For the Perplexed of the Generation – Lesson 10

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

🔗 Link to the original lecture

🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI

[Speaker E] He didn’t need to pass it through all kinds of filters in one device or another. He received the signal directly. His perception was on a higher level.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I think I agree that that’s what he means, except that I think the higher perception is specifically speech. That’s what it seems to me. I’m not sure. The passage isn’t entirely clear. What?

[Speaker C] Speech and not an image, as it were?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Speech and not an image. That’s probably what he means. Because speech really does have something to it. The Nazir Rabbi goes on at length about this in connection with prophecy—the student of Rabbi Kook—and he talks there about “Hebrew auditory logic.” And then he discusses the relation between hearing and seeing. And he says there that sight has an advantage and hearing has an advantage. Sight has the advantage of being unequivocal. You can’t argue with it—“hearing cannot be greater than seeing.” Right? Once you see, it’s absolute, it’s clear. But sight has limitations because sight has a certain range. When something is hidden behind some barrier, you won’t be able to see it, but you can still hear it. So hearing often represents a deeper kind of perception than seeing. Less unequivocal—seeing is unequivocal, it’s certain, it’s clear. That’s why he calls Greek logic visual Greek logic, a logic of sight. In contrast, Hebrew logic, says the Nazir Rabbi, is auditory logic. It is based on hearing. The Talmudic text is full of expressions of hearing, right? “Come and hear,” “what did he hear,” or “it was not heard by me.” “It was not heard by me” means, as it were, I don’t agree. No, no, no—I don’t agree with this thing. Meaning, to hear is to grasp something on a deeper level than simply to see. Okay? So here it seems to me that when he says that Moses our Rabbi has an advantage over the other prophets, he means to say that Moses hears and the other prophets see. Which sounds a bit backwards to us, because seeing is much more unequivocal. But yes, it is more unequivocal, yet it is flatter. Because when you see, you are really seeing a representation. Right? For example, when I read a book—after all, when you perceive something on television, it is completely unequivocal, but you are captive to what you see there. It’s very hard to interpret: what came before, what came after—that’s the power of television. Its power is often to flatten, though it is a very great power. Meaning, afterward it’s very hard for you to think, to give interpretations—maybe actually that’s not exactly what I saw, because there were earlier causes and later circumstances. It captivates you. Sight is so strong that it imposes itself on you. Hearing, by contrast—when you hear something on the radio—that’s far more open to interpretation. Meaning, you can better understand the depth of things, you can judge them, you can analyze them; they haven’t spoon-fed you completely, unlike visual appearance. What?

[Speaker E] Hearing is imagination—the auditory imagination—the imagination of Moses according to this? Right. Right. But another prophet sees exactly the word of the Holy One, blessed be He.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. That’s exactly the point: he doesn’t see. Because even what you see is only a representation. The thing itself is abstract, it is spiritual—that’s what I was talking about earlier. What you see is only a representation. So if that’s the case, then it’s actually preferable not to see; it’s preferable to hear. Because the moment you see a representation of the thing, you become captive to the representation. You won’t understand the real thing hiding behind the representation. But if it is described to you verbally, if you only hear it, then that’s perfectly fine. Then perhaps you have the possibility of grasping it—not visually, but that isn’t a disadvantage, because it doesn’t really have an actual appearance; it is an abstract thing. So the fact that I don’t grasp it visually is not a deficiency. When I do not see visually something that does have an appearance, then of course my perception is lacking. A blind person grasps less well than a person who is not blind. Why? Because the things around us have an appearance, and the blind person lacks the ability to see them. But an abstract thing has no appearance. It’s not that I’m blind to abstract things—there is no such thing as seeing abstract things. It’s not that I lack that capacity. Seeing abstract things is really a very restrictive representation of those abstract things. And therefore, someone who grasps abstract things through sight is actually grasping a very, very specific and tightly dictated aspect, and he is captive to that aspect, because what he saw is what he understood. But if you describe it to him verbally—what the idea is, what the thing itself is—then of course he doesn’t see it, but there’s nothing to see; and yet he does succeed, perhaps, in touching—not grasping completely, always more deeply—but touching the thing itself. Meaning, that is a deeper perception. Therefore Moses our Rabbi, precisely—I think this is what is meant here—precisely does not have the images, does not have the visual representations. He has audio, right? He hears it. For example, I’ll give you an example: when you read a book. You do it with your eyes. But in my view that is hearing, not seeing. Because you read words that describe the situation. You do not see the situation. You read a description of the situation. So you are not captive to anything. You can grasp the situation in its depth, analyze it, think where it came from, where it is going. That is why a book is a deeper medium than television. Because television imposes itself through the very particular representation it has chosen to give things; it is imposed on you completely. A book, even though it is much less unequivocal—when a situation is described to you in a book, it is not like showing you the film, okay? But on the other hand, you have more ability to return to the roots of things when you see a description in a book. Therefore I think that in this division, even though reading a book is done with the eyes, it is really hearing. It is not seeing. In the cognitive sense it is hearing. In perception it is seeing—yes, you see it with your eyes. But in the cognitive sense it is hearing. Because you see a verbal representation of the thing; you do not see a visual representation of the thing. You see a description. The description is deeper than the visual representation. Fine, but if we return to this—in fact the two forms of prophecy that he defines here, if we come back here in chapter 6. In chapter 6 he is basically talking only about prophecy of one kind. Only prophecy of the kind to which no sounds are attached. You perceive information, right? You reached a level that succeeds in perceiving this information, and then you perceive it. It’s not that someone addressed you with sounds. Here he says that even if someone addressed you with sounds, it’s still not certain that this is really an address. It may be that this is only a translation of the same information into audio, into sounds. But here he is apparently speaking only about the type of prophecy that is without sounds—the prophecy that is a perception, a perception of information. Now, that is the first point. Now, what really causes him to say this? Meaning, why describe prophecy this way? Why not describe it as we are always used to: the Holy One, blessed be He, addresses the prophet and tells him something, and the prophet hears and does whatever he does with that message? Why is it so important for Rabbi Kook to describe prophecy as something that, from the side of the Holy One, blessed be He, is completely passive?

