Introduction to the Talmud and Halakha, Part 2 – Rabbi Michael Abraham

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[Speaker F] You said that in the Talmud they don’t actually issue Jewish law rulings. I’ll get to that in just a moment. So then it’s only in some sense, basically.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It has only formal authority, it just doesn’t make use of it. So that’s regarding the question of formal authority versus substantive authority. From the Talmud onward, in principle there is no formal authority. None. Including the Shulchan Arukh, which is maybe the closest candidate for this crown of formal authority—there is no formal authority to the Shulchan Arukh. There are people who disagree with it here and there. Even though it has very significant halakhic weight, that’s why it’s the closest thing to an authoritative text after the Talmud. The Rosh already writes this in a responsum, and the Shulchan Arukh itself cites that responsum of the Rosh in Choshen Mishpat, siman 25. Ask people on the street and they’ll tell you—they don’t know the difference between formal and substantive authority—there’s authority to all the medieval authorities (Rishonim), for example. With the later authorities (Acharonim), authority declines. You don’t disagree with medieval authorities (Rishonim), that’s the accepted view. But that doesn’t stand the test of reality; people do disagree with medieval authorities (Rishonim). Meaning, it’s a kind of declaration which, in my translation, means that the literature of the medieval authorities (Rishonim)—at least the central ones—has very important weight. Obviously. But that’s a question of weight. Meaning, it’s not mandatory authority. Meaning, it’s not something where if one of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) said something, or even if all the medieval authorities (Rishonim) agree, even there someone can come and say: I disagree. It almost never happens, but in principle it exists. There is no formal authority after the Talmud. After the Talmud, everything is substantive authority. And again, substantive authority means the person is an expert. If he says something, he probably knows. So you should listen to him—but not because they’ll come with claims against me in the heavenly court, let’s say, if I made a mistake and didn’t listen to some sage. So they can’t come to me with claims because it says, “Do not deviate”—what do you mean, you have to listen to him. No, claims like that won’t exist after the Talmud. What will exist? You were irresponsible. The expert told you this was forbidden, and you didn’t act accordingly. That’s irresponsible behavior; for that they can come to you with claims. But the clause under which they would accuse me of violating “Do not deviate,” because I didn’t recognize someone’s authority—that doesn’t exist after the Talmud. Okay? I’m not pretending to say what happens in the heavenly court, this is just for illustration. All right? So that’s regarding the question of authority.

[Speaker G] Now what happens is, I have another question. Yes. Does that mean that everything that didn’t exist in the past, then in practice there isn’t some…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Questions of electricity, for example, or something like that.

[Speaker G] Yes. Does that mean that in practice all the Jewish laws are not… that they have no support from an authorized expert?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, there is… you can… they deal with them through interpretation. Let’s say I say that turning on electricity is like kindling on the Sabbath, or like building on the Sabbath—those are labors that already appear in the Talmud itself. But the connection—that electricity is this labor or that labor, what the sages referred to there—that can be debated. Meaning, the connection. You can’t debate what appears in the Talmud. But is there no criterion for creating connections?

[Speaker G] After all, there’s no authorized expert who can do that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, there’s no authorized expert who can do that. Aren’t there substantive authorities today?

[Speaker G] For making connections, not for electricity—electricity, no. Is there an authorized expert who came and said, if in the future there will be all kinds of actions—but there are no authorized experts today. Ah, the authorized experts back then—did anyone give them, so to speak, tools?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No.

