For the Perplexed of the Generation – Lesson 22

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. So how could he not become a heretic after being educated on such nonsense? In that God, I’d also be a heretic. And the point is that those people, even after they leave, fight with great fury against a religiosity that is imaginary religiosity. I’d fight that religiosity alongside them. The problem is that you won’t be able to convince him. It’s like—you know the joke about the two guys who learned together in a study partnership in Ponevezh? Not Ponevezh—they tell it about Ponevezh as a joke, but not necessarily. One of them got married and invited the other to be a witness at the wedding. So the other one says, I can’t be a witness, I’m a gentile. He was in shock—what do you mean, a gentile? So he said, but we sit here learning together. He said, yes, I understood Torah. He said, what? But you kept the Sabbath! How is that possible? He said, whenever I kept the Sabbath I had a stone in my pocket so there would be muktzeh or carrying, so that I would desecrate the Sabbath and not keep it fully, because a gentile is forbidden to keep the Sabbath. He said, what do you mean—but there’s an eruv? He answered, tell me, what are you talking about? I’m a gentile—do you think I rely on the eruv? Even when you reject a certain religion, you still preserve the religious picture you were raised on—because that’s what you’re rejecting. Like the husband and wife where the husband curses Heaven. So his wife says to him, you uncircumcised boor, how can you talk to the Holy One, blessed be He, like that? He is compassionate and gracious. He says to her, Yentl, you know we don’t believe in Him—we stopped believing long ago. She says, yes, but the God I don’t believe in is compassionate and gracious—how can you talk to Him that way? There’s some image a person takes with him even when he goes outside. When a person leaves the system—what religion did he leave? He left the very religion he was taught. Now if someone comes and says to him, listen, but the religious image you’re fighting against isn’t the right one, what will he say? You’re just a heretic, I’m not listening to you. He won’t really say it in those words, but that is what he feels. He stays a Bnei Brak person even as a secular person—it makes no difference. If you—I’ve had dozens of arguments with people. They explain to me that I’m a heretic, while they themselves are outside. They ask questions, I answer them, they’ve abandoned everything, and I try to explain to them: friends, what you abandoned deserves to be abandoned—there’s no reason to be there; I’m not there either. I try to draw for them an alternative picture, and then they explain to me that I’m a heretic and my words shouldn’t be taken seriously. It’s exactly the same phenomenon. You can’t detach from the religious worldview you grew up with even after leaving it, because when you left it, you left it. There is no other religion. You remain a Bnei Brak person; there’s no possibility of another kind of religiosity. All you can do is leave it or rebel against it, but anyone who isn’t like that is just some heretic. That’s what Rabbi Kook is talking about, and I think it may sound terribly naïve and simple, but once you break it down into details—religious people—there’s something pretty bold here. Rabbi Kook is basically saying: friends, part of our tradition consists of certain add-ons that it’s not right to hold onto. Someone who rejects them is right. In other words, these are things that got attached to the tradition, suddenly became one of the thirteen principles of faith, and now anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a heretic. So a person says: now I have to decide—either I agree with this nonsense, or I’m a heretic. So he decides he’s a heretic, and he’s right. He’s right because it is nonsense. That nonsense really should be abandoned. This willingness to separate between different components of the tradition—and I don’t think Rabbi Kook is talking only about random nonsense floating around in the street. He’s talking also about things found in the hard core of Torah, let’s call it that. There are Torah conceptions that are inferior conceptions. When he spoke about the gloomy skies in Jerusalem, in the old yishuv in Jerusalem that he encountered when he came to the Land, he wasn’t talking about secular people, and not about the simple masses. He was talking about a religious worldview, including the leadership—that’s obvious. He doesn’t write it explicitly, but it’s completely obvious. That worldview starts from the top; it doesn’t start with confused people in the street. People in the street receive it as education from their rabbis. There’s a worldview here that takes the tradition to places that leave no option but to reject that worldview. And this is a very bold statement for a rabbi coming out of the old world, certainly. Today we’re already a little calmer about these things, but in a world where the Haskalah is breathing down our necks and everyone is fighting it and looking for enlightened people like McCarthy hunted communists—when Rabbi Kook says things like this, there’s something very, very bold here. The claim is basically that the blame is on us, ‘and our pure and innocent Torah is not at fault in this, Heaven forbid. Our Torah is worthy of being a religion accepted and close to the heart even of the most enlightened sage, and all the more so the wisest of the wise. And the more his wisdom truly increases, the more his faith and love for Torah and its commandments will increase.’ In short, contrary to what these people think—that there is some contradiction between wisdom and Torah—he says the opposite: the contradiction is between stupidity and Torah. So the more your wisdom increases, the greater a sage you become in Torah, you’ll understand that this also converges with general wisdom. We talked about this in the context of the binding of Isaac, where the question was whether the lesson was that you need to sacrifice Isaac, or whether the lesson was ‘do not raise your hand against the lad.’ The lesson was that there cannot be a contradiction between the divine command and the normal, natural morality a person feels. So here too he says the same thing regarding wisdom. ‘However, he must have pure concepts of faith in accordance with the level of his education.’ In other words, many times—and this is what happens—many times people’s concepts of faith are those of a five-year-old child. The last time he dealt with matters of faith was in kindergarten. The kindergarten teacher told him exactly what happened and what one must do and not do, and from then on he calculates the Ketzot HaChoshen. In other words, he doesn’t deal with these matters of faith at all, so he remains stuck with his intellectual and faith-conceptions from age five, while his intellectual ability develops, and all in all there are sometimes very talented people there with very impressive analytical ability—but the faith-conceptions that are supposed to accompany that analytical ability are extremely poor. I think I mentioned that in Bnei Brak I had a very hard experience in the years I lived there. There were lions in the synagogue where I prayed there—kollel men who were truly a pleasure to talk to in learning. There’s nowhere you can’t allow yourself to speak, ask, hear what people say, look for answers. There’s even a board there—one of the beautiful things in Bnei Brak. In synagogues of kollel men, on the board there are notes with difficulties, and whoever has a question hangs it up, and people write answers there. It’s a pleasure to read that sometimes—you see very beautiful things there. Right? Exactly, a blog before the internet era. And when they move to dealing with aggadic questions, or outlook, or things of that sort, you hear things there that are unbelievable. In that same synagogue of these lions, every so often someone would come to bring us back to repentance, so some moral supervisor from some yeshiva would come and start telling us stories about sayings of the Sages, plain meanings—I don’t know where these interpretations dropped on him from—little homiletic nuggets like that. Ma’ayanah Shel Torah would be an intellectual peak compared to what we heard there. And people sit there and nobody chirps a word. It’s the giving of the Torah at Sinai. If this were a regular study lecture, he wouldn’t get through a sentence. The first sentence he said—they’d kill him on the spot and tear him to pieces and leave him on the side. In learning, people talk. In learning, there is criticism. In learning, they’re not willing to swallow anything. The problem is that when you get to fear of Heaven and pure outlook and all kinds of things like that, the capacity for criticism disappears, the legitimacy of criticism disappears, and as a result the ability to criticize also disappears. And it happens on both levels. When you get used not to criticizing, you really do lose the ability to criticize—you lose your critical faculty. And people really live there in a world, a religious world, of kindergarten children. Really. The kinds of things you hear there—I wouldn’t want my child to be told that sort of nonsense. And there sit grown men who know half the Talmud by heart—with medieval and later authorities—really lions in learning, people with amazing analytical ability. And there is an incredibly clear dichotomy. In learning, everything is allowed. You can ask anything. And if someone talks nonsense, they tear into him, even if he’s an important person. No calculations. In learning, it goes all the way. All the fear of Heaven stuff—that belongs in the ethics department. When learning, if you talk nonsense they’ll cut you down in the middle. There’s no etiquette at all. But when one of those supervisors comes, suddenly everyone falls silent, and I look around to see whether the people are still with us, or maybe they’re asleep. Maybe they nodded off, I don’t know. Sometimes I asked someone, tell me, is this okay? Do you agree with what he’s saying? Does this sound to you like—? He says yes, actually very nice ideas. And it’s amazing, really amazing, this compartmentalization people create. You have one particular wing where you don’t think. And that’s what he’s talking about. ‘The more—he must have pure concepts of faith in accordance with the level of his education.’ What happens to someone who starts thinking? Someone like that head of the kollel who starts thinking, who begins applying the same analytical ability he has in those other areas—he understands that this whole bunch are just chatterers. You’re not willing to accept a word from them. So what does he do?

