thing as logical contradictions in faith. Those are relatively new inventions. Fine, in esotericism there are always various things out on the margins, but the mainstream says there is no such thing as logical contradictions in faith. Today there is some notion that if you want to be really very pious, you have to live with contradictions. A Christian notion. Okay? Kierkegaard’s aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages—the summit, what he calls the knight of faith there, is a person who lives with contradictions. Or Tertullian who says, “I believe because it is absurd.” Yes, and it’s some kind of notion that faith has to involve contradictions—not only that it may, but that it even must, because otherwise it isn’t faith, otherwise it’s just… what?

[Speaker A] Pascal said that in physics? Ah, the more absurd it is, the more I believe.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, I know it from Tertullian, so maybe Pascal said it too. Fine, never mind. In any case, the claim is—for example, Maimonides writes in the Guide for the Perplexed that to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, can produce a square whose diagonal is smaller than its side—that is not true. He cannot. And Rashba copies this in a long responsum of Rashba, and it’s very interesting. He copies almost the entire chapter there from the Guide for the Perplexed. And they also asked him there: how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed Himself at Mount Sinai to those who were not fit for prophecy? There are rules for who is fit for prophecy and who is not, and there He revealed Himself to all Israel, both those fit and those not fit. So the questioner there asked him: how can that be? And there was some discussion there—what’s the problem? The Holy One, blessed be He, can do everything; He is above logic and above everything. And precisely there Rashba makes the distinction I told you before, between logical contradictions and contradictions that are not logical. And he says that this contradiction is a difficulty; it is not a logical contradiction. So a difficulty has to be resolved. But if it were a logical contradiction—and then he brings Maimonides—he says there is no such thing. The Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do logical contradictions. Why? Because there is no such thing. Likewise, to create a stone that He cannot lift. There is no such thing, so He cannot do it. When the Holy One, blessed be He… when you say that He cannot make a triangle—or a square—whose diagonal is smaller than its side, the “cannot” here is not “cannot” in the same sense as “I cannot fly in the air.” I cannot fly in the air because the laws of physics do not allow it. Or my abilities and the laws of physics do not allow it. But the Holy One, blessed be He, has all the abilities in the world; He can do everything in the physical sense. But we call both physical laws and logical laws “laws,” and therefore it confuses us terribly. When I was 19 or 20, I was very troubled by the question: how do we know that the laws of logic are true? Fine, is there someone who can prove the laws of logic? Is there some proof? Until I understood that this is ridiculous, because proof means using the laws of logic. That’s what proof means. So what does it mean to prove the laws of logic? The laws of logic are not laws in the same sense as the laws of the state, nor even like the laws of physics. Because the laws of physics—I can imagine another world in which the laws of physics are different. That could happen; it doesn’t contradict anything. It could be. The laws of physics are not logic; they are fact. They are a fact that of course exists and is imposed on us, but it could also have been otherwise. The laws of logic could not have been otherwise. Two magnitudes equal to a third magnitude are always equal to each other—unless the concept “equal” gets a different meaning, but then one is just using the same word, and that’s not interesting. So laws… when we say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject to the laws of logic, that does not mean subjection, as though there were someone above Him who… does not allow Him to do something He very much wants to do. This is inherent subjection; it is subjection from within, not from without. There is no such thing as being outside the laws of logic—not that there is someone even stronger than the Holy One, blessed be He. By contrast, if we say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject to the laws of physics, that really is problematic, because here there is some physical law that as it were ties the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He. That cannot be. He created the laws of physics; He did not create the laws of logic. The laws of logic were there—He never created them; they are simply there. The laws of logic are not laws; they are simply so. It’s not something that exists, some kind of entity that forces itself on us to think this way or that way—it is simply so, that’s all.

