A Look at Torah and Torah Study – Lesson 2 – Rabbi Michael Avraham
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The problem with defining Torah and the need for a conceptual dimension
- The prose-poetry axis and the distinction between pure prose and distilled poetry
- Kitsch, art, and the role of the artist’s added value
- The museum, Marcel Duchamp, and marking context as a component of understanding
- Vagueness, the sorites paradox, and fuzzy logic
- The axis of poeticness as a metric and the extreme points as typological entities
- Combinatorial definitions and psychiatric diagnostics
- Constitutive and regulative definitions: chess, basketball, and traffic rules
- Disputes about concepts, one truth, and changes over time
- The Torah is called poetry, and the discussion in Sha’agat Aryeh on “And now write for yourselves this song”
- Jewish law as the focal point of Torah and the need to explain the status of the other parts
- Midrash in Sabbath 88: the angels, Moses, and the human garb of the Torah
- Zen, archery, and Nachmanides on combinations of names
Summary
General Overview
The text presents a fundamental difficulty in defining the concept of Torah without collapsing into external definitions, and therefore builds a model for understanding complex concepts through the example of poetry. Poetry is described as a continuum between pure prose and distilled poetry, with most texts lying somewhere in the middle in different proportions, and the vagueness is resolved through fuzzy logic rather than a binary division. From this it is argued that many definitions are not constitutive but regulative: they try to capture an existing concept and therefore remain open to dispute and change. Finally, it is argued that the Torah is called poetry because the Torah itself is an abstract thing that clothes itself in different garments, and Jewish law and the verses are the human garb of that abstract content.
The Problem with Defining Torah and the Need for a Conceptual Dimension
The text states that the approach to defining Torah cannot suffice with social indicators such as “anything printed in Rashi script” or “bound in a brown cover with gold lettering,” and therefore requires an attempt to enter a conceptual dimension. The text presents definition as a process of “clarification” and progress in understanding rather than the creation of a sharp definition. The text states that the discussion of poetry will serve two purposes: to demonstrate a way of defining a complex concept, and because the Torah itself is called poetry, so understanding poetry will affect our understanding of Torah.
The Prose-Poetry Axis and the Distinction Between Pure Prose and Distilled Poetry
The text sets up a continuum on which different manifestations of poetry are arranged “in different doses” between two extremes. The text defines the pure prose end as texts like an encyclopedia entry or a phone book, in which the message lies in the meaning of the words and sentences and the text merely conveys information. Opposite this it places an end of distilled poetry, where the meaning is not found in the literal meaning of the words and sentences, and gives as an example “Once there was a lonely lamp at the edge of a neighborhood” to illustrate that the situation serves as a medium to evoke something else that is not the literal information. The text argues that in the middle there are many phenomena containing “a bit of this and a bit of that,” and that literature too lies in the middle because it describes events in a prose-like way but uses them to convey meaning beyond the facts.
Kitsch, Art, and the Role of the Artist’s Added Value
The text cites Thomas Kulka from Tel Aviv University and presents his argument that kitsch arouses strong emotion through the depicted situation rather than through the artist’s artistic value. The text characterizes kitsch as a case in which the creator’s contribution is mainly technical precision and transmission of the situation, so that the excitement comes from the content itself rather than from the mode of conveyance. The text states that art requires added value from the creator, such as an angle or perception ordinary people do not see, and therefore when the excitement is generated by the situation rather than the artistic processing, it has no artistic value. The text connects this to poetry and argues that poetry is art because the poet uses words as raw material and adds value to them that conveys a meaning not identical with their literal meaning.
The Museum, Marcel Duchamp, and Marking Context as a Component of Understanding
The text cites Marcel Duchamp and the toilet “Fountain” in order to reject the nihilistic view that “art is whatever is placed in a museum,” but also to explain that the museum has a role as a contextual marker. The text argues that the toilet in the museum is a work of art because the message is not “there are toilets” but something else conveyed through the toilet as a medium, even without technical artistic skill. The text compares this to poetry and argues that the printing format, line breaks, vocalization, or the declaration that this is a poem are meant to signal to the reader how to approach the text so that it will not be read as informative prose. The text states that the reader must know in advance that this is poetry in order to interpret the same words in a way in which the meaning is not located directly in their literal sense.
Vagueness, the Sorites Paradox, and Fuzzy Logic
The text presents the sorites paradox as a contradiction among three plausible claims: one stone is not a heap, adding one stone to something that is not a heap does not make it a heap, and a thousand stones are a heap. The text resolves this by arguing that the binary assumption is mistaken and that one should speak of “different degrees of heapness,” where adding one stone slightly increases the degree of heapness. The text presents fuzzy logic as a logic that assigns each collection a number between zero and one, and argues that the binary language of “heap/not a heap” is a shorthand that creates disputes about terms rather than about reality. The text extends this to concepts such as rich, smart, fish, and even Torah-level and rabbinic, and argues that instead of “either-or” one should speak in terms of degrees of validity and degrees of belonging.
The Axis of Poeticness as a Metric and the Extreme Points as Typological Entities
The text formulates the arrangement of phenomena on the axis between prose and poetry through a quantitative mixture, such as p between zero and one, and presents literature as an intermediate case in which there is both prose and a poetic dimension. The text argues that there is no such thing in the world as “distilled poetry” and no “distilled prose”; these are typological endpoints analogous to plus infinity and minus infinity as useful extremes for describing a continuum. The text states that the goal is less to define sharply and more to “clarify” by means of edge cases that help place real phenomena in the middle.
Combinatorial Definitions and Psychiatric Diagnostics
The text presents a model of combinatorial definition from psychiatric diagnostics, in which one gives a set of characteristics and defines a syndrome by “five out of eight” or by scoring. The text argues that such a model does not provide a definition of the concept itself but rather criteria for identifying its appearance—that is, diagnostics rather than clarification. The text includes a critique of the concept of the “normal” through Foucault and argues that this is a particular cultural definition, alongside mention of claims by Baruch Kahane and Rotenberg of Jerusalem about the possibility of a Jewish psychology/psychiatry that does not identify dependence on community as deviance. The text maintains the assumption that despite the difficulty of defining, complex concepts still exist and can be understood even without complete verbal formulation, mentioning Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as inspiration for this position.
Constitutive and Regulative Definitions: Chess, Basketball, and Traffic Rules
The text distinguishes between constitutive and regulative systems of rules through the example of chess, where moving a knight like a bishop is not a “violation” but leaving the game, as opposed to basketball or soccer, where a “foul” is part of the game with sanctions. The text presents constitutive rules as those that define the institution itself, and regulative rules as those that regulate a domain that exists even without the rules. The text applies this to definitions: in mathematics a definition is constitutive and therefore there is no right or wrong, whereas in human concepts a definition is regulative and therefore there is genuine disagreement about the concept. The text argues that “definitions of despair” such as “art is what is found in a museum” forcibly turn the definition into a constitutive one instead of continuing the regulative attempt to capture an existing concept.
Disputes About Concepts, One Truth, and Changes Over Time
The text argues that a dispute about a definition indicates that we are dealing with a regulative definition and that there is “one truth,” because if there were no shared concept there would be nothing to argue about. The text illustrates this with the argument over “Who is a Jew?” between a halakhic definition and a cultural-civic definition, and rejects a solution of “semantic separation” as though these were merely different names. The text presents a parallel example of a moral argument to show that replacing terms does not eliminate a real dispute about the same concept. The text adds that regulative definitions also make it possible to speak about concepts changing over time, as with democracy or morality, similar to the discussion of continuing identity in the ship of Theseus and Heraclitus.
The Torah Is Called Poetry, and the Discussion in Sha’agat Aryeh on “And Now Write for Yourselves This Song”
The text cites the verse “And now write for yourselves this song” as the source for the commandment to write a Torah scroll, and presents Sha’agat Aryeh, who offers two possibilities: that “the song” is the Song of Ha’azinu, and therefore one writes the entire Torah because one may not write the Torah in separate sections; or that “the song” means the entire Torah. The text argues that the biblical phrasing itself points to an essential connection between Torah and poetry, because it could simply have commanded “write the Torah,” yet it chose the language of song. The text presents the question of why the Torah is called poetry as a key to moving into a discussion of the characteristics of Torah “from above.”
Jewish Law as the Focal Point of Torah and the Need to Explain the Status of the Other Parts
The text suggests that Jewish law is the focal point of the Torah and argues that everything around it requires explanation as to why it is Torah at all, mentioning Rashi’s opening comment on Genesis as a question about the necessity of the book of Genesis if the Torah is mainly Jewish law. The text does not deny that the narratives are Torah, but insists that their inclusion in the whole must be explained. The text uses this structure to sharpen the meaning of Torah as poetry through a model of abstract content clothed in particulars.
Midrash in Sabbath 88: the Angels, Moses, and the Human Garb of the Torah
The text quotes the Talmud in Sabbath 88 about Moses ascending to heaven and the angels’ claim that the “hidden treasure” is unfit to be given to flesh and blood, and about Moses’ response through commandments such as “I am the Lord your God,” “You shall have no other gods,” “Remember,” “Honor,” and “You shall not murder.” The text defines the story as an aggadic midrash that “never happened and was never created,” but argues that it is intended to say that the Torah is not only the text given at Sinai but a collection of abstract ideas that can take different forms. The text argues that when the Torah “comes down below” it clothes itself in human language and in commandments belonging to the human world, whereas the angels had “a completely different version” that was not honoring parents and keeping the Sabbath as human beings understand them. The text explains that the dialogue between Moses and the angels is a “dialogue of the deaf” whose purpose is to clarify that even the angels did not understand that the Torah they deal with is a garment, and that there is one “abstract something” that clothes itself in every world according to its circumstances.