[Speaker C] Maybe that’s the role of study—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To be a kind of lightning rod that gathers all the—Rabbi Israel Salanter turned that into an ideology. He turned it into an ideology. He was willing—he rehabilitated the pilpul method because he wanted to compete with the wisdoms, with the Enlightenment. So we also want to have something that will attract the youth. And that’s exactly the point: instead of dealing with the things themselves, you give them some alternative that develops a certain detached analytical ability in that specific domain, and in all the other domains you don’t touch them, you don’t deal with them, and you remain there at the level of a three-year-old child. And then people, at some stage, the intellectually honest part of that group, gradually becomes secular.

[Speaker C] Like that lawyer Danielli.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know him, I just—but I’m saying, I don’t know, that’s what would have happened to me.

[Speaker C] He also got reprimanded by the court.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe, I don’t know, but I’m not—no, fine, again, I didn’t come to talk about him; he’s just an example for me. But the point is that if a person wants to be intellectually honest, when he grows up on such a picture, then he really leaves it. Who would remain inside such a picture? Only someone who isn’t intellectually honest. And this is a kind of reverse evolution. In other words, a filtering process is created here of all those who are critical and intellectually honest, and it leaves only those willing to go with the flow like sheep to the slaughter, without any critical sense. Then everything is fine and everything works out, and nobody thinks and nobody criticizes and everything continues as it should, because anyone critical is a heretic. So either you’re outside, or you’re inside and silent.

