For the Perplexed of the Generation – Lesson 11
This transcript 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
Table of Contents
- Censorship, the manuscript, and chapter 6:1
- The heresy associated with the theory of development and the source of the Oral Torah
- Time, material development, and the flight of the intellect
- Rabbi Kook’s model: all the details from Sinai or revelation out of principles
- Historical and source-based criticism of the deductive model
- Maimonides: words of the Sages, expansion through interpretation, and rabbinic status
- A third model: binding historical development by virtue of tools and authorization
- “Even if you’re right”: the acceptance of the nation as the foundation of obligation
- “Do not deviate,” Nachmanides, and the principled justification for obeying the Sages
- Rabbi Shimon Shkop and reversing the question of obligation
- Othniel ben Kenaz, forgotten laws, and the question of reconstructing a law given to Moses at Sinai
- The speed of intellect, Moses’s awareness of the details, and the principle of charity
Summary
General overview
The text presents a lecture on chapter 6:1 in a manuscript of Rabbi Kook, including the claim that some of the pages were censored without any clear explanation, and it focuses on the confrontation between the “theory of development” and the authority of the Oral Torah. Rabbi Kook is described as arguing that inferring heresy from development to the source of the Oral Torah is mistaken, because material development depends on time, whereas the flight of the intellect is not limited in that way. At the same time, a criticism is brought that such a model is itself problematic when tested against the sources and halakhic history. Later an alternative is presented by way of Maimonides and the distinction between revelation and expansion, and finally Rabbi Kook’s position is presented as claiming that even if the historical claim were true—that the Oral Torah took shape over generations—the obligation still stands by virtue of the acceptance of the nation, to the point of saying that one who removes himself from the collective is as though he denied a fundamental principle. The text is woven together with classroom discussion, comparisons to Rabbi Shimon Shkop, the issue of “do not deviate” in Maimonides and Nachmanides, and uncertainty over how to understand Rabbi Kook’s language about time and the speed of intellect.
Censorship, the manuscript, and chapter 6:1
The lecturer says that the page handed out in class is actually made up of three additional pages that appear in the manuscript and for some reason were censored in the abridged edition, and he sees this as far-reaching censorship if it really stemmed from fear. The lecturer says they already saw the opening of chapter 6:1 on page 34, and he has trouble understanding what could possibly be problematic in the passage, aside from concern about damaging the authority of the Oral Torah. He explains that the page in their hands begins with the paragraph after the first two paragraphs, which also appear in the book. He adds that the text he has comes from an unedited file passed around “through underground channels” and edited by Rabbi Shachar Rahmani, and he says he received permission from him to use it and that a book is supposed to come out, while in the meantime they already published an abridged edition.
The heresy associated with the theory of development and the source of the Oral Torah
The passage quotes “the heresy that arose as a wicked staff at the feet of the theory of development” and argues that the heresy arises from failure to understand in depth the “relation of development” in all reality, and that it also acts destructively regarding the question of the “lineage” of the Oral Torah. The text explains that researchers became enslaved to the thought that just as reality exhibits slow perfection, so too “the great and splendid edifice of the Oral Torah” was not created all at once but rather develops little by little, generation after generation, and from this there arose “masses of heretics, yoke-casters-off, and bond-breakers” who sought “to alter religion and law.” The text interprets the claim as saying that if the Oral Torah develops historically, then its source is not at Sinai but in the sages of the generations, and therefore there is no obligation toward it as divine Torah. The text says this looked to the speakers like a “scientific” inference, because the Oral Torah is perceived as a complex structure similar to other complex structures that developed over time.
Time, material development, and the flight of the intellect
The text quotes Rabbi Kook saying that the heretics “did not understand that the case is not comparable to the proof,” and distinguishes between material development, which depends on time because every physical motion requires time, and the “flight of the intellect,” whose speed is beyond investigation. The lecturer adds a philosophical interpretation of the concept of time in rabbinic and halakhic sources as tied to the movement of the heavenly bodies, and argues that motion and change are “the essence of time,” so that without change there would be no time—unlike the modern conception of time as an abstract axis. The text quotes that the sage can “in one moment” embrace the arms of the world, gaze upon “a vision of tens of thousands of years,” and survey “a multitude of details without limit,” and from that draws an a fortiori inference regarding the divine intellect in Moses’s prophecy and its capacity to comprehend the details of the laws and ordinances that were commanded. The text concludes from this that the inference from material evolution to the “development of Jewish law” is invalid, because intellect is not subject to time the way matter is.
Rabbi Kook’s model: all the details from Sinai or revelation out of principles
The text presents an initial reading of the two paragraphs as leading to the conclusion that everything was given at Sinai through Moses our teacher and that nothing essentially new happened over the course of history, except at most the unveiling of what had already been laid down. The lecturer raises the possibility that the meaning is not that Moses was literally given “section 12, paragraph 21 of the Mishnah Berurah,” but rather that these are general principles within which all the details are latent, and the generations merely “uncover” them. The text formulates this as a deductive model, using the image of axioms in geometry that implicitly contain conclusions, and even raises the idea that a computer could extract everything if you grind through the principles. The text points to a difficulty with halakhic disputes, since deduction is not supposed to generate disputes, and raises the possibility either that one side is mistaken or that we do not have the capacity to prove things even though the result is correct. The text brings the story of Moses not understanding Rabbi Akiva’s interpretations as a challenge to the naive model, and presents the more reasonable model in the lecturer’s eyes as the claim that “everything existed potentially” rather than “everything existed actually.”
Historical and source-based criticism of the deductive model
The text brings an example from tractate Sabbath 64 about an ancient custom that a woman should not adorn herself or paint herself during her menstrual impurity, and Rabbi Akiva’s interpretation of “and she shall remain in her menstruation” from which he permitted it, in order to show historical change rather than the simple transmission of a fixed detail. The lecturer states that Rabbi Kook’s presentation in the two paragraphs seems like “the most conservative picture possible” and calls the simplistic model “complete nonsense” and “ridiculous,” adding that it is hard to accept a thesis according to which there is no spiritual development beyond revelation. The text notes that the lecturer thinks Rabbi Kook himself later offers an alternative to the simple picture described here. The text shows that the argument with the “people of development” is a principled one about the possibility that later additions are a human expansion not latent in principles from Sinai, and therefore in their view lacking authority.
Maimonides: words of the Sages, expansion through interpretation, and rabbinic status
The text presents Maimonides’ view as evidence that the Sages expand beyond what is in the Torah, and distinguishes in his view between a Torah-level law, which is the exposure of what is latent in the verse, and a rabbinic law, which is expansion over the generations. The text describes two kinds of expansion: legislation in the form of decrees, safeguards, and enactments; and interpretive expansion, such as “You shall fear the Lord your God”—to include Torah scholars, which is defined as an expansion rather than the exposure of the inner meaning of the verse. The text states that according to Maimonides the role of interpretation is not to expose but to expand, and therefore its products have the status of words of the Sages. It calls this “soft deduction,” “induction,” or “analogy,” rather than one-to-one deductive inference. The text uses the story of Shimon HaAmsuni, who stopped at “You shall fear the Lord your God,” and Rabbi Akiva, who included Torah scholars, to show that the verse “compels” an expansion by force of an interpretive rule, without the thing being inside the verse according to its plain meaning. The text notes that Maimonides writes that a religious court in every generation can interpret as it sees fit even against previous generations, and that there is no requirement to be greater in wisdom and number with respect to interpretations as there is regarding enactments and decrees. The text brings examples of interpretations that are commonly viewed as Torah-level but that Maimonides sees as words of the Sages, such as acquisition by money in the laws of marriage and the disqualification of maternal brothers from testimony, and notes that the major debate is whether “words of the Sages” in Maimonides is only a conceptual heading or also a genuine legal status.
A third model: binding historical development by virtue of tools and authorization
The text presents the possibility that many laws were indeed created over the generations as products of religious courts and sages and are not deductions from principles at Sinai, and yet they are still binding because the Holy One, blessed be He, gave tools and legitimacy for expanding the Torah. The text describes the lecturer’s position that this conception resembles the historical description offered by the “people of development,” but that their conclusion is mistaken because they infer from this the collapse of authority. The text clarifies that the dispute is not about enactments and decrees but about interpretations and exegesis, and about the validity of what was innovated through them. The text argues that cultural or intellectual development can be the historical realization of ideas that were latent at the root, but even so the realization takes time because it occurs in human reality.
“Even if you’re right”: the acceptance of the nation as the foundation of obligation
The text quotes Rabbi Kook as claiming that even according to the opponents’ argument there is no place “to contradict ourselves” because of something accepted by the nation as a whole, and that “the acceptance of the entire nation is the foundation of obligation.” The text says that Rabbi Kook holds that whether the Oral Torah was accepted from Moses at Sinai in all its details or “was instituted over thousands of years” by religious courts, the very acceptance of the nation is what binds, and one who excludes himself from the collective is “as though he denied a fundamental principle.” The text quotes Rabbi Kook as concluding that the belief that the entire Oral Torah was transmitted to Moses is a true belief, but the existence of the Oral Torah in Israel does not depend specifically on that, because the obligation derives from the general acceptance. The text uses rabbinic commandments as proof: they too are not from Sinai, and nevertheless we observe them, so the inference that absence of transmission from Sinai cancels obligation does not work. The text ends with Rabbi Kook’s formulation that “once the ruling spread throughout the nation, we were already fully obligated by it,” and that even if someone claims that all the laws were clarified over time, “the obligation remains at its full level” and “their trickery did not help them at all.”