Zen, Archery, and Nachmanides on Combinations of Names
The text cites the book Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel as an example of how abstract ideas can be learned through different concrete media, such as archery or flower arrangement, without a one-to-one mapping between the actions. The text uses this as a parable for the idea that the Torah of the angels and the Torah of human beings are different garments of the same abstract thing, and that there is no way to access the abstract content directly except through “an ox that gored a cow” and the details of Jewish law. The text mentions Nachmanides, who says that the Torah is “a collection of combinations of the names of the Holy One, blessed be He,” and the motif of “mixed-up letters,” and treats them as metaphorical descriptions of the same principle of abstract content clothed in human garb. The text concludes that what is called Torah in our world is the particular garment of the abstract ideas as they came down at Mount Sinai.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, last time we talked a bit about the problematic nature of this definition of the concept Torah. How exactly do you approach this? We have various indications and different accepted conventions, and the question is whether and how they can be fitted to what we perceive as Torah. So we saw that the picture is not so simple. If you don’t want to deteriorate into a definition like “anything printed in Rashi script” or “anything bound in a brown cover with gold letters,” then you have to try, after all, to enter a bit into the conceptual dimension. As part of that discussion, I began talking about the problem of defining complex concepts. And I took the concept of poetry as an example, and I tried to show how one can move toward a better understanding of that concept. I’m not sure that what we arrived at can really be called a definition, but it’s a clarification, right? It’s some kind of situation in which we understand the concept better. So “definition” may be too strong for what we did. But at least we advanced. Later on I want to use this in two ways in this discussion of poetry. First, as a demonstration of how to define a complex, vague, abstract concept, whatever. And second, because the Torah itself is called poetry. And then we’ll have to understand, in light of the definition of poetry, what that says about the concept of Torah. But first I want to go back for a moment to the definition of poetry. In the end we came to some kind of understanding—I came to one, I don’t know, I hope you did too, or at least whether you agree or not. It’s like that poetry, and that the whole Torah is poetry.
[Speaker B] Okay,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I said before; I’ll get to that in a moment. In any case, we reached a definition according to which we really need to speak about some kind of axis of phenomena, along which we arrange different manifestations of the concept of poetry in different doses. The two ends of this axis: one end was pure prose. Now prose is usually used to mean literature, but no—I mean pure prose: an encyclopedia entry, a phone book. Something that basically just gives us a collection of information, right, describes it verbally, but simply conveys information, that’s all, by verbal means. That is prose. In prose, the message or meaning is found in the meaning of the words and the sentences. In other words, read the words and the sentences and you know what the writer meant to tell you. Okay? That’s one side of the axis. Opposite that, I’m trying to place the antithesis, the absolute opposite—I would say distilled poetry. Distilled poetry is something whose message or meaning is not found in the meaning of the words and sentences that are written. Right? When we read a poem, what the poet wanted to convey to us—if at all; some people would say you shouldn’t even say such a thing—but what the poet wanted to say to us is not the information contained in the words and sentences.
[Speaker C] Is it not only that, or is it not the information?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not the information at all. I’m speaking right now about the far left end of the axis, the most extreme pole. In the middle there are things that have a bit of this and a bit of that. But the most extreme pole is some collection of words whose literal content—the literal meaning of the words or the sentences—has no connection whatsoever to what the poem wants to convey to me. Right? So I gave that example: “Once there was a lonely lamp at the edge of a neighborhood,” which by the way isn’t distilled poetry, but I use it to illustrate the point. Clearly the writer of the poem didn’t want to tell me anything about lamps, neighborhoods, or loneliness. That’s not the point at all. He used the description of some situation in order to evoke something in me, to convey something else. That something does come through the words, but it is not found in the meaning of the words and sentences. And if you take this in the most extreme possible way, I’m saying it’s something like this where the words have no connection to the meaning. In the kind of poem I described before there is some connection, and that’s why it lies in the middle, not at the extreme, the farthest left pole. But I use it in order to show by negation what stands at that pole over there, okay? I don’t know if such a thing even exists, but it’s something typological—that is, I have two types of texts: one type is distilled prose and one type is distilled poetry. Allegories aren’t that either. Allegory is a literary device, and I said that literature itself, which people usually classify as prose because within the range of works of art the literature-versus-poetry distinction is the axis they use—but for me, since this is a broader axis than art, art lies somewhere in the middle of the axis. To its right there are many more texts that are much more prosaic, right? Much more so. When in literature they describe a situation to me, the message is not the situation. They use the situation to convey something else to me—an idea, a meaning, whatever. Right, it’s not certain that the novelist even meant to convey something to me, but never mind—that meaning I derive from the story is not the content described in it. It’s not like an encyclopedia entry. In that sense a literary work has a poetic dimension, a lyrical dimension. It is not distilled prose. Distilled prose is an encyclopedia entry. And even there, you could say, you could have edited the encyclopedia entry in different ways, meaning there is significance to the form of arrangement and not only to the meaning of the words and sentences, so even an encyclopedia entry is not really all the way on the right side of the axis. But I’m trying through these examples to clarify what I mean, okay? There is… I’m remembering now, there used to be someone at Tel Aviv University in the philosophy department named Thomas Kulka. Maybe he’s still there, I don’t know. I read articles of his a long time ago. He dealt with the question: what is kitsch? In art, right? What is kitsch? How do you define kitsch? You know, a crying child on the seashore in the sunset light or something like that. It’s regarded as low, inferior art. Although—or maybe because—the impact it has on us is a strong one. In other words, it arouses strong emotions in us, and despite that, or because of that, it’s perceived as some low, inferior kind of work. Now he tried to ask himself why. Why? What is low about this kind of art? Technically speaking, it might be a very high-level painting. In other words, a person with technical painting ability, who knows how to bring the person, the tear, the sun onto the canvas in a wonderful way, okay? So he may have excellent technical skills. He may have excellent technical abilities as a painter. What?
[Speaker D] Kitsch requires much more ability of its own. Maybe. That’s the common denominator.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe. I’m not sure about that, but never mind, it’s not important for our purposes. Just a second. Yes. Wait. Sorry, what’s your name? Itai. Itai what? Ben Yehuda. Ah, okay, so I knew I’d missed you. And your name? Dan. Okay. I’m just writing down students—whoever needs credit for this series or for this course, I’m writing it down. So if someone comes late or something, update me so I can include him on the list. Okay, so I’ll get back to it. So he asks himself: what exactly is low about this art? And he has a very interesting claim, and I think it doesn’t touch only on kitsch but teaches us something about what art is in general. He claims that in kitsch, the artistic work is supposed to arouse in us some emotional response, some kind of catharsis of one sort or another, okay? But in a kitsch painting or a kitsch photograph, what arouses the excitement is the content of the picture, the situation the picture depicts. The added value of the painter is, at most, precision—that is, he renders the situation precisely, describes it very accurately to my eyes, and makes me feel as though I’m present in that situation. But the excitement I feel in the face of that situation does not come from his artistic abilities. He has technical abilities, but not artistic abilities. His artistic abilities are not expressed here. What arouses my excitement is not the work of art; it’s simply the situation. He merely transmitted the situation to me, and the situation is what… it is what moves me. And Thomas Kulka’s claim is that this is precisely what is not art. Art is some kind of thing in which there has to be added value from the artist, even if he is depicting a situation that happened. Right? A photographer photographs situations that happened. But it is always from some angle, some form, I don’t know, he caught something there that ordinary people don’t see in that situation, and therefore there is added value to the artist even when he presents me with a situation from life. And that is the artistic value, not the situation. And when what arouses the excitement is the situation itself that is being conveyed to me, and not the mode of conveyance, then it has no artistic value. That is basically his claim. It could have
[Speaker C] been, everything could have been
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] something
[Speaker C] where in the end the kitschiness is that it’s pseudo-art, and therefore it looks as if it has qualities that present themselves—it uses all sorts of things that create a feeling of luxury and beauty and so on, but in fact it doesn’t.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what’s the claim?
[Speaker C] No, that it isn’t art at all. Why? It’s not art because it has no value.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Why?
[Speaker C] Because it had no use and also no… use?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Since when does use determine artistic value? I don’t understand what “use” means.
[Speaker C] Artistic use.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Things that were kitschy weren’t for some… You’re not answering the argument, you’re just saying it’s not art. Okay, but I’m asking why it isn’t art. And Kulka’s suggestion is that it isn’t art because of this. Never mind, people did all sorts of things, that’s not interesting. I mean at the principled level—who faked and who didn’t, it doesn’t matter. I’m saying, at the principled level, I’m suggesting an explanation for why it isn’t art. You’re saying it isn’t art—I agree. The question is why. And his claim is that it isn’t art because there is no added value from the artist over and above the situation itself. And to transmit, to place me inside a situation, that isn’t art. To be inside a situation is just a situation, with whatever it is. Art is always some additional value from the person—what he did with that situation. And that is what determines the artistic value of the thing.
[Speaker D] So if you take, for example, a painting by a child who draws the figures schematically, as opposed to a professional who shows you the tears and the facial features, it arouses emotion in you—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And the first is art and the second is not. Why? Because the second transmits the situation to you, and the situation arouses the emotion in you. But the situation does that, not the painting. By contrast, the first one made some schematic drawing. He didn’t convey the situation to me at all—on the contrary, he built something else out of it. Now you can say it’s good art, bad art, but it is art, because he actually did something with it; he didn’t just transmit the situation to me as it is. That’s exactly the point. And therefore it isn’t a function of how much emotion you feel in the face of the thing. In other words, although there is some significance to the excitement you feel in response to a work of art—that is the usual view—the question is what causes it. That’s the important point. Why am I saying this? Because it connects back to poetry as well. You take a text, okay? Now the text itself—the meaning of the words and the sentences—is not the meaning the poet intended to convey to me. Right? So what is? Again, you see that this is basically why poetry is art. Poetry is art because you take words—those are your raw materials, that’s the situation, the words and the sentences. But the question is what you do with them. That is what determines the value of the poem, or the fact that it is a poem, okay? The fact that it is a work of art. If you simply write me an encyclopedia entry, you also used words and sentences, but there is no added value from you. The words and sentences merely convey the facts to me, that’s all. The moment you are only conveying facts to me, you are not engaged in an artistic act. If you do something with those facts, if there is some added value from the person who handled the facts, who presented the facts, I don’t know, some such thing—then it really acquires artistic value. By the way, Marcel Duchamp, absurd as it may seem—you know his toilet, right? He called it Fountain. He put some toilet there as a work of art, and I think it’s one of the works of art that has received the most attention from scholars, critics, art people, yes. And he did nothing. That is, he took a toilet he did not build; it was apparently built in some plumbing factory, right? And he put it in a museum. And I talked about this last time, that in light of this people come to the conclusion that art is whatever is placed in a museum, right? That that is basically the definition of art. And I argued that this is a nihilistic definition—that is, a definition born of despair because you can’t define a complex concept. But it isn’t true. This complex concept does have a definition, or content—I don’t know if definition is the right word—but one can advance and understand it, and not just settle for this kind of nihilism in which art is whatever you decide, right? The curator decides what art is; if he puts it in the museum, then it’s art. Now in Duchamp’s case, I return to him: when you put that toilet in a museum, it really does turn into a work of art. You can like it or not like it, but it becomes… Why does it become a work of art? Because the message is not that there are toilets. There are toilets—I see them in the display window of a store that sells toilets too. Okay? The fact that he put a toilet there comes to tell me something. He uses the toilet as a medium through which he conveys something to me that has nothing to do with toilets at all. And therefore this is art. Even though in this case there is no artistic skill at all in what he did—he didn’t shape the toilet in any way, he didn’t… because in kitsch you have skill. Here there is no skill, there is nothing. But never mind—the skill is not what determines the artistic value of things.