[Speaker C] And there’s also economic pressure. What? There’s economic pressure operating on him.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, obviously—again, there are lots of things, I’m not going to do sociology of the Haredi world here, but there are many means they use. But in broad terms, the approach is this approach. There is some approach that says that if you reject the collection of nonsense we gathered over the course of history, then you are a denier. You don’t believe in the revelation at Mount Sinai, you don’t believe in the Holy One, blessed be He, you don’t believe in anything. If you think that Rabbi Akiva or Maimonides could have made a mistake about the Pythagorean theorem or something like that, then you simply don’t believe in anything at all, so go home. And I think I mentioned this once too: when I was in Bnei Brak they told me, look, anyone who enlists turns secular. They always told me that. I said, obviously you mustn’t enlist—after all, anyone who enlists turns secular. I said, I don’t know, I’m not close enough to it, but boys from Merkaz HaRav who enlist—each one in his own framework, whatever, each separately, not in hesder yeshivot and all wrapped up—they come back no less strong than when they left. The guys from Bnei Brak who enlist go in secular and come out secular. How did they get to the army? They got to the army because already beforehand they had left everything—otherwise they wouldn’t have been allowed to get there. So what’s the surprise that someone who enlists comes out secular? He went in secular. The army didn’t do that. The army only revealed what was already there beforehand. And many people won’t be brave enough, and it remains hidden inside the frock coat, and they won’t enlist. So they’ll remain secular inside a frock coat. That’s all. And that’s what he says here: concepts of faith have to be purified in accordance with the level of one’s education. You need to give this a real answer. Faith has to match in strength your intellectual tools. You can’t do otherwise, and if there’s a gap of this sort, then you stray from the path of Torah and faith. And this paragraph seems to me precisely a criticism of the standard Haredi tradition. ‘Certainly if his concepts of faith are savage and mistaken, and according to the state of his education he is a man of our generation, a thinker and investigator in every direction, it is impossible for faith to endure in his hand.’ There is some unbearable gap between the level of worldview with which you try to educate him and his intellectual level. It won’t work. He can’t buy it. So either he suppresses it and sees it as the counsel of the evil inclination and keeps scrubbing it away, or he says: friends, I’m not buying this. Bring me other alternatives. ‘Therefore we have no other remedy than to teach our educated youth the principles of Torah in a manner suited to and accepted by all the winds of the world that come and blow from the growth of wisdom in the world.’ In other words, one must use forms of wisdom in order to renovate and refine the conception of faith, not to create a conflict between faith and wisdoms. ‘We must uproot from them the coarse errors they have in their views of religion and faith.’ Notice—from what do we need to uproot errors? Not errors they have in science or in philosophy or whatever else. We must uproot the errors they have in religion and faith. Because everything starts there. If you fix that, the other things too will align with what is right. Because what is true is true. What difference does it make whether it is called heresy or not, whether it contradicts dogmas or not? If it is true, it is true—so rebuild your dogma. ‘Then there is no doubt that they will see and be radiant, the tears in their hearts will be healed, and they will recognize that there is no need, just as there is no possibility, to invent another spiritual concept that unites our entire nation except for the holy and pure concept, the concept of pure faith, which includes everything.’ By the way, it’s the same regarding Zionism. The same statements from earlier—this is what he’s talking about, and this is the period in which he is speaking. The attitude to Zionism was also like that: look, everyone who goes there never returns. Anyone there is secular, therefore one must not cooperate with them. Which of course means that once you imposed a prohibition, everyone who is there entered there secular, not exited secular. Because if he weren’t secular, he wouldn’t have gotten to be a Zionist. Exactly the same conception. You build the conclusion that you later point to as evidence for your method. Your method created that conclusion; it is not a conclusion that supports your method. ‘For example, our youth feel’—and here he moves to the second level. The first level was really adaptation on the intellectual plane. But I said there’s another level—the aesthetic and the ethical, yes, of Kierkegaard. ‘For example, our youth feel that the desire for life of every living being can in our days be attained particularly only through a heavy struggle.’ In other words, if a person does things because it’s pleasant for him, because it’s comfortable for him, because he connects to them, as people say today—then something here is treif, something’s wrong. It can’t be that this fits halakhic or Torah principles. It always has to come through a heavy struggle. In other words, to force—what I said before with Kierkegaard—to force down the aesthetic, the natural feeling that this is a good way for me to live, so what’s the problem? Why not? No—if it’s good, then apparently something is wrong here. There must be some clause in the Mishnah Berurah that forbids it. Because it can’t be.

[Speaker C] Here he’s talking about the desire for life of every living being.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does he mean?

[Speaker C] He means that those who turn to the Enlightenment accuse the halakhic world of the fact that—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the claim is—not Zionism, yes? He says—

[Speaker C] You basically have to—the normal things, the life you want to build, are supposed to come by way of some kind of struggle. Okay? That you—this isn’t in a critical tone, it’s in an accepting tone as an assumption leading into the rest of the paragraph.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, what do you mean not in a critical tone?