[Speaker E] To show that in the Holy One, blessed be He, there is no change and He is above time.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. He says, above time. And that is what he says at the beginning: prophecy must be understood without any change on the part of the blessed Creator.

[Speaker C] And that goes against what he said in chapter 1. In chapter 1 he explained two points. One, someone who thinks that he is one with the Holy One, blessed be He—he says even if that can pray, but at a complete level—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And you’ve reached a level—excellent comment, and I have no answer to it, or not a good answer.

[Speaker C] That’s exactly what I read, that it’s the opposite. Yes. What did he say? That prophecy must be understood without change, not because we have a principled problem with change on the part of the blessed Creator, but because of this evolutionary description of human development. We need to say that every person can always reach it; it doesn’t depend, as it were, on the will of God, but every person at his level is capable of reaching it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And still, in the final analysis, that means that the Holy One, blessed be He, really does not address the prophet; rather, the prophet reaches Him.

[Speaker C] Really, this kind of prophecy, that it will be possible for every person in the time to come.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, so you’re going back to that distinction between the prophecy of the past. But in the prophecy of the time to come, basically the Holy One, blessed be He, acts in a terribly static way—meaning, He simply waits for us. Whoever gets there, gets there; whoever doesn’t, doesn’t. It doesn’t matter whether He sends us messengers.

[Speaker C] No, that’s the point that matters to us. Yes. This specific point of the perfection of man reaching the level of prophecy. There, in order to say that every person can reach it, you have to say that prophecy is always being broadcast, so that everyone can receive it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And also to say that every person who reaches it—the Holy One, blessed be He, is with him. What’s the problem? What, you can’t say that too?

[Speaker C] Ah, is it a kind of necessity, no?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If every person who reaches it, then the Holy One, blessed be He, speaks with him—no, it isn’t a necessity. The Holy One, blessed be He, sees that you are complete, so He chooses to speak with you. Is it a necessity in the sense that it will always happen? He could choose not to do it, the Holy One, blessed be He, but “the nature of the good is to do good”—we already spoke about that. The fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, does things because they are right or because they are good—that is not a limitation.

[Speaker C] Then it isn’t a matter of will; I don’t think it’s the same change of will that he talks about there in chapter 1, regarding the fact that everyone can really receive it. That’s exactly what I’m saying—that it’s not the same thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Which is why I say that I don’t understand why—why he chose this different model, when he really could have done it with the other model too. He could have said that the Holy One, blessed be He, addresses the person who has reached the level worthy of being addressed. But that would be an active address. Exactly what I—I’ll come back to that comment later; it is a correct comment, and I really don’t fully understand the answer to it. But I think that the focus here really is that there is some philosophical problem, which he states in the first few words of the chapter. The philosophical problem is that if the Holy One, blessed be He, addresses a person, that means that at that moment something happened in the Holy One, blessed be He, that had not happened before and would not happen afterward. He chose to do something now that He did not do before and would not do afterward. That means there was some change in Him.

[Speaker D] And the creation of the world is the same too?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. The same question is asked in many other contexts, for example about the creation of the world—the most common case. How can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, at some moment six thousand years ago decided to create—or it doesn’t matter, let’s say twenty billion years ago—decided to create the world. And what was there a year earlier? Or a year later? Or I don’t know exactly—what happened that suddenly He decided to create the world? Did some need suddenly awaken in Him? Or…