[Speaker D] If I came and said to them, come on, I have a toilet to put in the museum—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I assume not, but I don’t know.
[Speaker D] Because it’s Marcel Duchamp, then…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but I’m saying, the skeptics say that it’s only because of that. You’re simply exploiting the fact that you are Marcel Duchamp, and now you’re making fools of us. You put a toilet here and we treat it as an artistic act because you are Marcel Duchamp.
[Speaker C] So I—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I say: that’s true, but on the other hand the question is whether that’s all it is. And the question is whether this really is just a worthless thing, and only because he is Marcel Duchamp we deal with it or appreciate it. No. The claim is that there is something here that perhaps if you had done it, nobody would have noticed—or if I had done it. Nobody would have noticed. Fine. But they wouldn’t have noticed, and yet it would still have had meaning.
[Speaker D] Everything has meaning.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but the question is: when you want to present things in some creative or unusual form or something like that, that is an artistic act in general. Okay? Good. So all this is just an expansion of the same insight we discussed earlier about poetry. In poetry too you use words and sentences; that’s the material you’re handling. But the added value you give to the words and sentences is what determines the artistic value of the matter. Now, in poetry this is one of the reasons why poetry usually also expresses itself in the way it is written or printed. It isn’t printed like a story. I gave the example of my post. Why? Because you want to signal to the reader—the reader needs to know that this is poetry. If the reader doesn’t know it’s poetry, then he’ll read it as: “There was a lonely lamp at the edge of the neighborhood,” okay, a historical description of something that once happened in some neighborhood sometime. Okay? When you tell him, no, this is a poem, then he tunes himself differently. Now he reads the same words, but he understands that those words have to be interpreted differently. This isn’t here to tell you that there was a lonely lamp at the edge of the neighborhood; it’s here to use words and sentences and situations in order to do something else. So that is why it matters that the toilet is in a museum, or that the poem is presented as a poem by breaking the lines and vocalizing it, or through all sorts of visual means that clarify to you that you are reading a poem. Because this really isn’t something you can understand from the text itself. It’s a very big question how you are supposed to approach the text. You have to be told beforehand that it is a poem, and now you know that this is how you need to approach it.
[Speaker D] If not a title—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, never mind—generally speaking, we have different means to explain to a person: listen, you’re encountering a poem here. When you encounter a poem, your relation to the words and the sentences is supposed to be different. The meaning is not found in the meaning of the words and sentences. Now, those are the two poles. In between there are many, many kinds of texts located somewhere along this axis between distilled prose and distilled poetry. Okay? Literature, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. Literature too has all sorts of shades, but it lies in the middle because in literature there is clearly more significance to the words and sentences—to the meaning of the words and sentences—than in poetry. Literature really does describe events to me; I follow it like a factual description. True, in the end I need to take that factual description and understand that it comes to convey something else to me, not merely that collection of facts. But in literature there is a mixture of prose and poetry, and that mixture contains a not insignificant measure of prose as well, not only poetry. And if you want to arrange the phenomena on this axis between prose and poetry, you would basically arrange them by proportions. Say I have p poetry and one minus p prose, where p moves between zero and one. Okay? When p is zero, that is prose; when p is one, that is poetry; when p is one-half, that is literature; when p is 0.8, that is—I don’t know—ballads. Doesn’t matter. All sorts of verbal works can be arranged on this axis and basically differ from one another in their p. The p defines the mixture between prose and poetry in this text. Yes, this really reminds me of one of the hard problems when we come to define a concept like art, poetry, Torah—all these complex concepts: the problem of vagueness. Now there are vague concepts that, because of their vagueness, make people despair, as I said before: art is what’s found in the museum. In other words, because it’s complex and you don’t know how to give a better definition. I mentioned Gideon Ofrat’s book last week, What Is Art?, where in the end that’s the conclusion he reaches: art is what’s found in the museum. So I say: there is something true in that. It’s what’s found in the museum because you need to put it in the museum in order to tell a person, listen, you are encountering a work of art here. You have to relate to it differently. It’s not a toilet in a display window; it’s a toilet in a museum. It has to be approached differently. You can say it’s a good work, a bad work, doesn’t matter, but it’s a work of art. That is the context in which you’re supposed to look at it and examine it. So the complexity or vagueness of concepts makes it very difficult for us to define them. Let me give an example—an example I’m very fond of: the heap paradox. What is the heap paradox? Suppose I have one gravel stone. One gravel stone is not a heap. Right? Two aren’t either. But a thousand are. A thousand gravel stones are a heap. When does it become a heap? At seventeen? Thirty-two? When does it become a heap? I don’t think anyone can give me a criterion, right? So let’s formulate this more systematically. We have three claims, each of which sounds very reasonable, but all three together don’t fit. First claim: one gravel stone is not a heap. Second claim: adding one stone to something that is not a heap will not turn it into a heap. One stone won’t make a difference one way or the other. Third claim: a thousand gravel stones are a heap. Now each of these claims sounds reasonable, right? But all three together don’t fit. There’s a contradiction here. Because if one stone is not a heap, and adding one stone changes nothing, then two aren’t a heap either, and if two aren’t then three aren’t, and if three aren’t then four aren’t, and then a thousand aren’t either. But a thousand are. So here are three claims—again, each one sounds reasonable and sensible—but together you can’t adopt them. Something here has to change. This is only with a heap—there’s the bald man paradox. If you have one hair on your head, you’re bald. Right? Adding one hair doesn’t change your status, unfortunately. Okay? But with fifty thousand hairs, you’re no longer bald. Again the same question. Or, yes, my children ask me: from when is it afternoon? Twelve o’clock is not afternoon, right? One second later doesn’t bring you to afternoon, but five o’clock is afternoon. So again, when is it? In the United States they solved the problem, right? In the United States, twelve and one second is afternoon. Twelve is noon. But in the civilized world it’s not like that—where there aren’t freely available weapons.
[Speaker D] Regarding a heap, you have to add physics—when is it actually piled up?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?
[Speaker F] When they’re one on top of the other.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, obviously, we’re talking—
[Speaker D] About a physical heap, where you take a bunch of stones and place them randomly. Physics determines whether it’s a heap or a flat surface.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I’m not talking about the shape—I arranged it in a heap. But if I arranged one or two stones, that’s not a heap; if I arranged a thousand, it is a heap. Okay? So the question is, from when does it start? So the claim is that basically—so what’s the problem? There are three claims here, each one reasonable, but together they don’t fit one another. Clearly something has to change here; one of the claims has to be thrown out. But which one? To say that one is also a heap? To say that a thousand are also not a heap? That doesn’t sound reasonable, right? So presumably the second claim is the problematic one: adding one stone does not change the status. But that too sounds very sensible. What’s the alternative? That from sixteen to seventeen it becomes a heap? That’s not really how it works, right? So what does? The answer—I’m skipping over some steps—is that adding one gravel stone changes the status a little. It makes it a bit more of a heap. What trapped us? What trapped us was the assumption that every collection of stones either is a heap or is not. That it’s binary. Okay? And what I want to claim is: that’s not true. A heap is not a binary concept. There are different levels of heapness. Okay? So really we ought to say this: one gravel stone has a negligible level of heapness. A thousand gravel stones have a very high level of heapness. Okay? Adding one gravel stone slightly increases the level of heapness of the collection. Okay? And now everything is fine.
[Speaker G] Like the minimum plural being two. Meaning what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning that it’s not like the minimum plural being two.
[Speaker G] No, two—the minimum
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The minimum plural being two is like the Americans, where you define everything above one as plural. But I’m saying: there is plural and very plural and fairly plural and somewhat plural—the reality is more complex. You need to use what logicians call fuzzy logic, a vague logic. We ought to use a logic that assigns each collection of stones a number between zero and one. And that’s a continuum. It can be 0.6 heap, it can be 0.83 heap, it can be one divided by pi heap—any number between zero and one. Okay? Therefore there are different levels of heapness, while we speak in shorthand of “heap” and “not a heap,” but in truth that binary language is problematic. We have no choice; that’s how we are built. But really we should be speaking in a fuzzy language, yes, a vague one.
[Speaker F] Yes, but here there’s a certain subjectivity. For one person, if you put six, in his eyes that’s a heap; for someone else, if you put sixty, he still doesn’t think that—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be. I think six and sixty are a bit extreme, but I assume there’s a gray area about which we’ll disagree as to whether one can already use the term heap. But the term heap is a linguistic term; it doesn’t describe anything. That is, the degree of heapness is what describes what is happening in the world itself. There are different levels of heapness. From when I begin calling it “a heap”—that’s just my decision. So of course different people’s decisions may differ.