“Do not deviate,” Nachmanides, and the principled justification for obeying the Sages
The text presents the basic question of the force of rabbinic law through the dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides over “do not deviate,” and explains that Maimonides sees the authority of the Sages to legislate as deriving from the verse, whereas Nachmanides argues that if that were so then a “rabbinic doubt” would become a “Torah-level doubt,” and therefore “do not deviate” is only a textual support with respect to legislation. The text brings Rabbi Kook’s question, “From where does the foundation of obligation come?” and answers in his name that it comes from “the self-evident truths” that the nation is obligated to conduct itself after its elders and sages, and that individuals are obligated to follow the general “center.” The text ties this to the acceptance of the Torah itself, which must be “accepted willingly,” and cites as sources “We will do and we will hear” and the claim that “the will and agreement of the entire nation” are the foundation. The text quotes that whether matters are a law given to Moses at Sinai or are “clarified by the judgment of some accepted religious court,” there is no difference in their severity once the ruling has been accepted and spread throughout the nation.
Rabbi Shimon Shkop and reversing the question of obligation
The text draws a parallel to Rabbi Shimon Shkop in Shaarei Yosher, who places intellect as the binding basis for fulfilling the Torah, and therefore asks “why fulfill what is written in the Torah” rather than asking why fulfill obligations that are not written. The text explains that intellect obligates obedience to the Holy One, blessed be He, even without understanding the reasons for the commandments, using the image of taking medicine from a doctor based on trust rather than medical understanding. The text argues that Rabbi Kook uses a parallel logic at the level of “the acceptance of the nation,” so that if acceptance is the basis of obligation to the Torah itself, it is also the basis of obligation to what the nation accepted with respect to the Oral Torah and the actions of the Sages.
Othniel ben Kenaz, forgotten laws, and the question of reconstructing a law given to Moses at Sinai
The text quotes Rabbi Kook as claiming that even laws that were transmitted as a law given to Moses at Sinai, had they been forgotten, would be restored “by way of interpretation,” as happened with “three hundred or three thousand laws” that were forgotten during the mourning for Moses and restored by Othniel ben Kenaz “through his dialectic.” The text brings the lecturer’s discussion from the previous year on Temurah and on the interpretations of Pnei Moshe or Korban HaEdah in the Jerusalem Talmud, which say that the law of a sin-offering whose owners died is a law given to Moses at Sinai that was forgotten and restored through dialectic, and from this infer a difficulty in assigning it Torah-level status. The text explains that the difficulty is that reconstructing a law given to Moses at Sinai is impossible to verify, because it has no source in a verse, not even through interpretation, and therefore at most one can treat the reconstruction as a binding ruling, but not as a certain restoration of the original tradition. The text presents this difficulty as a tension with Rabbi Kook’s assertions that there is no difference in obligation between original acceptance and a ruling of a religious court.
The speed of intellect, Moses’s awareness of the details, and the principle of charity
The text returns to the question of why Rabbi Kook emphasizes that the “flight of the intellect” does not take time, and suggests that this may hint at a simplistic understanding according to which Moses our teacher actually held all the halakhic details in full, as opposed to the understanding that these are only principles that contain the details potentially. The text suggests a distinction from Tosafot Yom Tov between what the Holy One, blessed be He, “showed” Moses—all that a veteran student would one day innovate—and what He “transmitted” to him to pass on further, comparing it to a compressed file that can later be opened. The text discusses whether the meaning of “a single survey” is knowledge of all the details themselves or grasp of the principles that allow them to be derived, and presents the time axis as unnecessary if there is no need to unpack all the details in actuality. The text invokes Donald Davidson’s “principle of charity” as a working assumption for interpreting Rabbi Kook in the most reasonable way, rather than as a straw man, but notes that the language about time still raises an interpretive question mark. The text ends by saying that the lecturer asks them to keep the page for the next class, and notes the lecture’s closing words: “That concludes a lecture of Rabbi Michael Abraham, Faith and Religion, Thursday, 2 Kislev 5771, December 9, 2010.”
Full Transcript
[Speaker A] Thursday, 6 Kislev 5771, December 9, 2010, a lecture by Rabbi Michael Abraham on Perplexities of the Generation.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In chapter 6:1, the page I photocopied for you—the page I photocopied for you is made up of three more pages that appear in the manuscript and for some reason were censored here. It’s not entirely clear to me why in this case. This is really far-reaching censorship if it stemmed from concern—I don’t know—or maybe it was just omitted for some other reason. Okay, the heresy here… chapter 6:1, page 34.
[Speaker A] Things requiring broad explanation from the shadow of the world.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, we already saw that when we discussed the opening. But in this case, if it really came from censorship regarding what’s written here, I really don’t understand what’s going on there. I can see how someone might see a problem in this, but if this is problematic then I think you could really omit half our sources. Are they afraid this will damage the authority of the Oral Torah?
[Speaker A] They’re afraid this will damage the authority of the Oral Torah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. “The heresy that arose as a wicked staff at the feet of the theory of development…” In the book, here I brought only the additions. In the book, chapter 6:1 has the first two paragraphs, which also appear there, and this page begins with the paragraph after them. “The heresy that arose as a wicked staff at the feet of the theory of development, out of failure to descend to the depth of the matter regarding the relation of development in all reality.” Here “relation” is spelled with a shin, not a samekh. Meaning, where it comes from—we’ll see in a moment. Not relation in the sense of what it refers to, but what its source is, where it comes from, what its lineage is, right? “It also produced its effects for ill regarding the relation”—again with a shin—“of the Oral Torah.” Meaning, what is the lineage of the Oral Torah, where does it come from. If this… that’s really what he means to say. In other words, in the wake of the theory of development, some kind of heresy emerges, a sort of wicked staff of the theory of development, and it is created as a result of ignorance or inability to get to the depth of the matter regarding the relation of development in all reality. So they don’t understand the concept of development. “Since the researchers began to see in all reality gradual perfection, the researchers of our people became enslaved to maintain that the great and splendid edifice, the Oral Torah by which the whole house of Israel lives, was also not created all at once, but rather developed in its time, little by little, generation after generation. And behold, this hypothesis began to spread, and behold, masses of heretics, yoke-casters-off, and bond-breakers arose, who sought to turn everything upside down and alter religion and law.” “Alter”—that’s a verse from Daniel: “He will think to alter…” Page 34. “To alter religion and law.” In other words, the claim is that since the theory of development says things develop and are perfected slowly, then the Oral Torah too presumably developed slowly over time. And if so, then its source is not Sinai, but the sages of the generations and their successive generations, and if so, then we are not really supposed to be obligated by it. These are products of human beings, not Torah given at Sinai—divine Torah given at Sinai. And therefore heretics arose and people cast off the yoke, broke restraints, and so on. They pin this on the theory of development, basically, because from a scientific perspective, when you look at complex structures, these are things that developed slowly. The Oral Torah too is some kind of complex structure, and therefore obviously it was created slowly over history, and if so, then it was not given to us at Sinai. “And behold, these heretics, scoundrels of the world, did not understand that the case is not comparable to the proof.” The case is the Oral Torah, and the proof is evolution. “For material development depends on time, because every material motion requires time, and it itself marks time.” What does that mean? The concept of time in general—this is an interesting point. We talked about it when we discussed the roots in one of the previous years—that the concept of time in rabbinic and halakhic contexts generally is not the abstract concept we have today. Rather it’s some kind of movement of heavenly bodies. When we say day and night, we mean where the sun is, and the movement of the heavenly bodies is not an indication of the passage of time—it is time. There’s some sense that time basically means where the sun is and where the moon is, not some abstract axis on which we merely see the sun and moon moving. There are a number of implications to this, and there are several sources that seem to see it this way. In any case, that’s what he writes: “and it itself marks time.” Meaning, time has no existence in itself; it’s not some abstract being that just flows along without anything tangible. Rather, the movement of things and the changing of things—that is the essence of time. That’s what tells us there is time here. If nothing were changing, there would be no time. Which doesn’t fit very well with certainly modern physical conceptions that see time as something that exists prior to the processes taking place within it. So even if there were no motion and no changes in events or objects along the time axis, time would still flow. Maybe we wouldn’t notice it, maybe we wouldn’t feel it, but time is not the events themselves; time is some abstract axis, the coordinate on which events move. Anyway, that’s what he writes: “and it itself marks time. But the flight of the intellect”—that’s the material realm—“but the flight of the intellect, its speed is beyond investigation, and the small-minded person cannot imagine how in one moment the great sage embraces the arms of the world and gazes upon a vision of tens of thousands of years, and surveys in one survey as well a multitude of endless details. If so, should one wonder about the way of the intellect, loftier and more exalted still—the divine intellect in the prophecy of the master of prophets—that in the laws and judgments he commanded as the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob, he also comprehended then their multitude of details and the ways of their judgment? And how can a healthy intellect doubt that fulfillments and explanations of many details were not given by that very same path through which the principles reached us?” So what he’s saying, basically, is that there’s a difference between material development—evolution—and the development of intellectual processes, of mind, because evolution in physical processes takes time. Every physical process takes time. But mental or intellectual processes basically don’t need time. You can survey in a single glance a process whose actual realization could take thousands of years and involve masses of details and so on. And therefore it is wrong to learn from the theory of development, from evolution, to the development of Jewish law. So if in the material world the theory of development is correct—or at least can be correct, as we learned in earlier chapters—in the world of the development of Jewish law that is not true. And the conception is basically that everything was given at Sinai through Moses our teacher in one instant, and Moses our teacher in one survey, through some rapid intellect, managed to pass through or transmit all the details all at once, and nothing happened later in history. Everything was basically passed down to us from Moses our teacher. That’s what comes out of these two paragraphs.