[Speaker A] Last year, one of the central courses of the second course of the year was an attempt to show that in Talmudic logical systems there is basically a kind of minimization of an objective function, with variations and all sorts of things like that. So according to that, there was some attempt to build a formal framework for a logical system. It was possible to define Talmudic logic by minimizing an objective function.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, and what does that say? That there it isn’t deductive logic. I’m talking only about deduction. Analogy and induction are completely different tools. Okay, so let’s go back for a moment to the first passage on page 23, where there were some puzzles that weren’t clear. But now in light of what we read later, maybe it’s worth reading it again and seeing now why he intends to speak about two systems in parallel. When he speaks about obligation and necessity, he speaks about it on two planes. On one plane, it’s the question of what happens in the world: is the world deterministic, or is there some free choice for a person, etc.—that’s one plane. The second plane is the relation between what happens in the world and the Holy One, blessed be He. Meaning: was the Holy One, blessed be He, compelled to do what happens in the world? That is determinism at a higher level. Or was He free—did He do it by His own free will? Okay? That’s a division on two different planes. You can ask whether the world is free or the world is necessary—that’s one question, whether the world is deterministic or whether human beings have freedom to choose. The second question is how the world and all its laws and all that is in it came into being: did it emerge necessarily from the Holy One, blessed be He? Meaning, do those same deterministic laws of physics have to be that way? When I talk about determinism in the first sense, I say: the result of the experiment has to be such-and-such; the laws of physics compel it, it cannot come out otherwise. That’s determinism in the ordinary sense. Here he is talking about second-order determinism. He says: who compels the laws of physics to be this way? Not who compels phenomena to behave according to the laws of physics, but who compels the compeller? Or how was the world created with its laws? Is this a necessary result of, let’s say, the structure of the Holy One, blessed be He, or the nature of the Holy One, blessed be He—or did He create it by His free will? Do you understand? Those are two different planes. Now when he says at the beginning, “desire or obligation in the divine law is a matter the sages of the generations have discussed from time immemorial”…

[Speaker A] It’s a continuation of one level above another.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, yes. But not necessarily, by the way, is one dependent on the other, even though there is here some attempt to say that they are connected.

[Speaker A] It’s a continuation of the previous paragraph, which is basically the claim that the great wonder is how the Holy One, blessed be He, managed to plan evolution.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Right. I think this is exactly a continuation of the previous passage. Exactly. Evolution appears as though it were something random; precisely the defenders of evolution argue that it is not deterministic but random, and his answer to them was: right, it is random within a system of laws that are entirely deterministic. Like dice. The result of the die is random. The die itself too is not random; there are completely deterministic laws there. So in fact there is a Holy One, blessed be He, who manages the matter in a very, very detailed way; there are no degrees of freedom. This distinction here continues exactly onward, and now he discusses these two planes: a. what happens here below, and b. how what is here below unfolded. What is the relation between us and Him—whether it is a necessary relation, or only that He decided it would be this way, though He could also have decided otherwise. Okay? As the Rabbi hints at what Ramchal writes, right? That “the nature of the good is to do good.” So from Ramchal it somehow appears that beneficence is some kind of thing from which the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot escape. It is not the result of His free choice. It is His nature; He does good; He cannot refrain from doing good. In that sense He is, as it were, compelled to do good. That is Ramchal’s claim in a very conscious and clear form. He takes it very far. And I think that here Rav Kook means to say that this is not correct. It is not correct. The Holy One, blessed be He, chooses to do good, but the choice itself is a kind of good. That’s what he says here. And then he says this: basically desire or obligation in the divine law—which for now has two meanings—is the matter that the sages of the generations have discussed from time immemorial. “According to the outlook, it seems that if we admit necessity, there is no Torah and commandments.” He is speaking about the determinism down below, right? And then he says, “However, the conjecture inclines, according to recent demands, toward the side of necessity.” That’s the missing sentence. Physical science deals with laws, not with how the laws came into being, right? Right? And after that he says: “However, one should know that necessity contradicts the Torah only when it is confined solely