[Speaker F] It’s a matter of money. People talk about the definition of a millionaire, so if you have more than a million—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that’s a sharp definition. But the definition of rich—
[Speaker F] The definition of rich, exactly. For one person, give him three million and he says—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I said: that’s why I claim the same thing here too. What you need to talk about is levels of wealth, not the question of whether he is rich or not rich. You shouldn’t be talking—
[Speaker F] On the question of whether he’s rich or not, you’re supposed to talk about the question of what level of wealth he has. Subjectivity—so I’m saying no, no, what level of wealth he has, that’s the objective definition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] His level of wealth is six hundred and fifty-four thousand three hundred and forty-two shekels. That’s his level of wealth, and it’s completely objective; it’s factual. Whether you call him rich or not rich, that’s already your decision. And here it’s obvious: there will be people who call him rich, and there will be people who don’t call him rich. But calling him rich or not calling him rich doesn’t describe anything about reality. It’s just language that we adopt. Descriptions of reality need to be formulated in terms of fuzzy logic, not in terms of binary logic of yes or no—rich or not rich—but rather in terms of fuzzy logic, yes, vagueness. Yes, same thing, yes, exactly. Therefore, the claim is that regarding a wise person there are doubts even about the fuzzy level. Meaning, the question is whether you can measure the level of wisdom at all, not just say whether he’s wise or not. There are arguments even about those discussions, yes exactly, so it’s even worse. But I’m saying that in places where I’m talking about things that are completely measurable—how much money he has, or what time it is now, or how many stones there are here in this pile—those are objective things. Here there won’t be arguments. The arguments begin when you want to use a shorthand term like pile or not a pile, okay? Or rich or not rich. All right? But those are really arguments about language, not arguments about reality. In reality itself, you need to speak in terms of fuzzy logic.
Now all the concepts of reality—you have to understand—all our concepts in reality are fuzzy. There isn’t a single concept for which it’s correct to use binary logic. You can talk about a millionaire, of course, because that’s an artificial definition: someone who has a million shekels. Fine, that’s a binary definition. Someone who doesn’t have a million shekels doesn’t have it; someone who does have it, has it. But I’m saying all the concepts in ordinary language that we didn’t define artificially, rather the ordinary concepts in our language, are all fuzzy. Dairy? Meat? What is that? Even in dairy and meat, there’s one-sixtieth, it gives flavor, it doesn’t give flavor—even there it doesn’t work like that. Think about Escher’s metamorphoses, yes, between a bird and a fish, you know that? You start with a school of fish, and then the spaces between them turn into a flock of birds. Little by little it suddenly goes through some metamorphosis—you see a school of fish here, you don’t… I don’t understand where the change happens, and suddenly you find yourself looking at a flock of birds. Okay, those are metamorphoses—he has a few metamorphoses—and that basically shows us that in fact every concept in our world is fuzzy. Even the concept fish is fuzzy. It seems to us that fish is a well-defined concept. No. There are creatures that aren’t entirely fish. There are fish that are mammals, fish that aren’t mammals, all kinds of things. There’s a huge amount—there’s metamorphosis in every concept. We’re used to using concepts in a binary way because that’s how our thinking works, that’s how we’re built, and that’s fine.
[Speaker D] Like in progressivism—they say male and female, there’s no such thing, you can say…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, right. Even if it’s like the progressives, it can still be true. Meaning, that can happen. Even a stopped clock shows the right time twice a day. Yes. What?
[Speaker D] Is there a basis for the argument?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. I wrote about it at length. Not only is there a basis—they’re completely right, in my opinion. They’re not right about certain implications they draw from these things. But in their factual claims, anyone who denies it is denying facts. Anyway, that’s the issue. In short, what I want to show here is that complex concepts often make it hard for us to define them because we want to define them in a binary way. And the concept of poetry, for example—the axis I described earlier—that just means what the degree of poeticness of the text is. That’s how we ought to speak, and not ask whether this is poetry or not poetry. You can speak about the degree of poeticness between zero and one, or the degree of prosaicness of the text—it doesn’t matter, that’s just one minus the degree of poeticness. Okay, so that’s the right way to deal with the phenomena themselves.
The problem arises when we try to use binary concepts: poetry, prose, rich, pile, wise, things of that kind. Then we have to ask ourselves where the line is. From what level of pile-ness do I call it a pile? From what level of wealth do I call him rich? From what level of wisdom do I call him wise? Okay? Or from what level of fish-ness do I call it a fish? Okay? These are all things of that sort, but it’s a problem that arises when we insist on using binary concepts. The world is more complex than that.
Once I saw some study—now I’m remembering it—about the distinction between Torah-level and rabbinic. I’ve written more than once about this issue, that even the distinction between Torah-level and rabbinic is not binary. There is a continuum of levels of validity in Jewish law, where pure rabbinic and pure Torah-level stand at the two ends, and in the middle there are all sorts of things, all sorts of phenomena, several levels—distinct levels. In principle there’s a continuum, but I can distinguish several distinct levels that also have concepts, that lie on this axis. And then I really saw some—what? Of spirit and matter? For example, Maimonides writes in the second root that laws derived from scriptural exegesis are words of the Sages. So everyone attacks him—what do you mean, this is Torah-level, in cases of doubt we rule stringently, it’s not like a rabbinic enactment or decree. What I want to argue is that there is a rabbinic dimension in it; it’s not pure Torah-level. Pure Torah-level is what is written in the Torah. What emerges from the Torah by means of exegesis is already 0.8 Torah-level, or 0.6 Torah-level. And now the question is: for what purpose does that matter? And it has halakhic implications. The level of Torah-ness that determines the Jewish law is not always the same. Regarding the question whether in cases of doubt we rule stringently or not stringently, that may require a Torah-level of 0.8. Regarding the question whether human dignity overrides it, maybe that requires a Torah-level of 0.6. Regarding all sorts of things—in short, how much money you spend on it—there are various implications, differences between Torah-level and rabbinic, and it’s forbidden to discuss it as a package deal: is this Torah-level or is this rabbinic? Rather, the question is what the level of Torah-ness of the matter is. And each such question can be based on a different level, a different threshold of Torah-ness for this implication and for that implication and for that implication.
[Speaker F] When there are two and you have to choose between them, does it come out that you’d call the higher one…?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Say if they conflict with each other, then it makes sense to choose the one that’s higher, in conflicts. Yes, for example. So in short, what I want to say is that the goal is less to define the concepts and more to clarify them. That’s why I take edge cases—pure prose and pure poetry—which I try to make as clear as possible, but all this… there is no pure poetry and no pure prose in the world. There isn’t. These are fictional phenomena. They’re at the edge of the axis—think of them as plus infinity and minus infinity. They are potential phenomena; they don’t really exist in actuality. But they help me define everything in the middle, the things I know from my world, because I understand that there is some mixture of this and that there. And the mixture determines where I am on the axis or how to relate to the phenomenon I encountered. What about potential? You talked about potential—infinity minus and plus. No, no, not potential—think of the x-axis, minus infinity and plus infinity are the two ends of the axis. Now the axis has no ends; there is no point called minus infinity or plus infinity, right? But it’s convenient for me to talk that way because I give names to the two ends of the axis, and then I have some way to talk about everything in the middle.
[Speaker F] Because it’s always virtual, you add epsilon and that helps you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, right. That’s exactly what I’m saying here too. Meaning, all I want to argue is that the concept of poetry and the concept of prose do not exist. They do not exist. They are points like plus infinity and minus infinity, potential points that are somewhere out there—not potential in the electrical sense, potential in the mathematical sense. In other words, with the concept of infinity mathematicians usually use a potential meaning, not a concrete meaning. There is actual infinity and potential infinity. Actual infinity is talking about real infinity, and potential infinity is a limit—you approach infinity. So it’s a concept that doesn’t really exist, but it’s convenient to define it as some kind of endpoint relative to which things are measured. Yes, exactly. So it simply helps me describe the real phenomena by adding two more fictional building blocks, and that helps me describe the real phenomena.
[Speaker B] So I can say that poetry has characteristics like line length, like rhyme.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying no. I claim that this is not a characteristic of poetry; rather, people use those formal phenomena in order to signal to the reader: pay attention, you are standing before a poem. But that is not what makes the thing a poem. Okay? In other words, you simply have to signal to the person that he should relate to this thing as a poem. Therefore, for example, in contemporary poetry, postmodern poetry, there are no lines, no formatting, nothing, and the poem can be written entirely like prose. You just have to declare that it’s a poem because otherwise… But in the Torah? What? No, in the Torah, of course not—there is a different writing form for poetry.
[Speaker C] Yes, but the thing is that there aren’t rhymes there and…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay. So there are no rhymes, but there is formatting. Again, even in poetry outside the Torah there aren’t always rhymes; rhymes are not a condition for poetry. Fine, okay. But I’m saying in general, the visual means I use to signal to a person what poetry is are means to signal it to him—that’s not what defines it as poetry. Okay? I simply signal to him through those visual means: know that you are standing before poetry. Sometimes of course that also includes the formatting, or how you punctuate it, or whatever—that also takes part in the poem itself—but first and foremost those means are basically intended to signal, to place it in the museum. Just as the museum is the sign that this urinal has become a work of art. In a poem that you read sitting at home, not in a museum, how do you know it’s a poem? Because they tell you it’s a book of poems, or they write it in the form of a poem. Okay? That is basically placing it in the museum. All right?
[Speaker D] Regarding a parameter of relativity—for example, Noah was a righteous man in his generations—so there’s no definition of what a righteous man is, but there is a definition relative to his generations. Meaning, in language too you can assign a value…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Usually all the concepts I spoke about earlier—because the real concept is undefined, what we define is a fictitious concept, okay? So how do you determine your position on the axis? Always relatively. Meaning, I call this a poem—why is it a poem? Because it is more poem-like than those things that I call prose. But relative to something that is even more poetic, farther to the left on the axis, then it’s not a poem. Right? The definition, precisely because there is such an axis, is always relative. If you are 0.6 then you are more than 0.5; if you are 0.5 you are more than 0.4. But that is exactly because there is an axis here.
[Speaker F] Yes. Is enemy also not binary?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, of course not. There are different levels of hostility. Obviously.
[Speaker F] Most Arabs are not enemies.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, of course they are enemies. What do you mean, not enemies?