[Speaker A] First of all, it seems to me that Rabbi Kook too, with the ideas of evolution from earlier, went beyond physical evolution—he also talked about cultural evolution. Meaning, all the achievements we have today weren’t there two thousand years ago.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] נכון, but culture is also an occurrence—cultural evolution. No, but culture is also a kind of occurrence in the world. It doesn’t matter that it’s invented by human beings; it’s the development of—
[Speaker A] Ideas, concepts.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the ideas absolutely may have been latent already at the root from the beginning. Their realization in practice is a historical process. History also happens through people, through objects, through human beings, entities acting in the world, so it takes time. But when you look at the ideas in themselves, the connection between them is not something that takes time. It could be that all the details really were latent in some primary idea, like a unified field theory—some abstract primary idea that existed from the beginning, and in fact all the details were inside it. Until that filters down and gets acted on and realized and appears—fine, that’s already a historical process, not an intellectual one. Okay, I think he means something similar in the Torah context as well, because this really does need explanation, and later we’ll see that he also offers an alternative to the simple picture he described here. The picture he described here is apparently the most conservative picture possible. There are quite a few people today who think this way. It’s complete nonsense, I think.
[Speaker A] No spiritual development, just revelation all the time.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. I think what he means to say is that there is no development at all. At most—exactly like what I said earlier about cultural processes—so too on the halakhic plane, everything was basically latent from the start in the principles given to us from the beginning. And all the rest is some sort of uncovering process, where each generation reveals more and more details. But basically it was all inside. Moses our teacher already put everything in, surveyed everything, knew everything, received everything from the Holy One, blessed be He, and over the generations only more and more things are revealed or exposed that were latent from the start in the foundational principles. Now here too, this can be formulated in a few ways. One can assume the simplistic model—and I find it hard to believe that’s what he meant—which says that Moses our teacher received section 12, paragraph 21 of the Mishnah Berurah. In other words, the Holy One, blessed be He, taught him the Mishnah Berurah, Arukh HaShulchan, all the details. Everything was given to Moses our teacher. He just didn’t bother to reveal all the details to us. He gave us some general things and relied on us to manage to extract all the details from the principles he gave.
[Speaker C] Moses our teacher testifies about himself that he doesn’t understand what Rabbi Akiva is deriving.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right. That’s why I’m saying this is an extremely simplistic picture, and it seems to me really ridiculous to think that way. Let’s say—I find it hard to believe that even Rabbi Kook, who may be earlier—
[Speaker A] that’s what he thought.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What seems closer to me in understanding his words is that he means that on the principled level, these things were hidden within the principles Moses our teacher received. Moses our teacher received some kind of system of principles—besides the Written Torah—some kind of system of principles called the Oral Torah. These principles were very general. Now when you break them down into components, and when you draw out everything latent within them, shake them out and get everything out of them, then section 12, paragraph 21 of the Mishnah Berurah comes out. Then everything comes out. Everything was really latent inside. I’m not even sure Moses our teacher thought through all those details, but basically they were latent in his words. In the form of begging the question?
[Speaker D] Like mathematics, which we expanded on once? In the form of deduction.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, the claim is—that’s what I mean here, in any case—that there is some kind of deduction here. In other words, if you know the four axioms of geometry, then you basically know implicitly that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees.
[Speaker A] Why do you say four? What? Why do you say four and not five?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We hold there are five. No, no—one depends on the other four, so there are four. Euclid had five, but one depends on the others; they removed one. They proved it. There are four. In any case, it doesn’t matter—that’s a marginal detail for our purposes. The claim is that everything possible—maybe Moses our teacher would not have known how to tell us a particular paragraph in the Mishnah Berurah. Maybe he wasn’t aware of that paragraph hidden within the principles he received. But everything is there inside. In fact, in a perhaps more extreme formulation, really what you said—a computer could have extracted everything. Meaning, this is logic; it’s something where you just have to grind properly through the principles Moses our teacher received. Everything is in there. We didn’t add anything. There was no substantive expansion over the course of history.
[Speaker A] Including disputes and differences in custom?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, here’s exactly the whole question. Differences in custom—I don’t know whether customs belong here. Customs are customs. But laws? rulings? Sephardi rulings, Ashkenazi rulings?
[Speaker A] Yes, rulings, not customs.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s all hidden inside? Fine. That’s always the question of how to relate to disputes, of course. Yes, “these and those are the words of the living God,” so maybe the Holy One, blessed be He, gave him both ways of unfolding the folds. The problem is that there’s a dispute about how to unfold the folds, and that means it’s no longer deduction. Because in deduction there are no disputes. There is no dispute about how to unfold the folds of geometry. Anyone who accepts these four axioms cannot argue that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. Once there is a dispute about how to unfold the folds, that means unfolding the folds is not a deductive process.
[Speaker A] Maybe one of them is mistaken. Fine, that’s another solution.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? One is mistaken. Fine, that’s another solution. You’re basically saying that in disputes it isn’t true that Moses received both sides. He received the correct side, and one of them is mistaken and one is right. What can you do? We don’t always know what Moses received. Fine, that’s the unavoidable conclusion if you really take this model seriously.
[Speaker A] And if it’s deductive, you can always show where you made the mistake. What? If it’s deductive. No, not necessarily—we may not manage to get to the deductive level.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Say, I can understand that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees in some leaping sort of way, but maybe I won’t know how to prove it. So if someone thinks otherwise—
[Speaker A] I won’t be able to convince him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You don’t know how to prove it because you don’t know. No. But if I can’t find that proof, I won’t be able to do it.
[Speaker A] Then you don’t know it’s 180.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I think it is. You think. Fine. So that’s true—that’s what I have; I don’t have more than that. I didn’t receive from Moses our teacher what the sum of the angles in a triangle is. I have to reach the conclusion, and therefore it seems to me that what seemed right to Moses our teacher was that it’s 180. I have no proof. So what do I do now? I need to make a decision, so it’s 180. If someone thinks otherwise, I can’t prove it to him. If I knew all the mathematics behind it, maybe I could prove it to him too. And here I’m presenting something I don’t really agree with, but it seems to me this is at most what Rabbi Kook intended here. I don’t think he meant that we literally received all the details—that’s just absurd. We talked about this last year too, I think, with that example of Rabbi Akiva and his interpretation in Sabbath 64, that in earlier generations they used to practice that a woman should not adorn herself or paint herself during the days of her menstruation. Then Rabbi Akiva came and said: Could it be that she thereby becomes repulsive to her husband? How could that be? Therefore he interpreted “and she shall remain in her menstruation” to mean that it is permitted. So here we have an explicit record of a process of change, not of receiving the halakhic detail through tradition. Rather, Rabbi Akiva interprets the verse and derives a different law from it—not a law that had been accepted among the earlier generations. And that’s only one record; I assume there are many others. Okay, so that’s the first direction, and in that direction, at least on the principled level, the conception is that this really is the accepted conception, at least nowadays, that everything at least in idea came down from Sinai. So even if we don’t hold the naive conception that all the details were given verbatim at Mount Sinai, the basic conception is still that everything is included within what was given at Sinai. The people of the theory of development, against whom Rabbi Kook is arguing, want to claim otherwise. Meaning, they want to claim that what was done over the generations was not even deductive exposure out of what Moses our teacher received, but some kind of expansion—an expansion they themselves made. They didn’t derive it from the sources they received in tradition. And therefore it has no authority, because it isn’t Torah from Sinai. According to the model Rabbi Kook proposes, the fact that we extract conclusions from the principles of Moses our teacher means that in the end our conclusions are certainly binding Torah-level laws, because we derived them from the principles that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave at Sinai.
[Speaker A] Does anyone think that’s not binding? What? Does anyone think it’s not binding on a Torah level because it’s not at the same level as—? That’s what Rabbi Kook is claiming here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, people think it’s not binding precisely because it wasn’t included in what was given to Moses at Sinai.
[Speaker A] But Rabbi—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll get to that Maimonides with words of the Sages—I’ll get to that Maimonides. So that’s Rabbi Kook’s claim. He is arguing against the developmental conception in the sense that the additions made over the generations were not hidden or latent within the principles Moses our teacher received.
[Speaker A] I don’t even understand what the problem is for that writer. Because in evolution too, in the end it was all latent in the first point. There were laws.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not so simple. In the middle there are random processes. Mutations are formed, and something very accidental happens.
[Speaker A] But random isn’t really random. What does random mean? Okay, but in the end there are laws of physics.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I agree, but—
[Speaker A] Nothing is really random.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How are you going to explain that to biologists?
