A Look at Torah and Torah Study – Lesson 3 – Rabbi Michael Abraham
This transcript was generated automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- The transition from abstract concepts to commandments and Jewish law
- Aggadic literature as a text that demands precision and interpretation
- The Zen parable and the appearance of an abstract idea in different garments
- Kant, perception, color, and sound as an analogy for Torah
- Changes in brain wiring and the objectivity of language
- The problem of color and the gap between linguistic synchronization and inner experience
- Moses’ answer, garments, and shifting the focus of halakhic ruling downward
- Religious exclusivity, internal education, and different roles
- “These and those,” the concubine in Gibeah, and truth as a multiplicity of aspects
- Halakhic dispute, practical decision, and 150 reasons
- The distinction between aspects and garments, and the seventy faces of Torah
- Conflict resolution, South Africa, and the cultural-religious context
- Qualia, psychophysics, and the psycho-physical problem
- Gender and sexual orientation as an example of dependence on inner report
- Yosef Neumann, materialism, and emergence
- The author of the Tanya: thought, speech, and action as garments of the soul, and divine contraction in Torah
- Torah as water and the descent from a high place to a low place
- An additional transition: from the idea to the formulation and then to the act
- Kingship and understanding: a descent that returns to the conceptual foundation
- “An eye for an eye” and the laws of Hammurabi as an example of the gap between formulation and understanding
- Shema: the dispute in Berakhot, the interpretation of Shema, and Rashba’s explanation
- Shabbat 40 and Tosafot: does language apply to contemplation?
- Summary of the distinction: Torah as a double garmenting, and preparation for the next lecture
Summary
General Overview
The text presents the unfolding of Torah from something abstract into concrete garments of commandments and Jewish law, and argues that what is perceived as Torah in our world is a form of appearance adapted to the world of human concepts, not “Torah itself.” It interprets the aggadah about the argument between Moses and the angels as proof that Torah clothes itself in different garments in different worlds, and connects this to Kant’s views on human perception, to philosophical problems of color and sound, and to the question of the objectivity of language versus subjective experience. It brings a passage from the author of the Tanya that the Holy One, blessed be He, contracted His will and wisdom into the 613 commandments and their laws so that a person could grasp them through thought, speech, and action, and continues to another distinction between an idea and its linguistic formulation, through the dispute in Berakhot about “Shema” and Rashba’s interpretation.
The transition from abstract concepts to commandments and Jewish law
The speaker focuses the discussion on Jewish law as an example of the process in which Torah descends from a system of abstract concepts into commandments or transgressions, and says that the essential explanation may come later. He brings the aggadah about the argument between Moses and the angels to argue that the angels ask why Torah is being brought down to earth because they identify “Torah” with a particular garment, while Moses answers them that the halakhic garment of “father and mother,” “six days,” “murder,” “theft,” “Sabbath,” and “eating pork” is not relevant to their conceptual world. From this he concludes that Torah itself is something abstract, and the laws are a garment adapted to the world of human beings; in another world people would study “Torah” in a way that would not be recognizable as such from the human form in which it appears.
Aggadic literature as a text that demands precision and interpretation
The speaker argues that precisely because aggadah is not a binding historical description, one must be even more precise with it, because every detail included in the story serves a communicative role. He illustrates this with the story of Alexander of Macedon and Shimon HaTzaddik, which in his view could not have happened because of historical and factual mismatch, and therefore the very construction of the story forces us to ask why specifically Shimon HaTzaddik, Alexander of Macedon, and Jerusalem were chosen. He uses this principle to ground a reading of the aggadah of Moses and the angels as a text intended to teach what Torah is, not to describe an arm-wrestling match between figures.
The Zen parable and the appearance of an abstract idea in different garments
The speaker brings Eugen Herrigel and Zen as a parable for the idea that an abstract concept can be expressed in different media, like flower arranging or archery, so that from the outside it seems that different disciplines are being learned, while in fact the same principle is being learned. From this he concludes that a person never encounters “the thing in itself,” but only through practical garments that enable interaction with the principle. He presents Torah in the same logical structure: the abstract Torah clothes itself in an angelic garment and, in parallel, in a human garment; both appearances are forms of expression and not the essence itself.