to the fixed laws of nature.” Only there. “But if it extends also to the laws of justice and wickedness,” etc., then it’s fine. I asked: what’s fine? If it extends to the laws of free choice, then it is not determinism. Here he moved to the second plane. He says: even if you say that the laws of justice and uprightness are also a necessary derivative of the Holy One, blessed be He—not that what happens here is a necessary derivative of the laws of justice and uprightness on the lower plane, but the opposite. He says: just as the laws of nature are a derivative of the Holy One, blessed be He, so too the laws of justice and uprightness and our freedom of choice are a necessary derivative of the Holy One, blessed be He. That will no longer contradict free choice or freedom. Why not? Because once I speak about determinism in this sense, it is perhaps a determinism that somewhat approaches Ramchal, that the nature of the good is to do good. That the Holy One, blessed be He, basically chooses to do good, and therefore He gave us laws of justice and uprightness and therefore He also enabled us to choose. Or if I go back to the lower plane in order to understand the upper plane through it, then I would say this: many times Kabbalah is presented as something whose role is to explain how evil came to exist in the world at all. After all, no evil comes down from above from the Holy One, blessed be He. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not create evil. So one has to have all kinds of mediating factors, some chain from above to below, such that somehow along the way the evil thing is created. But in the final analysis, evil—at least in the human moral sense—has a simpler solution. Not evil in the sense of, say, epidemics, which may not depend on us, but actual evil that human beings do. When human beings do evil, that evil did not come down from above. That evil is the product of the human being who did it. What came down from above? What came down from above is the human being’s ability to do evil. And if the Holy One, blessed be He, had not given him that ability, he could choose until tomorrow, but he would not succeed in actualizing it. Right? Meaning, the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the possibility of doing evil or good—or in other words, gave us free choice—is utterly good. And in that there is nothing evil at all. We now take the ability to do either good or evil and choose to do evil; that is how evil is created. So no evil comes down from above, because from above what came down was not evil; what came down from above was the ability to do either evil or good, free choice. What we do with that ability is solely our responsibility. And then it turns out, essentially, that the Holy One, blessed be He, created a world in which there is free will, in which there is freedom of choice, and this thing is completely good. Because if He had created a world in which one could behave only well, only do positive things, then even that good form would not be good. It is good only because the person chose to do it and chose not to take the evil option. Right? If it were not the product of choice, then it too would not be good; it would empty the concept of good of its content. Therefore there is no choice: the Holy One, blessed be He, is, as it were, compelled here in this regard. If He wants to create a world in which something good will be expressed, He must leave in it a measure of freedom, He must leave in it a measure of freedom of choice so that the person can choose. But a measure of freedom means that the person can choose evil. Because otherwise, if the person—there will be freedom and you will choose good. Like we talked about with the elections in Syria. Those are elections in Syria: they give us some freedom and we freely choose the only option available to us. Fine? That is basically the alternative picture. So that does not count as creating a good world. Therefore the perfection of the world and our ability to do good—that’s what he says here—requires that in addition to the deterministic laws here, there must necessarily be created, notice, therefore this is deterministic, there must necessarily be created free will and freedom to choose. So from His nature, as it were, the Holy One, blessed be He—or the aims of the Holy One, blessed be He—there come into being in a deterministic way the laws of nature, physics, and our freedom of will, the ability to choose freely. That’s what he is talking about here. And therefore he says that determinism in this sense does not contradict Torah and commandments. Because this is not determinism in the sense we usually define on the lower plane; it is determinism on the upper plane. It is determinism that says that not only do the laws of physics necessarily proceed from the Holy One, blessed be He, but also the laws of justice and uprightness, and also the freedom to choose between justice and wrongdoing. That too necessarily proceeds from the Holy One, blessed be He; it is deterministic. And why? Because His will is to do good, and to do good means to allow us to choose between good and evil; otherwise it would not be called good. So there is no choice; this must necessarily be so. Therefore this necessarily proceeds from the Holy One, blessed be He; it is deterministic. But what is it that necessarily proceeds? What necessarily proceeds is that we have the possibility also to choose freely.