[Speaker A] We don’t know—it’s so complex that we jump. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I agree. It’s like a die.
[Speaker A] Nothing is random. It’s like a die.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I completely agree. I’m only saying that from the biologists’ perspective, and from the perspective of people of the theory of development, they see these things as random processes and not laws of physics. And then in the name of the laws of physics they make very heavy assumptions. I once had to run a year of physics for biology students—mechanics—and it was severe suffering.
[Speaker A] Ice-haulers—that’s always what you mean.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We were talking about high-school-level physics, and there were terrible groans there from the lecturer. Anyway, both conceptions Rabbi Kook compares in these two paragraphs seem to me incorrect—not only what they propose, but what he proposes too. I think you can see this quite clearly in Maimonides’ view that was mentioned earlier, and as I mentioned last year—we talked about it. Maimonides quite clearly sees what the Sages do in their interpretations as some sort of expansion of what is written in the Torah, not the exposure of what is written in the Torah. You can see this in many places in Maimonides, not only from the fact that he calls it words of the Sages—that’s just the tip of the iceberg—but in many places in Maimonides’ approach you can see that the Sages expand beyond what is in the Torah. Where something is exposed—where what the Sages do is the exposure of what was hidden in the verses of the Torah—then that law is a Torah-level law according to Maimonides. A rabbinic law is a law that is an expansion by the Sages over the generations, and that expansion can either be legislation—in which case it is really rabbinic law in the usual sense, decrees, safeguards, enactments, and so on—or it can be an expansion of the verse, like “You shall fear the Lord your God”—to include Torah scholars, which Maimonides brings in the second root. That too does not expose some depth-dimension already inside the verse. It’s not that when the verse says “You shall fear the Lord your God,” it includes within it the obligation to fear Torah scholars. According to Maimonides, interpretation does not have the role of exposing; its role is to expand. So when he expands and says there is a commandment to fear Torah scholars, he means: this is in the spirit of the command to fear the Holy One, blessed be He—but not that it is latent inside it. This is not deduction; it’s induction, some kind of analogy, some kind of expansion beyond what is in the verse, and therefore it really does have a status of rabbinic law. So in Maimonides, it seems to me, you can see the conception against which Rabbi Kook is arguing here. Now it’s true that Maimonides did not infer from this that we are not obligated to obey all these laws. Maimonides says that therefore these are rabbinic laws, not therefore they are non-binding laws because they were not given to Moses at Sinai. And as I explained last year—I think we discussed this—that really this concept of expansion is also widely misunderstood, at least it seems to me. People who think dichotomously classify every interpretive act, and as a result every law, into one of two types: either it is interpretation or it is legislation. Meaning, if it comes from you and not from the verse, then it’s rabbinic law, it’s legislation—from you meaning from the Sages. If it is interpretation of what is written in the verse, then you have exposed what is in the verse, that is interpretation, and it is a Torah-level law. Maimonides’ innovation is that there is an intermediate category. That intermediate category basically says that when you interpret a verse, the interpretation absolutely contains subjective elements, yes—but on the other hand it is not legislation. It’s a kind of soft deduction, meaning it is a derivation from the verse, but a derivation that does not expose, rather a derivation that expands. And therefore I gave an example—we did this two years ago when we discussed the roots, the second root—so I brought as an example the same example Maimonides brings: “You shall fear the Lord your God”—to include Torah scholars. What would happen if in the Sages’ judgment their reasoning had told them that one should not fear Torah scholars? There’s no reason to. On the contrary, maybe it’s a kind of idolatry—you should fear only the Holy One, blessed be He, alone. That’s exactly where Shimon HaAmsuni got stuck, right? It says “You shall fear the Lord your God,” and Shimon HaAmsuni would interpret every occurrence of the word “et” in the Torah until he reached “et the Lord your God shall you fear,” and there he stopped. Why did he stop? Because he could not include anything besides the Holy One, blessed be He. Whom could one compare to the Holy One, blessed be He, such that one should fear him as one fears the Holy One, blessed be He? Basically there is some idea here that this is impossible—it damages divine uniqueness, yes, exactly—such a thing cannot be. It’s a kind of idolatry. So suppose that really had been the Sages’ reasoning, like Shimon HaAmsuni. Then Rabbi Akiva comes and says to Shimon HaAmsuni: “You shall fear the Lord your God”—to include Torah scholars. He saved him. Meaning, he found an interpretation for that verse. Shimon HaAmsuni didn’t think of it? Suppose he did think of it; it’s not exactly the least obvious candidate. You don’t have to be a great genius to see it. Rather, he was unwilling to accept it. He was unwilling to accept it because it cannot be that we compare something to the Holy One, blessed be He. So what is Rabbi Akiva saying? You could say that Rabbi Akiva is saying: no, I disagree with your reasoning. Yes, it isn’t idolatry; there is room to fear Torah scholars as well.
[Speaker A] But because of the word “et,” what? It’s like its reflection.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes. But no—I’m saying, I think that behind this, what’s really embedded here, maybe also behind what you’re saying, is that Rabbi Akiva doesn’t necessarily disagree with Shimon HaAmsuni at the conceptual level. He says: fine, but it says “et”; we have to include something from the word “et.” After all, there’s a rule that every word “et” comes to include something. There’s no way around it. So your reasoning won’t help you here—you’ll have to find something that is included by this verse, because the rule is that “et” comes to include. And you’ll agree with me that the least problematic thing to include is Torah scholars. Now if you asked me whether to institute such an enactment—certainly not, of course not. You shouldn’t have fear of Torah scholars. My reasoning says that this is destructive, irrational, wrong—destructive. So as an enactment or decree, certainly not; the Sages would never have done that. And still, the verse forces them to do it. But the question is: is fear of Torah scholars a stone that was uncovered, or one that was quarried out of the verse? Not necessarily. The verse forces me to extend beyond what is written in it. The fact that it forces me does not yet mean that it was hidden inside it, because the rule of derash is not a rule of interpretation; it is a rule of expansion. So when the verse compels me, it compels me to expand, not to uncover.
[Speaker A] So therefore, there’s no other way. Fear of Torah scholars—really their authority comes from the fact that you fear them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that there’s no other way—that’s clear. But the verse… no, because there’s a rule here that says “et” must include. Without that rule, if you just read the verse, you would not include Torah scholars. That very rule—and that rule was received from Sinai, that rule was transmitted. What’s the problem? There’s no problem with it. Maimonides didn’t say that the rule is incorrect; that’s his whole innovation there. It’s not that it’s wrong. Rather, it’s a rule of expansion and not a rule of uncovering—that’s what Maimonides says. Meaning, this rule is not an additional tool to quarry more details out of the verse, but a tool designed to expand with further details beyond what is in the verse. The claim is…
[Speaker A] He said it like this—how can I put it most briefly—to fear God, and as a result also to fear Torah scholars. That is exactly against what Maimonides…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is exactly what Maimonides wants to argue is incorrect. That is the conventional understanding of derash, and that’s apparently how Nachmanides understood it. But that itself is precisely what Maimonides comes to innovate—not so; that’s not how it should be seen. Even though, as Maimonides says, don’t think I’m saying this is incorrect or that it shouldn’t be observed—he says this explicitly in the second root—of course it’s valid. But the claim is that this is rabbinic law. Why is it rabbinic law? Because the rules, the rules of derash, are rules of expansion and not rules of uncovering. So even if the result is a necessary result, in the end it is not found inside the verse. And he says this regarding the other commandments too, in all the hermeneutic principles—all the principles and the logic, all of it.
[Speaker A] And also regarding this whole issue of “et”—the fact that he gives us the power to decide…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he gives… what do you mean, gives us? He gives us tools for expansion; the tools are a law given to Moses at Sinai.
[Speaker A] Only one possibility, that it’s Torah scholars, or could it be anything…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know what the Holy One intended; I have no idea. He told us, “You must include,” because “et” comes to include—that is a rule we received from Sinai, one of the principles by which the Torah is interpreted.
[Speaker A] So a generation could come and say… and there are disputes, right? Sure, huge disputes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course there are disputes about derashot; that is entirely possible. And Maimonides writes that every religious court in every generation—we already talked about this Maimonides, I’ve mentioned it several times, I think—every religious court in every generation can interpret the Torah as it sees fit, against all previous generations. And it does not have to be greater in wisdom, or in number, or in anything at all with regard to derashot. Only regarding enactments and decrees is there a requirement that the later court be greater in wisdom and in number. Regarding derashot, there is no such requirement whatsoever. A religious court today could come and decide, as I said, that there are two categories of labor on the Sabbath, not thirty-nine. Two primary categories of labor—and then that’s what there will be.
[Speaker A] So some commandment that… Maimonides said it is Torah-level, and in the end it is… the opposite, the opposite, the opposite—there are commandments…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …that we say are Torah-level, and Maimonides says are rabbinic. That is Maimonides’ innovation: things derived from derashot—what people usually think is Torah-level—Maimonides says are rabbinic law. Like acquisition by money at the beginning of the laws of marriage, the disqualification of maternal brothers from testimony. Those derivations—but Maimonides argues that this is considered a stringency. So here the question is—and here there is the big debate—the question is how to relate to the halakhic force. When Maimonides says this is rabbinic law, does he only mean some conceptual label? Or does he mean that it literally has the status of rabbinic law? And that is a whole topic in itself. I think he means the status as well, but that’s another discussion. This claim, essentially, says that there is here a different model from the two models of Rabbi Kook. Basically, the development of Jewish law over the course of history is also not deduction. It is not uncovering what was hidden inside the principle that Moses received. There is expansion here. There are laws that are the product of religious courts over the course of history. And that does not undermine obligation. Exactly, and it does not undermine obligation, because we received from the Holy One tools of expansion and not only tools of uncovering, and of course also the legitimacy to expand. And once so, it is binding.