[Speaker D] I want to understand a nuance here. Take the Shulchan Arukh, okay? It doesn’t claim, I assume, that it has authority, right? So basically it comes and says: I come and draw from the… not draw from it—I come and give some kind of… I take the Talmud and say, this is my opinion, this is how it ruled. That’s basically what it says when it goes to the Shulchan Arukh. But it would be desirable for me to accept its opinion—yet there’s no obligation saying I can’t in any way disagree, that I agree with it that this is what the Talmud said.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. And you can say: in my view the Talmud said something else. You can’t say: you’re right that this is what the Talmud said, and I disagree. Because the Talmud has formal authority. Right? But you can say: I disagree with your interpretation of the Talmud; I learn it differently. Okay? And there too, again, if he’s a great Torah scholar, then it’s worth giving weight to what he says because he understands the issue, he’s an expert. But that’s substantive authority, not formal authority. Meaning, you’re not obligated. Like with a doctor—you don’t have to take the medicine he prescribes for you. It’s just sensible to take it because he understands it and you don’t. Okay? And no one will sue you for not listening to a doctor. You don’t have to listen to a doctor. He has no authority. It’s like a law professor versus a judge. Not listening to a judge—that’s formal authority, they’ll sue you for that. But a law professor, who may understand law better than the judge—you don’t have to listen to him because he has no formal authority; it only makes sense to listen to him because he’s an expert, he understands it. Okay? So that’s regarding the types of authority. Still, throughout history there were—well, not still, maybe precisely because of this—processes of what’s called codification and canonization. So it starts with canonization, say, the six orders of the Mishnah—that’s the first writing down by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, who edited the Mishnah. Basically, the Oral Torah was transmitted orally. It was forbidden to write it down. All right? For all kinds of reasons, but it was forbidden to write it down. At a certain stage Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi reached the conclusion that it had to be written down, otherwise we’d lose the whole thing, and he ruled against the existing Jewish law, “It is a time to act for the Lord; they have voided Your Torah,” as the Mishnah says—he ruled that the Mishnah had to be written down. And he documented the disputes that existed up to his time and different opinions and so on. The Mishnah contains disputes on all sorts of topics. You’ll hardly find there actual Jewish law rulings—who the Jewish law follows—but there are indications. For example, there are opinions that appear as the opinion of the majority, or without the name of a specific sage; usually the assumption is that Jewish law follows those. And if there’s an opinion that appears as that of a specific sage, that’s a minority opinion. It appears there, but we know the Jewish law does not follow it. But these are rules that accompany the Mishnah. In the Mishnah itself there are almost no halakhic decisions, hardly any. Okay? Now that’s the Mishnah. After that came the Talmud. And again, there were study halls that dealt with things orally, discussing and debating the Mishnah, the Torah, and so on. At a certain point the sages came and decided to write down the Talmuds as well. The Jerusalem Talmud—Rabbi Yochanan; the Babylonian Talmud—Rav Ashi and Ravina, and after them a few more centuries of consolidation, and it became a canonical text. Okay? Not a code, by the way—a canonical text. In a moment I’ll explain the difference. It’s a canonical text, meaning it’s binding, it’s closed, nothing is added to it and nothing taken away from it. Okay? After that, the next canonical texts, you could say, are Maimonides. And again, not authority in the sense that everyone must listen to him, but it is a closed text to which nothing is added, and it covers all areas of Jewish law. I’ll return to that point in a moment. The Tur and the Shulchan Arukh as well can be said to be works of this type. These are more or less texts that underwent canonization—they receive public recognition as central texts with important weight, some of them binding. Truly binding, like the Talmud, and some with very, very important weight—it’s almost unheard of to issue Jewish law against the Shulchan Arukh. It’s very rare. That’s regarding canonization. Regarding codification—meaning, that’s not the same thing. Codification is taking this canonical text and turning it into a code. A code is supposed to be organized, classified by topics—something that doesn’t exist in the Talmud; even in the Mishnah it doesn’t really exist. In Maimonides it already does, and in the Tur and Shulchan Arukh you could also say it does, although in the Tur and Shulchan Arukh several opinions appear. In a code it’s less common to include several opinions; a code has to decide. The only complete code in the history of Jewish law is Maimonides. Notice this—people aren’t aware of it—only Maimonides. And you have to understand what kind of work this man did; it was simply absolutely inconceivable. Anyone familiar with acts of canonization and codification done in modern legal systems—think of the codification of civil law that was done here. Dozens of experts sat on it for I don’t know how many years, and in the end they finished some portion, and even then they didn’t really finish sorting it all out. Maimonides took all the sources before him, up to his time—everything. The Talmuds, halakhic midrashim, everything. He filtered them, determined the bottom line, classified them by topics—all the things that committees of dozens of people do over generations. In Turkey and Egypt there were two very, very famous codifiers—I don’t remember their names anymore—who did work that to this day people speak about with admiration regarding Turkish law and Egyptian law, and Maimonides did that work alone, while also being a philosopher and the sultan’s doctor and answering questions. It’s simply inconceivable. And the way he did it was very reflective, very systematic. He details all the stages of how he arrived at this thing, because it’s very far from simple—how to classify, how to make sure you didn’t miss anything. He is the only one who covers all fields of Jewish law and closes with bottom lines. Again—not completely binding—but he created the only complete code. The Tur and the Shulchan Arukh deal only with laws practiced in the present time, and they already rely on Maimonides; they didn’t do the work alone. Maimonides did work that you just can’t understand how he did. Really, the man had unimaginable talents.

[Speaker G] And what he basically did—he created a module, built a kind of taxonomy, basically divided the…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, and he explains how he did it.

[Speaker G] And then by principle, he extracted it. He presented a modular principle, created classification and a module.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He does exactly what you’re saying.

[Speaker G] And in the end he also gives bottom lines. What’s the bottom line?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Jewish laws—he established all the Jewish laws, he closed all the topics, he made decisions everywhere, he explained what the Jewish law is, and that’s it.

[Speaker G] Meaning that his module, in the end orally, got to what—to the topics?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not to the topics; he uses the topics. Halakhic rulings: is it permitted to trap flies on the Sabbath or is it forbidden to trap flies on the Sabbath? That comes out of Talmudic passages and halakhic midrashim and everything else. In the end he arrived at bottom lines, practical directives. In principle he covers all practical directives.

[Speaker G] In all…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fields—everything you can find in halakhic material. Of course, it may be that he doesn’t deal with electricity because he didn’t know what electricity was. So we can take things Maimonides said and try to apply them to the question of electricity, and of course that’s a matter of interpretation. But everything that existed up to his time in his reality—everything. It’s just inconceivable; you have to understand that it’s inconceivable.

[Speaker F] Wait, Rabbi, maybe say one more word about what the Shulchan Arukh and the Tur decided not to…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Shulchan Arukh and the Tur deal only with laws that apply in the present time. Meaning: there’s no ritual impurity and purity there, no sacrifices, no laws of the holiness of the Temple, Temple and consecrated things. There are agricultural laws there, but not in very great detail—though yes, there are agricultural laws in Yoreh De’ah. Meaning, laws that apply in the present time.

