For the Perplexed of the Generation – Lesson 13

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

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does that have to do with anything? If I die, the reward for the collective won’t help me either. What does that have to do with the issue? Rain is not a reward for the collective. Rain is a reward for the individual. You need to drink, not “the people” need to drink. Each one of us needs to drink. What does that mean? The fact that we all need it doesn’t mean it belongs to the collective. It means it’s true for all of us as individuals. When you talk about the collective, you’re talking about something entirely different. You’re talking about something addressed only to the collective, not to each of the individuals who make up the collective. I don’t know, “Three commandments were commanded to Israel upon entering the Land: to establish the Temple, to wipe out Amalek, and to appoint a king.” All of those are collective commandments. That’s what makes them unique. Why? Because I am not commanded to appoint a king. Me personally—I’m not commanded at all. The one that is commanded is the collective. Now, true, if nobody does it then the collective also won’t do it, but the one commanded here is the collective. But when all of us are commanded not to eat pork, does that make it a collective commandment? No! What does that have to do with anything? Every individual who is bound by those commandments must not eat pork, that’s all. What? The reward is the same way. The reward is like pork—what are you saying? They tell you: you’ll have rain. What is rain? Each person will have rain in his own field, will be able to drink, will be able to grow his produce, that’s all. So what if it’s for everyone? “For everyone” does not mean it’s collective. “For everyone” is a collection of individuals. So what is collective here? The fact that we pray for rain together—fine, because we all want to pray for rain—but that doesn’t mean it’s as a collective. That’s something completely different. There is—and here we get into this issue—there’s an interesting example, I think I once spoke about it, from a philosopher named John Searle. He talks about body and soul. He has a book that came out in the Am Oved publishing house, called Mind, Brain and Science, something like that, I don’t remember the exact title, and he talks there about collective properties, right? Nowadays, because people tend toward materialism, they need to explain mental phenomena as some kind of emergence, something that somehow gets created as a collective phenomenon out of the collection of particulars. Right, you have a material structure, a material collective, and it has some collective property that appears to us like what we describe as the mental or psychological or spiritual. But the claim is that it somehow comes out of the material itself. It doesn’t mean there’s another substance here, another thing—say, the soul, another spirit—but rather it’s a property, a collective property of the body. So when he tries to explain this matter—and I think it’s absurd to say that, by the way, but that’s a different discussion, I won’t get into it here—but when he tries to explain it, he brings the following example. He says there are properties that are properties of the collective that do not characterize any of the particulars that make up that collective. One example he brings there is liquidity. Okay? There is a collection of molecules that we call a liquid in one phase, right? Liquid, solid—let’s talk about liquid, though solid and gas too, by the way, all three of those properties are collective properties. So a state of matter is a collective property. When you look at a single molecule, a single molecule is not liquid. There’s no meaning to talking about a liquid molecule. What is a liquid molecule? “Liquid” speaks about the relation between the molecules. The question is whether the connection between them is rigid or whether the connection between them is flexible. Right? That’s really what defines a liquid. So the property called liquidity is a property that characterizes the collective and not any of the particulars that make up that collective. So that’s what I call a collective property. A collective property is a property that you cannot point to and say it characterizes individual A, individual B, individual C, and therefore of course also the whole. That’s not a collective property; that’s a private property of many particulars. But there are properties that appear—this is the emergence people talk about—that appear only on the collective plane. They do not exist on the individual plane. They don’t. You can’t talk about concepts like liquid, gas, and solid in relation to a single molecule. So that’s what I mean when I speak about collectivity. Rabbi Kook did not innovate the idea that all the Jewish people have to observe the same commandments. Everybody knows that. Rabbi Kook is talking about the Jewish people observing them as a people and not as individuals. Meaning, say, if you weren’t within the framework of a people, then you’d eat pork. I’m exaggerating, but in principle. Meaning, if you’re not in the framework of a people but are just an individual, then eat pork—who cares? Meaning, the whole point of your not eating pork, or your keeping Sabbath, or honoring parents, or whatever it may be, is only insofar as you are part of the collective. In that sense it’s similar to liquidity. Just in parentheses I’ll say why I think it’s not similar to the emergence of spirit: because with liquidity, I can describe very clearly how that property comes out through integration of the properties of the particulars. If I know the field around each molecule, then I can tell you in advance that this will come out liquid. I simply see the field around the molecule and I can see. What? You can say I don’t understand. Ah, fine, maybe I also won’t understand; I can still say it even without understanding. But the collective property is a clear projection of the properties of the particulars. True, it does not appear as such on the plane of the particulars, but I can show exactly how it emerges from the properties of the particulars. But who is going to show me exactly how free will comes out of a genetic chain? Nobody in the world—not only can’t show such a thing, they don’t even know in what language one would talk about such a thing at all. What nonsense is this? Again I’m saying—what is “nonsense”? Maybe one day something like that will be found and it will be true. I don’t know. But on the basis of the scientific knowledge we have today, it’s simply absurd. But they deny free will. What? Because it’s deterministic? No, never mind, let’s talk about free will. Let’s talk about mental phenomena. Nobody denies those—we all experience