[Speaker F] He’s the father of the enemy, he hates me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s an enemy, but he’s not holding a weapon, so he has a different status than someone who is holding a weapon. My struggle is not with terrorists; my struggle is with Palestinians. The fact that there are uninvolved people there, okay, maybe you’re forbidden to harm them, or under certain circumstances—but they are enemies. Meaning, this is an enemy population. What do you mean? There is a general and there is a soldier. There’s one person holding a weapon and another supplying tea to the commander—he’s also a soldier. There is an enemy who wants to kill me, there is an enemy who wants to rob me, there is an enemy who only wants to harass me. There is an infinite range of enemies. Thank God, we’re not lacking types of enemies—we have as many as you want. Some people will say there are internal enemies too, I don’t know, all kinds—there are lots of types.
[Speaker F] Suddenly he becomes your friend and a moment later he’ll become your enemy—it’s like from enemy to beloved.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Agnon’s story, “From Enemy to Beloved,” yes. Okay.
[Speaker C] All right,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, let’s get back to our topic. What I basically wanted to say is that the concept of poetry is really an example of a concept that should be treated with vague logic, fuzzy logic, okay, and not in a binary way. And the way to treat such concepts is to define the binary concepts on the two sides of the axis—which usually are not real at all—but they help me deal with the complex phenomena, and then define some metric, meaning yes, between zero and one between these two extreme phenomena. And that is really the way to deal with vague concepts, okay, like poetry or Gaza or what we talked about earlier.
There’s another phenomenon connected to this, and you could call it combinatorial definitions. What does that mean? You know, for example, in psychiatric diagnostics there are many psychiatric phenomena—I think most of them are like this, maybe all of them, I don’t know exactly, I’m not a great expert—that have a definition where you give, say, a set of I don’t know what, eight characteristics, and if five of them are present then you suffer from this or that disorder or syndrome. Any five you want—five out of eight, yes, that’s combinatorics, you have many possibilities. Okay? And all those possibilities are basically—I don’t know—paranoid schizophrenia.
[Speaker D] Or you assign a score to each…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter, I’m not getting into the details here, but broadly speaking it’s a combinatorial definition. What does such a combinatorial definition mean? Again, we’re basically talking about a complex phenomenon; it’s hard for us to define it in a sharp binary way, yes? If it’s like this then like this, if it’s like that then like that. So what do we do? We propose characteristics, okay? We have various characteristics. These characteristics do not define paranoid schizophrenia; they indicate that you suffer from it. Fine? It’s not a definition, it’s characteristics. Now characteristics, because it can appear in all kinds of forms, so with some people characteristics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 out of the eight will appear; with another person 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8 will appear. Yes, six is also above five, that’s fine. And so on. So there are many possibilities in which the thing can appear.
What’s interesting here is that all those possibilities are perceived as appearances of the same thing. Meaning, the concept of paranoid schizophrenia is one. I don’t know how to define it; I don’t know how to make a direct diagnosis of it, yes, binary, okay? What I do know is how to give characteristics. I understand that it appears in all kinds of forms, and I say okay, if five out of the eight characteristics appear, then you suffer from it.
[Speaker D] But isn’t that compared to normal? What? Usually in medicine, when there’s that kind of combinatorics, there’s some definition of normal.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Normal is someone who doesn’t have these phenomena. Zero.
[Speaker D] Fine, but they established that. I’m giving an example, say in MRI. After all, when you just read an MRI by itself you don’t know anything, only in comparison to normal. Okay, so first you need to define what normal is.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. That’s Foucault’s criticism. Foucault’s criticism of the diagnostic approach accepted among us is that our definition of the normal is basically a Protestant definition. Meaning, it is basically a definition—yes, Weber and Foucault—that is based on… the person who knows how to manage and doesn’t need others is the normal person. And whoever needs others in order to manage, doesn’t know how to manage alone—that’s an abnormal person. Okay? Why is managing alone the criterion for normality? There are claims by Baruch Kahane and what’s the name of his rabbi, Rotenberg from Jerusalem, who argue no—a Jewish psychiatry needs to be built differently. Psychology, Jewish psychiatry should… I have no problem relying on others, so what happened? We are a community. A person can rely on others; each of us relies on others at one level or another. We can’t exist alone in the world. Security, economy—you provide me food, I provide you hand-waving, it doesn’t matter, each according to his craft. Yes, so fine, society always… and therefore there too the question is how to define someone who doesn’t manage alone. Fine. But who said that’s the definition at all? Who said that’s the definition?
[Speaker F] But there’s a very broad generalization here… this concept, paranoid schizophrenia—I’m sure that if you put ten thousand researchers on it, they would now classify it into eight thousand sub-schizophrenias, and then basically this is that background, this is that background, this is that background. But we, who don’t have that—we didn’t invest those ten thousand researchers who are now going to examine it—so we put some general concept there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but that general concept is theirs—it’s they who invented it, not me. They claim that all of this is paranoid schizophrenia.
[Speaker F] They didn’t devote enough to it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, they devoted enough, and they claim that all these types are paranoid schizophrenia. That’s what they claim. There are different types and there are disputes—it doesn’t matter, they go down there into details. Doesn’t matter. But still there is one concept here to which all these different appearances are attributed. So that means these appearances are not a definition; these appearances are characteristics. It has characteristics, and because it’s complex the characteristics can differ from person to person, but they all characterize the same kind of phenomenon. What does that actually mean? That we haven’t really created a definition here for the concept of paranoid schizophrenia; rather, we have ways of doing diagnostics. Meaning, checking when a person has it and when he doesn’t, but we don’t have a definition of what it is. Or at least, I don’t know, this combinatorial definition is not a definition. Maybe they have some definition.
[Speaker F] The collection of things you’re saying is not a definition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s diagnostics. That’s what I’m saying. It’s not a definition. It’s a definition in the sense that it lets me understand that it’s present here, but it doesn’t clarify for me what it is. Meaning, it doesn’t tell me what paranoid schizophrenia is. It only tells me, look, if he behaves A, B, C, D, then he has paranoid schizophrenia. But what is paranoid schizophrenia?
[Speaker F] When you open the book of paranoias, the DSM, there’s a definition there. Whether it’s a good one?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, maybe. I’m not proficient in it.
[Speaker F] Surely in the doctors’ book,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure. The DSM—but I’m not sure, not sure there’s a definition there. I don’t know. You’d have to ask people who know.
[Speaker F] It can’t be that there isn’t. What? They need some concept to talk about.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Psychoanalysis too—Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud is all hallucinations, metaphysical hallucinations. Yes, but with him he wasn’t engaged in science at all, that’s totally…
[Speaker C] The DSM, if I remember correctly—what? The DSM works like this too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think there isn’t, but I don’t know, I’m not proficient enough.
[Speaker C] No, I’m not sure, because it says in the book here that schizophrenia is something undefined unless according to conditions one, two, three, four. Yes, okay. Fine.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, the claim is that these combinatorial definitions too—which are another way of dealing with a complex phenomenon that is hard for us to define—do not really offer a definition. They offer characteristics or criteria for the appearance of the concept we are interested in, but they do not clarify the concept itself for us. What does this concept mean? Okay? But of course, that’s on one hand. On the other hand, we assume that this concept exists, that there is such a concept, because all these characteristics are basically trying to direct us toward, or point to, the existence of a phenomenon or concept that we believe is there somewhere, right? Even though we haven’t defined it.
And that brings me—I think I mentioned it last time—to Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Yes. So the claim is that even if concepts are not defined, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There are sometimes concepts that are hard for us to define, maybe even impossible to define, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They exist, and sometimes we even understand them—we just don’t know how to give that understanding explicit verbal expression, but we understand them. So it isn’t—even understanding doesn’t require definition, certainly the concept’s existence itself doesn’t require it. But of course we should still try, as much as possible, to define, because we still want to understand better. It helps us too—even if there is understanding, when we define it, it helps sharpen the understanding. I think I also talked about this last time in connection with multiple intelligences, right? There too, on the one hand there is some very abstract concept here—intelligence. The attempt to define it helps me a lot to understand it, even though I start out from an understanding of it. I make the definitions on the basis of that prior understanding I had, but after I define it, that can come back and sharpen the understanding for me. And we saw there that it even leads to implications—different implications.
One final point in this introduction—I’ll mention again what I talked about last time too—that there are constitutive definitions and directive definitions. Definitions, yes—analytic philosophy distinguishes between regulative and constitutive systems of rules. What does that mean? Suppose I’m playing—did I talk about this? I don’t remember anymore. When I play chess, yes, and I now move my knight like a bishop, have I violated the rules of the game? I wouldn’t define it as violating the rules of the game; I simply wasn’t playing chess. I’m probably playing something else, not chess. Meaning, this isn’t a violation of the rules of the game. I’ll bring an analogy to make it clearer: think about soccer or basketball, okay? I once heard a lecture about this in some bar in Tel Aviv by two researchers from the Open University who dealt with the philosophy of soccer. It was during the previous World Cup, not the last one. And they talked a bit there about philosophical issues around soccer; it was very interesting. Among other things, they talked, for example, about a foul. What is a foul?
Now, we know—those who know a bit of soccer and basketball—that a foul is one of the rules of the game. Meaning, sometimes in your strategy you say okay, commit a foul now. Why do you commit a foul? You prevent a basket; he’ll shoot twice, maybe he’ll make them and maybe he won’t, but you may gain something from it. If he makes only one, then you gained a point instead of his making two points, right? So the question of whether there’s a foul or not doesn’t mean you violated the rules of the game. You did not violate the rules of the game. Committing fouls is part of the game. It just has sanctions attached. What? Even if you don’t mean to, it’s still a foul. No, it’s doing it. You gamble. You put it there, yes.
[Speaker F] When you do it, when you use them that way, they turned it into an unsportsmanlike foul too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. An unsportsmanlike foul maybe already starts getting closer to… although there too they’ll tell you: commit an unsportsmanlike foul and leave the game. That too can enter into the tactics of the matter. It’s hard to say that someone who commits an unsportsmanlike foul isn’t playing basketball, as in chess. It’s not exactly the same thing. Okay? A more extreme case: think of someone driving not according to traffic laws. Someone driving not according to traffic laws—we won’t say he isn’t driving. Obviously he’s driving; he violated traffic laws, right? So there are sometimes situations where you call it a violation, but it’s really part of the rules of the game. When you say it’s a violation, what you really mean is what sanction is imposed on the one who does it. So if you violated traffic laws, there is a sanction imposed on you. If you violated the rules of basketball, because you committed a foul in basketball, there is a sanction imposed on you: possession changes, two free throws, I don’t know, all kinds of things like that. Okay, that’s a sanction imposed on you. But the expression violation here is used in a different sense than violation in chess, where there you simply are not playing chess. There is no sanction imposed on someone who moves the knight like a bishop, yes? That’s not a sanction—he simply isn’t playing chess. What?