Kant, perception, color, and sound as an analogy for Torah
The speaker uses Kant and the terms noumenon and phenomenon to argue that all perception is always “in the terms of the perceiving system” and not the result of some accidental limitation. He illustrates this with the color of a table and argues that there is no such thing as “brown color” in the world itself, only frequencies, and that a statement about color is really a statement about how the human system translates a physical phenomenon into consciousness. He brings the question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there,” and determines that there was no sound there, because sound is a conscious translation of a pressure wave and not an entity “in the world itself.”
Changes in brain wiring and the objectivity of language
The speaker describes the theoretical possibility of rerouting information from the retina to the auditory center so that a person would “hear sights,” and emphasizes that such a person is not “malfunctioning” but simply operating with different wiring that creates a different mapping between phenomenon and experience. He argues that every wiring creates a translation, and therefore whenever we say something about the world, we are really saying something about how the world appears to the perceiver. He rejects a postmodern conclusion of total subjectivism, and says that statements like “the table is brown” are objective in the sense that they describe a consistent relation between the structure of the table and frequencies that humans perceive as brown, and the difference between Hebrew and English illustrates that language is a form of expression and not reality itself.
The problem of color and the gap between linguistic synchronization and inner experience
The speaker presents the “philosophers’ chestnut” with the question whether two people who see “red” experience the same inner shade, or whether for one person it is what the other would call “green,” while the words and reactions remain perfectly synchronized. He argues that there is no way to verify this, because one can check wavelength but cannot enter another person’s subjective image. From this he concludes that one can agree semantically and factually about phenomena in the world despite possible gaps in sensory representation, and he uses this to explain how angels and human beings can engage in “the same Torah” even though they do not understand one another’s garments.
Moses’ answer, garments, and shifting the focus of halakhic ruling downward
The speaker interprets Moses’ answer to the angels as the claim that there is no reason to be alarmed by Torah’s descent, because what descends is a human garment, while the angels continue to engage with the garment relevant to them, and he formulates this as the distinction between “honor your father and mother” and “eternity within splendor.” He adds that sometimes the texts present not only parallel garments but also a transfer of the center of decision to this world, and he brings the story of Rabbah bar Nachmani and the dispute about a bright spot and white hair, in which the heavenly academy turns to a ruling in the lower world. He notes that this is the perspective of the human Talmudic text, and suggests a symmetrical imaginary possibility of “the Talmud of the angels,” in which the story would be presented the other way around.
Religious exclusivity, internal education, and different roles
The speaker raises the example of a Christian who grew up in a Polish village and serves his God faithfully, and argues that there is no necessity that he end up in hell just because he was born into a different context and did the best he knew. He argues that the interreligious exclusive discourse of “I’m right and you’re wrong” serves largely internal needs of commitment and identity, and that from a higher perspective these may be different garments and different roles. He distinguishes between saying that someone is “okay” and saying that he is “right,” and stresses that the claim is not necessarily that the other is right, but that absolute judgment does not arise from the internal language of education.
“These and those,” the concubine in Gibeah, and truth as a multiplicity of aspects
The speaker cites from Gittin the phrase “These and those are the words of the living God,” and the dispute over whether there was a “fly” or a “hair” in the story of the concubine in Gibeah, and describes the Talmud’s answer—“He found a fly and did not object; he found a hair and did object”—as the claim that both factors together produced the objection. He proposes an interpretation of “partial correctness,” in which each side grasps a certain facet, and the full truth emerges from combining those facets. He illustrates this with the parable of the elephant and with spatial projections of a point onto different planes, in order to explain how disputes describe partial intellectual projections.
Halakhic dispute, practical decision, and 150 reasons
The speaker argues that halakhic disputes are disputes in which both sides are “completely right in their reasoning,” but in practice there still has to be one decision for action. He brings the phrase “150 reasons to declare impure and 150 reasons to declare pure,” and Maharal’s interpretation that both sets of reasons are correct, while the practical ruling is determined by the greater force of the reasons, not by the cancellation of the other side’s reason. He emphasizes that force or violence do not determine truth, and criticizes the view that whoever wins, or “kills the opponent,” is the one who is right.
The distinction between aspects and garments, and the seventy faces of Torah
The speaker distinguishes between “aspects,” which are partial truths that join together into a complete picture, and “garments,” in which the same full truth appears in another language and does not need to be completed by combining different perspectives. He classifies “the Torah has seventy faces” as closer to the category of aspects, and brings the example of “an eye for an eye,” where the plain sense presents physical injury and interpretation leads to monetary payment, and both readings carry a principled truth even though practical Jewish law chooses one. He argues that with angels and human beings there is no need to combine faces in order to complete the truth, because each world receives a complete truth in its own language.