them. Someone who denies them should be hospitalized. Free will one can debate. So let’s talk about love, hope, stinginess, I don’t know, all kinds of things—pain, pain—these are higher-level properties. Just plain “it hurts me when someone stabs me”—that too is a mental phenomenon. Why? Is that mental? Of course pain is a mental phenomenon. Physical? What are you talking about? It’s a completely mental sensation; every sensation is mental. It has physical, bodily causes, fine, everything does. Like light—we already talked about this—that light is something that exists only in our head. What exists in the world is an electromagnetic wave, if we’re right, and if not, then that isn’t either. But what exists in the world is an electromagnetic wave; light exists only in our head. Okay, that’s a mental sensation—so how can I take pills and fix it? It affects the physical. You treat the cause. That’s exactly the point. Meaning, the cause is physiological. The cause is physiological, and there are also mental phenomena, psychophysical phenomena—obviously, what’s the issue? Do you deny that there is psychophysical influence? What is… it’s obvious. There is mutual influence. That does not mean I reduce the two planes to one. There are influences. Okay, I don’t even know what to look for. If I say that a person is depressed, and they tell him “take a pill” and he comes out of the depression—right, okay—that means the depression is a product of a physiological state, agreed, but not that the depression is a physiological state. That’s not the same thing. But the question is whether there is influence between the two planes. The question is whether the one plane exists—if the physiological cause exists, and I by mental power can choose to move or not to move—ah, that too one can still debate, but first of all I’m talking about the very existence of the mental, even before the question of how dependent it is on the physical or whether one can overcome that dependency. That’s another question. First of all, the very existence of the mental. The very existence of the mental itself requires explanation in a materialist conception. What is this thing? So the common explanation today is some sort of emergence, something that came out, a collective phenomenon of our material whole. I hear something that angers me, I turn red, now they’ll give me a blood-pressure pill and I’ll turn white again. So what does that mean? It means the physiology got fixed, but my mental feeling—I don’t even know how to describe it. No, that’s—the mental phenomenon depends on it, leave it—even if we can’t separate them. Suppose physiology always defines the mental state. Let’s say I accept even that. You still have to explain what a mental state is, even before the question whether you can separate soul from body or say, despite having a hole there I’ll meditate and it won’t hurt. That’s mental treatment that breaks the connection between the physiological cause and the mental result. But I’m saying, let’s suppose you can’t break it, and let’s suppose everything, everything is determined by pills—you can arrange everything—and still that does not mean the mental thing does not exist as something separate. It only means it is affected by, or dictated by, the physiological infrastructure that produces it. That’s something else. When people talk about emergence they are not talking about influence; they are talking about identity. They say there is no such thing as the mental. That’s it, there is no such thing as the mental. The mental is simply a property of the collection of molecules, that’s all. That’s their property, just as they have the property that they are brown, they also have the property that they have intellect, that they think. Okay? That’s the claim. Now, the fact that they are brown I know how to explain; I have excellent scientific explanations for why they are brown. But how they begin to think—not only is there no explanation, there isn’t even the language yet. Meaning, how there is any connection at all between this and that, nobody knows anything, and everyone talks about it with this kind of total confidence as if it were obvious, as if scientifically we’re already past that. I’m listening now to some course in Jerusalem about free will and physics and choice… sorry, neuroscience, physics, and free choice. And there the new religion is materialism; this really is the new religion. I saw this lecture online by Sompolinsky. Haim Sompolinsky. He gives the course—Sompolinsky, Haim Sompolinsky. But in the biology department, in the biology department, Uzi Motro and Danny Cohen—I heard both of them say that anyone who links complicated human traits, especially psychological ones, to genes probably doesn’t know genetics. Okay, we didn’t say genes—they’re talking about the brain, and neuroscience is something else, it’s a parallel assault but from a different direction. But again, people talk about it with some kind of total confidence when in fact there isn’t even a hint of a direction. I’m not talking about results that already show it. Really, this is a fairly ridiculous new religion that’s taking over there. But anyway, let’s close the parentheses, that’s not our issue. Only the point I’m… it is an example of something I want to talk about here, and that’s the relationship between the collective and the individual that composes it, the individuals that compose it. When I talk about a collective property or about the collective as the addressee of the religious command, I am not talking about the collective as a collection of individuals, that all of you have to do such-and-such in the sense of—that’s why I brought this example. I’m talking about the collective as some distinct entity that stands on its own, not a collection of individuals. It is of course composed of a collection of individuals; without the collection of individuals it would not exist. But there is something in it that, in the ontological sense—that is, beyond the collection of individuals. Yes, there is something here that exists beyond the collection of individuals. This is not an imagined community, not a technical definition. We all organized ourselves, set rules for ourselves, and that’s what’s called a people or a state or something like that. That’s a technical definition. On the ontological level—ontological meaning the level of being, yes, that’s the doctrine of being—what exists? What is there? What is there is only the individuals. They can organize in different ways, but those are only forms of organization of individuals. The ones who really exist are the individuals. And the opposing claim is a claim that says no: on the ontological plane itself there is another being, the collective being. That is something in addition to the collection of individuals. All right? And if we go back to