[Speaker C] Rabbi Kook agrees with this? With what? That the desire for life of every living being is attained by a heavy struggle? I don’t know. Yes or no? Yes. Fine. No, there are two—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, there really are two planes here. There’s one plane—

[Speaker C] Something attained by heavy struggle also has value; it’s not something done easily.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re right. There are perhaps two meanings here, maybe even opposite ones. One meaning is the struggle that requires fighters and all that, and with that he certainly agrees. And there’s the second meaning of struggle, meaning restraining my natural inclination, and with that he does not agree—that religion is not supposed to be a constant war of a person against himself. What appears here in the continuation—we’ll soon see—I got ahead of myself a bit. ‘The desire for life of every living being can in our days be attained particularly only through a heavy struggle. The desire for life of an entire people, moving in every direction, certainly requires fighters, and not necessarily fighters with sword and spear; in any case, people who strive, organize, engage in its improvement and in attaining the modes of its existence. And in this they see Zionism as the aspiration of the nation. In contrast, they think that the cause of weakness is the concept of faith, casting one’s burden upon God; therefore man does not stand up for his own soul. Therefore it appears to them proper to distance themselves from those concepts that weaken the force of national life, and then there will arise among us a generation of fighters who know that the life of the nation depends on their own efforts, and they will act and succeed.’ So here it’s in your essential sense—that there needs to be some struggle with the outside, not with the inside. Some struggle: you need to overcome something in order to realize your inner desires, and that requires dealing with other things besides prayers and religious acts. ‘However, let us see whether the concept of religion and faith and their true understanding create an obstacle to our own full, life-filled effort to rebuild the ruins of our people, to revive its body and spirit.’ Here is the second meaning. So does the fact that this is what people want really mean it is the evil inclination? Because it means you are going with what you feel you want to build. But Torah is supposed to make you fight your natural desires. So he says no. ‘The concept of religion that these youth have, because of their lack of knowledge of Torah, because of the lack of teachers who would establish them in the principles of Torah and in a simple and clear, yet profound understanding, has given them misleading concepts; that can indeed dull the force of life and national movement. But not the concept of religion understood properly according to Jewish law.’ In other words, religion as it was pictured at the stage at which he writes, at the point where he stands—that really is a religion that in practice indeed halts this possibility. It really does. Yes, as people always said, religious people would not be able to establish the state. In other words, if there had not been secular people, there would not have been a state. Because there is something in the religious conception that was formed—and this is what he criticizes here—that essentially blocks people’s movements, their natural desires, the natural movements of a people or of a private individual. You basically have to somehow overcome that, see it as the counsel of the evil inclination, and continue praying. And he argues that this is an example of what he said above: this is some distortion of the tradition, some distortion that comes from religious people, not from religion. It is not a trait of religion; it is a trait of religious people. That’s his claim. He says, ‘They have acquired misleading concepts,’ so yes, that can indeed dull the force of life and national movement. ‘But not the concept of religion understood properly according to Jewish law.’ In other words, the religious worldview prevailing in his time really does this, but that’s not religion itself, not religion as such. ‘Never did our people, when it was a living people and also at the beginning of its development, have any doubt that the way to develop its life and achieve its existence depends upon the manner of its diligence and effort. The moral relation to the value of effort was always only to recognize that the Lord our God is the One who gives us strength to achieve success. But the matter always depends on our effort and diligence.’ Here he states the principle, then examples. There are several points here worth paying attention to. His claim is basically—yes, another part of those attacks by moral supervisors is “my power and the might of my hand.” A person who thinks that the army won the war, or that the doctor healed him, or things like that—they try to say this is “my power and the might of my hand,” and that this distorted and heretical conception must be uprooted, because it doesn’t understand that the Holy One, blessed be He, really did it. Because that’s “my power and the might of my hand.” And then Rabbi Kook, of course, writes here—he refers below to the Derashot HaRan, it’s pretty obvious that this is what he means, the famous Derashot HaRan, where he explains that “my power and the might of my hand” of course means the opposite. “My power and the might of my hand”—that’s with an exclamation mark, right? “My power and the might of my hand made me this success.” Meaning, that’s really true—that’s exactly what happens. Only what? One must know that the Holy One, blessed be He—and that’s the continuation of the verse—‘is the One who gives you strength to achieve success.’ In other words, obviously the Holy One, blessed be He, is the One who gives us the strength to act, but the one who achieves the results is our action, not the Holy One, blessed be He.

[Speaker C] The one who brings about the success is the person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. He gives me the strength; without Him I couldn’t live. But now, after I have the strength from Him, in the end I do the actions. If I don’t do them, they won’t happen. It’s not that someone who goes to war is just doing pointless nonsense; he could pray in kollel and everything would be fine, because the Holy One, blessed be He, is doing it anyway, so what difference does it make whether you go to war or not? That is a distorted conception. You have to pray in order to receive the strength to achieve victory in war, but if you don’t fight, there won’t be victory in war.

[Speaker C] When did this distortion begin in the public regarding—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think that this distortion, specifically, is actually a very old distortion. The big difference is—and this is actually a modern influence, I think—there are statements like this in the Sages and among the medieval authorities. Nachmanides is well known in various places: a person has no share in the Torah of Moses until the end of Parashat Bo unless he believes that all our events are nothing but miracles. The roots of this conception are ancient. But what? In the past people knew how to separate between the ideology and how we behave in practice. And in the modern world, life also forced them to.