[Speaker D] The splitting of the sea? What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The splitting of the sea. The same thing, the same thing. Every action of the Holy One, blessed be He—you can leave aside the splitting of the sea, even a lesser miracle. Every thing really comes out of the power of the Holy One, blessed be He; it makes no difference whether it is miracle or nature on the principled level. Everything draws from His power. Okay, in miracles it is more conspicuous. But still, the question can really be asked much, much more broadly. The Shelah, for example, in the introduction to his book, has sections—ten sections—and one of them is “The House of Choice,” where he discusses the question of knowledge and free choice, and he also presents it this way. His problem with knowledge and choice is: how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, changes in light of the act that I chose to do? For with the Holy One, blessed be He, He and His knowledge are one—unlike others. Right? The knower, the knowledge, and the known are one thing in the Holy One, blessed be He, unlike human beings, who are one thing, their knowledge is another thing, and the thing known is a third thing. Okay? With the Holy One, blessed be He, everything is one. So once everything is one, if I decide—and what I do depends on me—then I now decide to do A. So only now can the Holy One, blessed be He, know that I did A. Before that He did not know it, because before that I had not yet decided. Okay? So the Shelah asks the question—how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance and yet a person has free choice? When he presents the question, he presents it for exactly this reason. How can it be that when I choose freely I create some information in the world that only now the Holy One, blessed be He, knows—meaning, before He did not know it. That means some change happened in Him—before He did not know and now He does know. How can there be change in the Holy One, blessed be He? Many, many perspectives in philosophical or thought literature depend on this point—that it cannot be that the Holy One, blessed be He, performs some active action on His side, or even passive action—really, a renewal of knowledge is something passive—that was not there before. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not undergo changes over time. So how can this be? So here too, it seems to me that what leads him to this static conception of prophecy is this consideration. As he says: prophecy must be understood without change on the part of the blessed Creator, between before prophecy, after it, and at the time of prophecy. And then he says: so what does happen? After all, at some point an interaction does take place between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the prophet. There is no escaping the conclusion that the prophet probably came to see something that had in fact always been there. The prophet came to see it because he reached the proper level. And then he says: if so, then now we can see that indeed the summit of evolution, when we reach the highest level, is what is called prophecy. Meaning, he starts, it seems to me at least, from the philosophical consideration that compels us to interpret prophecy not as an active address from the Holy One, blessed be He, to us, but as our ascent to the Holy One, blessed be He. And from this consideration, if that really is the model of prophecy, then it is now clear that this will also be the end of the evolutionary process. When we reach the highest level, we will all be prophets. Because that is what it means to be a prophet—that’s what he proved from the previous consideration. So if that is the case, then in the end we will all be prophets. What will happen when we are all prophets? Then there really will be no need for prophets, right? Specific prophets. Because we will all see the things we are supposed to be—the uprightness of the collective and of the individual, as he calls it here. This is what people often refer to by saying that the commandments will be nullified in the time to come. Why will the commandments be nullified in the time to come? From this picture it is very clear. The commandments are meant for the stage in which we are supposed to perfect ourselves. Once we are perfected, commandments are no longer needed. So the commandments will be nullified in the time to come. Meaning, there is something here: one reaches some perfection in which there are no prophets, no commandments, all the things we know from our world—including death. There is no death, there is resurrection of the dead. Meaning, everything we know from our world is essentially canceled and turns into some completely perfect world—spiritually, in holiness, intellectually, from every standpoint—a perfect world, everyone prophets, everyone living forever, and everything good. Only population density will need solving, because if there is no death then we are in ecological trouble. Well, maybe we also won’t eat, I don’t know. Three hundred and ten worlds. What? Three hundred and ten worlds. Yes, okay. Three hundred and ten is three hundred and ten, but in the end we’ll exceed the capacity even of three hundred and ten worlds. We’ll need to create more worlds. Anyway, we’ll leave that one for the Holy One, blessed be He, to solve. The evolution of the Messiah. It seems to me we’ll solve it. Yes. Okay. I have a friend who had this childhood dream to invent—once as a child he read that the actual matter of a person doesn’t amount to even a thousandth of a pinhead, the sheer matter, if you remove all the spaces and all that semi-classical way of looking at things, then nothing remains of it. So he wanted to organize some sort of machine that would turn a person into a pinhead like that, put, say, a thousand pinheads into a matchbox, send them from Haifa to Tel Aviv—you wouldn’t need a hundred thousand buses. It would be enough for a thousand people to go out, and there there would be a pump that would turn them back into human beings, and that’s all. Maybe that could solve the problem of population density too.

[Speaker D] Well, did you notice that in the book of Genesis, when they were close to the stage of the Garden of Eden, their first child was not born when they were nineteen or twenty-five?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re saying evolution already takes care of that too?

[Speaker D] Part of the refinement—you say evolution at the beginning eventually reaches, you say—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That our rate of ascent will reduce the rate of reproduction in some series that ultimately converges. Meaning, one plus a half plus a quarter and so on—

[Speaker D] Everything works out perfectly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. Fine, so now you see that our intellectual development already enables us to solve some of the problems. In any case, this argument—the argument that it is, as it were, impossible for there to be change in the Holy One, blessed be He—really leads him to a different conception of prophecy. Once he arrives at a different conception of prophecy, he derives from it the final state of the evolutionary process, namely that once everyone is perfected, everyone is prophets, and that’s it—the world is perfected. Now there is something here: eventually one reaches such perfection that the problems of death and all the other problems are solved. Which, of course, continues the description in the first chapter as well, because in the first chapter, in the sin of the first man and the whole description of the verses—the creation verses in the book of Genesis—what was he trying to do there, really? He was trying to offer a natural description of all those strange and non-ordinary, non-natural things that happen there. He tried to show that they too can be described in natural terms, translated into ordinary natural processes. Here he is basically completing the picture. Meaning, now we’ve talked about where we came from, now we are looking at where we are going. “Know from where you came and to where you are going.” So where we came from he already explained: we came from evolution, meaning, through a normal natural process; everything is normal. Through a normal natural process all the descriptions in the book of Genesis are parables, metaphors, but in essence they mean—or can at least mean—some natural evolutionary development. What is the other end? Now let us look at the other side: where are we going? We are going toward the time to come, resurrection of the dead, the coming of the Messiah, with the whole world that will come in the future. What is that? That too will be a natural process. It will simply be the arrival of science, morality, and holiness at their consummation. And once that is complete, human beings will simply achieve everything by scientific means. The Holy One, blessed be He, is essentially outside the picture both in creation and at the end—meaning, there is something here that seemingly removes the Holy One, blessed be He, from the picture entirely.

[Speaker D] He is in the picture through the fact that He laid down the rules.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, of course. We talked about that when we discussed evolution.