liquidity, for example, we can really ask ourselves: who is the substance whose property it is to be liquid? That’s not a simple philosophical question, because if indeed we do not accept the existence of a collective—at least in the context of water, not in the context of a people, not in the context of a human being, but in the context of water—then what is the collective? It’s a collection of molecules that have one kind of interaction or another between them. That’s all. So how can it be that there are some properties that are properties only of the collection and not of the particulars? Only if this collection is some sort of entity can it have properties. But if it is not an entity, then how can it have properties? The particulars have properties, and therefore the collection. There’s some point here that the being between the particulars creates contact and phenomena with something outside them maybe. Yes, fine, but when we describe those phenomena, yes, some kind of not molecule but the collection. Obviously, but I’m saying when I describe that property by name, I say it has a property called liquidity. Usually we understand that a property is a property of a thing. So now, who is this thing whose property that is? The collection of particulars doesn’t have that property. So apparently—well, there one can debate a bit, I’m not convinced, but it’s not a simple philosophical question. Not a simple question. In the context of the human being or of society it is of course much more complicated than a collection of water, of water molecules. Okay, in any case, maybe I’ll say a few more words about this. I think, again, this is my personal position, but it seems to me one can see it from the sources, that what emerges is some sort of combined conception. Meaning, in the ontological sense I think yes, there is some kind of view in which the collective really is a kind of entity that exists in its own right, and not merely a collection of individuals. But the total subordination that Rabbi Kook makes to this pole of the map, the collective pole, seems to me to veer a bit too far. Meaning, he subordinates the individual completely to the collective. I’ll bring a few examples even in the halakhic sense so this will be more grounded. My feeling is always that Jewish law grounds things better than books of thought. So let’s see how Jewish law treats this kind of thing. So we already talked about Maimonides in the laws of repentance, where Maimonides says there that on Rosh Hashanah every person is judged, the city is judged, and the state is judged. Right? So his commentators ask: after every person has been judged separately, what is there to judge in the city? Take the judgment of each individual person, add them all up, integrate all the judgments of the separate individuals, and you’ll get the judgment of the city. What is there in the city besides the collection of its residents? Once we see that there is a separate judgment on this entity, it means that there is some kind of relation to the city as a collective beyond the relation to each person as an individual. And it seems to me anyone can see this, that there can be societies—I’m speaking with people, for example, who sociologically belong to other societies, secular people, looking at the settlers, for example. Secular people—not all secular people, but some. So they see—why am I saying secular people? Because I’m probably outside it. So there is this kind of attitude as if they’re all a collection of evil wicked people who just grab guns and shoot in all directions. That’s what’s there. And then I try, so to speak, to explain to people: listen, there are very good people there. Maybe there are also less good ones, like in every society. But there are very good people there, I know people there, there are wonderful people there. And at a certain stage of the discussion, and likewise in the opposite direction too, because everyone has a stereotype about the other, as is well known—but at some point in the discussion we suddenly discover that it doesn’t mean what I said necessarily contradicts what he said. Meaning, it could be that there is a collection of people who are very good on the individual level, but somehow their collective product is a very problematic product. Now I’m not saying that is the case, I’m only saying these claims do not necessarily contradict one another. There definitely are some properties that are properties of human societies that are not a direct result or integration of the properties of the individuals who make up that society. There can be a society made up of very good people, or at least with a reasonable distribution of good and bad, and yet the collective looks very bad. Obviously, because there can be decisions of a government, of a collective. Yes, but I think it’s beyond that. Because the government, first of all, expresses something. I don’t think government decisions come in a vacuum. They represent some collective that is being pushed toward some idea, not necessarily the individuals, not referring to the individuals. No, but I’m saying, I’m talking about collective behavior, not only decisions, that the individuals ultimately create. After all, what? A nation cannot behave by itself. The behavior of a nation is through the behavior of individuals. So somehow when you look at the broad scale, you actually see a problematic society. When you look at the narrow scale, at higher resolution, you actually see wonderful people. And that can happen. Meaning, I think there are quite a few such phenomena. There’s some sort of problem here. What? In my opinion that’s a claim, not a fact. I don’t know, it’s an impression, I know—it can’t be. You think not, I think yes, so each person can decide for himself what he thinks. I didn’t do a study, I can’t present research findings here, but anyone can get an impression from what’s around him. I think we can see such phenomena. I don’t think these are far-fetched phenomena; they are things we know. I don’t know, that’s how it seems to me. I’ll tell you more than that: in the example he mentioned earlier, there are very problematic situations in the collective behavior of that group, even though I know many, many people there and they are wonderful people. And still those same people themselves, in collective behavior, at times there are problematic behaviors there. Again, I’m telling you this as someone who does know them that way, I think—what does that mean? It’s not a fact, it’s a judgment, but that’s what I think. And those debates turned my heart back to this point. A person says to me, “Listen, these people are wonderful people, they help their surroundings, everything’s wonderful, but there are certain population groups that are invisible to them.” So what? If they don’t encounter those groups, then you