[Speaker C] What? Yes, life forced them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the modern world—even today life forces us a bit; all in all it’s hard to live without money to buy groceries. But today, specifically, the ideological conceptions around us have penetrated inward, and we’ve become terribly ideological. We live according to the dogmas we recite. Now as long as it was just recitation—again, that has a negative connotation—as long as there was some general statement meant to educate the people and they didn’t pay attention to this nuance, whether He gives me strength to achieve success or whether He really does it and I’m just a puppet—fine, it didn’t matter. In life everyone knew what had to be done: go work so there will be money. I told this once—this is what my father used to say to my relatives in Bnei Brak when they were always looking for segulot for livelihood. He told them he knew a proven segulah for livelihood: go to work. There’s a normal way of life that a person senses and knows and does. So ideologically, and in talks at public Torah gatherings or on Sabbath, he hears encouragement that the Holy One, blessed be He—and he doesn’t get into the nuances of whether exactly the Holy One, blessed be He, does it in my place or not—he knows how to live. But today, on everything we investigate. Today we live like this already only among religious people; among secular people much less so. But among religious people there is some inertia of a modernist world that checks itself by its ideology. In other words, you have to live according to the ideology. Let’s see if it’s true or not—so they investigate. The moment you start investigating this seriously—well, if the Holy One, blessed be He, does everything, then let’s bring that down to practice. If He does everything and we’re supposed to live what we believe, then once we live what we believe, okay—if the Holy One, blessed be He, does everything, then why should I interfere? Let Him do it, and I’ll just pray that everything goes well, and that’s it. In a certain sense this is even nicer—a person lives his ideology, he doesn’t just recite it and in practice do something else. But there is something here: if you really live your ideology, then you must clarify it much more precisely. If it stays in the study hall and you rely on your simple intuitions, you’ll do what is right. A person has common sense; he knows what needs to be done and what not. No one stays home when he is very sick; he goes to the doctor. But once he suddenly hears there’s such a Nachmanides and that really the Holy One, blessed be He, does everything and effort is just unnecessary and neglect of Torah—what does he say? Fine, so if I learned this, let’s be a true servant of God. I need to live what I believe, what I learned. Now the clarification of faith he continues doing at kindergarten level, but now there is some ideological conception that one must live one’s faith, not merely pay lip service. And he lives the nonsense he learned at age five. In other words, he doesn’t carry out the ideological clarification required if you really want to live it. And that aspiration is correct, genuine, and beautiful—that a person doesn’t want merely to recite principles of faith, he wants to live them, he wants them to be expressed; he’s not willing merely to do commandments by rote. But that requires something. If so, then treat them with the tools of an adult. Understand that what was good for kindergarten—in kindergarten no one has to go to work, and you can educate the child that everything comes from God; he doesn’t have to go work, it won’t hurt him, it’s fine. They once relied on his common sense; today even the adults have invaded that space. But okay, when he gets to the point where he needs to, he’ll know what to do. So it’s good to strengthen him with the idea that God does everything and he shouldn’t despair and everything will be okay. But when people start living those age-five conceptions without the clarification required for that, a more adult clarification, this is the result. So the seeming progress of the generation, becoming more ideological, less willing to recite one thing and live differently, leads to very large distortions because the ideological clarification is not being done properly. So do it, and after that really live according to what emerges from your clarification. But to live your principles of faith without clarifying them—you talk to people about questions of faith and providence and trust, trust in the Holy One, blessed be He, I mean, and you see that they think about it really at the level of children. They haven’t really examined these things. There are things there that need to be checked on the logical level; they are not esoteric matters. But if he acts according to it and doesn’t bother to clarify, then he really does foolish things. What I mean to say is that when we speak here about effort, people always knew how to make effort. They always knew how to make effort. But the ideology that effort is false—that ideology is ancient. It has ancient sources; it’s not a new invention. The new invention is that people live it. Yes—that people live it, that is a modern conception, that people live their ideology. Once, ideology was good for books. In modernity, in the modernist conception, all of modernism is living your ideology, advancing it, realizing it, bringing about a better world. But this is supposed to come together with clarification. So they forgot the clarification and keep advancing the ideology. When I say that this includes all kinds of contradictions, I mean of course: how do we relate to statements of this sort, that everything is from the Holy One, blessed be He, in the completely logical sense, even before the question of what we do in life? Does it really hold water? And is it really ‘if you walk in My statutes, then I will give your rains in their season’? So does the rain depend on our keeping commandments, or praying properly, or something like that—or is rain really a result of certain meteorological conditions? Fine, ask an ordinary Jew from Bnei Brak and he’ll say certainly it has nothing to do with meteorology at all; that’s just the delusions of weather forecasters. Everything is from the Holy One, blessed be He, and all meteorology is nonsense. And every time the weather forecaster is wrong, Bnei Brak rejoices. I know, I was there. There’s genuine delight there every time some expert gets the clouds wrong. Because once again it’s proved that it’s the Holy One, blessed be He, and science is false and everything is fine. But that’s nonsense, of course. It’s nonsense that stems from the same lack of thought. What—you don’t really believe that if a strong enough force acts on this fan and nothing holds it up, then it will fall? It will fall not because it sinned, but because the force of gravity pulls it downward. Fine. Now the question is how you combine that with faith in the Holy One, blessed be He, or in providence. That’s a very non-trivial question, very non-trivial. And the depth of clarification required for this is no less than in Ketzot HaChoshen. To try to understand, to find some path, to chart some course in which one does not abandon the conception of divine providence together with the very simple and clear belief all of us have, if we are not deceiving ourselves, that the laws of nature operate here. How do those two things fit together? Now before you hold yourself accountable to live this ideology, before clarifying what it even means, that is a recipe for catastrophe. That is exactly what happens. The unwillingness to recognize that one must make efforts in order to achieve something. I told you—I don’t remember if I mentioned it—I read not long ago on the internet that one of the great rabbis today was asked about these audits they do in kollels because of all those identity-card frauds. They asked him: why are all these troubles coming upon us? Where did we sin? It takes some very deep metaphysical inquiry to understand why these troubles are coming upon us. Fine, so he sat and reflected—truly one of the greats of the generation, a Torah scholar—apparently he thought about the question carefully. And he said: listen, it’s slander and interpersonal wrongdoing. We need to strengthen ourselves in matters between man and his fellow and in slander and all that. And you say, Master of the Universe, I don’t know—these audits came because you cheated, that’s all. What does this have to do with slander and strengthening faith and commandments? You cheated, and after they discovered that you cheated, they came to check that you’re not cheating. That’s all. Is somebody coming to persecute you? And even if they are coming to persecute you, that’s the most natural thing in the world. They’re coming to go after you because you stuck it to them first, so the normal human tendency is to get back at you. True, maybe they’re overdoing it there, I have no idea.