[Speaker D] He is the engineer who built the startup.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. Right. We talked about that when we discussed evolution, and this just continues it into the time to come, but it is the same description. I once thought about the fact that in the words of the Sages, the commandments will be nullified in the time to come. So I said earlier that this could be because the world will be repaired, and then commandments won’t be needed to repair it. Incidentally, that’s also what people say about the Patriarchs—that the Patriarchs didn’t need a command because they were upright people, so they… We actually spoke about that; we discussed the upright person and the one who conquers his impulses—that they do not need a command because they know naturally what must be done. If you think about it, a large part of the commandments or of the Jewish laws that today we are supposed to keep will really become obsolete by technological means. Once they synthesize milk and synthesize meat in a laboratory—not through genetic cloning or things like that, which in the end are done biologically, but through an entirely artificial process—then there will be no problem at all with eating meat and milk together. All the mixtures, all the prohibitions and permissions, everything will disappear. Once technology manages to synthesize milk, meat, or all the foods we have, nothing will remain from large parts of Yoreh De’ah, for example. Nothing. I don’t know—once we reach certain means that are not electricity, but perhaps something even more abstract and sophisticated for carrying out various actions, then on the Sabbath too it may already be possible to do everything.

[Speaker E] Those are prohibitions, not commandments.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Prohibitions—it’s not commandments, but the prohibitions of the Sabbath, yes, prohibitions. That same day. Some horizon that says the commandments will be nullified in the time to come—not because there will be some command from the Holy One, blessed be He, exploding from the mountaintops, “The Torah is canceled from here on; you are free. Free period.” Rather, the intention is that we will simply arrive at it by ourselves. As he describes here the process of resurrection or the abolition of death, it is really a process that we are supposed to reach by ourselves, through technological, moral, and other means. Fine. Now regarding a few other remarks on this chapter. First of all, one has to notice that here too Rabbi Kook adds the layers that he makes a point of adding at every stage in this book, or at least in what we’ve seen so far. If evolution until now was an evolution of the development of abilities of various kinds, including intellectual abilities—meaning, there is some development and refinement of man and of living creatures in general—Rabbi Kook makes a point of adding to this will, morality, values. Meaning, it doesn’t remain on the plane of intellect as it did with Maimonides. We’ve already spoken about this many times, and this updating for the perplexed of the generation—or the perplexed of the period, yes, that is this book—the update is always to bring in, alongside intellect, also will, morality, and values. For Rabbi Kook, these must go together. It cannot stop only at intellectual perfection. So here too, in fact, we see that he adds this even to the evolutionary process. Meaning, even evolution cannot remain only on the plane of abilities and intellectual abilities, but also on the plane of holiness and spirituality and morality and so on. That is one remark.

[Speaker C] Although in a certain sense there is no choice but for it to go together with morality.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, of course not. That’s why I say, with Rabbi Kook I think this is what is called emergent; that is, it results from it. I don’t think he means to say that only the moral survive according to the simple laws of survival. Rather, the claim is that one who is more complete is generally also more moral, simply.

[Speaker C] Yes, but why is there a connection between physical evolution and this spiritual evolution?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is only a connection of result—that’s what he is saying, I think, a result connection. He does not mean to say that there are evolutionary rules such that in the Darwinian struggle the more holy survives. Usually it may even work the other way around. Rather, he means to say that the one who survives is more refined, more intelligent, more complete, and such a person is necessarily also more complete in the moral sense. That is his optimistic perspective. And therefore, de facto, spiritual evolution will also emerge from this. Not that there is really evolution acting on spirit directly. In fact there isn’t evolution of abilities directly either. What exists is that the struggle takes place between phenotypes, while what passes from generation to generation is genotype, not phenotype. Meaning, there is a shift between levels even in ordinary natural evolution. That is, when animals struggle over some food, the stronger one survives. But strength in itself is not really the thing that survives. What survives is what is transmitted through genes—meaning, what is not inherited through genes doesn’t matter, even if it prevails. So there is some transition here between domains. The evolutionary struggle is carried out by the phenotype, by the creature itself, not by its genes, but what survives in the end is the genome, which passes on genetically to the next generations. Okay? So here too there is a similar transition. Meaning, the struggle for survival is carried out by our material part, our natural part, and perhaps also the intellect. Intellect is an important parameter in evolution, fine. But in the end, de facto, an evolution of morality or spirituality will also emerge from this. Now I don’t know exactly how this attaches to the facts, meaning to reality. Is Rabbi Kook speaking here about things he thinks ought to be, or is this a diagnosis of the world he sees around him? This is not a simple question. There are certain dimensions in which the world really does seem to be progressing—without doubt. And Rabbi Kook is not afraid of this. Despite the axiom of the decline of the generations, in a number of places Rabbi Kook is certainly not afraid to say that the world is progressing.

[Speaker E] And not only is he not afraid—this was his whole approach in everything. Repentance is a process of development. “Decline of the generations” means it is also a process where, as he once writes, in the past there were individuals and now it spreads to everyone, which fits what we said about prophets. About the survival of the Jewish people, he writes several times in Orot, about various processes that existed in the world, that all kinds of phenomena disappeared and the Jewish people remained.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He isn’t afraid of this, although for many other people, in the traditional worldview this is very frightening. This is one of the great innovations Rabbi Kook made: this willingness to recognize, after all, something that at least in my eyes is a simple fact—also in my eyes it is a simple fact. But religious axiomatic thinking somehow manages to impose itself on us to such a degree that people are willing to ignore the facts they see around them. The world cannot be progressing; it is only retreating—there is decline of the generations. Look around you and see: is the world only retreating, or are there at least certain aspects in which it is progressing? It seems hard to say that there are no such aspects. But there are many religious people who still manage to say that there are no such aspects.