won’t see in his daily life that he has problematic aspects. He’s a wonderful person, helps every neighbor, helps everyone. Someone said that, and I’m pretty convinced that Haredim are also invisible to him. Correct, I didn’t say he’s free of that. Nobody is free of that. I’m just giving an example. Again, I’m not going to make it a contest over who is better. I’m giving here an example of the dissonance between a collective property and a property of an individual. It exists everywhere, obviously yes, nobody is free of it, but also nobody is free of it. But you don’t have to go to some second-order model like that, looking for problematic behaviors. The problematic nature of the collective can be inherent in the very definition. Meaning, there is a collection of people, an ordinary distribution, some wonderful, who made a decision, and by virtue of their definition as a collective, as people who decided to live beyond the borders of the so-called Green Line, that constitutes a kind of collective behavior that, according to the Left, gets all of us stuck in a problem. And in the opposite version, wonderful people but who share the decision not to observe Torah and commandments—in our eyes that constitutes a kind of black cloud hanging over everything. These examples are too simple. I don’t think they reflect well the dissonance I’m talking about. Because in those examples, where someone is morally good but does not fulfill his religious obligations, then even on the individual plane I can make that distinction. You don’t need to get to the collective. On the individual plane I say, “Listen, this person is a wonderful man, but he doesn’t keep Sabbath, what can you do? He’s married to a non-Jewish woman, he eats pork, whatever—so he’s not okay by religious standards even though he is a wonderful person in the personal sense.” You don’t have to get to the collective level to see that distinction. No, but he is holding up the process, he is stopping the whole process because he chose to live there. No, as an individual, as an individual he chose to live there. Therefore I’m saying, that example too I don’t think is exhaustive, because he’s not talking about stopping the peace process. Stopping the peace process he does consciously from an ideological worldview. He thinks differently from you, perhaps. But I’m talking about behaviors in the moral sense. Not about stopping the peace process in the political sense. Behaviors in the moral sense, where sometimes there is cruelty, there is lack of consideration in all sorts of places—not in places where one must and politically there’s no choice, but even in places where one needn’t. After all there are such things, these things have happened. All right? So what does that mean? Does it mean people are not good? Be his neighbor and you’ll see he’s a wonderful person. There’s something, I don’t know, some kind of properties that are created on the collective level that do not exist on the individual plane. There’s some sort of transition there. And I think the Torah speaks to us on both of those planes, that we are judged as private individuals and afterward the city and the state are judged, so we are judged under both of our hats. It’s the same thing as deciding to kill the whole city because the city is sinful, so that means all of us as residents of the city will die. We don’t have two souls, we have one. But each one of us serves here under two hats. He has the hat of a private individual, and there he is judged as to whether he is a good person or not a good person, and he has the hat of citizen of the state or citizen of the city or citizen of his community, and there it may be that he comes out very badly in judgment. It’s very… and by the way not always necessarily his fault. Meaning, sometimes a person will try with all his might to fix his society, but he is part of a corrupt society, so he will be called to account together with the corrupt society in which he is found, or at least he may be. Right, that’s what was in Abraham’s argument with the Holy One, blessed be He. It seems there was only Lot there and he was saved, or as there are midrashim that say there were other relatives there. But Abraham’s argument with the Holy One, blessed be He—how many righteous people are there inside this city? Abraham—sorry—Abraham, how many righteous people are there inside this city? Clearly there was some distribution there, I assume, right. Fine, in short, there are phenomena. I’ll maybe give two more examples that express this now on the actual halakhic level. Look, there is—isn’t it written, “And the whole city was in an uproar because of them”? The whole city—that’s it, about almost the whole city down to the last person. “The whole city” means the face of the city. “The face of the city” is what’s written, but in the end it means the face of the city there. The face of the city means the important people, the leading figures of the city. “The whole city” is not literally the whole city; the Sages themselves also say that “all” means a majority, that’s “all.” It doesn’t have to literally mean all. “He and all the congregation.” “And the whole city was in an uproar” is like that today too. When you say “the whole city came,” what does “the whole city came” mean? It means many people came, a respectable portion of the city’s residents came. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t there. “Everyone and his wife.” What did Abraham achieve? Lot was okay and therefore he was saved. That’s what I said, that Lot is not a good example because Lot really was okay and was saved, so fine, or at least he had Abraham’s merit. No, no, no—the Holy One, blessed be He, saved him, not Abraham. The Holy One, blessed be He, saved him in Abraham’s merit. The plague of the firstborn in Egypt—clearly there were firstborn there who had done nothing bad. Yes, right. Obviously, there is collective punishment, and that is the whole idea of collective punishment. Maybe I once heard a lesson or read something on the portion of Lot and Sodom. It says there, “And the men of the city, the men of Sodom, they struck with blindness, from young to old, and they wearied themselves to find the door.” What does this technical detail contribute—that they wearied themselves to find the door? Is the Torah’s purpose just to tell us why Lot was saved and didn’t get lynched on that occasion? That’s not the story. The story is that the Torah wants to convey to us how corrupt they were and how deserving they were of destruction and of the punishment that the Holy One, blessed be He, decreed upon them—that even after they were struck with blindness and understand that a great power is intervening here to their detriment, they are still obsessive, still gripped by their lust. They don’t find the door—they don’t want to find the