[Speaker A] But if it’s subjective and not univocal, then how?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then we’ll argue, take a vote, and reach a conclusion like with anything else. There can also be disputes about interpretation in Torah-level law—so what?
[Speaker A] There are disputes about “according to all that they instruct you.” There is a religious court, it has authority; this concept, the authority of a religious court… wait, there are certain people who teach Jewish law this way, Maimonides as he opened… the Mishnah Berurah… Hokhmat Shlomo… a decisor… I’ll get to that because that’s in the continuation that was censored here, censored, yes, I’ll get to that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So basically there are two models here. One of them is that of the evolutionists—those “matir resha,” as Rabbi Kook calls them here—who basically say that since everything is the product of later generations, we are not obligated by it. Rabbi Kook proposes against this the model that says that everything is basically some kind of deductive derivative of the principles that Moses received. And I’m setting aside for the moment the third possibility—that everything was given to Moses literally as word-for-word text—that I think is… I don’t think Rabbi Kook thought things that stupid. And against these two conceptions stands a third conception—or actually a fourth, if we also count what I left out—which says that indeed things were created over the generations, as those evolutionists think and so on, but their conclusion is incorrect. The fact that things were created over the generations does not mean that they are not binding. It does not mean they are not part of the Torah. They are part of the Torah. And that is the whole meaning of the world of derash: that the Holy One gave us certain tools through which we can expand the Torah, and if we use those proper tools, their products are binding products. Therefore, these laws that we observe today were not given to Moses at Sinai. A large portion of them—most of them—were not given to Moses at Sinai. He never even dreamed of them. And they also do not emerge by deduction from what he received. They are products of what the sages of the generations did, and that still does not mean that they are not binding. So the historical conception of those evolutionists—that historical conception of those evolutionists—is precisely the conception of Maimonides, only the conclusions they draw for the service of God are mistaken conclusions. All right? Now Rabbi Kook says this point in the continuation, and that is the continuation in the pages I gave you, except that there he presents it as a fallback position. As a fallback position. He says—and I’ll give it now as a heading so we have the framework—in effect, I don’t even need to get to this. Because even if they are historically correct, those evolutionists, and they say that the later laws are products of the various religious courts, of the sages, and not a result of what was given to Moses, it still does not mean that we are not obligated by them. True, that isn’t correct, says Rabbi Kook—meaning, he sticks to his position that it isn’t correct—but he says even if they were right, that still wouldn’t be enough. Again, by the way, throughout the whole work we see these kinds of arguments, right? Even if you were right about this, I could still manage on your own terms. Meaning, in almost every chapter this type of argument returns. First of all, you are not right—but even if you were right, your conclusion does not follow from your premises. And the next pages are basically devoted to that, which for some reason, as I said earlier, they chose to censor. I’m not quite sure why.
[Speaker A] Is that the continuation of 6a?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, it’s literally a direct continuation. True, it’s the next paragraph; the first two paragraphs also appear there. So I don’t know why this thing is called 6a exactly—it’s not entirely clear to me. Really, it’s a question why this chapter is called 6a. Maybe Rabbi Kook inserted it after he wrote 6 and 7, and he thought it should be placed between 6 and 7. If so, that’s an interesting point. Because first, we need to understand why—why exactly is its place here? Second, we see that the order was structured. Meaning, the order is not accidental; it’s not just a collection of paragraphs somehow thrown in, as perhaps happened with some of his writings, but really an order he thought about, and it seemed to him that the chapters should appear in this order. It was—if I remember correctly, maybe even in the introduction here, I don’t remember—I saw somewhere people claiming that specifically the order does not seem to them to be the order Rabbi Kook intended. But this marking of 6a really seems to indicate that there was some arrangement here.
[Speaker A] Is there a manuscript?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is a manuscript. I haven’t seen it, but there is a manuscript. They’re publishing this from the manuscript. On both sides it says 6a; apparently that’s in the manuscript. That’s how I understand it, because it appears both in the book as 6a and in this version produced by the computer. Yes, so apparently he did think this was the correct order and was careful about the order. And then it gives even more motivation to try to check why this chapter comes after that chapter, because apparently there was some thought in the order of the chapters and not only in the content.
[Speaker A] It’s not just a collection of notes on a computer? This too is some edition that once…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, Rabbi Shachar Rahmani is working on it there. I said this at the beginning. Rabbi Shachar Rahmani from Merkaz—he’s working on it, he’s now doing a doctorate on it, on this composition, and he also intends to publish it.
[Speaker A] A doctorate at Merkaz HaRav?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he’s doing a doctorate at the university, but he studied at Merkaz HaRav; he’s a Merkaz HaRav person as far as I know. He’s my student from the midrasha. It’s not a scanned book; it’s a file that circulated online through those underground channels, because it’s supposed to be a book eventually. He hasn’t yet proofread it, it’s not organized, but it’s supposed to come out as a book. But in the meantime they beat him to it and put out the censored edition, yes. I asked him for permission to use it—I told you in the first class—I asked him for permission to use it, and I got it.
[Speaker A] Fine, in any case, Shachar Rahmani.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, in any case, maybe one more point. What Rabbi Kook writes here—that an intellectual flight doesn’t take, doesn’t take time—it’s not entirely clear to me what he means. Because if, if indeed the meaning of his words is as I interpreted them, then it’s a little problematic. Because basically it’s not true that Moses surveyed all the details in one sweep. No—he stated the principles. True, all the details are hidden within those principles, but there’s no need to make some claim about speed here. It’s not, it’s not a matter of speed. This claim about speed somewhat hints that maybe Rabbi Kook does mean the simplistic approach—that Moses really transmitted the Mishnah Berurah with all its subsections. What?
[Speaker A] What details do you think he means when he says “details”? If you mean details of the laws of sukkah—the minimum height of ten handbreadths and so on—it seems to me that he does mean that. But if you mean…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then what difference does it make? If it’s not talking about all the details, then why does it matter? Then he too agrees that some of the details were created later. So what difference does it make now? I think there is room here only for two extreme approaches at the principled level. I don’t care whether practically there may also be middle positions. At the principled level, it’s one of two: either you’re unwilling to accept any addition after Moses unless Moses said it explicitly—not just that it’s contained within his words—or you are willing to accept such things. If you are willing, then what difference does it make how many such things there already are? If at the principled level you’re willing to recognize this kind of law as binding law, then you’re already in the second theology. It no longer matters how many details are like that.
[Speaker A] I don’t understand the whole issue of time here at all. What does time have to do with this?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t quite understand, but from…
[Speaker A] According to either method, what does time have to do with it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, evolution—the evolutionary approach says that things take time to crystallize. But Rabbi Kook’s argument, his argument really isn’t entirely clear to me. I’m inclined to guess that he did not mean, as I said earlier, the simplistic claim that Moses received all the details as they are. But if he really didn’t mean that, then I don’t quite understand why this whole issue of time matters here—that one surveys it all in a single overview. Moses didn’t actually survey all the details.
[Speaker D] No, maybe he wanted to distinguish—the theory of evolution speaks about development that is, in the end, physical, which can perhaps also be measured materially, in genetic material. Okay. Whereas in the Oral Torah, Rabbi Kook is trying to say that that’s not the issue—not about detailed commandments maybe, not about sukkah. About ideas, maybe, that… almost—it’s clear that everything ultimately gets fleshed out into actions, into commandments. But maybe he meant to refer to it as an idea, as a concept—that our Oral Torah today, even as an idea, is not the same thing it was in his time. And with that he wants to say that maybe…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Did Moses understand, consciously, all the details that later developed, or not? That’s the question.
[Speaker D] It could be yes, and it could be no.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the point is that if he speaks about the fact that in one sweep one can survey many details, he apparently means that for Moses all those details were indeed there in actuality—not only potentially hidden within the principles he had, but he noticed them all at once, because intellectually it doesn’t take time to notice many details, unlike material development. But then that somewhat hints that he is indeed speaking about the simplistic approach that says Moses received all the details and knew them all—everything came from him. And not the approach I proposed, which is not that Moses received and consciously knew all the details, but only that they were extracted from the principles within him. There may be another possibility to say: in the introduction to the Tosafot Yom Tov on the Mishnah, he talks about this—he also talks about these issues, as in many introductions—and he says that it is written in the words of the Sages that the Holy One showed Moses at Sinai everything that a veteran student would one day innovate. Each generation and its teachers, each generation and so on. So He showed Moses everything. There he distinguishes between what the Holy One showed Moses and what the Holy One transmitted to Moses. That is not the same thing. What the Holy One transmitted to Moses—that is the Torah that Moses also had to pass on. He received it in order to pass it on. That was part of the essence, or only the principles, or something like that. But as a bonus, He showed him everything that would develop, all the details that would develop in the future. Yes, exactly.