[Speaker F] How do they formulate that—“laws that apply in the present time”? Is that the wording?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The fact that those areas don’t appear there—and that’s how it is—only this appears there. By the way, the Rif and the Rosh also issue Jewish law only for laws that apply in the present time. Meaning, Maimonides couldn’t even use the halakhic books that existed before him, because they didn’t do the work on laws that do not apply in the present time. That work he did from scratch. He could use the Rif—he knew the Rif—but only for the laws the Rif ruled on, which are laws that apply in the present time. Therefore Maimonides is the only code that encompasses all of Jewish law. The only competitor he has is the Shulchan Arukh completed by Future Shulchan Arukh—Arukh HaShulchan, sorry—and Future Shulchan Arukh; together maybe you could see that as some kind of code, but of course it also uses Maimonides. But that’s it; it’s the only halakhic code, and that is in fact its main importance. Meaning, Maimonides’ status derives not only from his greatness; it was also created and derived from the fact that he simply covered everything. So if you want to know something, the most natural thing is to go to Maimonides. Who else will you go to? Maybe someone else never dealt with it; with Maimonides you can also be sure. Why do people always raise difficulties on Maimonides and resolve Maimonides and so on? Because since Maimonides spoke about everything, you can see in him whether he’s consistent or not, because he spoke both here and there. Various other halakhic decisors or commentators maybe spoke here but didn’t speak there, so you don’t know whether they’re consistent or not. Maimonides is committed to consistency. And Maimonides formulated everything in clear Hebrew, unambiguous, precise in his language. One of the rules in Jewish law is that in Maimonides you can infer precisely from the wording. Unlike almost all the other commentators, where someone who infers from the wording is usually just being hair-splitting.

[Speaker F] What about Rashi, the Rosh, the Rif—there you don’t infer from the wording?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. You’re not supposed to infer from the wording. What do you mean, not infer? You have to understand what they said. But to infer from the phrasing—why he chose this formulation and not another—in Maimonides, yes. In Maimonides they also infer from where the Jewish law is placed. Many times that says a lot about how he understood that law, because he thought through where everything is located, how it’s formulated. You just have to understand—it’s inconceivable.

[Speaker G] Did he also talk about all this? Did he explain how he does what he does? The methodology?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Broadly speaking, yes. Yes. And he explained the rules that guided him.

[Speaker G] If we find this LLM and ask it to do Rambamist work, can we get insights here?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Interesting. Interesting.

[Speaker G] The question is whether…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whether it’s too open-ended. It would be very interesting to see what an LLM would do with this. I’d die to see it. What an LLM would do with this.

[Speaker A] Where does he write this?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In several places. He has the roots, which are in the introduction. After that he built roots—those are the rules for counting the commandments. He had to count the commandments. Why? Because the 613 commandments basically cover all the branches of Jewish law; everything else is just elaboration. The problem is that the 613 commandments are not written anywhere. They’re in the Torah, but how do you know—with interpretations and everything? So he had to establish rules—go back and establish rules for how you decide what is a commandment and how you divide the commandments. That’s called the roots. From those roots—and there he argued with various counters of commandments who came before him—from there he built Sefer HaMitzvot. Sefer HaMitzvot is the skeleton of the Mishneh Torah, because if you have the 613 commandments, you know you’ve covered all of Jewish law. So now you divide it, create a taxonomy of the commandments into fourteen books, and each one into several clusters of Jewish laws. Into each of them you place some of the commandments from the 613, you make sure nothing remains in the chamber, and that all of them are allocated, and then you know you’ve covered everything. And now all that remains is to gather all the material up to your time and place it literally inside the knowledge graph, inside that model, that ontology. Yes—to place everything there. When you said it earlier, suddenly a light went on for me—that this is really very similar work. Was Maimonides a human being, or was he some ancient LLM model?

[Speaker G] He was Yemeni. That’s offensive. So that’s you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he was Yemeni. The Yemenites follow him. Once he was a code. Yes. Anyway, those are the praises of Maimonides.

[Speaker H] I have a small question, if I may. When you say—when we talk, say, about Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi and he edits the Mishnah—there are things he leaves out of the Mishnah, right? Okay. When Maimonides takes that and makes his code, are there also things he doesn’t address—say, by virtue of not being in the Mishnah—or does he also deal with a baraita and…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He deals with everything, but he decides who is right. Meaning, he leaves out opinions that in his view are not Jewish law in practice. But in principle he deals with everything. He is the only halakhic decisor who talks about halakhic midrashim, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud—everything. You can’t even begin to talk about what happened there. What is this—you just can’t understand it. Really, it’s a project that simply—well, I’ve said that enough times already. So that’s the process of canonization. You need to understand that both the Shulchan Arukh and Maimonides took a lot of flak for what they did from other sages. And why? Because there’s something very anarchic in the genetic makeup of Jewish law. Jewish law did not, for good reason, produce codes. It doesn’t like codes. We live in a world of disputes and arguments—I think this, you think that. Don’t close it off for me. Who are you to close it off for me? Are you Moses our teacher? Are you the Holy One, blessed be He? Who are you to close Jewish law for me like that? Who appointed you? Tell me your opinion. But to tell me your opinion, you can’t write me a book like Maimonides that says: it is forbidden to trap flies on the Sabbath. You need to tell me: the Talmud says this, I interpret it this way, others interpret it differently; it seems to me this way for such-and-such reason. Maimonides didn’t say that; he wrote the Jewish law rulings. So what do you mean—you’re not bringing a reasoned position here. And as an unreasoned position, it’s worth nothing. And as for issuing Jewish law—nobody appointed you. You’re not the Holy One, blessed be He, to determine for us who is right and who is not. And therefore there was a controversy—these are called the controversies of canonization and codification—in Menachem Elon’s book called Hebrew Law, he has three very thick volumes, where he describes the codification controversies around the Shulchan Arukh and around Maimonides exactly on this point.