door. They do want to find it. No, “they wearied themselves to find”—they did not succeed in finding it. They kept searching despite the blindness. They didn’t draw the conclusion, wait a second, what’s going on here, let’s go home and sleep. They keep pursuing the sin. If that is the Torah’s aim, then apparently “the whole city” really means the whole city, because the Torah wants to convey that the message of this passage is that Sodom deserved to be destroyed. The apostate city, gentlemen—there are laws. In the apostate city they punish even people who did not sin, even children. There is collective punishment in the Torah, and that is the whole point. Meaning, the revolt against collective punishment, which is very common today, stems from an individualistic view of the reality around us. It stems from the fact that the people around us are only private individuals, and therefore each one has to be judged by what he did, good or bad. Collective punishment always presupposes something collective. You punish someone even though he doesn’t deserve it. Why? By what right do you punish him? You punish him because he is part of the evil collective even though he himself is a good person or a very good person. So in the conception—behind these supposedly moral debates, not supposedly, these moral debates, stand different metaphysical conceptions. It starts from metaphysics, it does not start from morality. The question is how you see the reality around you. Do you see the one standing before you as a collection of people, or do you see the one standing before you as a people? That is something entirely different. Meaning, if you see him as a people, there is room under certain circumstances for collective punishment. If you see him as a collection of people—what collective punishment? What does that have to do with anything? Whoever sinned, sinned, and whoever didn’t, didn’t. Views that are very prevalent today are very individualistic views, and therefore even in places where it seems completely proportionate, yes, they absolutely do not agree. You are forbidden to harm innocents. Why? Because there is an individualistic conception here, and indeed in such lenses it really is unjustified. You cannot harm someone who did not sin in order to save yourself. According to Jewish law, you cannot do that. Jewish law says you cannot save yourself at the expense of your fellow’s life; it is “let yourself be killed rather than transgress.” You cannot kill someone in order to save yourself. So what is the permission to harm innocent people, even if say it endangers me in some sense? Only if you see that thing as a collective. Because if you see that thing as a collective, then you are basically saying they are part of the factor that endangers me. They are not merely innocent. Under their individual hat they are innocent, but under their collective hat they are a pursuer. All right? Suppose you want to bomb some place or a car, yes, of what was his name? Yahya Ayyash? The one who didn’t… not Yahya Ayyash, the Engineer. No, the one with the phone. But someone in a car with the one-ton bomb, I don’t remember exactly who it was, what his name was. Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an example. So you drop a bomb there on a person who is himself dangerous, who endangers lives and whom you need to kill, no nonsense. But on the other hand he is traveling with his wife and children or with several other people in the car. So there is some very strong objection to dropping a bomb on that car. Ostensibly that objection is justified. That objection is justified because one may not save oneself at the expense of one’s fellow’s life; that is the Jewish law. I may not kill someone in order to save myself—let yourself be killed rather than transgress. So what is the permission that can make such things possible at all? Only a collective conception. Because in a collective conception you are basically saying: the one threatening me is not the specific person I want to kill; the one threatening me is the group to which he belongs, on whose behalf he acts, which gives him legitimacy to one degree or another. Consequently now I can depict that whole collective as having the status of a pursuer, not the status of a third party whom I may not kill in order to save myself, but if they truly have the status of a pursuer, then I can kill them. On the other hand, though, then maybe I should kill them altogether? Even if they’re innocent and not sitting with him in the car? It’s not only him; it’s not only me either, it’s all of us. Right, obviously. It’s a struggle between two collectives. That is exactly the point. And notice: many of the moral debates taking place around us come out of this point. It starts there. It doesn’t start from moral principles; it starts from ontology. It starts from the question: what are the entities I see standing before me? Are they peoples or are they human beings? If you see everything as imagined communities, which is usually the so-called leftist conception, at least what is called the Left today—once the Left was the exact opposite, or not exactly the opposite, actually. Communism also did not accept communities; it wanted the whole world to be—yes, but never mind. In any case, what is called the Left today tends toward an individual conception. To tend toward an individual conception means that you see private individuals around you; you do not see a collective. So they are right according to their method. It is forbidden, forbidden, to kill an innocent person in order to save yourself. And in a place where you see a collective before you, then you say fine, the one pursuing me is not that engineer; the one pursuing me is the collective. And if I need to kill it in order to save myself, then I will kill it in order to save myself. So you’ll ask me, fine, then maybe I should kill innocents even if they’re not sitting next to the engineer in the car? Here the second hat comes in, and this misses the right side of the map. Since every person has two hats. Every person is both a private individual and part of a collective. So in a place where you need to harm someone who belongs to the collective in order to save yourself, you may do so because there is a law of a pursuer here. But you cannot do it just like that. Because he is not really a pursuer. Meaning, under his private hat he is not a pursuer; he is a pursuer only under his collective hat. He is an innocent person, yes? So under his private hat he is not a pursuer, only under the collective hat. So you may not just kill him; he is not a pursuer. So this way of looking at the two hats—these two hats come together, and every time you have to pay attention to which hat you are speaking under. Let me bring you another example from within society itself, not in relation to