[Speaker D] What? The basis for our being bound by what is said in the Talmudic text is to recognize in—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a very big question; that’s the subject of the next chapter. I don’t think that’s the basis for… In the next chapter he does this. In the next chapter, page 97—not what appears here—there there is the Tzelar. So we’ll see it there. There he speaks about this exactly, and it is certainly related, and the claim is that the authority of the Sages does not necessarily derive from that. But we’ll still get to that. In any case, there is something here that really… I was once in Yeruham—when I studied in Yeruham there was… We gathered one evening before a festival—what?—and people talked about various things, and among other things the attitude toward a gentile came up. How do we view gentiles. And to my amazement—I was simply astonished. I mean, if this had been in Ponevezh it wouldn’t have surprised me at all, but in the hesder yeshiva in Yeruham it really amazed me—that people almost unanimously said: there is no such thing as a moral gentile. No such creature exists. Meaning, “the kindness of the nations is sin.” That’s from the Sages, right? “The kindness of the nations is sin.” Since that is so, everything is like the pig stretching out its hooves—as if to say, look how righteous I am. When they do moral deeds, it is only to show how… Whereas the Jews, by contrast, are all of course righteous and holy on high; they can even be murderers, but inside them this hides some tremendous righteousness that no one manages to discern. For me, this was an amazing illustration of the way theological axioms—or I don’t know what sort of axioms—force themselves onto reality. He simply will not be willing—it’s a bit like a kind of Leninism. Everything happening in reality around you must fit the theory. And if it doesn’t fit, then we will force it to fit, because it has to fit the theory. And it doesn’t matter now that nothing fits. That’s not… A large part of them don’t know gentiles; I also don’t know very many gentiles. But here and there I meet some, I see, I hear a little, I read. My impression is completely different. Today I really don’t see much difference at all—I don’t in fact see any difference—between the morality of a Jew and the morality of a gentile. On the face of it, I don’t see—begging the pardon of everyone who thinks otherwise. I don’t know; I really don’t see it. There are good Jews and there are not-good Jews, there are good gentiles and there are not-good gentiles. Very often the moral behavior of gentiles seems to me better than the average behavior, let’s say. There are always good and bad people, but I see no such difference. Yet the axioms somehow force themselves onto one’s view of reality. And this, of course, is something that very much characterizes ideological societies, religious and other ideological societies as well. With Lenin, of course, everything fit the theory. I mean, Lenin—Stalin even more afterward—in fact invented all of modern linguistics, as is well known. Anyone who read Solzhenitsyn knows this.

[Speaker C] Yes, but it’s very natural for a people persecuted for two thousand years to feel this way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, fine, okay, it’s natural, natural—but the question is whether it’s true, not whether it’s natural.

[Speaker C] No, empirically, everyone feels that way. Anyone who has read history instinctively feels that they killed—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Us. Everyone killed us, and we were terribly righteous; we killed no one because we couldn’t. Right. Yes, okay, why should “the kindness of a nation…”

[Speaker C] Yes, but the individual within the nation…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that’s already a nice excuse, but beyond the nice excuses, I think nations also do acts of kindness—at least no less than the State of Israel. When the State of Israel performs great acts of kindness and sends its—I don’t know what—its rescue forces to all corners of the universe, is it doing that because it is so righteous, or because it really wants to stretch out its hooves and say, look how righteous and moral we are? I don’t rule that out. We are all human beings. And that’s not… But everyone is human—that’s exactly what I’m saying. We’re all human beings, and this… and this drives me crazy, this clinging to those axioms and forcing them onto all the facts. We won’t see the facts at all except through the glasses. And these are people who, all in all, live in the broader world—they watch television, they see movies, they read books; this isn’t Ponevezh. And it was quite astonishing for me to discover this. It’s not a closed yeshiva either, not one of the hard-line yeshivot, not from that yeshiva… Fine, there are fairly open people there overall, or so I thought. It was very surprising to me. Now in this sense Rabbi Kook—it is true that he has an agenda and he has rules and principles. After all, that is also what he writes here in the words of Maimonides: that if something illogical emerges from the Torah, then we will make a creative interpretation of the Torah and adapt it to what seems right to us. I think he does the same thing with the sayings of the Sages, as we see here. Constantly—that’s what he is doing here all the time. If I have become convinced that evolution is correct, then I will arrange the book of Genesis for you in such a way that it comes out like that; there is no need for Origin of Species—we already learned evolution from the book of Genesis. Meaning, this is exactly the opposite of what his students actually do. Because his students—and this is a characteristic of many great men, or of the students of many great men—the great man is often original, so he is willing, he dares, he formulates different things, he formulates revolutionary theses; and then his students come and cling to every revolutionary thesis of his in the most orthodox way possible. Meaning, they are not willing to make even the slightest deviation from the enormous deviations he made. Rabbi Blumentzweig—I mentioned Yeruham earlier—once said that custom has a certain kind of paradoxical quality, because it is the fixation of deviation. Meaning, how does a custom begin? It begins with something that has no root in Jewish law, right? Someone started by changing something. Once he changed it, it is forbidden to budge from what he changed. Meaning, all of us must be consistent and not deviate one hairbreadth from the deviation he made. Why? He was the first one who deviated; he established everything—meaning, you must not deviate from him. This is something that terribly characterizes great people. Take the Chazon Ish, for example, who is regarded—by anyone looking from outside—as the greatest of conservatives and the most fossilized of all. He was an enormous innovator. He was an enormous innovator in all kinds of ways of thinking. You can agree with him, you can disagree with him, but he was innovative in many respects. And not only was he innovative—he was very much in favor of autonomy. Very much in favor of a person doing what he thinks; he writes this. It’s not even oral tradition; he writes it. Now what do his students do? We once spoke about the fact that there are two kinds of Chazon-Ishniks, right? There are the Chazon-Ishniks who do everything the Chazon Ish writes, except for that chapter where he writes that one should do what one thinks—but everything else the Chazon Ish writes. And there are those who do what he writes only in that chapter. Meaning, they do what they think, just as their rabbi did what he thought. This is the famous Hasidic story about Rabbi Noach—Rabbi Mordechai of Lechovitch, I don’t know which was the father and which the son, one of them—where the father died and the son became rebbe, and he changed the customs of his fathers. So the Hasidim ask him—I once saw this in Buber, I no longer remember exactly how it went—so the Hasidim ask him: how can you change your father’s customs and so on? What, I am changing my father’s customs? I am continuing my father’s path. Just as he changed the customs of his father, so I am changing the customs of my father. Meaning—and that’s true, it’s true. The real Chazon-Ishnik is Gedaliah Nadel. He is the real Chazon-Ishnik, not those who are punctilious about every drop of a drop.