[Speaker G] But they don’t disagree with the ontology. There’s criticism, yes, of what he did…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Beyond that, right, and everyone is also full of appreciation. Meaning—but division, but dispute. But there was an extremely fierce dispute over this. Meaning, they didn’t let him off the hook over it. There’s something—and this is very important to understand—something in the halakhic structure is very anarchic; it very much resists the imposition of rigid templates. And there’s something awesome about that, and we need to understand it very, very well—including a bit in relation to ourselves, some of what we talked about today. We need to understand it very well, because when people ask, wait a second, so what does Jewish law say? There’s no such thing as “what does Jewish law say.” Let’s clarify the topic; I come out with this reasoning, I come out with that reasoning. You have to decide. Someone else, another branch, will decide differently. There is no “what does Jewish law say.” Even if it’s written in the Shulchan Arukh or in Maimonides—still no.

[Speaker G] Some will say: whatever you feel like.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Yes, exactly. So I’m saying: from the outside, it often looks as if you do whatever you want. I think that someone who understands it from the inside understands that this is not true. It’s not whatever you want, but it is a softer system of thought; it’s not deductive. But there is still right and wrong within that system. Meaning, you need to understand this. A lot of times, for example, in relation to critics of the legal system—I once had a lightbulb moment at a conference at the Van Leer Institute. There were lawyers there against rabbis, around Aharon Barak—it was in the Aharon Barak period, there were tremendous quarrels, all the rabbis were furious with Aharon Barak—and Van Tyr was sitting there, the last dinosaur positivist, and he sat there defending: what are you talking about, this is all purely professional work, it has nothing whatsoever to do with worldviews or anything. And they looked at him as if he’d fallen from the moon. Now I said to myself: look, he’s not an idiot—I don’t know, I assume not, I don’t know him—but he’s probably not an idiot. And no, Van Tyr is from Bar-Ilan, sorry, that one who was a Supreme Court justice from Hebrew University—what was his name? Religious.

[Speaker D] Cheshin? Nachum? No, no, no. Englard? No, you just said Nachum.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, Shalom… never mind, someone else, it’s not important, I forgot his name, and his name. So he was a Supreme Court justice and he was speaking from inside the system. And I said: apparently we, who look at the legal system from the outside, react to it the way I feel people react to the halakhic system, when I’m on the inside and others come from the outside. And they tell you: you do whatever you want, you do what suits you. Because the fact is, he’s Zionist so he rules this way, he’s Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) so he rules that way. We can see that you’re basically biased by worldviews and all kinds of things like that. Now someone who lives the halakhic discourse from the inside understands that this isn’t true. There are such correlations, but there are discussions, and you can bring proofs, and you can persuade, and you can agree and disagree, and not all of us are always perfectly straight—fine, we’re all human beings—but there is right and wrong. Meaning, it’s a softer framework; it’s not deduction, but there is right and wrong. Meaning, there is a way to conduct Talmudic discourse, and that’s a very important point, because here I come to the point we discussed today. The Talmud is a very unusual canonical text. I don’t know if there is another text like it at all—I don’t know one, though maybe there is. It’s a text built out of passages, passages in each of which there are all kinds of discussions from here and there, a little associative, proofs this way, proofs that way, answers, objections, refutations, all kinds of things like that, without a bottom line. In almost no passage—almost no passage ends with a Jewish law ruling. Sometimes there is “and the Jewish law is such-and-such,” and sometimes there is “refutation,” and afterward “and the Jewish law is such-and-such”—a complete mess.

[Speaker D] And that’s really what bothered them—not only the fact that suddenly someone comes and says now in any case I won’t need to come and decide ad hoc with some kind of flexibility and I’ll just have the law—but also something about the Jewish way of life itself, okay, which basically said: I need to go to yeshiva and argue and engage in pilpul and not really arrive at a bottom line. And now suddenly someone gives me a bottom line. The fact is, this system survived despite Maimonides. Not despite—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, despite Maimonides.

[Speaker D] Despite the fact that suddenly someone came with bottom lines and did codification, but…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here I’m coming exactly to that… I’m coming to that right now. Meaning, the claim…

[Speaker G] But again, if there are no bottom lines, there’s a strong statement here. The text comes and says my goal is not to give bottom lines, but rather to expose a worldview. A worldview that looks at situations with complexity, and through the process of discussion I expose for you some kind of value-based course. Meaning, we intentionally don’t mark bottom lines because that misses the point.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s already interpretation, but I completely agree with that interpretation. Meaning, the fact is that the text is open. It doesn’t end with bottom lines. Why is that so? So I completely agree. The claim, basically, is that the Talmud never came to play a role like Maimonides and the Shulchan Arukh. On the contrary—that was the criticism of Maimonides and the Shulchan Arukh. Why are you deviating from the path of the Talmud and closing things with bottom lines? The Talmud wants to teach us how to discuss, how to analyze things, how to look at them from different angles, and in the end you’ll reach your own decisions. That’s not my business. As long as you did it with Talmudic methodology. Meaning, the Talmud dictates a methodology. Now there’s something here that in my opinion is genius. Genius, and I don’t know to attribute it to anyone specific, but there’s a collective intelligence here. Because if they had closed the canonical Talmud like the Shulchan Arukh or Maimonides, it would have blown up. You can’t close bottom lines when the Jewish people are scattered all over the world, every ten Jews in some fishing village are influenced by different circumstances, and this one knows how to read, that one knows how to write, each one interprets differently, thinks differently, lives in a different culture. If there had been rigid bottom lines, it would have exploded; it couldn’t have held together. Now, if they hadn’t done canonization at all—that’s the second option—they wouldn’t do canonization at all, everyone… it would spread as it spread… develop as it developed—we wouldn’t be here today. We wouldn’t be here today because basically a hundred thousand Judaisms would have developed with no connection between them. Now what they decided to do in the process—again, history decided, I don’t know who decided, but in the end it happened, and it’s a kind of collective intelligence—they decided to establish a binding canonical text that doesn’t say anything. Meaning, it doesn’t not say anything, but it gives methodology, gives a framework for discussion without giving bottom lines. Now what happened as a result of that—only because of that are we here today, in my opinion. If that hadn’t happened, if they had chosen one of the other two options, we wouldn’t be here.