[Speaker A] And that’s the square root of it. He wants—He wants to do good to us, and He really does want that. Right. And then for that He has to give us choice, and in order to give us will. Exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. That’s what he’s saying, and that’s why all the confusion is here, because he moves between levels—at least that’s how I understand it, if I decoded correctly what he means. He starts with the discussion of whether our world is deterministic, and then he says that to say the world is deterministic contradicts the Torah and the commandments. Then he says, yes, but if we make determinism… now he has moved to the higher plane. Does this necessarily follow from the Holy One, blessed be He, or does it happen freely? So he says no, it necessarily follows from the Holy One, blessed be He. Why? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to bestow good, and bestowing good cannot be done in any other way, categorically. These are the laws of logic, not the laws of physics. Even the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject to that, and therefore free choice necessarily comes into being here.

[Speaker A] There are two higher things here. Because if you accept determinism on the lower level, that means logically there can’t be free choice.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course, but turn it around. He presents the opposite thesis: that below, there is no determinism.

[Speaker A] There’s no determinism?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course not. That’s why he says—this is what he says—that this determinism is the limited determinism, where only the absolute laws of nature, right?

[Speaker A] I understand it as if he’s saying, okay, we can accept that, no problem, we’ll add another layer on top of it. But you can’t add another layer on top of it, you can’t accept that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, “another layer” here means within this world, not in its chain of development. Here, adding another layer means that not only laws of physics exist here, but a person also has a will to choose, freedom to choose, free will. The only question is—where is this… why is this soft determinism and not libertarianism? So he says it’s soft determinism, and then it doesn’t contradict. It’s soft determinism because we’re now speaking on the second plane. To what extent is this compelled by the Holy One, blessed be He? From the Holy One, blessed be He, it is completely compelled; it is deterministic. But what is compelled? What is compelled is that there be laws of physics that are deterministic, and also that a person have free choice—and all of that is compelled. That’s why he still calls it determinism. But it’s a determinism that no longer contradicts Torah and commandments. Then he goes on and says: now let’s continue. If this comes forth from the Holy One, blessed be He, necessarily, then how can that be? After all, with the Holy One, blessed be He, necessity and will don’t really apply. Certainly necessity—but maybe will doesn’t either. How do we attribute such a thing to Him at all? So he says: from our perspective, it comes forth from Him necessarily. But what does “necessarily” mean? Because He decided, in His free will, to bestow good upon us. So in His free will He decided to bestow good upon us, and for that we are supposed to feel gratitude toward Him, because without that there would be no gratitude. That’s what he says at the top of the next page. Right? Without that there would be no gratitude. So clearly He decided to bestow good upon us. Now, how does this work? It’s a free decision. Here there is freedom. This is already the third level, not the second. Everything begins from there. Now, once He decided to bestow good, there are the laws of logic. Even the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject to the laws of logic. And what does that mean? That the very definition of the concept of good includes free choice within it. Therefore, if you want to bestow good, there is no way to do it except by bringing free choice down into this world. So now, deterministically, the Holy One, blessed be He, is forced as it were to create here a system of physical laws on the one hand, and a system of free will—of human will, the ability to choose freely—on the other hand. And this is what the Holy One, blessed be He, is as it were forced to do. But He is forced because at the beginning He chose to bestow good upon us. So there is room for gratitude, because everything begins with His deciding to bestow good. But after He decided to bestow good, there is a deterministic side. From there it is already derived. And after that deterministic side is derived, what happens in our world? In our world there are laws of physics, and a person has the ability to choose freely. Okay? And basically what drives this whole thing behind the scenes is that there is a different conception here of the concept of good. There are those who understand—and I once spoke about this downstairs, at some festive third Sabbath meal, I think—about teleological good and deontological good. That is, there are those who define good in terms of the result: doing good for people, that’s called a good act. But in the Kantian definition—and I think this is also what our sources suggest, I think it’s closer to the truth—the good thing is not to do good for people; it isn’t measured by the result. It is measured by the question of what your motive is. What are you trying to achieve? You may even fail. The question is what you… If someone does good for people because he is subject to, compelled to do good for people, that is not called doing good. Even though, so to speak, people are very comfortable and everything is good and everything is fine and no one suffers. But that is not good in the moral sense. It is good only in a borrowed sense. It’s pleasant, it’s nice, fine, because no one suffers. Good in the essential sense, Kantian good, is a demanding kind of good. It is a good that says: there are rules, and you have to overcome your inclination or your personal desires and be subject to the laws of morality. And if you did that out of that submission, then you performed a good action. Not because of the results of the action, but because of the motives of the action. We judge actions by the question of what you wanted to achieve and why you did the action, not by the question of what you did—or at least not only by the question of what you did. There is room here for some nuances too. But certainly that judgment is also there. And now obviously the opposite conclusion follows. That is, if you understand that bestowing good simply means that things should be good and pleasant and that no one should suffer, that can also be done without granting free choice. If that’s what the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted in bestowing good—but if bestowing good means making things pleasant for us. Making things pleasant for us is not bestowing good in this sense. Exactly. You can make us robots and it will be very pleasant for us. Maybe He could simply create in us a highly developed sense of pleasantness, and all of us would feel wonderfully pleasant. You don’t need free choice for that. In the teleological conception of the concept of good, if good means the result, then the whole movement of the world never gets started. That is, good is Kantian good. Good means that you do the good because you chose to do the good, because you are subject to a command that tells you to do good, to principles, to what he says here—the laws of wrong and right. There are laws according to which we are supposed to behave. This kind of good cannot be achieved unless we are given free choice. And that involves changing the concept of good. Understand that when we speak about the concepts of good and evil, we usually speak in terms of results. But if it really were about results, then this whole argument would be wrong. In other words, only because we assume this is deontological does the argument work. The argument depends on the person’s will and motivation and not on the result itself, and then indeed there is no choice. If someone wants to bestow good in this sense, then bestowing good means making us good, not doing good to us. That is what bestowing good means here. Bestowing good means making us good, good human beings—not doing good to us, not making things pleasant for us. That is something entirely different; it is a completely different concept. Sometimes it is a very unpleasant concept. Sometimes a person pays a heavy price for moral behavior, he suffers because of it, but the Holy One, blessed be He, wants him to be good, not for things to be good for him. Maybe also for things to be good for him, but that’s not the point. The Holy One, blessed be He, wants there to be good for the person, not that he be good. That is something else; that is a different desire to bestow good. And for that you have to create free will; for that it cannot be done without it. Therefore it is deterministic. That is basically what he is claiming here.

[Speaker A] To wake us up from books—Rabbi Kook says, I don’t remember where he says this—not that good and evil made us evil.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so that’s very similar. Fine, okay. Let’s stop here.