[Speaker E] But his children, his children excommunicated whoever… Rabbi Shilat—they said he didn’t say what…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] His children are something else. Again, Gedaliah Nadel was a Chazon-Ishnik. He himself told Rabbi Shilat to write the book, meaning he apparently did not excommunicate Rabbi Shilat’s book. There is something like this: a great person is so charismatic that his revolution becomes the stagnation of the next generation. I once saw a memorial book for Rabbi Ra’anan, who was murdered in Hebron. And you know in yeshiva memorial books there is often a section called something like “Treasures of the Ancients” or “Words of the Elders,” or whatever they call it—some collection of articles by great figures of previous generations, in manuscript, not yet published. That is always there in memorial books, almost always. So I looked there: what were the “Treasures of the Ancients” in that book? Rabbi Kook, Rabbi Charlap, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda, and maybe one or two more, of course from the same place. Meaning, you see—it started with Rabbi Kook, right? Before him there was none and after him there will be none like him. That’s it—before him there is nothing. Among the Briskers it’s Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, exactly. Now every person who began such a chain was a crazy revolutionary. He was a revolutionary completely unlike anything that came before him. And his students—also in general—they accuse everyone around them, both the students of Rabbi Chaim of Brisk and the students of Rabbi Kook, the particular students I’m talking about; there are many kinds of students—they accuse everyone else of having a Torah without a family tradition, of not having served Torah scholars, that “new is forbidden by the Torah,” that one must only walk in the tradition of our fathers. This “tradition of our fathers” began eighty years ago. This “tradition of our fathers” is the tremendous revolution that is connected to no tradition of our fathers in any way whatsoever. It is connected in the same sense that the Chazon-Ishniks are connected—that “the tradition of our fathers” really means doing what is right and what one thinks. That’s true; in that sense it is connected to the tradition of our fathers. But this ridiculous clinging to the revolutionary character of the first in the dynasty.