[Speaker G] So there, you answered my question. I asked whether, if we want to build agentic systems, where in the end every agent is an intelligence that at the next stage is supposed to serve me in some kind of cooperation, then the solution is not to give them bottom lines. It’s to give them some sort of methodology of discussion, to give them a methodology of discussion that presents and exposes… and is exposed to a value-world through argumentation and simulation, and then in that way they can themselves reach decisions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Through…

[Speaker G] Through the fact that they basically have all kinds of…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As for agents, it would be an interesting experiment to do this. But in practice that’s what happened in the Jewish world, I think.

[Speaker G] Rules like “you may not disagree with…” —you’d have to build some kind of…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But you know—“you may not,” but sometimes they do disagree.

[Speaker G] There’s something significant here, because even “you shall not murder”—nothing here is well defined. So okay, murder—now define what murder is. And it’s like “an eye for an eye.” You’re going to waste tons of electricity on this… really, absolutely.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But there’s something here—look, today it has become clear that great sages who lived in completely different cultures, in completely different periods, speak with each other as if they’re sitting around one table. Now, they don’t think the same way. Culture influences, circumstances influence, society influences, everything influences, history influences—and they speak as if they’re sitting around one table. This one disagrees with that one, and that one agrees with the other, and of course there are always connections among them too. Why? Because all of them are inside the methodological framework of the Talmud. What each one does with it and how he interprets it—each one something else. But they managed to create a system in which what connects everyone is not principles of bottom lines at all, but a methodology of deliberation. Within that methodology each one thinks as he thinks, and we continue to argue, to conduct discussion, to kill one another—kill in the metaphorical sense—within that framework. And that kept Judaism alive as one organism only because the framework that organized it was a soft framework, without bottom lines—a framework that dealt with the methodology of discussion and not with what one must do.

[Speaker F] How many times have you already said “methodology”? Is “methodology” a word you stand behind all the way? Is it the most precise word to characterize the Talmud?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think so, but the question is what you mean by methodology. If you mean by methodology a set of rules that are formulated and well defined, then no.

[Speaker F] Then what would you call it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re talking about a general mode of thought. I can try to propose rules to you, and there too we’ll have disagreements—what are the rules that describe this methodology. But the fact is that it conveys some kind of genre of arguments, clarifications, deliberations, in some sense that I don’t know how to formulate as a well-defined set of rules.

[Speaker G] A methodology of…

[Speaker J] Big data. But the distinction you once made between casuistry and positivism—yes—that in the Talmud they don’t go with an approach of giving rigid rules, but of giving examples, and you learn from the examples how to apply it to your own tools. So that’s a bit reminiscent of AI in the sense that you don’t, say, teach AI what the rule is for distinguishing between a dog and a cat; you show it lots of pictures of dogs, lots of pictures of cats, and it’ll rack its brain figuring out how to distinguish between a dog and a cat.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Meaning, the Talmudic structure—and I’ve written about this more than once—is very, very similar to the way we teach an artificial intelligence system. Very similar. You don’t give it rules at all; you give it cases. And that’s what’s called casuistry in legal theory, as opposed to positivism which works—yes, German law, the Bundeslaw—it goes from top to bottom: there are rules, and from them you derive cases by deduction. In common law, yes, British law, you go from cases and make analogies to other cases. They’ve already converged toward each other somewhat, but broadly speaking those are the two poles, and the Talmud leans very strongly toward the British model. Very strongly. Meaning, we begin with cases, make analogies between them, and the rules always appear among later commentators. They try to generate rules that describe the cases appearing in the Talmud. In the Talmud itself there are few rules—few rules. There are some, but very few.

[Speaker F] Do you think that given this particular set of cases, several Talmuds could have emerged?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In principle, yes. Yes. And still, you see—think about an AI system. You give it a thousand examples, okay, say supervised learning, right? You give it an example and tell it what’s right and what’s not right. In principle there are infinitely many ways to generalize that, right, when you give it a thousand examples. But the fact is that it does converge…

[Speaker F] Converge.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To the right answer, with one degree of reliability or another. The same thing happens here. But in principle it could have generalized it in many ways. But the fact that… and therefore indeed there are different sages and different learning cultures and so on—but it does converge in some way, at least in the sense that we can talk to one another. Meaning, we haven’t lost contact with the mothership. Okay? In that sense, I think this too is, to my mind, a fascinating phenomenon. I don’t think it has another example, though I don’t know. It would be interesting, interesting to examine that.