[Speaker C] But it is between man and his fellow, because—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They cheated in matters between man and his fellow? Yes. Then afterward I thought of another example of this issue. The slander part didn’t quite fit for me. Then he even had a proof. Do you know what the proof was? All from the internet; I didn’t hear him myself, of course. And I’m not saying his name either, because saying his name would be actual slander. So he says he has proof: how do you explain the poverty in the Haredi world if not because of slander and matters between man and his fellow? A crushing proof. So again I go back to my father, yes: poverty in the Haredi world is because they don’t go to work, so they’re poor. That’s all. This total disconnect, the willingness not to acknowledge everything happening around you when you yourself know—here the person is deceiving himself. There is no one who doesn’t understand these things; if he doesn’t understand that, then he really is stuck in third grade. The explanation is so simple, and you explain to me that it’s slander. There’s some notion that if you’re religious, you have to be detached from what’s going on. You always have to invent other explanations when everything is perfectly clear, completely clear what is happening here. Totally natural, totally simple—there’s no difficulty here at all. The very fact that they came to ask already shows a disconnect. But the fact that he answers that way—I’m in shock. But those are his words.

[Speaker B] A person can believe that illnesses that befall him are really connected to his religious behavior, and still, when he comes to a doctor and the doctor gives him, I don’t know, 15 antibiotic pills, he won’t take 14 because if I’m so religious and pray so well then 14 should be enough. He takes all 15. So evidently he believes. But still, he thinks the problem is religious.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s still some certain level of sanity left in people, that when they go to doctor A, they look for the best doctor—they all know that. Despite this ideology of non-effort and all that. And B, they usually also listen to him. Although there is some very strong tendency there toward alternative medicine; I don’t know, maybe that too is part of the issue, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s like that among the religious public in general.

[Speaker C] There are also those who don’t go to doctors.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s it. Now, those who really live this way, the true ideologues, they’re basically… I once had a friend from Netivot Olam, from a yeshiva I studied in for newly religious returnees in Bnei Brak, and he was a genius. He immigrated from Russia, where he had come in second in the mathematics olympiad in the Soviet Union—not in some little village. Meaning, we’re talking about a heavyweight on a global scale. At some point he became religious. He had two professor parents, and of course they expected great things from him. He was in the middle of a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, entered the yeshiva, and never left. So his parents begged him: “Listen, go do a doctorate in mathematics at Tel Aviv University.” I think he had actually even started a master’s degree, and stopped in the middle because he became religious—this was all nonsense, he was learning Torah. Fine. His parents kept pressuring him, and in the end they went to the head of the yeshiva. The head of the yeshiva told him, “You have the commandment of honoring your parents; you need to go do a master’s degree.” So he went and did a master’s during lunch breaks. Two years, during lunch breaks—I know, I was there. For two years, during lunch breaks, he did the master’s. He had morning study session, he had afternoon study session in the yeshiva, and during lunch breaks over those two years he did the master’s degree. He finished it and apparently did some impressive things there—I didn’t check. Then it ended. His professor told him, “Listen, I can’t… I mean, you still have to do something more. I can’t approve a master’s like this.” He said, “That’s it. I did this for honoring my parents. If it’s not enough, that’s your problem, I don’t know.” So in short they went back again to the head of the yeshiva, and the head of the yeshiva told him, “You have to finish it, and you also have to continue to a doctorate.” And this was also after consulting Rabbi Shach—Rabbi Shach was actually very grounded on this issue; he didn’t let people float off. And he also had to do a doctorate, I think, and at some point that got stuck too. Then after three months he finished the doctorate as well. Again they told him, “Listen, impossible—three months? No one’s going to give you a doctorate after three months.” He apparently proved whatever needed to be proved there; I don’t know exactly what. But he was… we’re talking about a world-class prodigy. This is not… the man was probably a complete mutation.