[Speaker C] What, you mean his method of learning?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of Rabbi Chaim? Yes, I’m talking about that, yes yes, certainly. Both the method of learning and the method of halakhic ruling, this stringency—like all these methods—these are very strange conceptions. Meaning, no, it’s not, it’s not something that existed before Brisk; it’s a collection of people who are kind of crazy. And this—before Brisk weddings there’s always the procession, you know, in Jerusalem, the chicken procession. They take all the chickens and tie them one to another in a chain to make sure they aren’t non-kosher. They inspect them, they do all these inspections—they don’t eat a chicken before it’s taken a walk with them. Ariel Sharon once said that he doesn’t eat friends—you know, the sheep on his farm. So he said he doesn’t eat friends, meaning he doesn’t eat his own sheep. But they do—they eat only friends. They take the chickens for a walk and then eat them. These things are terribly strange. Strange—I understand the mechanism—but when you look at it from the outside it really is odd. I mean, an extraordinarily revolutionary person comes along, and his students become fossilized and conservative like this; they cling as though their rabbi’s Torah came down from Sinai exactly as is, when in fact it’s an invention that has no connection at all to what came before. These are really very powerful revolutions, I mean very significant revolutions. Okay, so we were at the question of whether the world really progresses, and to what extent we impose our axioms on the reality we see around us. So here Rav Kook really says: he sees around him a world that apparently—at least as he understands it—is truly progressing, even though all the spiritual supervisors in Bnei Brak make an effort to explain to us that the world is only deteriorating and everyone is becoming more wicked and hedonistic, and I don’t know exactly what—as if people once didn’t think only about money. They thought even more about money then; they just didn’t have money, that’s all, so they couldn’t. Today it’s within reach for many more people, that’s all. And Rav Kook sees around him a world that is indeed progressing. Now, I don’t know if it’s really progressing in the personal sense—I’m not sure the average individual in our generation is better than the average person a hundred years ago. Maybe; I don’t know exactly how you check that. It also has to be examined against the background of the circumstances in which a person operates. Maybe on average a person is more moral—possibly yes—but society as a whole is certainly progressing. That’s not simple; I mean, the fact that the world today operates with, say, moral aspects much more present in international discourse—whether we like it or not, we often suffer from it—but you can also suffer from the opposite. You can also suffer from a world in which everyone just kills you and nobody cares who is killing whom. We would suffer from that no less. I don’t know which suffering would be better; I think it’s better to suffer the suffering we have today. And there is something here that really is advancing—Rav Kook cannot ignore that. There really is some kind of progress here. Now, how does this connect to the decline of the generations? About that, one could give a whole lecture on the decline of the generations. I think the simple way to understand it is that the decline of the generations means a distancing from the source. The source was at Mount Sinai, and the farther we move away, the less connected we really are to what was there, the less we understand it, at least in the intuitive sense. And since that’s so, we already talked about how there is a native language and an ulpan, and someone who learns in an ulpan usually speaks less well than someone who speaks the language natively. All of that is basically a metaphor for the decline of the generations. But that doesn’t mean that the decline of the generations means Rabbi Akiva was some kind of seraph in human form. He was a human being, flesh and blood, maybe very wise, very charismatic, invested a great deal in Torah, knew a great deal of Torah to the extent one needed to know then. The material we have today is a thousand times more than what existed in Rabbi Akiva’s time. Rabbi Ovadia knows more Torah than Rabbi Akiva knew—at least more pieces of information than Rabbi Akiva knew. There’s simply much more today. What material did Rabbi Akiva have to master? The Mishnah. Big deal. I mean, the Mishnah today everyone knows—not everyone, but it can be known. The Mishnah can be mastered. But let’s see Rabbi Akiva master the Mishnah and now also the Babylonian Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud, the Mekhilta, baraitot, tannaitic midrashim, midrashim of Jewish law, medieval authorities (Rishonim), later authorities (Acharonim), Geonim, halakhic decisors, responsa—it’s not remotely the same order of magnitude in quantity of material. But yes, there is something there—apparently Rabbi Akiva also didn’t need all that.

[Speaker D] The information explosion is among the later authorities. What is potential? The information explosion is across the generations.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that happens in all human knowledge—it bursts outward, right. So I don’t know if it’s an explosion of knowledge; it’s an explosion of information, not an explosion of knowledge—that’s not exactly the same thing. There are huge numbers of pieces of information, and sometimes that actually interferes with knowledge, because with so many trees you no longer really see the basic principles of how things actually work. Sometimes a thinner forest is easier to crack than a dense forest. So there is something in this decline of the generations—at least this is how I interpret it for myself—that this decline of the generations is really a distancing from the source. And in that sense, if I ask myself who was more right, who better hit the intention of the Holy One, blessed be He—Rabbi Akiva or me—I assume it’s Rabbi Akiva. But I’m not sure Rabbi Akiva was a greater intellectual than me—not than me, but than a person in our time. I don’t think that’s true. And it doesn’t have to be that way either. That isn’t the point. The fact that today we are better mathematicians than Rabbi Akiva—that’s hard to dispute—or better scientists, with more systematic thinking than Rabbi Akiva. So what? If we see that around us, then that’s how it is. There’s no need to panic over facts. As the Ran writes in Sukkah, one must not deny the evident. He discusses there, regarding sunlight greater than shade—whether it is measured in the roofing or measured on the ground. So they discuss there what happens: does the light expand downward, or perhaps the shade expands downward and the light narrows. It’s a dispute that already begins in the Talmud and then continues among medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim). So the Ran says: one must not deny the evident. If we see that that’s how it is, then that’s how it is. And if you see the facts, you don’t impose axioms on them. Work things out with your axioms. If there are facts, then the facts are correct. Now think about what to do with the axioms. Okay? So in that sense I definitely think that Rav Kook is alert to what is happening around him. When he sees facts, then for him those facts are binding.

[Speaker C] The fact that there were two world wars, that also—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes—can it change the outlook? No, right, but I don’t think the world wars testify to anything about human nature in general. It testifies to the fact that we have—

[Speaker C] More means to do things.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the Romans had had those means, I’m not sure they would have behaved any better. Or I don’t know—any of the conquerors who existed throughout history, not to mention Genghis Khan and people even greater than the Romans. There were all kinds. So if they had had the means the Nazis had, the technological means the Nazis had, I’m not sure their cruelty would have been any less.