[Speaker F] They’ll stop playing with him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that time they didn’t play with him. He simply didn’t play chess. He only thought he was playing chess, maybe. But he simply isn’t playing chess. So in chess the system of rules is constitutive. Meaning, if you violate it, you simply are not playing chess. So it constitutes the institution called the game of chess. In regulative systems of rules, directive systems, these are systems that regulate a domain that exists without them. They do not constitute the domain. I’m driving on the road—that’s driving on the road. There are systems that regulate driving on the road in one way or another. Drive like this, don’t drive like that, and so on. But obviously even if you didn’t drive properly, you still drove on the road. Therefore it’s a regulative system, not a constitutive one. Okay? Often the sanction imposed is an indication that this is a regulative system and not a constitutive one. Because if it’s constitutive, there’s no sanction. You just… you’re not… you’re not in the game. Meaning, there’s no point in imposing a sanction on you.
So also with definitions of concepts in general, we basically distinguish between constitutive and directive definitions, or constitutive and regulative. There are definitions that constitute the field we are dealing with. In mathematics, for example, it is customary to think that the definition is constitutive. Meaning, you define the concepts, and from then on the concept has that meaning, and you try to prove things about it and do all sorts of manipulations with the concepts and try to reach various results. But no one can tell you that your definition is incorrect. What is an incorrect definition? It’s my definition. If you want, define it differently and do something else. There’s… there’s no such thing as right and wrong with respect to a definition, right? Therefore this is a constitutive definition. It’s a definition that constitutes. There is no right or wrong here. If you define it differently, you are simply defining a different concept, not this concept. Okay?
By contrast, there is a definition that is a definition—I wouldn’t say regulative—but not constitutive, rather directive. What does that mean? These are definitions with respect to which I can speak in terms of right and wrong. I think you are not defining the concept correctly—when I say something like that to someone, what does it mean? It means the definition does not constitute the concept. Because with a definition that constitutes the concept, I can’t say to him, I think you are defining it incorrectly. This is the concept. The definition is the concept. If I define it differently, I’m simply talking about a different concept. Okay? Therefore when I say to someone that you’re defining the concept incorrectly, I am basically assuming that the concept exists prior to the definition. So what does the definition do? It tries to understand the concept, or characterize it, tries to clarify it. But the concept exists before I defined it. It exists somewhere, and now I’m trying to define it, and someone may come and say no, you didn’t grasp it correctly. You didn’t define it well; it needs to be defined differently. Then we have an argument. That’s the concept—there is nothing in the concept beyond the fact that this is how we defined it. Okay? So these are constitutive definitions and directive definitions.
And again, many of the vague concepts I spoke about earlier, for which people propose all sorts of, I don’t know, combinatorial definitions or fuzzy-logic definitions, all the things I talked about earlier—very often there are people who say forget it, there is no right and wrong here. There is no such concept as poetry. Poetry is whatever is written in broken lines. Or a work of art is whatever is placed in a museum. What does that actually mean? That we have a constitutive definition here. Right? We have a definition, basically. What is placed in a museum is… I’m not trying to hit upon the concept of art and asking myself what it is. No, there is no concept of art. Whatever is in the museum is art. I’ve basically turned the definition from a directive definition into a constitutive definition. And I want to argue that these expressions of despair, which turn concepts into concepts that are basically constituted by the definition, stem from despair because of the complexity. Because it’s complicated, you can’t define it, so you say okay, then there is no such concept. We’ll just define it artificially. Whatever is in the museum is art. Whatever is written in broken lines is a poem. Whatever—I don’t know—things of that sort. And we now treat the definitions as constituting the concept, whereas originally, when we got tangled up in the definition and failed, we treated the definition as directive, not constitutive. We were really trying to understand what poetry is. It’s not that I’m now trying to define a new concept. The definition is trying to capture an existing concept or an existing phenomenon. That phenomenon exists before the definition, and therefore one can argue whether the definition is correct or incorrect—you define it this way, I define it another way—because there is something here that we are trying to grasp. So we have a dispute. Okay?
Therefore, when I speak about definitions, I’m speaking about directive definitions, not constitutive ones. Definitions that can be correct and can be incorrect. Not definitions in the mathematical sense, where you define a group according to some collection of characteristics—that’s a group. If you want to define another group, the Hasamba gang, then define it differently. It doesn’t matter, just don’t use the same word because it will only confuse us. We have no argument. All right? I’m talking about definitions about which there can be an argument. Definitions that make a claim. Basically, these definitions are not definitions in the same sense as in mathematics, but claims. The claim is that poetry is what I said earlier. I’m making a claim here. I may be right, I may be wrong, but I’m making a claim. I’m not defining a concept, because definitions cannot be argued about. I defined it that way, so that’s what it is. Fine? Therefore it is very important to understand that when we talk about definitions, we are talking about directive definitions, and that is what creates all the complexity. That is what creates all the complexity. We understand that there is some concept before us, and we are trying to capture it. We are not constituting a new concept now. We are trying to capture an existing concept, but it is so amorphous and flexible and complicated, complex, that we can’t really capture it sharply. We develop all sorts of techniques like combinatorics, like fuzzy logic, like all sorts of things of that kind, while all along the assumption is that we are trying to grasp a concept that exists. There is such a concept. We are trying to grasp it. Okay?
When I want to discuss what Torah is, I assume that there is such a thing as Torah, and I’m not trying to define it in the sense of a constitutive definition, but rather trying to understand this concept as we know it, as we understand it. I’m only trying to formulate it explicitly—to take some understanding that exists in us in a raw form and give it explicit form through words and explicit sentences. Okay. Now, maybe one last sentence in this introduction, one more sentence: the fact that here we are dealing with directive definitions and not constitutive ones has two implications. One implication is what I said earlier—that there is right and wrong here, and there can be arguments about the definition. With constitutive definitions there is no argument and there is no such thing as right or wrong. Okay?
Now, we argue about the question who is a Jew. So what’s the problem? I say that a Jew is someone born to a Jewish mother or someone who converted according to Jewish law. And someone else says that a Jew is someone who speaks Hebrew and reads Amos Oz and serves in the army and pays taxes. Okay? So what’s the problem? Then call that a Jew, I’ll call mine an Israeli, and we’ll part as friends.
[Speaker F] Converted according to Jewish law—you added that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter. I call—I say that Jewish law defines the Jew. I claim that Jewish law defines the Jew. That is a claim, not a definition. Hm?
[Speaker D] In the end it comes down to money.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it doesn’t come down to money. That’s exactly why I say: you can define everything differently without bringing money into it. You can say that the money is given to Israelis, not Jews. Fine. You don’t need to cling to a different definition of Jew and argue with me about the definition of Jew. You claim that your whole problem is with the money? Then propose that the money be given to Israelis, not Jews. Why do we need to argue about the meaning of the concept Jew? It just creates confusion. Okay? The answer is that when we argue about the concept Jew, we are really arguing about a concept that exists beyond the definitions. And we are trying to characterize it, and if two people characterize it differently, then they have a dispute. This is a directive definition, not a constitutive one.
[Speaker F] A definition is…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, change—we’ll talk about that in a moment. Right now let’s talk about disputes. Change in a moment. Right now let’s talk about an argument over the definition. Okay? When I say there is an argument—many times people think that if there is an argument about the definition, that means there is no definition and that means everyone has his own truth—that would make it a constitutive definition and not a directive one. Not true. On the contrary—not only is that not true, the opposite is true. If there is an argument, that is a sign that the definition is directive. It means there is one truth. Because if there were not one truth, then what are we arguing about? You define it this way, I’ll define it another way, everything is fine. I agree with you that sometimes it is like that, but we have a tendency to tell people too quickly: friends, what’s the problem? You call it Jew, call it Israeli, and part as friends. Everything is fine. No—there is a real dispute here. It’s not a question of money. That’s why I say: then use different terms so as not to confuse things. You call it Israeli, I’ll call it Jew, and everything is fine. No problem, get married. You can’t marry him anyway. What difference does it make what he’s called? You can’t marry him anyway because he’s not Jewish according to your view. What difference does it make whether he’s called Israeli or Jew? It’s just semantic clarification, that’s all. Give different terms to the different meanings so that one can speak clearly. That’s all. But there is no dispute. What do we have to argue about in the question who is a Jew? You are talking about a different concept from the one I’m talking about. The answer is no. If we are arguing, that means we both agree on one thing: that there is such a thing called a Jew, and we have a dispute about what really characterizes it, what defines it. And on that we need to conduct an argument. Semantic separation won’t help here. If I call mine a Jew and you call yours an Israeli, everything will be fine. No, that won’t help, because there is a real dispute here.
[Speaker C] It’s like deciding what the size of the pile is, saying that it’s sixty stones.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but here it’s not the pile; here it’s a different kind of argument.
[Speaker D] Here it’s the characteristics. Conversion according to Jewish law, not conversion according to Jewish law.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. So it’s an argument, but the argument stems from the question of how you conceive the concept, and therefore it’s a real dispute. Semantic separation won’t help here, if you call it Israeli and I call it Jew and everything is fine. An argument about morality: there’s an argument about morality. I think elderly people should be put in assisted living, and the Eskimo thinks they should be taken out into the snow so they can freeze there peacefully. Okay? We have a moral dispute. Is that a dispute or not? What’s the problem? So call it morality and he’ll call it forality, and everything is fine. According to the principles of forality, they should be taken out into the snow; according to the principles of morality, they should be put in assisted living. So we have no dispute, everything is fine. Do you agree? Of course not. It’s a real dispute, right? Why? Because we are both talking about morality. We are both talking about the same thing—not only are we calling it by the same name, it really is the same thing. So how do we have an argument? If it’s the same thing, how is there an argument? There is an argument because we are genuinely trying to understand what stands there—what is this thing we are looking at? This thing called the idea of morality, yes? And we have a dispute about what we see there, what that idea says. But it’s a real dispute; it has to be conducted. It won’t help here to separate at the level of terms—you’ll call it one thing and I’ll call it another and everything will be fine.