[Speaker A] No, but then he got frustrated, he didn’t… no, it’s…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure those midrashim line up; they’re only midrashim, but…
[Speaker A] But maybe He gave him the file in compressed form, and Moses received it all. No, and that’s everything, and that’s also what the Rabbi said…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …last year.
[Speaker D] About intuition.
[Speaker A] No, but…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is exactly the claim: if the opening is a deductive opening, then I think that’s problematic.
[Speaker D] And that’s what the Rabbi said last year, in the later classes when we spoke about intuition—that today we interpret it into rules, but for Moses it was natural. Maybe that’s what the Rabbi calls “above nature”; maybe that’s why…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …he was able to understand it; maybe because of that. Yes, possible—but that still doesn’t include explicit awareness of all the details. There is the principled intuition, and clearly one can derive the details from it in one way or another, but it’s not… it’s not that Moses had to remember all the details in one swoop in some…
[Speaker D] If he did that, he had direct access to it—that’s the point. He didn’t have to wait for all the…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because he had it. So why talk about time? Again, that’s exactly what I don’t quite understand. So why… it’s not connected to time. He didn’t hold all the details and run through them rapidly in some bird’s-eye sweep. He didn’t deal with the details at all. He knew the principles, he received the principles, and the details later came out of the principles—even according to Rabbi Kook’s approach, I’m saying. Still, I don’t quite… unless he really means to say the simplistic approach, which says that Moses actually held all the details. But then again there’s room to discuss whether, when Moses held all the details, that means what the Holy One showed him, or whether it was…
[Speaker A] …what the Holy One transmitted to him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …what He showed him—like He showed Adam all the future generations, as one of the midrashim says. So Moses was shown all the halakhic generations, all the halakhic derivatives, but not that he actually passed that on to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and basically all of us are just parroting. Even if he knew all the details, let’s say… what does time have to do with that? If he knew all the details… he learned in two years? What? In two years you can learn all the details? In two years you can learn all the details? Even today in yeshivah they learn… you can’t learn all those details even in twice a lifetime. Even more than that. That’s exactly why I think he said—it’s not… and here I do understand why he talks about time. The question is whether that’s really what he means; I don’t know.
[Speaker A] You can’t learn all the details in two years.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not just the straightforward meaning of the Torah—we’re talking here about an entire library.
[Speaker A] A whole one—a huge portion of Jewish law, all the Shulchan Arukhs that would later be created as well.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] After all, in coming years more and more are still supposed to be created. The laws of a triple Purim that falls in the Sabbatical year—which today already fill a thick book like this—did he hold that too? It sounds strange, if so. Huh? The bottom lines.
[Speaker A] The bottom lines.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This whole book is all bottom lines. Yes, a book full of bottom lines. And it’s… unbelievable. In short, it’s hard for me to accept such a conception. But on the other hand, if he is talking about the axis of time—that it takes very little time—then it really does somewhat seem that he means Moses held all the details. I really don’t know.
[Speaker A] Maybe Rabbi Kook meant that time… time is the main component of evolution. To come and make some change in spirit, one can grasp many things…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But grasp them without grasping the things themselves, only the principles from which they are derived.
[Speaker A] Not the things themselves. The time it takes a wise person to grasp things—ideas that crystallized over many years—is a second. No, fine, but in evolution time is the main component.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, obviously, I understand. But if that’s what he’s saying, then I agree—that was my final remark. But if that’s what Rabbi Kook is saying, then it turns out that he is indeed answering the simplistic approach.
[Speaker A] And what…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What he is basically saying is that Moses grasped all the details we have in hand. And then he has an explanation: intellectual details can be grasped in one overview; there’s no need… it doesn’t take time like material evolution.
[Speaker A] That’s more possible.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes—no, that I understand. But if that’s what he means, then he is saying something that in my view is historically implausible. Meaning, I don’t think it’s plausible that Moses really held all these details. I also see no reason to say this; in my opinion it doesn’t stand the test of the sources either. But again I’m saying, from the way he relates to the time axis, as you say, it does seem that maybe he means that—I don’t know. Unless he means to say that it takes very little time precisely because there is no need to go through the details, but only to know the principle, and all the details are already present within the principle. So therefore it doesn’t take time. Not because the transition from principles to details is quick, but because no transition is needed. The details are already included in the principle. I don’t know—these are all possibilities. I really don’t know. I… in terms of the principle of charity, I think he means the principle of charity—there is this… to interpret… Donald Davidson, an analytic philosopher, coined that term. It means interpreting a person in the most reasonable-sounding way possible; you do him the kindness of charity. You don’t interpret him in the absurd-sounding way. Not as an idiot.
[Speaker A] What? Yes, exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or at least as a working assumption. When you want to criticize someone, don’t present him in a ridiculous way. When you want to criticize someone, don’t attack him in a way that makes it easy to laugh—try to understand in the most charitable way what he said, and then say what you think about it. And indeed many times people set up a straw man in order to attack it easily. So they paint some grotesque version of the view that opposes them, and then naturally it becomes very easy to deal with it. So according to the principle of charity, I think Rabbi Kook did not mean the simplistic view. It seems to me that doesn’t suit him. But again, I’m saying, this talk about the axis of time remains somewhat of a question mark for me.
[Speaker A] There are sources I’m now remembering in which the time axis appears. There’s a verse about the Holy One: “A thousand years in Your eyes are like yesterday,” which basically says that for the Holy One, who is not limited by the constraints of the material world, one can really compress time, as it were—do some rapid simulation of the future or something like that. And there’s another teaching of the Sages that says an angel teaches the fetus the whole Torah before it is born. I also think that this…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—I’m saying again—I have no problem with the statement itself, that intellectual overview doesn’t take time like material development does. But I have a problem with the halakhic conception behind it—not with the metaphysics of time or the physics of time; that’s not my problem. My problem is that if he needs that principle—which I’m willing to accept in itself—that means that historically he is in fact making the simplistic claim. He is indeed claiming that Moses held all the details, and here is a wonderful solution: you can hold all the details in a single second. It’s not like material evolution. Fine—I’m willing to accept that. What is harder for me to accept is the conception that requires him to resort to that principle—the conception that says Moses really did hold and receive all the details at once. That seems problematic to me. I think details were created over the course of history. You can’t argue with that.
[Speaker A] Maybe what he had was exactly like a compressed file, and when he needed to open it up to the comma, at that very moment he knew how to open it up to the comma according to the rules—he was a genius. Same thing, he would open up lulav each time, anything.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then again the time axis is not important—that’s what I said before. If so, then the time axis is not important. So why do you need to get to this—what, suddenly? No, then basically he didn’t open everything; he opened only what was needed. So it doesn’t take time. Then why do you need to explain that all the details can be encompassed in a single second? He didn’t encompass them all at all. He held everything in compressed form, and if there was a question that needed opening, then he opened it. So you don’t need the time axis.
[Speaker A] Fine, no problem. He held everything in compressed form, and whatever needed to be opened he opened. When Rabbi Kook feels the need to say that spiritual or intellectual processes don’t take time, or take very little time, that means he probably understood that Moses also opened it, not only held it in compressed form. And that, I’m saying, is the conception that seems more problematic to me. Fine. I actually think maybe one can see that it doesn’t sound so… There’s a difference between saying that Moses… according to both these possibilities, it seems that Moses either held a simplistic position or knew principles. First of all, it’s also quite clear from the Torah itself that Moses, even if he didn’t know every detail up to today, did know a great many details.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, it’s not either-or.
[Speaker A] Maybe if he presented the 613 commandments, each one with its minimal explanation, all that is still very significant. Obviously, obviously. So it is quite clear that Moses learned a great many details in an amount of time that seems unreasonable. Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not unreasonable time—I don’t know. To learn the Torah, to sit and learn Torah with the Holy One explaining to you what each commandment means—I have no problem doing that in forty days. What’s the problem? At the level of the initial details, not at the level of Ketzot HaHoshen.
[Speaker A] At the level of the initial details.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To understand what totafot means, to understand what “the fruit of a beautiful tree” means, to explain the verses—is there any problem doing that? What’s the problem?
[Speaker A] What tefillin look like and every…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Every commandment and commandment—what’s the problem doing that?
[Speaker A] By no means is that a problem. Right, exactly. I think what Rabbi Kook means to say is that… those who conceive of the Torah—if there were a model in which ninety percent of the Torah that we know today, let’s say, just as an example, ninety percent of the Torah we know today was already with Moses, and only ten percent is everything that was revealed or innovations that came later—electricity, whatever—that’s one picture of the world. As opposed to another picture of the world that says: with Moses, what was there until now at all—what did tefillin even look like? People just did whatever they wanted, and only the Sages in the fifth century CE decided that it had to be a black square. That’s a different picture of the world.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but I think in the debate Rabbi Kook is conducting here, that’s not the point, because he’s talking about the principled question. He says that at the principled level, the claim of those evolutionists is that what was created after Moses and was not quarried out of what he said, but was created afterwards, is not binding. Now Rabbi Kook would not accept that even for one single principle out of… out of the whole corpus of Torah. There is a principled conception here; it’s not a question of percentages. Meaning, there is a claim here that says—you can say, I hear your claim, but I don’t think that’s the debate Rabbi Kook is conducting here. The debate he is conducting here is a principled debate. The question is: when there is just one single detail—all the rest was given to Moses at Sinai, and one was created in, say, the fifth century—then those evolutionists will say: that one, I am not obligated by, because it is not Torah from Sinai. Rabbi Kook does not accept that. I don’t think he is speaking about percentages.