Now, a while ago some friend of my parents came by, and it turns out he actually knows him. He said, “I heard about Vladek,” and so on. I knew him as Ze’ev, so I didn’t know who he was talking about. He said, “Listen, there’s this Vladek there, the son of some friends of ours, and his parents are going crazy—two professors.” He doesn’t go to doctors—that’s why I mentioned it—he doesn’t go to doctors, he doesn’t do anything, he just learns Torah. They have no livelihood, they’re sick and they don’t go to doctors, they don’t know what’s going to happen there. Those people are going to die with their children and everyone there, and they’re doing nothing. Now we’re talking about an unbelievable prodigy, I mean a person with apparently absolutely insane intellectual abilities. But the fit between the religious worldview he holds and his intellectual abilities is just a crazy short circuit. And he comes to wild distortions. Now try proving to someone like that that he’s wrong—you’ll never succeed. He’s more of a genius than this whole country put together; no one’s going to prove anything to him. With arguments and logical constructions, you can explain everything. Right? There’s no way to talk to him. The more gifted he is, the less you can talk to him.

By the way, this is a common phenomenon among many people. The sharper they are in Talmud and all that, the more skillfully they defend the biggest nonsense. Meaning, you can’t show them they’re wrong, because they have some very sophisticated logical structure that explains it. They sit on Ketzot, and that’s how they dig themselves even deeper into these mistaken worldviews. This is exactly the same gap that Rabbi Kook talks about between a person’s abilities and his faith.

So he says—I’m continuing to read—“But the matter always depends on effort and diligence on our part. And have we made so little effort and fought so little for the land promised by the word of God, with absolute promise and the oath to the fathers? However, it is not little effort that pure faith causes, but rather courage and complete hope that in the end the goal of our soul will come.” Right? The contribution of faith to our efforts is not weakness of the hands, saying, well, everything is from the Holy One, blessed be He, so why make an effort? On the contrary. It tells us that even in desperate situations a person should never despair—“even if a sharp sword rests upon his neck.” Here faith can help; on the contrary, it can make you exert yourself more, more intensely—meaning, make you less despairing. Someone who is prepared to try to make an effort in any case, even in hopeless situations, because the Holy One, blessed be He, can help us, and who knows, maybe we can still succeed. So this actually gives motivation to make more effort.

There’s an interesting point here, by the way. The Chazon Ish, in his book Faith and Trust, talks about this issue—the distorted conceptions of trust. And one of them is what Rabbi Kook writes here. He argues that the belief that since everything is in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the end what comes out will be the best thing—that is a mistaken belief. What comes out? Yes. What comes out in the end is the most correct thing. Not the best thing. So it’s not necessarily that you’ll be healed, but that whatever comes out is what truly ought to be. And that you can believe in. But people say, no, everything is in the hands of Heaven, and therefore obviously the Holy One, blessed be He, will heal me. No. Everything is in the hands of Heaven, and therefore obviously the Holy One, blessed be He, will do what is right to do. Sometimes it is right to heal me, and sometimes it is not right to heal me. What He decides, I do not know. I’m still speaking within the conception that the Holy One, blessed be He, does everything. Right? So here too he says that it gives courage and complete hope that in the end the goal of our soul will come. The question is whether that is hope or certainty. There are those who say it’s certainty: in the end we’ll succeed because it’s the Holy One, blessed be He. So what if we are small and we are David facing Goliath? The Holy One, blessed be He, is with us; we can succeed at anything. Not entirely true. The Holy One, blessed be He, is with us means that what needs to happen will happen, but it still does not necessarily mean that what happens automatically is that we win. If someone goes out to fight a hopeless war, then he’ll lose because he shouldn’t have done it. Right? It doesn’t matter whether the Holy One, blessed be He, is with us or not. Sometimes there is no choice, so maybe the Holy One, blessed be He, intervenes, performs a miracle—I don’t know exactly what. But things proceed as they are supposed to proceed. It is not true that there is some complete hope that in the end the goal of our soul will come. It’s not certain that it will come. If it ought to come, then it will come, and if it ought not to come, then it will not come. I’m saying this even within the conception that the Holy One, blessed be He, arranges everything and it does not depend on actions. The correct interpretation of the phrase “it was not and will not be” is that what is not good will not be. Yes, exactly. The same mistake—that was the same issue there.

“Therefore it adds strength and courage and distances us from all despair. The concept of faith brings us only to a complete understanding, comprehensive and intrinsic, that we will not be built by material forces alone, but also—and primarily—by the moral forces that will be perfected within us together with them. And this is certainly a covenant fixed and understood by anyone who understands and listens to the ways of our people from of old and to its inner life.” He says “its inner life” not for nothing. As I said earlier, there definitely are earlier sources—it’s not a new invention—that essentially say effort is false and faith is true. Which, as a paraphrase of what Rabbi Wolf writes in his physics book—I didn’t read it, by the way, I had no desire to read it—at the beginning of his book he writes there, “science is false and our Torah is true.”