[Speaker B] A constitutive definition is something, an artificial concept. I say Jew is a constitutive definition and I don’t know how to define it. Everyone will define it differently. I say there is Torah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so what I’m saying is: if the definition is constitutive, then you know exactly how to define it. What you define is your definition of a Jew, and what I define is my definition of a Jew. It makes much more sense to use different words. Fine. Because otherwise it just creates confusion. But there’s no problem at all with the ability to define, if the definition is constitutive. A constitutive definition—what you define is the concept. When you talk about a problem of defining, you’re always talking about an extensional definition, not a constitutive one. Because what you’re really saying is: there is a concept, and now the question is whether I manage to hit it with my definition or not. Meaning, the concept exists not only by virtue of the definition; it existed before it. It’s abstract. It’s abstract, and therefore there may be arguments about how to define it, but it exists there. And the fact that it’s abstract doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and has no meaning. Okay? The second practical difference is the practical difference of change. Can concepts change over time? The concept of democracy, the concept of Jew, the concept of—I don’t know—morality, have changed over time. Okay? Does that mean the concept changed, or are we simply talking about a different concept? That’s all. So if we understand that a definition is constitutive, then there’s no such thing as a concept changing. The moment you define it differently, it’s simply a different concept. If you’re talking to me about a concept that changes, that means you understand that there is… our assumption is that it’s the same person. Why is it the same person? After all, he looks completely different; maybe not even a single cell remains from age one to age thirty, let’s say for the sake of discussion. The Ship of Theseus, right? So is it the same person? Yes, we assume it’s the same person. Why? Because the person is not this collection of cells; it’s probably his characteristics, his forms of appearance, but the person is some other kind of thing that can undergo changes. If that collection of characteristics were the person, then the moment there were different characteristics, it would be a different person. One river, yes, exactly, Heraclitus, yes. So the claim is that if we’re talking about extensional definitions, that opens up two things that won’t exist in constitutive definitions. First, arguments—truth or falsehood, or who is right. Yes, there’s something here: I say it this way, you say it differently, we argue about the definition of a concept. Second, changes. The concept can—the definition of the concept can change. And in constitutive concepts there’s no such thing. The moment it changes, you’re simply talking about a different concept. Not that the concept itself changed. Okay? So that’s regarding definitions of complex concepts, and in particular poetry. Now, I said I’m opening with a definition of poetry for two reasons. First, because it helps me deal a bit with the concept of definition in relation to complex concepts. Second, to define the concept of definition. The second reason: the Torah itself is called poetry. Right? “And now, write for yourselves this song”—you said earlier, “write for yourselves this song”; from here they derive the commandment to write a Torah scroll. That is, the Torah is called poetry. Except that the Sha’agat Aryeh does write—he has two possibilities for explaining why from “and now write for yourselves this song” it follows that one must write a Torah scroll. That is, there are two possibilities. One possibility is that “the song” is the Song of Ha’azinu. But when you write the Song of Ha’azinu, you can’t write it by itself, because one may not write the Torah in separate sections. It is forbidden to write one part of the Torah separately. So you write the whole Torah. But really, when the Torah says “write for yourselves this song,” the song is not the Torah; the song is the section of Ha’azinu. It’s not the Torah. It’s just that in the end we arrive at the commandment of writing a Torah scroll because one may not write the Torah in separate sections. And then it turns out that the Torah is not necessarily being called poetry here. Of course the view—what? That’s just a difficulty on the Sha’agat Aryeh; we won’t get into that now. Yes. The second possibility he mentions is that indeed the song is not the Song of Ha’azinu, but rather the Torah is called poetry. “And now write for yourselves this song” means to write the Torah. By the way, even according to the first possibility, it’s clear that if I wrote the Song of Ha’azinu and let’s say violated the prohibition against writing the Torah in separate sections, I still fulfilled the commandment of “write for yourselves this song,” right? Seemingly. So according to that view there really is no commandment to write a Torah scroll. I think he doesn’t mean that; I think he means something else. Since there is a prohibition against writing the Torah in separate sections, that was the way the Torah commanded me to write the whole Torah. It simply commanded me to write the song; it knew, of course, that one may not write the Torah in separate sections, and from that I can understand that I need to write the whole Torah. But the commandment is to write the whole Torah, not the Song of Ha’azinu. It’s like telling someone: you have to watch the last episode of this series. Yes, exactly.
[Speaker C] Fine, right, it’s forced; this whole suggestion of the Sha’agat Aryeh is forced. In any case, for our purposes, really why I’m saying this—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —is because in the end, the very fact that the Torah chose to write it specifically this way—why did it choose to write it specifically this way? If it wants to tell me to write the Torah, then why does it write “write Ha’azinu” and rely on the rule that one may not write the Torah in separate sections? It should just write “write the Torah.” What’s the problem? Because it wanted to tell me that Torah is poetry anyway—even according to that possibility. So in any case we think that according to both possibilities it’s clear that there are places where we see the Torah being treated as poetry. Why is that really so? Why is the Torah called poetry? The concept of Torah… what? The fact that today we call the Torah “Torah” is not because of “write the words of this Torah to completion”; there it says Torah—
[Speaker C] It suddenly has to do with instruction, so the concept Torah was born a thousand years later.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe, but in any case it could have been written not through the word “song,” right? Meaning, it could say, I don’t know, “write the things you received from Me.” There are ways to formulate it. That’s not the issue.
[Speaker D] That doesn’t come from the Torah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what? The Oral Torah doesn’t—what difference does it make?
[Speaker D] If the Torah tells you to write only this song, and you interpreted that you need to write—because it’s forbidden to write sections—that’s already your interpretation.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, interpretation? Oral Torah. Oral Torah is not necessarily interpretation; it could be a law given to Moses at Sinai, or something transmitted by tradition, Oral Torah. Oral Torah is not necessarily interpretation. It’s a law given to Moses at Sinai, or it was transmitted by tradition, Oral Torah. It doesn’t have to be interpretation.
[Speaker D] No, but we’re relating to the written text. If you say it says to write this song, then you’re relating to what’s written. I didn’t understand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You write this song, and there is a rule from the Oral Torah that one does not write the Torah in separate sections. So you understand that you have to write the whole Torah. So what if it isn’t written explicitly? That’s a rule of the Oral Torah; we received the Oral Torah as well. We received the Oral Torah too. So if in the Oral Torah it says that one does not write the Torah—or let’s say, it doesn’t say “written,” but it says—that one may not write the Torah in separate sections, then I use that and understand that I can’t write the song separately. Okay, in any case—so what does that mean, what does it really mean? Up to this point I want now to move on to characteristics, some characteristics of the Torah, and still from above, so to speak. Okay? Why is it called poetry? I think not accidentally, not in the sense of the definitions we spoke about earlier. Basically, I think the Torah is some kind of mode of contemplation, or some kind of collection of abstract ideas that come to us through the particulars that appear in the Torah. Let’s talk for a moment only about Jewish law. Later I’ll talk about the relationship between Jewish law and other things. Let’s talk—and I’ll argue that Jewish law is really the focal point of Torah. Torah in its essence is Jewish law. Everything around it needs an explanation of why it is Torah at all. But for now I’m leaving that aside; let’s focus for the moment on Jewish law just for the—
[Speaker B] The Torah narratives aren’t Torah? What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Torah narratives aren’t Torah? The book of Genesis? I said: that needs explanation—why that too is Torah.
[Speaker B] I didn’t say it’s not Torah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rashi’s very first comment—that’s not me, that’s Rashi’s very first comment on Genesis. If Torah is only Jewish law, then what is not Jewish law isn’t defined as Torah? So I said: what is not Jewish law needs an explanation for why it too is included there. And that’s Rashi’s first comment on Genesis, right? That’s what he asks. So I want for a moment to explain—using this point, using the comparison to poetry, to illustrate more clearly what I mean: what is Torah? Look, let’s look at the Talmud in tractate Shabbat—what happened, happened, of course, a bit of aggadah; here and there we’ll touch it unavoidably—Shabbat 88b. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: At the time when Moses ascended on high, the ministering angels said before the Holy One, blessed be He: Master of the universe, what is one born of woman doing among us? He said to them: He has come to receive the Torah. They said before Him: The treasured thing hidden away with You, hidden away for nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created, do You seek to give it to flesh and blood? “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You think of him? Lord our Master, how mighty is Your name throughout the earth—place Your glory upon the heavens.” Yes, why are You giving him the Torah? He’s a human being, made of matter, dwelling in houses of clay. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses: Answer them. He said before Him: Master of the universe, I fear lest they burn me with the breath of their mouths. He said to him: Grasp My Throne of Glory and answer them, as it is said, “He grasps the face of the throne, spreading His cloud over it.” And Rabbi Nachum said: This teaches that the Almighty spread some of the radiance of His Presence and clouded him with it. He said before Him: Master of the universe, the Torah that You are giving me—what is written in it? “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” He said to them: Did you descend to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? Why should the Torah be for you? He says to the angels, yes? You didn’t go down to Egypt, so what do you want with the Torah? Again, what is written in it? “You shall have no other gods.” Do you dwell among nations that practice idolatry? Again, what is written in it? “Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it.” Do you perform labor, that you need cessation from labor? Again, what is written in it? “Do not take…” Do you have commercial dealings among you? Again, what is written in it? “Honor your father and your mother.” Do you have father and mother? Again, what is written in it? “You shall not murder,” “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not steal.” Is there jealousy among you? Do you have an evil inclination? Immediately they conceded to the Holy One, blessed be He, as it is said: “Lord our Master, how mighty is Your name” etc., and it does not say, “place Your glory upon the heavens.” Yes, they gave up their demand to keep the Torah in heaven. A very well-known midrash. Of course it never literally happened; it’s an aggadic midrash. But what is this aggadic midrash trying to say? There’s something very strange in the angels’ claim. They want the Torah not to be given to Moses our teacher, right? They had been occupied with Torah until then; Moses our teacher arrives there. The Holy One, blessed be He, gives him the Torah, and they say, wait, wait—what? First of all, one candle can light a hundred candles—what’s the problem? Let him engage in Torah too, and you engage in Torah too. What? Why does it bother you that he too should have the Torah? Apparently the understanding is that the Torah is transferred there—it isn’t given there as well. Not that we’ll keep ours and they’ll also receive Torah. Fine, they too will occupy themselves with it the way we do. No. Something about bringing the Torah down means that the Torah is no longer with you. That’s it—it has moved into something else. Okay? That’s one thing. Second, Moses gives them arguments—yes, do you have parents? What are you doing with “Honor your father and your mother”? Or Sabbath—do you rest on the Sabbath? You don’t do labor. What did they think? Or what did they do with the Torah before it was given to Moses our teacher? What did they do with “Honor your father and your mother”? Again, this is an aggadic midrash, but I’m asking within this aggadic midrash, on its own terms—what is the meaning of this bizarre back-and-forth between the angels and Moses our teacher? It’s a trivial argument, right? What did they think? What did they do with the Torah beforehand? Okay, so I’ll return to that midrash in a moment. It’s clear that what this midrash wants to say, it seems to me—clear, it seems to me—is that the Torah is not what Moses our teacher received. That’s not the Torah. The Torah is a collection of abstract ideas that can wear various garments. The garment the Torah wore when it came down into the human world is the garment we know today. Yes: honor your father and your mother, do not steal, do not murder, Sabbath observance, and the like. That is the garment the Torah wore when it descended at Sinai to earth and was given to human beings. Then it speaks in human language and clothes itself in the conceptual world of human beings, and that’s it. What did the angels do before? Obviously they did not study “Honor your father and your mother.” That’s irrelevant from their point of view. Rather what? They studied some abstract matter or abstract matters whose translation into human language is honoring parents, do not rob, Sabbath observance, eating kosher, things of that sort. Okay? So that basically means that the Torah as such, the abstract concept, is a collection of ideas that we don’t really have a way to formulate, touch, think about, or understand, and therefore when the Torah comes down here it clothes itself in our conceptual world and becomes “an ox that gored a cow” and “honor your father and your mother.”