[Speaker A] According to that, is everything Torah-level? What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] According to that, everything… no, there are enactments; that’s something else. About enactments we are not arguing. We are arguing about derashot and interpretations. Enactments are something else. Fine. Now in the second part he continues, as I told you before, and he says: all this I’m telling you because it is the truth. But even if they were right in their historical theory, their meta-halakhic theory, that still does not mean that the conclusions they draw are correct. “However, even according to their claim, we have no basis to contradict ourselves because of anything accepted by the nation as a whole, for that is the entire foundation of national existence. For the Torah handed over every doubt to the religious court, and the appointment of the religious court itself depends on the acceptance of the nation. Therefore, whether the Oral Torah was received from Moses our teacher, peace be upon him, from Sinai in all its particulars, or whether it was instituted over thousands of years through explanations and enactments of religious courts, the acceptance of the entire nation is the basis of obligation, and one who removes himself from the collective is as though he denied the fundamental principle.” All right? What is he basically claiming? Here is the main point. Everything else is just details—we’ll still see more—but here is what he is basically claiming. He is claiming: even if you are right in your historical theory, that there are results that are products of the work of religious courts over the generations and were not given to Moses at Sinai—which isn’t true, says Rabbi Kook—but even if you were right, it still would not mean that it isn’t binding. Why not? Because what obligates us in the Oral Torah—and later we’ll also see this regarding the Written Torah—what obligates us is the acceptance of the nation. This is the theory he repeats in other places. The claim is that the acceptance of the nation—that the whole Jewish people accepted upon itself commitment to Torah—that is the basis of our obligation to Torah. Now if the Jewish people accepted upon itself commitment to things that religious courts decreed over the generations, then what difference does it make? What’s the difference? After all, regarding the Torah itself you can also ask: why observe what the Holy One gave at Sinai? So what? Why still observe it? There is some conception that the acceptance of the whole Jewish people is binding. We’ll discuss later why, but that is his conception. If that is true, then the whole Jewish people also accepted the interpretive and derash-based teachings made by the Sages over the generations. So what difference does it make? Then it is binding to the same degree. So that is basically his fundamental claim. From here on it’s only elaboration, but that is essentially the claim.
[Speaker A] And it’s binding to the same degree? Meaning the Torah too receives—also accepted it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is a very similar claim by Rabbi Shimon Shkop in Sha’arei Yosher. Rabbi Shimon Shkop says there regarding several matters that there are principles—in that case he’s talking about legal principles, laws of acquisition, laws of ownership—that are binding even though they are not written in the Torah. Then he asks: perhaps you will ask why we are obligated by this law of jurisprudence—is this some sort of universal obligation? Then he says: perhaps you’ll say, what obligates us if it isn’t written in the Torah—what is this “universal obligation”? I don’t want to do it. What obligates me? So he says: before you ask that, ask instead: why observe what is written in the Torah? Why is it obvious to you there that one is obligated to do it? It is obvious one is obligated, because it is certainly an obligation that what is written in the Torah must be done. This too is equally obvious—what reason says, he says. Since reason is the basis that obligates us to observe the Torah—not because our reason tells us to put on tefillin, but because our reason tells us that one must do what the Holy One commands. All right? So if our reason is enough to obligate us regarding what is written in the Torah, then reason is also enough to obligate us regarding what reason itself obligates without the Torah. What difference does it make? In either case, it all comes from reason.
[Speaker A] The seven Noahide commandments.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the seven Noahide commandments are written.
[Speaker A] No—the requirement to establish laws.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That too is written.
[Speaker A] The laws aren’t written.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Laws” is something on which there is a dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides. Nachmanides says it means like our civil law. Maimonides says it means laws they legislate for themselves. But again, that’s not a good example, because they can legislate whatever they want and it is binding by force of the Torah.
[Speaker A] By force of the Torah, not by force of logic.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not logic—that’s exactly the point. The Torah says there is a commandment of laws, like “do not deviate.” The Torah says there is a commandment of laws. What does that mean? That what society legislates, you are obligated to observe. Now society legislates all kinds of laws, whether they are logical or not logical—that doesn’t matter. Why are you obligated to do it? Not because logic says so, but because the Torah said there is a commandment of laws. So it begins with the Torah, and that’s why it’s not a good example.
[Speaker A] It’s not a good example because it starts from the Torah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But Rabbi Shimon Shkop goes one step further back. Rabbi Shimon Shkop asks: and why do we observe the Torah itself? Because reason says we should. Well then, if reason says other things too, why not observe those as well? What is the difference? This assumption—that if it’s written in the Torah it is obvious that one must observe it, but if it isn’t written in the Torah then why observe it…
[Speaker A] In the Torah we also observe things that aren’t logical.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s why I say: the reason he’s talking about there is not that reason obligates putting on tefillin, but that reason obligates obeying what the Holy One said. Even if you don’t understand it, like tefillin, or like all kinds of other things. Even if you don’t understand, it still emerges from reason. I’ve often given the example: I take medicine a doctor prescribes for me. Why? I don’t understand how it works. I have some trust that if he studied and knows, then he probably knows what he’s doing, usually. Fine. So I follow it. Why? And that’s very rational; it’s not a non-rational act, it’s a very rational act. So if I trust the Holy One that the commandments He gives are correct commandments or binding commandments—each according to his own theory, it doesn’t matter, we’ll still discuss that later—then reason itself tells me to put on tefillin even though I don’t understand why it is good to put on tefillin. So if reason is the basis for the observance of the Torah, then reason is the foundation, not the Torah. So now when there is an obligation that comes by force of reason, people ask: why do I have to obey—it’s not written in the Torah? Why? And why do you observe what is written in the Torah? Because of reason. Well then, why would you not observe what reason says? What is the difference? On the contrary, says Rabbi Shimon Shkop, the better question is why one should observe what is written in the Torah—not why one should observe what reason says. That is obvious. The question is why one should observe what is written in the Torah, and the answer is: because reason says one must observe what is written in the Torah. Meaning, he completely reverses the question. And this is not just an answer; it is a conception that is reversed from the root. Meaning, the basis is reason; the basis is not the Torah. That is the point he wants to sharpen. And here too he is basically saying something similar—of course not on the plane of reason but on the plane of acceptance by the nation. He is essentially claiming that since the acceptance of the nation is the basis of our obligation to the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, then if there are additional things that also have the acceptance of the nation, they are binding to the same degree. What difference does it make? Why do those proponents of the theory of evolution say that if this thing is not written in the Torah and was not given to Moses at Sinai then we are not obligated by it? So he claims against them the same claim as Rabbi Shimon Shkop: and why are we obligated by what is written in the Torah and was given to Moses at Sinai? Because of the acceptance of the nation. Well then, there is acceptance of the nation for this too.
[Speaker A] But it’s not reason saying acceptance of the nation.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s already another question; I’ll still talk about that.
[Speaker A] Here it’s: why did the Sages say this? After all, we accept the authority of the Sages—why not…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …accept it as the acceptance of the nation? No, but perhaps reason says one should accept the authority of the Sages? I don’t know. Acceptance of the nation—that’s… well, I’ll still talk about that.
[Speaker A] Today, the nation you referred to—that’s the public.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. Who is the nation?