Is that Rabbi Wolf? From the seminar? Yes. Those from Yekkes were always the worst. And what Rabbi Kook is basically saying here is that this is “a covenant fixed and understood” by anyone who listens to the ways of our people from of old and to its inner life. Because in its inner life, the Jewish people always knew that one has to make an effort. In slogans I can bring you many sources saying you don’t have to, that it’s all really false, and all sorts of stories that if you are a great righteous person you should stay at home and make no effort at all. But when you really listen to what this whole business is saying—and I think this is what Rabbi Kook means by “the inner life”—the Jewish people always understood this. They didn’t always say it; it wasn’t always the slogan. Some say this way and some say that way. Nachmanides was also a doctor, by the way. That’s very strange—Nachmanides, the father of this whole approach that effort is… yes, he was a doctor. So yes, you need to earn a living. Fine, not only do you need to earn a living—even earning a living is effort. Earning a living is not the issue. If he had no money, then he made a living.

[Speaker C] He didn’t need to—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let him pray, and special funds will come from everything.

[Speaker C] He’s a doctor, he doesn’t need to.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Our people need to develop according to their spirit, and their spirit needs to be built through full appreciation, through feeling, understanding, and inner recognition of all their great past and their future as well—something that no person of sound understanding can remain satisfied merely with as a wondrous possibility; in any event his spirit will not be able to endure according to its path except through the observance of Torah. Because all the efforts and substitutes and everything, in a reverse way, cause it so that in the end we really will not succeed in the mission. And people, in order to succeed in the mission—say, the Zionist one in his context—say, fine, so we have to abandon religion, because I’m not willing to swallow that nonsense, and yes, we need to fight, and yes, we need to advance on all sorts of fronts, we need to push this forward. So what happens as a result is that they also will not succeed, because effort alone also does not work. Meaning, you still need the religious backing, as he said above, because that gives us the confidence and the motivation to make an effort even in places where the chance is small that it will happen, and so on. So what happens is that you create a dichotomy that cannot work in any case, because faith alone doesn’t work and effort alone doesn’t work, but everyone agrees on one thing—both the secular and the religious—that those two together cannot go. Meaning, either you believe and then effort is false, or you make an effort and then faith is false. And therefore there are two camps in the public, whose goal, paradoxically, whose desire to attain the goal, is exactly what prevents them from doing so. Meaning, you say: I can’t attain the goal without effort, but faith tells me not to make an effort, so I leave faith and go do it the proper way, the human way. But that doesn’t work. Without faith, you won’t really succeed. You need that spirit. And therefore it is so important to create this synthesis between the believing outlook and giving backing to the outlook that understands one must make an effort—through the observance of Torah.

“Therefore, just as we need to care for all our national instruments, so too—and all the more so”—here he makes the second side of the essay, right? After speaking in praise of effort, he comes back and says: yes, but not effort alone. Not to abandon faith and deal with other things, but in addition. “Therefore we must return and, just as we need to care for our national instruments, so too and even more we must strive that faith be accepted in the hearts of all our young people who desire the building of the nation, and that it be accepted and deep in the heart to such an extent that they know and recognize that there is no burden and no obstacle in the path of life with faith and its observance.” Right—that it is not supposed to stop us. On the contrary, it is supposed to give us strength and motivation.

“And if they encounter some obstacle, they need to understand how far it reaches.” Sometimes faith does indeed limit; there are things one may do and things one may not do, so one has to know where yes and where no—not to exaggerate. Many times it appears that everything we want to do is basically forbidden. But that’s not so; one has to check where yes and where no. “And we, for our part, need to explain to them how its loss comes out as gain, how through a small apparent obstacle there will come to us great and enduring protection and salvation. And how can we explain all this to them? Only by means of books of thought and religious inquiry, which can be found in great abundance in such a way that they fill every complete feeling, until many wise and great people are devoted to working in this field of the doctrine of ideas and the wisdom of the inner morality within Torah, and then we will be able and certainly succeed in revealing the light within Torah and presenting it before our generation in a way that captures the heart, as our forefathers did,” and so on.

Meaning, the example he is talking about in this chapter is basically an example of what he is trying to do throughout the whole book. He is trying to create a synthesis between two things that are perceived by both sides as conflicting—just as we saw in the context of Torah and science in one of the previous chapters. There too there is a kind of agreement between both sides. The believers say science is false; the scientists say faith is false. But on one thing they both agree: science and faith cannot go together. On that everyone agrees. Now the whole question is only which one you choose. And what Rabbi Kook is basically trying to say is: friends, the fundamental conception that forces you to choose either this or that—that’s where your mistake is. And here too it’s the same thing. Either effort is false or faith is false. The common denominator of both sides is that effort and faith cannot go together. And once again, that is a mistake. It is not true. Effort and faith go together. It’s even better than not together. All right? So I think I’ll talk about this more next time, in order to make the clarification that I said was needed. That’s the end of the lesson.

[Speaker B] by Rabbi Michael Abraham in Confronting the Generation, Thursday, the 4th of Adar II, 5771, March 10, 2011.