Conflict resolution, South Africa, and the cultural-religious context
The speaker rejects the pessimism that arguments must be resolved by war, and argues that decisions can also be reached by peaceful means such as voting and following the majority. He brings the truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa as a historical example of breaking the expectation of a bloodbath after regime change, while qualifying that “it worked until it stopped working,” but still not in the expected way. He says he is skeptical about importing that model into the local conflict, and argues that in the Christian world the concept of forgiveness is “very deep,” whereas in the Jewish-Muslim world it is harder to implement such a solution.
Qualia, psychophysics, and the psycho-physical problem
The speaker argues that there is no way to measure directly the subjective phenomena of inner experience, and raises the psychophysical question of how a physical phenomenon like light intensity is translated into “how much brighter” in experience. He mentions Daniel Algom’s book Psychophysics and the debate over whether the law linking stimulus to sensation is logarithmic or a power law, and argues that measurement relies on reports that do not allow precise determination. He cites Yeshayahu Leibowitz to the effect that the soul is not accessible to scientific research in its inner sense, only through questioning, and argues that psychiatry and neuroscience rely on correlations that can always be challenged in principle.
Gender and sexual orientation as an example of dependence on inner report
The speaker presents a distinction between biological sex and gender and sexual orientation, and argues that the latter are not measurable but rely on the person’s internal report. He explains that public controversies arise because people do not believe the report “I was born male but I feel female,” and there is no way to prove this to someone who refuses to accept the report. He adds that trusting the report does not require a halakhic or practical decision, and that one must separate recognition of the phenomenon from the question of “what do we do with it.”
Yosef Neumann, materialism, and emergence
The speaker describes a conversation with Professor Yosef Neumann, “a very active and militant atheist materialist,” who argued that many materialists are mistaken when they identify thought and emotion with electrical currents, instead of claiming that electrical currents generate mental phenomena. He presents this as a claim about emergence and as a kind of Gestalt image, and emphasizes that the distinction exists even from within a materialist perspective and therefore does not depend on the debate between materialism and dualism. He uses this to strengthen the claim that even if biological mechanisms of perception are similar, there is no way to know that the subjective picture is identical.
The author of the Tanya: thought, speech, and action as garments of the soul, and divine contraction in Torah
The speaker reads a passage from the author of the Tanya stating that every divine soul has three garments—thought, speech, and action—and that these garments clothe themselves in the 613 commandments through performance of practical commandments, verbal involvement in the laws and explanations of the commandments, and intellectual grasp in thought in the inner orchard of Torah. He explains that the purpose is to connect the person to Torah and to the Holy One, blessed be He, through garments that allow perception and attachment, and he formulates this by saying that garmenting enables the perceiving system to grasp in its own terms. He quotes “Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are entirely one,” and the Tanya’s wording that “the Holy One, blessed be He, contracted His will and wisdom into the 613 commandments of the Torah and their laws, and into the combinations of letters of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and their interpretations in the aggadot and midrashim of our sages of blessed memory… so that every soul, spirit, and life-force within the human body would be able to grasp them.”
Torah as water and the descent from a high place to a low place
The speaker quotes from Tanya: “Therefore Torah is compared to water… it descended from the place of its glory… in the hidden chain of levels… in the unfolding of the worlds… until it clothed itself in material things and matters of this world… so that every thought could grasp them.” He argues that “no thought can grasp Him at all” is a general logical claim about the impossibility of grasping the thing in itself, and not only a statement about divine transcendence, and he illustrates this with a table no less than with the Holy One, blessed be He. He concludes that garments are a condition for the connection between a person and something abstract, just as in learning Zen a practical medium is required.
An additional transition: from the idea to the formulation and then to the act
The speaker argues that the descent does not stop at the move from abstract ideas to halakhic ideas, but continues with another concretization in which the idea is formulated in words, and only afterward realized in action. He explains that the formulation “Honor your father and your mother” does not exhaust the idea of honoring parents, but only represents it in summary form, and therefore there is a gap between the Written Torah and the full halakhic and intuitive whole. He connects this to the claim that the Oral Torah “must remain oral” so that it not become imprisoned in rigid formulations, and emphasizes that the act does not realize the speech as such but the thought behind it, while the speech is a representation that requires a process of abstraction back from the text to the idea.