[Speaker G] You said there are only a few cases. Often the exception comes to teach us something. So is there a characteristic of the places where the Talmud does come and state things clearly, as a bottom line?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can’t say. I haven’t thought about it. Interesting question. I can, however, bring examples showing that when the Talmud as a whole refers to rules, it sounds strange even to the sages of the Talmud themselves. Meaning, the Gemara says—brings the four primary categories. The Mishnah says at the beginning of Bava Kamma: “There are four primary categories of damages: the ox, the pit, the grazer, and the fire.” Okay? And then the Gemara says: “And what is common to them is that their way is to cause damage, and their safeguarding is upon you,” and so on—it gives the rule. Okay? Then on page 6 the Gemara asks a question that we’re all used to, but when you look at it—it asks: “What does this general rule come to include?” Meaning, why did you bring me the rule? Once you’ve really already given me the rule, say thank you—ask why they brought the cases, the examples, because they already gave you the rule; the examples are just particular cases. No. The Talmud, when given the particular cases and the rule, asks why the rule is needed—not why the particular cases are needed. Because the casuistry is so deeply built in, that the Gemara says in Kiddushin: “One does not learn from general rules”—general rules in the plural—“even in a place where an exception was stated.” Meaning, think of a rule that says: every positive commandment dependent on time—women are exempt. Let’s say there were such a rule. There is such a rule. Okay. Now you say: yes, but there’s one commandment where we found that they are obligated. Fine, so they said more or less the rule, but there are also exceptions. But if they formulate the rule like this: every positive commandment dependent on time—women are exempt, except for A, B, C, and D. Now I say: wait, but there’s also E. That’s already strange, right? They already brought the exceptions, so you’d expect that here the formulation really is exhaustive. But no—what’s the big deal? “One does not learn from general rules even in a place where an exception was stated”—even when they bring the exceptions. So there are more exceptions—why are you making such a big issue out of everything? So I think whoever wrote that was joking. And that seems pretty clear to me. But what does it teach us nevertheless? It says: be careful with rules. The Talmud doesn’t like rules. There are rules there, but it doesn’t like rules, and these rules are always broken, and then they invent some sub-rule and all kinds of things like that. The Talmud doesn’t like rules.

[Speaker D] Something here admittedly confuses me a bit. Okay. When we talked about Maimonides, you described him as a code, right? Now at least in my imagination I picture this as working with bottom lines—even if it doesn’t formally connect them—working on the basis of bottom lines of what he basically said from the Talmud itself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are no bottom lines in the Talmud itself.

[Speaker D] No, but he inferred from it—he says this is the… this is how they decided. So in a certain sense, although it’s a code, right, if he goes by the Talmud’s bottom lines, then it’s still some kind of casuistic thing. Meaning, it’s not… it’s still a kind of common law, okay?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even though there are rules there from which…

[Speaker D] Even though the process isn’t there, only the bottom line, it’s still not exactly a code—not the grand German code. It’s more like common law still.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Even where he would show you how it came out, he still wouldn’t set the rules for how to derive it in other places. Meaning, rules do not appear in Maimonides. Even though it’s a code, what appears there are cases: in this case the law is this, in that case the law is that. Rules do appear there—there are some, a little. Very rare. Meaning, he didn’t turn back into German law. I completely agree. Okay. Now this point basically says that over the generations, rules are created even within the world of the Oral Torah and Jewish law. Rules are created—even in the Gemara itself there are rules. But as I said earlier, the Gemara also warns against clinging too tightly to rules. It places rules there, but cautiously. Because we all think with rules; we can’t think without rules. But one has to be careful. The parable I once heard for this, from Moshe Koppel, was that it’s like the development of a language. Language develops in a living way—we speak—until some person comes along, some linguist, and says: ah, there’s a rule: at the beginning of a word, beged kefet takes a dagesh. Those rules come to approximate, in some fashion, what emerged from the language in the end. That’s how one should also relate to the rules of the Gemara. The rules of the Gemara, and the rules of the halakhic decisors, and all of that. Meaning, in the final analysis those rules are merely proposals by commentators on how to approximate, more or less, the bulk of the facts in the Talmudic context.

[Speaker G] Exactly. The most compact model you can find for organizing a language.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Assuming it’s the most compact—even that I’m not…

[Speaker G] Sure, but…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sure of. But that’s at least what it purports to be, yes, agreed. Meaning, it’s the compact model, but there are always deviations. Yes, it says regarding the disputes of Abaye and Rava that the Jewish law follows Rava except for six cases. The Gemara itself says this, this isn’t another interpretation—the Gemara says: except for six cases, Y-A-L K-G-M, the acronym. Fine? Maimonides rules in at least two more places like Abaye, which are not among those six cases. Now that’s against the Gemara. So how do you understand such a thing? So the commentators on Maimonides tear out their hair and try to create sub-rules so that somehow it can still… there’s no basis for it, obviously not. Maimonides probably understood that this Talmudic rule is a guiding rule, and if you have a clear position that the Jewish law follows Abaye in this specific case, then rule like him. If you don’t have a position, then you need to rule like Rava except for those six cases. If you do have a position, very good—then do what you think. There’s a well-known story about the Chazon Ish that I heard from the original source, yes—Rabbi Yogel once told me this in Pardes Hanna. They would go with the Chazon Ish, and he and Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel were study partners—also a well-known Torah scholar from Bnei Brak, both of them have already passed away—and in the 1950s they would go up from Bnei Brak once a week as a study pair and go to the Chazon Ish once a week to ask him questions. Then Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel asked him: tell me, but you wrote this way there, and it doesn’t fit? So he says to him: of course, Gedaliah—if you think otherwise, then do otherwise, what do you want? Meaning, what—as if—fine. I don’t write things as though this were mathematics. Nachmanides writes in the introduction to Milchamot that “the wisdom of our Torah is not like the wisdom of astronomy and mathematics, whose proofs are conclusive.” It doesn’t work with deductions. Meaning, it works with analogies, it works with soft comparisons. It’s not logical thinking in the strict sense of the word. I’ve worked quite a bit on trying to formalize the soft logic of the Gemara, which in my view can also be formalized in some way—the hermeneutic principles, not of the Gemara, but it is still soft logic. Meaning, that’s why you have all these disputes, and in those disputes you won’t find right and wrong in a simple sense. You’ll find someone you agree with and someone you don’t agree with. But there is almost no such thing as right and wrong here. In the language of the Gemara this is called “mistaken in a Mishnah.” Someone who missed a Mishnah is mistaken. There are almost no such things. Usually it’s “mistaken in judgment.” Meaning, you have this judgment, and there’s another judgment, okay.