[Speaker D] Like in physics—they knew the theory of gravity, and I only see the apple falling.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s say, something like that, exactly. So the claim basically is that the concept Torah is not the Torah scroll we received at Mount Sinai. That’s the meaning of this midrash. The Torah scroll we received at Mount Sinai is some kind of garment that the Torah, that abstract thing, put on when it came down here. The angels were occupied with a completely different version of the Torah. Is it the same Torah? Exactly the same Torah. Exactly the same Torah. The only thing is that in every world, in every context, in every set of circumstances, that abstract thing takes on a different form within that system. So the angels were probably occupied with the question of which wings one should fly with on the Sabbath, and what one should do—six wings for one, or four wings for one—or all kinds of things of that sort. Doesn’t matter, something from their world, which was probably also only a garment. It wasn’t the real thing itself either. But they really didn’t understand, “place Your glory upon the heavens.” As if to say: the Torah we know—what are that bunch of guys down there supposed to do with it? And then Moses our teacher answers—it’s really a dialogue of the deaf. What are you supposed to do with the laws of angels’ wings? And he asks them: tell me, what are you supposed to do with laws of father and mother? You don’t have father and mother. And it’s obvious that this is a dialogue of the deaf.
[Speaker D] How did they know this, if you’re saying it was given only to Moses?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, they didn’t know anything.
[Speaker D] On the contrary, that’s what he argued to them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How did he convince them? Because he showed them what was written in the Torah he was receiving. Come see what is written here in the Torah—it’s not relevant to you. What’s the novelty? The novelty is that even the angels didn’t understand that the Torah they were occupied with was also a garment. It too was not the Torah itself. There is something abstract that you grasp this way, I grasp that way, and it’s the same thing. Okay? Understand that what I am receiving isn’t relevant from your point of view, and what you were occupied with really isn’t relevant to me. “Place Your glory upon the heavens.” Everything is fine. When the Torah is given on earth, that basically means it clothes itself in some garment that is the garment. The decision is made down here—that’s another thing that accompanies this idea. But first of all, it means that the Torah is an abstract thing, and what we know of it is some kind of garment of it; it is not it itself, not the Torah as such. Now notice, I’m not talking about the verbal formulation of the ideas. You could say the Torah itself is honoring parents, and the verbal verse “Honor your father and your mother” is the verbal garment of the idea. No, I’m saying the idea itself is a garment. The very idea—the whole engagement with father and mother, and honoring father and mother, and children and all that—is entirely a garment; it is not the thing itself. There’s a very nice example I use for this point—if I have the quote here, I don’t remember anymore. No, I don’t have the quote here. There’s a book by some German professor of philosophy, Eugen Herrigel or something like that—I’m surely not pronouncing it exactly right—from the beginning of the twentieth century, called Zen in the Art of Archery. And it reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but that’s something else, more modern. Zen in the Art of Archery is an old thing, early twentieth century. This was a German professor of philosophy who had a friend, a professor of law at the University of Tokyo, and he came to him there on sabbatical or whatever, to stay there for a period. And he asked him—he wanted to study Zen, Zen Buddhism. So his friend connected him to some Zen master who would teach him. And the book describes what he went through with the Zen master, trying to translate it into a Western ear. Now, the book opens—I think this is the opening of the book—he gets there, and the master asks him, at the first meeting, what do you want to learn: archery, flower arrangement, or—I don’t remember what it was—wrestling? I don’t remember, something else. And he says: no, no, no, none of those—I want to learn Zen. He says, okay, yes yes, but flower arrangement, archery—he didn’t understand what he wanted. And in the end he decided to teach him through archery, and that fellow there shot an arrow and bow from I don’t know how far away, some two hundred meters, without looking, and he sent the arrow straight into the apple, yes, like William Tell. But he taught him through archery, and then basically over the course of the book it becomes clear that Zen is a collection of ideas—that’s the claim—Zen is a collection of abstract ideas. You can learn it through learning archery, and you can learn it through learning flower arrangement, and you learn exactly the same thing. You are occupied with something completely different—there is no connection—and it’s not that every way of arranging flowers corresponds to some way of shooting a bow and arrow; the mapping is not one-to-one. It is a collection of abstract things, and you can transmit them through all kinds of media, through flower arrangement, through archery, and it doesn’t matter. You convey the exact same thing itself. Because that thing itself cannot be conveyed directly. You cannot engage the abstract thing itself; it has to clothe itself in something concrete. You shoot a bow and arrow, you arrange flowers—only through that can it be learned. But through each of them you learn exactly the same thing. Now, what is this abstract thing you learn? I don’t know how to define it, but I can characterize it—you see the psychiatric characterizations and so on, all that will now be translated here. Meaning, I can characterize it or convey it through a certain medium, so that it takes on, clothes itself in, a collection of concepts: how to hit the target correctly with a bow and arrow, how to concentrate, how to aim, which bow and arrow to use, it doesn’t matter, what kind of target, what the wind is. He learned archery the normal way; he didn’t learn Zen—he learned archery. And the claim is that through that he actually learned Zen. That’s the claim. Do you understand? And the same is true of flower arrangement, and the same of anything else. Now, I think this is a wonderful parable for what I’m looking for here regarding Torah. The Torah of the angels and the Torah of human beings are basically flower arrangement and archery. They are two different garments of some abstract thing, and it is that same abstract thing itself. It is the same abstract thing. But you cannot talk about that abstract thing except through “an ox that gored a cow,” honoring parents, Sabbath observance, eating kosher, and do not steal. Okay, that is the way—I have no way to touch the thing itself; I can touch it only through its clothed forms in our conceptual world. What? Okay.
[Speaker C] What happens with the content of what was there before? I didn’t understand. When we say the entire people of Israel received the Torah, they heard the Ten Commandments before what happened here. So what? Just as the patriarchs studied Torah, Torah is basically the speech, the divine speech. After that Moses our teacher goes up the mountain, as it were, to receive the Torah. Okay. So the angels didn’t hear what the Holy One, blessed be He, said?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea. Maybe not, I don’t know. What difference does it make? I’m saying: this aggadah never literally happened. I’m not talking about that at all—obviously. But I’m saying that it comes to tell me something. Why did the Sages formulate such an aggadah? They formulated such an aggadah, I think, to convey this idea. I’m not claiming that it really happened there.
[Speaker D] When you say about that same person who learned Zen through archery—at the end of the day, did he have some set of these ideas that he knew how to formulate?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea.
[Speaker D] How did he know?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He knew—you know, like—
[Speaker D] —doing an internship.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You do an internship and you learn the profession, even if you don’t know how to formulate it as a set of rules.
[Speaker D] I’m not talking about the profession of archery. I’m talking about the fact that it represented ideas. The question is whether he became aware of those ideas.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I assume so. I don’t know whether he could formulate them. I assume he couldn’t formulate them. That’s why even in the book he writes through archery, but through that he tries to convey something that passes through the archery.
[Speaker D] And then we understand the ideas of Zen?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You understand what it’s about, yes. Meaning, not the ideas of Zen, but what Zen is. Not the ideas themselves. There are also a few of the ideas themselves there, but he’s trying to say that it’s a collection of abstract ways of looking at things—don’t think it’s archery or flower arrangement. That’s the medium through which it passes.
[Speaker D] So when we study honoring father and mother, and so on…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll talk about that next time. I’ll talk about it. Yes.
[Speaker B] Nachmanides writes somewhere that basically the Torah is a collection of combinations of the names of the Holy One, blessed be He. Okay. And basically we divided the Torah—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That connects to the midrash he mentioned earlier about the scrambled letters. “Moses wrote in tears,” according to the Vilna Gaon, so those too are scrambled letters in a tearful mixture. But the scrambled letters, or the collection of the names of the Holy One, blessed be He, are all metaphorical descriptions of what I was talking about here. That is basically the collection of these abstract ideas I’ve been discussing. You can call it scrambled letters, you can call it the names of God—it doesn’t matter. The principle is that there is here a collection of abstract ideas, and what we call Torah is merely the particular garment those ideas wore in our world when they descended at Mount Sinai. Okay.
[Speaker C] Good.