Kingship and understanding: a descent that returns to the conceptual foundation
The speaker says in kabbalistic language that kingship is considered both low and high because it is composed of all the others, and suggests that kingship returns to understanding and to the underlying idea of the process. He formulates this by saying that practical implementation is the lowest stage, but its purpose is to hit the highest content, that is, to create a match between the act and the original will. He adds that mistakes were made in human interpretation and that “a large part of the Torah in our hands is clearly not… what He intended,” and suggests that closeness to the source has an advantage, but distance stimulates the development of analytical abilities as compensation for weaker intuition.
“An eye for an eye” and the laws of Hammurabi as an example of the gap between formulation and understanding
The speaker responds to the claim that “an eye for an eye” in the laws of Hammurabi was not implemented literally but as a metaphor for payment, and notes that among the sages the move to monetary compensation appears as interpretation—“a verbal analogy of ‘under’ and ‘under’”—and not as a declaration that this is the plain sense. He accepts the possibility that de facto the sages reached the original plain meaning even if they justified it by way of interpretation. He uses this example to illustrate that the biblical formulation is a layer that demands conceptual reconstruction.
Shema: the dispute in Berakhot, the interpretation of Shema, and Rashba’s explanation
The speaker cites a Mishnah in Berakhot 15: “One who recited Shema but did not make it audible to his own ear has fulfilled his obligation. Rabbi Yosei says: he has not fulfilled it,” and the Talmud that says Rabbi Yosei derives from “Shema” the obligation to make it audible to the ear, while the first Tanna derives “Shema” to mean “in any language that you hear.” He quotes Rashba, who objects to the possibility of deriving “two things” from the same word, and offers an interpretation in which the law of making it audible to the ear is learned indirectly from the need to permit “any language,” because if mere contemplation were enough, “language would not apply.” From this he establishes a distinction between a law focused on thought, in which language is not a factor, and a law focused on speech, where the question arises in what language the idea is to be represented.
Shabbat 40 and Tosafot: does language apply to contemplation?
The speaker brings the Talmud in Shabbat 40 about the permissibility of contemplation everywhere except in the bathhouse and the toilet, and Tosafot, who raise the possibility of contemplation in a secular language as opposed to the holy tongue. He quotes the comment of Rashash, who understands from this that language does apply to contemplation, and sets this against Rashba. He rejects the understanding that Rashba is saying one cannot think in words, and argues that Rashba means that when the law deals with thought, the content of the idea is primary and therefore the language is not significant, whereas in speech one deals with linguistic representation, where language requirements may indeed arise.
Summary of the distinction: Torah as a double garmenting, and preparation for the next lecture
The speaker concludes that the Torah we know has already gone through two stages: a descent from the abstract to the ideas of our world, and a further descent from the idea to a specific linguistic formulation, and then to action. He argues that Torah “at its source” is not even the ideas but the abstract thing itself, and that even with respect to formulated Torah one must distinguish between the verses and the ideas expressed in them. He ends by promising to connect this later to the question “What is poetry, and why is Torah called poetry,” and concludes, “That’s it for now.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, last time I started talking a bit about the unfolding of Torah from a system of abstract concepts or abstract ideas into commandments or transgressions. I spoke about the halakhic part, so I’m focusing on that for purposes of the discussion; maybe the explanation will come later, but there’s also a more essential explanation behind it. Right now I’m talking about Jewish law as an example. I brought the Talmudic passage about the argument between Moses and the angels, where the angels ask why the Torah was brought down to earth, and then Moses answers them: what do you have to do with Torah? Do you have a father and mother? Do you work six days? Do you murder, steal? How are all these things relevant to you? And the question was of course: what did they think to begin with? The angels—what were they thinking? Again, of course this is aggadah, but this aggadah is coming to say something, and by the way I think—and this is a methodological point—when something is aggadah, you have to be more precise with it. Meaning, if something is a description of an event that actually happened, then not necessarily every detail of that event is important; that’s just how it happened. But when someone constructs an aggadah in order to convey some message, then every detail he inserted into the aggadah probably serves some role, otherwise why is it there? It’s like the Talmud that talks about Alexander of Macedon who came to the Land, and Shimon HaTzaddik went out to meet him with the sages of Jerusalem, and then Alexander of Macedon got off his horse, and everyone asked him why he was getting down, and he said: the image of this man goes before me and grants me victory in all my wars. Shimon HaTzaddik basically paved the way for Alexander’s army, and one could elaborate at length about the idea behind that, but the question that comes up there is that Shimon HaTzaddik did not meet Alexander of Macedon for two reasons: first, they didn’t live in the same period, and second, Alexander never