outsiders. It says in the Torah, “You shall not be intimidated by any man.” And the Talmud says: one might think that if a judge sees a litigant who is violent, yes, violent, who endangers him, and he is afraid to rule against him—may he withdraw from the case? Certainly not rule in his favor, that he certainly cannot do. But may he withdraw from the case? Why do I need this trouble? What do I need this headache for? Yes? Forbidden. Now how far does that prohibition go? Is fear that he’ll punch him enough? That he’ll take his money, kill him? How far is the judge obligated to endanger himself? There are decisors who say up to a doubt of danger to life, up to and including a doubt of danger to life. Meaning, in a doubtful life-threatening situation you may not withdraw; you must judge the case. This is very relevant, by the way, I spoke with Menachem about it several times. It’s very relevant; sometimes a judge feels threatened, and the question is whether he can, I don’t know, pull some trick—it’s not simple, not a simple situation. He may not. He may not even in a situation of doubtful danger to life. Then the question arises: what do you mean? Aren’t there only three severe transgressions that are not overridden by danger to life—sorry, that override it? Where did “You shall not be intimidated” come from? How does “You shall not be intimidated” override a doubt of danger to life? So the common conception is, it seems to me at least, that the explanation behind this is that when it comes to the needs of the collective, then fear of undermining the judicial, social, governmental structure is danger to life. It is danger to the life of the collective. And if that will dismantle the collective, even if none of the individuals dies. But it is danger to the life of the collective, and therefore you may—or not may, you must—even enter into a situation of doubtful danger to life. Only then the opposite question arises: why there only doubt and not certainty? And that’s a very important point—why not certainty? And this bothered me a lot. Meaning, nowhere in the Torah do we find a difference between doubtful danger to life and certain danger to life. Meaning, whatever danger to life overrides, doubtful danger to life also overrides. And what is not overridden, neither of them is overridden. Where do we find a difference between doubtful danger to life and certain danger to life? There is no such difference. There’s the matter of a time of religious persecution, “even for a shoelace.” No, we’re not talking here about a time of religious persecution. No, but you could still say that maybe this is much worse than a time of religious persecution. Because if there’s no court system, then this… Fine, that’s what I said. In short, the answer is this: since danger to the social fabric is considered danger to life. No, very good, but why doubt? Why? Why did we say only in doubt, not certainty? That’s what the decisors say. Even those who say it regarding doubt—not everyone agrees even about doubt. But those who say it about doubt say doubt and not certainty. And the question is why? There is no halakhic category for that. Maybe a kind of doubtful danger to life that is certain? Why? Because he’ll kill the judge? No, the ruling will be issued and then he’ll kill him afterward, take revenge on him, but the ruling will have been issued. Why? A ruling will be issued, what do you mean why won’t it? He’ll put a bomb in his car, but he’ll go to prison. What do you mean? The ruling will be issued. No, if he is afraid of them… No, I don’t think that’s the point. The point is a different point. Think of a soldier in the army. A soldier in the army risks his life in war. Risks his life. We require a person to risk his life for what? For the fact that there is danger to the life of the collective here, right? Can I order a soldier to enter a situation of certain danger to life? Like the jeep in the Mitla Pass, yes, where they asked for a volunteer, they didn’t send someone by direct order. And it seems to me that even in the ethical code, if I remember correctly, you don’t—you don’t—one cannot compel a person to enter a situation in which he will certainly be killed, even though war is a situation in which there is doubtful danger to life, and ostensibly I should also be able to compel a person to enter such a situation, but this is permitted, this is certain, and this is because it is danger to the life of the public. So why not certainty? It’s needed in order to succeed in war, I am assuming of course that we are speaking of an action required in order to win the war. So why not? Again, it’s the same thing as before. A person also has a private hat. A person is not only part of the collective; he is also an individual. He has two faces. So in doubtful danger to life you say, look, you take the risk upon yourself because you are part of the collective, you must sacrifice yourself because that is your role, otherwise the collective will not survive. But in a place where I say to him, listen, you certainly have to die, it cannot be that I—this is the question of proportionality—it cannot be that I say to a person, listen, under your private hat, ignore yourself completely, you are entirely subordinate to society. No, I also have rights as an individual. If I decide to give myself over, then I’ll be blessed. But the collective cannot— it is not the sole owner of me. I am also part of the collective, but I am also a private person. So the same thing with the judge. I say to the judge, look, if you are in doubtful danger to life, then you are part of the collective and you must enter a situation of doubtful danger to life, there is no choice, it is your role. But in a case where he will definitely be killed, then listen—you can phrase it a bit pettishly, yes, so he’s already outside the collective, if he will definitely be killed then he isn’t obligated either. But I don’t think that’s the point. The point is proportionality. Meaning, there is a certain level of demand from the individual that I cannot impose upon him by the collective. No, he is not entirely subordinate to his collective aspect. He has some rights as an individual. There is a difference between the question whether a commander in the army may order a soldier and the question what the Holy One, blessed be He, demands of that judge. That is a completely different question. Fine, and still the answers to both are the same answers. Not necessarily. Not necessarily, but that is the answer. Those are the halakhic facts. Those are the halakhic facts. Meaning, those are the facts. Now one can say whether that’s necessary or not necessary—that’s another discussion. Fine, one can check exactly what the discussion there was about. I’m telling you that in my opinion these are the halakhic facts. Now we can begin