[Speaker G] Here maybe just a brief comment about fuzzy logic. I’m saying: I have some probability that this thing holds, and then I have a probability for the whole thing. In logic, sometimes I work according to some logical criterion and sometimes I don’t.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that’s an interesting question, because fuzzy logic also isn’t exactly probability. Probability is one example of fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic is something broader. Right. Now, which of these fuzzy logics fit the Talmudic text? That’s another question. Yes.

[Speaker G] You have logics in which you add a probabilistic dimension, and then you kind of have that formalism. Yes, okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, probability itself is a kind of fuzzy logic. Meaning, because you get truth values that aren’t only zero or one, but the whole range between zero and one. That’s multi-valued logic. Okay. But again, probability really is one particular model of fuzzy logic. There are other fuzzy logics. For example, Łukasiewicz’s, Łukasiewicz’s three-valued logic, which also deals with future-tense statements. Never mind, there are all kinds of fuzzy logics. But I’m saying again: you can talk about being right in terms of probability, being wrong in terms of probability, but nobody knows how to quantify that. I don’t think that language will help here. I can tell you that if I think like someone, I still can’t stake my head on it. I’m not sure it’s correct, but that’s my opinion. And I go with that opinion. Meaning, I understand that there can also be another position, and someone else thinks differently, and that’s fine, as long as he brings reasonable arguments for his position.

[Speaker G] And in both cases—whether it’s three-valued logic, or whether I have probability and I know how to map values to probability, or whether I don’t commit to numbers but I say there’s uncertainty here—there are two tracks. Meaning, I come and build expressions, and on that basis I decide. Meaning, I can say there’s a space and I can derive exactly what the possible space is. I can come and say something else: no, now I’m like a philosopher. It’s true that that’s what I derive, but I want for a moment to work with my intuition and my gut feeling, and therefore I say it’s not correct. And then I break the mechanisms of classical reasoning here and say: no, no, no—even though logic took me here, I’m now activating intuition.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, I don’t think that in the Talmud—I don’t think you see that, and I’m also not sure I agree with the distinction you made. Meaning, in the end there is always reasoning. But the question is what assumptions stand at the basis of the reasoning. After all, every reasoning process starts from assumptions, axioms, right? Then you reason and reach a conclusion. Now, the intuitions are found in your choice of the basic assumptions. So if we have different intuitions, we’ll start from different assumptions, but with the same rules of logic we’ll reach different conclusions. Then we’ll have a dispute. But the dispute is not because we have no reasoning, or because our reasoning is not logical, but because we chose different assumptions. That’s certain. It seems to me that’s right.

[Speaker G] When people say, “It doesn’t feel right to me,” they won’t always really know how to say—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I have an intuition that… fine. They won’t know, so what?

[Speaker G] But that’s the point. That’s really taking it in another direction. The person says: it feels to me that this isn’t taking me in the direction I want it to. I have no idea how I get there…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have a healthy feeling that what you’re saying is wrong. Like in a paradox. In a paradox, you have very clear logical reasoning in favor of some conclusion, and yet something says that that conclusion is wrong. Right.

[Speaker G] Zeno. Zeno. Nimrod.

[Speaker H] No, but what Nimrod is saying—and Rabbi, if I may add—when you say people say “it doesn’t feel right to me” or things like that, they’re no longer saying something about the claim and whether it’s true or false; they’re saying something about themselves. About yourself, say whatever you want. About the claim—you have no way to say whether it’s true or false.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That distinction between me and the claim, in my opinion, doesn’t exist at all in the world of the Talmud. Meaning, if I feel that it’s not correct, then as far as I’m concerned it’s not correct. I don’t attribute that to some lack of understanding on my part; quite the opposite. The sages say: if I feel that it’s not correct, apparently I won’t issue a halakhic ruling that way, at least in many cases. And then, as far as I’m concerned, that feeling is only directing me to the fact that it really isn’t correct. It’s not a statement about me. It’s a statement about how I understand Jewish law.

[Speaker H] About how you understand it—in my opinion that is a statement about you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? Well, that depends on the halakhic decisors, of course—each one and his own proportions, and how strong the evidence against it is, how strong your feeling is. Of course you can’t lay down hard-and-fast rules here. But I’m talking about these feelings not in the sense of, look, I’m uncomfortable with it. It’s clear to me that this is the conclusion, but I’m uncomfortable with it. I’m built in such a way that it makes me uncomfortable. No. I’m talking about a feeling that says: something here is not right. Like in a paradox. Just think about the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. You reach the conclusion that Achilles never catches the tortoise. But we all know that he does catch the tortoise, right?

[Speaker H] No, wait. That’s not the problem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why isn’t that a problem?