came to the Land. So this story could not have happened. And the claim I want to make is that precisely because it didn’t happen, that means it demands interpretation—meaning, a story was built here in order to convey some kind of message. So you have to ask what that message is saying. Because if it were just a story of something that happened, they’re telling me what happened, fine, that’s what happened. You can still ask why they brought it, but certainly not every detail in the story is important; the detail was that way because that’s how it actually was, that’s what happened, what do you want them to tell you? But when someone constructs a story, then every detail he puts into the story—you can ask yourself why he put in specifically that one. Why didn’t he put Abraham our forefather there? Why Shimon HaTzaddik? Why specifically Alexander of Macedon? Why specifically in Jerusalem? All kinds of questions like that, which you wouldn’t ask if it simply happened with Shimon HaTzaddik—well, that’s what happened, what do you want, that we should tell you it was Abraham? It happened with Shimon HaTzaddik. But if it was neither Abraham nor Shimon HaTzaddik, then the question is why they chose specifically Shimon HaTzaddik. And therefore, many times something that is aggadah demands interpretation—“interpret me”—more than facts do. So for our purposes, what we basically saw here is that Torah undergoes a transition. Moses says to them: so what are you doing with Torah? And what I argued is that this aggadah wants to tell us something about Torah. This is not some kind of arm-wrestling match between Moses and the angels; rather, there is some story here that comes to teach us something about what Torah is. And our initial intuition is that Torah is the collection of things written in the Torah scroll; that’s what’s called Torah, okay? Honoring father and mother, keeping the Sabbath, murder, “love your neighbor as yourself,” the prohibition against eating pork—all these things, that’s what’s called Torah. And what this aggadah wants to say is that that’s not true. Torah is some abstract thing that among the angels clothed itself in a certain garment relevant to their conceptual world, and among us it wears a different garment. But those two garments are not really Torah; they are garments of it, or forms through which this Torah, that same abstract thing, appears either in the world of the angels or in our world. And that basically means that what we perceive as Torah is not really Torah itself. It is the expression that this abstract concept called Torah takes on in our world. Okay, it’s a very specific expression. In another world you would be learning Torah and you wouldn’t even recognize that it was the same thing.
[Speaker B] And the angels saw it—the angels and the lower beings—they didn’t see it, they saw Torah in another form, like Moses did?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Apparently yes. That’s what—again, that’s what the aggadah says. Yes, yes. I brought some example, right, with Zen—Zen and the art of archery. Yes, what Eugen Herrigel—that German philosophy professor who went to study Zen, Zen Buddhism. And a friend connected him to some Zen master, and he studied, and the master asked him what he wanted to learn—flower arranging, archery, or I don’t know, something else. He said to him: no, no, I want to learn Zen. He said: yes, yes, Zen—but flower arranging, archery? And little by little he understood that the concept Zen is some abstract concept, and it can come to expression through all kinds of media. You can learn it through flower arranging, or through shooting with a bow and arrow, or wrestling, or I don’t know—I don’t remember exactly the different options there were, I think there were four. But you learn the same thing itself, each time in a different context. Now, from the outside you don’t realize that you’re learning the same thing. One person is learning how to shoot with a bow and arrow, and that other person is learning how to arrange flowers. But you don’t understand that in fact he’s not learning flower arrangement and he’s not learning archery. They’re learning some abstract principles as they come to expression in the world of flower arrangement or in the world of archery. And Zen Buddhism is that same abstract thing whose practical expressions are what they were learning. Okay, but that’s not what this one learned and not what that one learned. They learned some garment in which that abstract thing clothed itself within the relevant world in which they were engaged. Now, why is it like that? Because you can’t really encounter the thing in itself. Like Kant basically said: everything we say about the world or encounter in the world is not really the world as it is in itself, the noumenon. It’s the phenomenon. It’s the thing as I perceive it. For example, when I say that this table is brown, then of course the color brown exists only in my consciousness. There is no brown color in the world itself. Right? That’s clear. There is no brown color in the world. In the world, at most—if our physics is right—there are different wavelengths, light, an electromagnetic field at different wavelengths or frequencies, and our human characteristic is that when a certain frequency hits our retina, it gets translated inside our consciousness, inside our soul, into the color brown. Actually with brown I said—there’s no such thing as a brown frequency—but yellow, okay, not brown. Or red. So for us it gets translated into yellow or red. But in the world itself there is no yellow color and no red color. Yellow and red exist only within us. When I ask what color the table is, I’m basically asking something not really about the table at all. I’m asking something about the image of the table as it appears to my eyes. The table has no brown color; there is no color in the world. Yes, there is no color in the world at all, as our teacher said. Yes.