discussing whether that is necessary, not necessary—that’s another discussion. This issue is precisely the expression of this dual-hat structure in which every person is found, in that on the one hand you play the role of some individual within a collective, to the point of doubtful danger to life, meaning that goes pretty far. But there is a limit. Meaning, one cannot demand of a person to commit suicide for the collective. That’s not. That’s not. If there is a chance he’ll remain alive and also a chance he’ll be killed, one can go that far in extreme cases. But you cannot erase his rights as an individual, you cannot erase his individual aspect. There is also such an aspect in parallel. Therefore it seems to me that the picture—at least as I understand it from Jewish law—is some kind of mixed picture. Meaning, there is definitely recognition of collective aspects, but every person is also a private person. I also serve God as one who stands before Him as a private person, not only through the community, the collective channel, as part of the collective standing before the Holy One, blessed be He. Maimonides in the laws of repentance, that a person should see himself as half meritorious and half guilty; if he does one commandment, he tips himself and the whole world to the side of merit—and immediately afterward he moves on to say the same argument but on the level of the person as part of the collective. He should see the people of his city as half meritorious and half guilty. Okay. Now he goes on, let’s keep reading. “And when this idea will be fully absorbed in the heart of the nations with all its strength and splendor, it will no longer be conceivable that nation shall lift sword against nation.” Yes, if everyone understands this utopian idea, then there will be no wars, everything will be wonderful. Why? “For every nation will understand that the sword it bears against another, it pierces its own soul.” Meaning, if you kill the other nation, the other people, you are really harming yourself, because each one has some contribution to the whole. And it’s not worthwhile to get rid of someone who has some contribution, because he contributes to me too. “Apart from the law of justice that will become perfected, so that the killing of men and the shedding of their blood will become abhorrent to the soul, and no political cause in the world will be able to purify this abomination of murder, once it is clarified in the heart with the purity of its true feeling.” Here too there is a very interesting point. He is basically grounding here a moral principle not to go to war, that one nation should not kill another nation—on what? On a utilitarian consideration. Right? I’m basically saying that if you kill him, you will harm yourself, because he has some contribution that you will lack. So moral behavior—refraining from murder or war—is based here on pragmatism, on a pragmatic, utilitarian consideration. Right? Not only because of the value of human life. True, afterward he writes, “Apart from the law of justice that will become perfected,” and there will also be some moral commitment here, to reach the point where it too will more or less—. The next paragraph says even more, maybe we can read the next paragraph. What does “it pierces its own soul” mean? That it robs itself? Yes, yes, “it pierces its own soul” is a verse, “whom you rob,” yes. “And as with all good traits and all good deeds in the world, the gateway to enter into them is self-love.” He is aware of it, of this transition—reward and punishment, and love so that you will be loved, and from doing not for its own sake one comes to doing for its own sake. He himself is aware that he moved here from a utilitarian reason to a moral reason, an essential reason. He says this is from not for its own sake to for its own sake. We begin by recognizing that the other contributes to us and therefore we do not harm him, and from that we will also arrive at the feeling that truly we must not harm him because we must not, because it is immoral, not because I will lose from it. “For the laws of nations must first develop in the understandable way, that every nation in its success improves the condition of the whole, and that the division of nations is nothing but an imagined agreement to enlarge the impression”—notice this exactly, imagined, right?—“to enlarge the impression of ‘what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours,’ but with no purpose other than an exalted end bound up in this, namely the perfection of all humanity through the expansion of all the special domains in which each and every nation is distinguished.” Imagined communities are a state of not for its own sake; he is not arguing in favor of imagined communities, quite the opposite. He says the world begins from a conception that there is room for a nation as an imagined community, but from there it will arrive at an essentialist conception that says: what do you mean? Every people has some real role, not just a kind of imagined community. Now here this simply reminded me of a nice point that I think we once discussed maybe at a third Sabbath meal at Yonah’s. In the story of Jonah, there is the gourd plant. The Holy One, blessed be He, grows the gourd plant, then sends a worm and an east wind and dries up the gourd plant, and Jonah then wishes for death. Then the Holy One, blessed be He, says to him: “Are you greatly grieved?” He said: “I am greatly grieved, even unto death.” Then He says: “You pitied the gourd plant, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow, and shall I not pity Nineveh the great city, with its many people and much cattle,” and so on? What kind of a fortiori argument is that? It’s a stupid a fortiori argument. Did Jonah pity the gourd plant? Jonah pitied himself. He was hot, he had no shade. What kind of comparison is that? The Holy One, blessed be He, says: you pitied the gourd plant, so you want me not to pity Nineveh? He didn’t pity the gourd plant; he needed shade. It was hot for him in the desert, he needed shade. What kind of a fortiori is that? So I thought of two possible answers, and afterward I had a third. First answer—and this is our criminal mind—maybe Jonah really did pity the gourd plant, and it wasn’t egoistic. We’re used to thinking that if a person acts according to his interests, then he’s an opportunist. Right, it also fit his interests, but maybe Jonah really did pity the actual gourd plant? Who said not? No, obviously—I said aside from that—obviously the heat bothered him, but the question is whether that was all, or in addition he also—the Holy One, blessed be He, knew his heart and saw that Jonah perhaps really did pity the gourd plant. You know, we always interpret something like this—we interpret it cynically, basically. He’s self-interested, he doesn’t really