[Speaker A] As the Hazon Ish says.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Where did he learn…
[Speaker A] …this idea of the acceptance of the nation?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He learns this from reason, from the Torah—”we will do and we will hear,” first of all, of course. The Jewish people took it upon themselves in “we will do and we will hear.” Why does the Holy One, blessed be He, need that at all? He could have simply imposed it on us as a command, and that would be it. What is this “we will do and we will hear”? Why do we need our acceptance? That’s the first source. The Scroll of Esther as well, of course—”they fulfilled and accepted.” So we’ll still talk about these things. And from this you learn that the belief that the Oral Torah in its entirety was transmitted to Moses our teacher, peace be upon him, from the mouth of divine might, is a belief we received from our forefathers and is true in itself. But it’s not the case that the existence of the Oral Torah in Israel depends only on that. Again, he goes back to the same point. First of all, they’re mistaken, because we received the entire Oral Torah at Sinai through Moses our teacher—but that’s not what it rests on. That also happens to be true, but even if it weren’t true, it wouldn’t matter. After all, we are also obligated in commandments that are certainly rabbinic. And what’s his proof? What are rabbinic commandments? Rabbinic commandments—we’re also obligated to keep them, right? And rabbinic commandments, according to everyone, even according to the most conservative views imaginable, were certainly not given to Moses at Sinai. For all the midrashim saying that Abraham our forefather observed the law of eruv tavshilin, nobody really means that rabbinic commandments were given to Moses at Sinai. So is there anyone who argues that those must be observed? So Rabbi Kook asks: why? Now apparently there is an answer to that—you might say, “Do not deviate” from the Torah. Fine, but that’s not such a great proof, like the example I gave earlier—actually, it’s not an example, because there is “do not deviate.” The Torah verse of “do not deviate” provides the basis for rabbinic commandments. So it’s not by virtue of the acceptance of the nation or some theory or extra-halakhic principle; it’s a verse in the Torah. So how is that an example here? When the Torah says “do not deviate,” it grants authority, delegates authority, to the sages. But if there’s something the sages do not by virtue of their authority, then why should I listen to them? So first of all, even here before he continues, I don’t really understand the claim. Because if the verse “do not deviate” gives the sages authority to legislate, then it also gives the sages authority to interpret. So what’s the problem? Then their whole position is already dismissed on its own terms. Because he says: if it were “do not deviate,” then I would have no claim against you. But now I’ll show you that Maimonides, for example, does not accept “do not deviate,” and therefore here is the proof against you. I say—leave it; even according to Maimonides there is proof against them. Maybe I’ll go back again to something we discussed at length. There is a dispute involving Maimonides. Maimonides says that the verse “do not deviate” gives the sages authority, of course, to interpret, to expound, to transmit oral traditions, laws given to Moses at Sinai, and to institute enactments, decrees, and customs. So according to Maimonides, all the powers of the sages derive from the verse “do not deviate.” Nachmanides disagrees with him, because Nachmanides argues that if that were so, then every rabbinic-level doubt would have to be ruled stringently, because it would really be a Torah-level doubt. If you have a doubt whether you’re now eating poultry cooked with milk or not—poultry with milk is a rabbinic prohibition—and you have a doubt whether you’re eating it or not, then since the rabbinic prohibition draws from “do not deviate,” if you eat poultry with milk you would be violating the Torah prohibition of not deviating. So in effect it’s a Torah-level doubt, not a rabbinic-level doubt, and you should have to be stringent. Therefore Nachmanides says it cannot be that rabbinic laws emerge from “do not deviate,” and so he disputes Maimonides. He claims that “do not deviate” gives the sages authority only to interpret and expound, and maybe also to transmit traditions—but not to legislate. Legislating does not come from “do not deviate.” And that is the dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides. Then Rabbi Kook says: according to Maimonides I still understand what you’re saying, because according to Maimonides the sages have authority to legislate because of “do not deviate.” But according to Nachmanides there is no “do not deviate.” After all, several of our rabbis hold that it is not so, for the sages merely attached it to the verse “do not deviate”—and this is of course Nachmanides. Nachmanides claims that “do not deviate” is only a mere scriptural support; in essence, the authority of the sages to legislate is not really learned from “do not deviate.” And since for him it is only a scriptural support, from where does the basis of the obligation come? A tremendous question. Yes—so Nachmanides has a good objection to Maimonides. It cannot be that the sages’ authority to legislate comes from “do not deviate,” because otherwise every rabbinic law would be Torah law. Very nice—it can’t be—but now explain to me why we are nevertheless obligated to obey them. Nachmanides does not offer an explanation; he only says that it is a scriptural support on the verse “do not deviate,” that the sages attached it there. But scriptural support is an absurd explanation, because what does that mean, scriptural support? There is a rabbinic law; scriptural support always means the law is rabbinic, it just has support in a verse. So what, there is a rabbinic law to listen to the rabbis—and why should one listen to that rabbinic law? It can’t start that way. So clearly that does not provide the full explanation according to Nachmanides. So Rabbi Kook struggles with this, and then says: the matter is one of the simplest dictates of reason—that the nation as a whole is obligated to conduct itself after its elders and sages. This is the obligation of the individuals within the nation to conduct themselves according to the simple central authority of the whole. And this is certainly a full Torah-law obligation, and it is above every obligation, so much so that it is fit to serve as the foundation of every holy obligation. For even regarding the very existence of the Torah—although it was directly from God—our sages nevertheless received that for it to become a complete obligation for us, it specifically had to be accepted willingly. That is, the will and consent of the entire nation—”we will do and we will hear.” And it is explicit in the Torah that we took the Torah upon ourselves by saying “we will do and we will hear.” Therefore, aside from the fact that in truth, all matters that serve as explanations of the commandments or as their boundaries—for us there is no difference whatsoever in their force between whether they were transmitted as a law to Moses at Sinai or whether they were clarified by the reasoning of some accepted religious court—once the ruling spread throughout the nation, we are already fully obligated by it. Okay? So basically what he is saying is that the acceptance of the nation, just as it serves as the basis for acceptance of the whole Torah, means that the nation also accepted upon itself the interpretations of the sages. And his proof is that this also applies to the legislation of the sages. The dispute with the people of the evolutionary theory of Torah is not about legislation. The dispute with the people of the evolutionary theory of Torah is about exegesis. When the sages expound, do they have authority? Right? Because regarding legislation there is nothing to discuss at all. It’s not even a question whether it was given at Sinai or not given at Sinai—it certainly was not given at Sinai. The whole dispute is over what happens with the exegeses and interpretations they gave to Torah law throughout the generations. Did Moses our teacher receive all of that, or was it innovated in later generations? That’s the dispute. So he says to them: and why don’t you argue about rabbinic laws? Why did you need to reach this evolutionary argument? What about rabbinic laws? Rabbinic laws were not given to Moses at Sinai—so why must they be observed? What will you say—acceptance of the nation? Fine, but the acceptance of the nation also applied to the interpretations and the exegeses, so what is the claim? Very similar to what Rabbi Shimon Shkop says. If so, even if someone were to claim that all the laws in the Oral Torah are nothing more than things clarified by religious courts over time, the obligation remains at the same level. And regarding matters that are rabbinic, certainly the foundation of the matter is the general acceptance of the nation. Therefore those who sought to strike at people’s hearts and stirred up resentment by saying that the Oral Torah was instituted over time by various sages and courts, and by this wanted to weaken hearts and slacken hands in the observance of the Oral Torah—they gained nothing at all by their approach. Again, he comes out against this view in any case. He says: even if you were right, this whole move doesn’t help them at all, because these things would still be binding exactly like Torah law, since the obligation is founded solely on the acceptance of the entire nation. For even those laws that were received as laws given to Moses at Sinai—if they were forgotten, we would restore them through exegesis, as happened with the three hundred or three thousand laws that were forgotten during the mourning period for Moses, and Othniel ben Kenaz restored them through his dialectical analysis. And there is no difference at all in their obligatory force whether they were known to us by way of the original tradition or whether they were transmitted through the ruling of a religious court. By the way, I brought this last year, and we expanded at length on this topic in Temurah, about the laws that Othniel ben Kenaz restored, and there I brought, I think, the Pnei Moshe or Korban Ha-Edah—the commentators on the Jerusalem Talmud speak there about the sin-offering whose owner died. That’s a law given to Moses at Sinai that was forgotten during the mourning period for Moses and was restored through dialectical argument. And because of that they say that this is not Torah law—the Pnei Moshe and Korban Ha-Edah—because with every law given to Moses at Sinai, you think that’s what it was, but if this is your reconstruction, you have no way of knowing that this is really what it was. Unlike, for example, exegeses, where we can have some kind of feedback—we can see whether we expounded correctly or not. For example, in light of various other exegeses, what exactly is the proper way to expound—that’s the whole work Othniel ben Kenaz did. But reconstructing a law given to Moses at Sinai is impossible, because a law given to Moses at Sinai is uprooted from the text; it has no source in a verse, not even by exegesis. So how do you know that you reconstructed it correctly? At most, you can treat it as okay—as exegesis, or as rabbinic, or whatever—but it’s no longer a law given to Moses at Sinai. Fine—so here that’s a bit against what Rabbi Kook is saying.
[Speaker A] So not only does he say that Moses our teacher knew all the details—why? Three thousand were forgotten, so how many are there, thirty thousand let’s say?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—the verbal analogies. But all this now expands into masses of material. There is the verbal analogy of “lah lah” from woman between a slave and a woman. So how many laws come out of that verbal analogy, and how many detailed sub-laws from each of those laws? Let’s say he knew the verbal analogy itself.
[Speaker A] It doesn’t matter either way—let’s say he knew. Fine. Stars in the sky. All in all there are five thousand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think that’s what he meant. But even if he knew all the verbal analogies—assuming he knew—that’s only the verbal analogy itself. The verbal analogy of “lah lah” from woman. But from there to knowing all the details that emerge from that verbal analogy—that’s enormous topics, masses of topics throughout the Talmud, with endless details, with later authorities and medieval authorities, all on the basis of that one verbal analogy. So I don’t think you can derive from the Talmud the claim that Moses knew everything. Knew everything—I don’t know. But from this Talmudic passage, I don’t think you can derive that. Even at the end of all the back-and-forth discussion, you’d expect that what comes out is some list of details. No—it’s a list of lots of details, not like that; it’s a list of very, very many details, and more details will also be born in later generations, because it’s not closed. So all of that—Moses our teacher? I don’t know. Again, I’m saying—it doesn’t sound plausible to me, and I also don’t see a reason to think that, so why do I need to force myself into that reading? Now then, basically his claim here—I already need to finish—well, we’ll continue next time. Bring the sheet with you next time because there are still a few important points here that I wanted to discuss. Keep this sheet. That’s it for now.
[Speaker A] A lecture by Rabbi Michael Abraham on the book Dor Revi’i, Thursday, 2 Kislev 5771, December 9, 2010.