[Speaker C] That’s not what—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As for cruelty—the Nazis still had to get drunk when they shot Jews. They had some cultural restraints that were hard for them to break out of. There are famous stories about Nazi officers who would drink wine when they had to kill. In my opinion that doesn’t testify to human character. These are very exceptional phenomena, and I don’t think one can say on that basis that humanity is deteriorating or that society is deteriorating. Absolutely not. In my opinion it’s the opposite. Not because they were such great righteous people or because they were better than Genghis Khan, but as a phenomenon—when you look at the broad scale—yes, there were two such events, the two world wars, but in general the world is moving in a more positive direction. That’s how it seems to me. But I think that is basically what drives Rav Kook. When he builds his theory for himself, he doesn’t ignore the reality around him. When he sees people who seem to him to be good, then they are good. And if the Sages say—there’s a saying of the Sages, “The kindness of the nations is sin”—then we need to work it out. Fine, so maybe that was about the gentiles the Sages knew, and not the gentiles I know. I know different gentiles. So that saying of the Sages needs analysis. I have a few other things that need analysis too. But so what? That doesn’t mean I’m going to impose those axioms on the reality around me. Okay, one more point regarding prophecy. Maybe with this I’ll finish—two points perhaps regarding prophecy. The first point is that when he describes prophecy here, really, not as seeing the future but as a very elevated form of apprehension. I mentioned earlier the Shelah, who presents the problem of knowledge and free choice through the consideration that there cannot be change in the Holy One, blessed be He. So the answer—or the description—he ultimately offers for this problem of knowledge and free choice is that in fact there is no foreknowledge. There is only free choice. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance what will happen. That is the solution he offers to the contradiction between knowledge and free choice. And along the way he discusses what a prophet is. If the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know, then how does He tell the prophet in advance what will happen? And then he says that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not tell the prophet in advance what will happen. The Holy One, blessed be He, lays out before the prophet the possible options and which of them is most likely to be realized. But if the society, or the specific person being discussed, chooses to go against what would naturally be expected to occur, then it indeed will not occur.

[Speaker D] There’s a Rashba in the name of Tosafot who says: a prophet prophesies what is fitting to be, not what will be. Right? I didn’t remember. Check it—to Tosafot, I don’t remember where. If you find it I’d be very happy. He prophesies what is fitting to be.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so the Shelah elaborates there on this whole matter, and he argues that basically the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know the future, and consequently the concept of prophecy takes on a meaning much closer to what Rav Kook writes here. Because this basically means that the prophet does not see the future, but rather the prophet understands reality better—what the options are. Basically, what Pasig does at Bar-Ilan—the futurists. What he pretends to do, with modern calculations. Nonsense in tomato juice. But never mind. What? No, it’s a livelihood—that’s important, I agree—but why is that my fault?

[Speaker D] He also knows it’s nonsense.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I hope so, because if—

[Speaker D] If not, then it’s really a difficult situation.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, in any case, in any case. The classic example that illustrates this, yes, is with Moses our teacher—a favorite example of mine that some of you have surely already heard. About Moses our teacher, Rashi says on the verse, “He turned this way and that and saw that there was no man, and he struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” So what does it mean, “He turned this way and that and saw that there was no man”? Rashi says: he saw that no one would descend from him who would convert. Yes? And then the simple question, of course, is: how could someone descend from him who would convert if in another moment you’re killing him? Obviously no one will come from him to convert—that I can also tell you; for that you don’t need Moses our teacher. Meaning, if I kill you in another moment, no one will come from you to convert—that’s obvious. So what? If prophecy really is looking by folding the axis of time backward, meaning looking at what will happen in the future, then what Moses our teacher did there was trivial. Obviously what Moses—The Shelah himself brings this; indeed, I think even this very example. He himself brings this example to show that prophecy is not seeing the future; prophecy is seeing the present. When you see what this person is today, you understand what is supposed to come out of such a person. If he chooses differently, something else will come from him, or his descendants will choose differently. But you see his present—what is fitting to come from him. That already narrows the difference between a sage and a prophet considerably. So basically the prophet does not look at the future; he looks at the present. Or in other words, what Rav Kook writes here: prophecy is a kind of apprehension in which you manage to see into deeper layers than an ordinary person, but you see the present—you see information that is already present today. Or regarding the future, you see what can be known today about the future in the clearest possible way, so it’s not certain it will turn out to be true. That means a prophet simply sees more deeply, not farther in time. This basically comes very close to Rav Kook’s model—which of course raises the question, and with this I’ll finish: what is the difference, basically, between a prophet and a sage? They always say that a sage is preferable to a prophet. According to how Rav Kook describes it here, the prophet is simply the greatest sage. So what does it mean that a sage is preferable to a prophet? What are all the implications of that?

[Speaker C] Intuitions and so on? Is it not in things connected to Jewish law, or simply a weaker power in understanding things as they appear? No, why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There—you see, like, he looks at that same Egyptian, and he sees all the way into his depths; he grasps the reality around him in the deepest possible way.

[Speaker C] That’s not the same reality as estimating whether this Egyptian can now lift—

[Speaker E] That, or something of wisdom—look at him in spiritual matters. That’s what the Rabbi said last time, that the prophet is seeing farther and the sage is seeing into the instant.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I said once—and you already don’t remember—that indeed the sage is a kind of—this is another mode of grasping those depths. The sage understands those depths; the prophet sees them. And understanding them is stronger than seeing them. That’s what we discussed earlier: that to understand—or to hear, yes—to understand something is stronger than to see it. Seeing is more clarified, more unequivocal, but you are less deep, you succeed less in grasping the thing itself. I think that is the comparison between a sage and a prophet. Both have apprehension, as Rav Kook describes here. A prophet too is apprehension; it’s not a divine voice speaking to him. It is an apprehension of the depths of reality. So what is the difference between him and a sage? That the sage intellectually comprehends those depths, whereas the prophet sees those depths. And in that sense, the sage is actually preferable, because it is preferable to comprehend it than to see it. It is deeper; it grasps the thing itself more. Up to here, a lecture by Rabbi Michael Abraham, Thursday, the twenty-fifth of Kislev 5771, the twenty-fifth—

[Speaker B] Of November 2010, a lesson on Orot HaKodesh by Rav Kook.