care about the gourd plant. But that’s not true; maybe he really did care about the gourd plant. How do you know? Who said not? He needed the gourd plant, fine, but who said only need caused the protest? Maybe also caring? But there was also a bad worm there that wanted to eat. Okay, but one still had to pity it. Fine, I don’t know if he saw that worm. In any case, there was also the east wind, and the worm alone probably didn’t do it, I don’t know. In any case, the worm alone dealt with the gourd plant; the east wind only intensified his situation. Fine, in any case, that’s one direction. The second direction is of course the opposite direction. Maybe in truth the Holy One, blessed be He, also did not pity Nineveh but needed it. Otherwise why did He create it? Why did He create Nineveh? He created it because, again, He needs it in some sense. We won’t go into all the theological problems that arise from this issue, what it means to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, needs. But the fact that He created a world, created cities, created people, apparently means that He wants them to exist, needs them in some sense. So now one can take the opposite direction. Right, Jonah was not self-interested; he wanted the gourd plant. The Holy One, blessed be He, says to him: look, you want the gourd plant, I want Nineveh. What do you mean, telling me to destroy Nineveh? Why did I create them? In order to destroy them? I created them because I want them. So that too can be a good basis for the comparison. And afterward, my third stage was: who said these two directions even contradict each other? We have this sort of Kantian intuition that says morality is always the opposite of interest. Meaning, you need to suppress interest or passions, and then you are a moral person—a kind of morality of sublimation. Meaning, you have to suppress your natural drives, your passions, and then you are a moral person. If you simply do what suits you and what is good for you and what serves your interest, then you’re not a moral person, you’re just a hedonist. But in fact, when Rabbi Kook speaks here about this need of each nation for the other nations, when you really understand that every other contributes also to you, surely that is a valid reason not to harm him or to have pity on him. And it could be that this recognition also has some moral value. Meaning, it is easy to say “I alone and none besides me,” nobody contributes anything to me, and whoever bothers me I wring his neck. But if I understand that the other selves or the other people are necessary to me, I need them, I am not all-powerful, I also need them, and because of that I do not harm them—I don’t know if that is the pinnacle of morality, but who says that isn’t moral? Maybe a kind of humility? Meaning, it may very well be that this reasoning, which seems merely utilitarian, does not necessarily contradict the fact that there is also a moral person here, a person behaving morally. Not every person is prepared to recognize that he benefits from others. Where it is very immediate and very simple, it is easy to recognize that. Someone who contributes and gives me money every month, then it is very easy to recognize that I need him. But in a broader sense, where every people gives expression to some idea or some worldview or some outlook, culture, whatever it may be—that is much more distant. And it is very easy not to recognize it. And it seems to me that not recognizing it contains some moral flaw, maybe also stemming from lack of humility, whatever—but there is some moral flaw there. And recognizing it does have some moral virtue. And if I derive from that the prohibition against harming or killing the other, I don’t know if that is something merely utilitarian. There is something in it that I think also has moral aspects. Did you want to say something? No, I wanted to move something to my head. Okay. “And in this way,” I continue reading, “the matter is understood, that it is impossible for the order of a single state to be perfected unless the center is placed in one place, a king or a legislative house.” We already talked about the center also in the previous chapter, in the omitted passages, that there is some center of the nation, the Sages or the Sanhedrin, a king or a legislative house. “So too, it is impossible for the world to come to this perfect order unless there is at least some fixed center in one place.” Meaning, he is basically saying: just as a single state, which is a collective collection of individuals, cannot function unless there is some center, a central authority that organizes it—unless there is kingship over that people, it is not one, it is just a collection of private individuals. The king is what makes the people one. So every collective, in order to define the collective, needs a center that defines it; otherwise it is just a collection of individuals. So Rabbi Kook said: the same is true also regarding the whole world. The whole world is a collective of nations, not of individual people, and this collective of nations too needs a center—only now it is a center that is a people, not a center that is a single individual. And this of course—what? A center that is an essence? Yes, but he says a role similar to what a king does in—again, not necessarily in the governmental sense. He doesn’t mean that the Jewish people are supposed to be the government dictating to everyone what they need to do, though I don’t know, it’s not all that far off. There are the seven Noahide commandments; in principle you are indeed dictating to them what they are supposed to do. But I think he really speaks more on the level of the spiritual center than the governmental center. But he draws an analogy between the collective of a single people or of a single state and the collective of the entire world. And then the claim is of course that the Jewish people are the center that constitutes the king, so to speak, in relation to each individual nation. And this brings us back to his opening statement, where he says that “the divine purpose inherent in preserving the Israeli nation in its distinctive character is loftier than the duty of preservation appropriate to each individual nation.” For each individual nation he uses the concept of a right—it has a right to exist. In the case of Israel there is some duty: it must exist; it is a divine purpose. Meaning, it’s not only its right to exist, “don’t infringe on my right,” but there is some duty here, because that simply closes the circle, since the Jewish people are as it were this center that turns the world into a collective—which yes, without it the world would not be such a thing. Okay, maybe next time. End of the lesson by Rabbi Yitzhak Ben Pazi on the topic of generation, Thursday, the sixteenth of Tevet 5771, December 23, 2010.