[Speaker H] No, wait, of course that’s… The fact that we all know he catches the tortoise isn’t the paradox. The paradox is that you have no explanation for why Zeno is wrong. The fact that you have an alternative explanation doesn’t take away from the fact that Zeno’s explanation also seems correct.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Completely right, and that is exactly what I’m saying. Meaning, I’m saying that the reasoning led me to the conclusion that Achilles doesn’t catch the tortoise—Zeno’s argument—as long as I haven’t found an error in him, right? Right. But the conclusion—the conclusion is clearly wrong. So now what do I do? Do I eventually conclude: okay, then apparently Achilles doesn’t catch the tortoise, and as for my feelings, I’ll take a pill to overcome them? Or do I say no—my intuition tells me that something in Zeno’s reasoning is wrong, even if I can’t put my finger on exactly where.

[Speaker H] Right, and it only took two thousand years to develop calculus to explain why Zeno really is wrong.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but in my opinion it’s not calculus. I once wrote an article about that. It’s not calculus, but that’s a different discussion, never mind. But true, that’s exactly the point. The point is that if I have an intuition that the result is incorrect, I will go with it. I’ll also issue a halakhic ruling with it. And what about the reasoning? I’ll think about where the flaw in the reasoning is. But many times Rabbi Soloveitchik, for example, wrote that when a halakhic decisor issues a halakhic ruling, he usually knows the answer first and only afterward looks for the reasoning that leads to it. That’s a somewhat exaggerated description, but there’s a lot of truth in it. Meaning, that feeling, as far as I’m concerned, directs me to what is correct. It’s not a statement about me. A statement about that feeling—it’s perceived as a tool for the decisor, or for the interpreter. Meaning, I feel that this is right. Now many times, after he feels it, one can try to think it through and formalize it and produce reasoning from it. Meaning, but the feeling—like in mathematics. In the end, the mathematician has to provide a proof. Without that he can’t. But he has a feeling that this theorem—Fermat’s theorem—he had a conjecture that it was true. Fermat also had a proof, never mind, but for our purposes, he had a conjecture that it was true, and that gave people motivation to look for the reasoning that would lead there. But in the end, almost everyone was willing to stake their head on the fact that Fermat was right even before there was a proof, otherwise Andrew Wiles wouldn’t have spent six years on it. Right? Meaning, you don’t spend six years on something you don’t think is true. Okay, the same thing in Jewish law. In Jewish law this is an everyday matter. Meaning, when you feel that something here smells fishy, something here is not… you won’t rule that way. There’s actually such a law in monetary law; it’s called a fraudulent case. A judge has valid evidence brought before him, valid evidence, and he hasn’t found a problem. But something sounds fishy to him. So he withdraws from the case. He says: this is a fraudulent case, something here feels wrong to me, I’m stepping away, I’m not willing to decide this case; let another judge come—if you convince him, fine. Meaning, there is weight to the sense of smell, to the intuition of the halakhic decisor, no less than to the orderly reasoning he produces. Many times it’s the sign for which direction to look for the reasoning in; meaning, the sense of smell tells you: this is what’s right. Okay, now let’s think how one can substantiate this. So in the end it is desirable to substantiate it, but sometimes the decisor will say: look, my heart tells me—as Rabbi Asher Weiss often says—my heart tells me that this is not right. Something here, something is not right. Okay? So that has weight. It’s not a statement about the person himself; it’s a statement about Jewish law. All right, it seems we really need to finish. I’ve more or less finished, there’s still a little more, there are still a few things, but—

[Speaker G] Things—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] More practical ones. So if you want, we can continue afterward, maybe even study some passage and look at the… Thank you very much.

[Speaker C] When you say—when you say to yourself, according to what… according to what seems right to you, and afterward you look for the reasoning, are you basically saying according to what seems just in your eyes? Or according to what… what is right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not interests, obviously not. I’m talking about: I have an intuition that this is correct.

[Speaker D] He means… he means to draw a distinction between what is just and what seems correct to you from the standpoint of intellectual inference?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I mean the second. Not what is just in the sense of natural justice, but it seems to me that this is what Jewish law says. The question of the relationship between that and natural justice is an extremely complex question; we could talk about it for several lectures if you want. But that… that’s another question. What I’m talking about right now is: I have an intuition that this is what Jewish law says, not in the sense that this is what is morally proper.

[Speaker D] I’ll tell you why—where this question comes from. I know my father, it comes from the world of… of law, where sometimes the judge marks the target before he shoots the arrows, so that’s where it comes from.

[Speaker C] Erez is absolutely right, because when I did a lot of arbitrations in my life—and an arbitrator is like a judge, and arbitration according to law—and I heard the case, one side and the other side and the witnesses and so on and so on, I felt something very similar to what you’re saying: once I felt what was just, and a second time what was legally correct. And if the two came together, because sometimes the law does not serve justice, but let’s say the two came together, then I mark for myself that this will be the result, and now I start looking for how to justify it. If I don’t succeed, then no. But this way is a way that in my opinion is also very common in courts.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I was talking about something a little different, as I said. That also exists, but I was talking about something a little different, because that requires further clarifications that I won’t go into here. I was talking about something else—not in the sense of my feeling of natural justice, but my feeling that something in this reasoning is not correct; meaning, Jewish law says something else, when I don’t know exactly how to put my finger on it, like Zeno’s paradox. I don’t know how to put my finger on where Zeno made the mistake in the formulation, but it’s clear to me that the conclusion is wrong. And then many times I will still give weight to that feeling, and I will rule in accordance with that feeling, not specifically because of natural justice.

[Speaker C] I understand, I understand, there’s no need to add anything, I understood that already from before. Your experience and your deep knowledge lead you to a certain thought, and from that point on it has to be substantiated.

[Speaker D] Right, thank you very much.

[Speaker F] Okay friends, three-thirty, philosophical sync.