[Speaker C] Wavelengths too are in our consciousness. What? Wavelengths too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So we can continue that abstraction further, and I’m willing to agree with you, but still it obviously represents some physical phenomenon. You’re right that I could keep going with this infinitely. In the world itself there is something that, when we describe it, we describe it through color, wavelengths, all sorts of things like that. Wavelength is not sensory perception; it’s intellectual perception. But still, intellectual perception also definitely “colors,” in quotation marks, reality within our intellectual conceptual world. Right. And therefore reality itself—this is the famous question: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, does it make a sound? Does that fall make a sound? And the answer is of course no. Obviously not. What? You don’t hear it. Because nobody heard it. But what does that mean? Usually people think the answer is obviously yes. No—the answer is obviously no. If nobody heard it, then there was no sound there. What was there was an acoustic wave. There was a pressure wave in the air, which, when there is an eardrum for that wave to hit, gets translated inside us into sound. But in the world itself there is no sound. In the world itself there are acoustic waves and electromagnetic waves and things like that. Our consciousness translates acoustic waves into sound and electromagnetic waves into sight—into a visual translation, color, appearance, and so on. Therefore everything we really ask and say about the world, we are in fact talking about the world as it appears to us, not about the world itself. And why? Many times people think—and this is a mistake in understanding Kantian philosophy—many commentators on Kant explain that this is basically our inability to grasp the thing in itself. A human limitation. Human beings cannot grasp the thing in itself; they necessarily need mediation—the senses, our means of perception, our perceptual apparatus. But that’s a limitation, a human weakness. That’s a mistake. There is no such thing as grasping the thing in itself. When you perceive, whenever you perceive something, you perceive it in the terms of the perceiving system. That’s what it means to perceive. The thing in itself exists there as it exists. When I talk about perception, I’m always talking about how I form an image of it within myself. Right—that’s what it means to perceive something. Okay, now when I create some image of the thing inside me, that image will always be in the terms of the concepts in the conceptual system I have inside me, which I use. That’s true by definition; it’s not a matter of weakness. Meaning, there is no other creature that will perceive the world as it is in itself because it doesn’t have this weakness. It may perceive the world differently because its sensory tools are different. By the way, for us too—today that we already have neuroscience and all that—there’s no difficulty understanding this. Take the information that comes from the retina and reroute it, change the wiring, and send it to the auditory center, not the visual center. You will hear sights, right? Meaning, you’ll look at an air conditioner and hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. That’s what “air conditioner” will mean for you. An air conditioner means hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Now, you won’t be mistaken. It’s not that I’m right and someone who functions like that is messed up, not right. No—he’s just as right as I am. My wiring is like this; his wiring is different. So what? In the end every wiring creates some kind of translation—what I called garmenting earlier, doesn’t matter—a translation of the thing itself into the conceptual system of the perceiver. Okay, that’s true by definition. You can’t interact with something and have that thing remain within you as it is in itself. Whenever you deal with it, perceive it, ask about it, say something about it, you are always speaking about how you perceive it; you are never speaking about it in itself. And that doesn’t mean that those statements are subjective, and you shouldn’t jump from here to postmodernism and pluralism and all sorts of distorted ideas of that kind. In the end these are completely objective statements. When I say that the color of this table is brown, I’ve made an objective statement. What is objective about it? That this table has such a structure that the light rays hitting it reflect a wavelength that is perceived by us as brown. True, the description “brown” is our subjective description—or intersubjective, because it’s all human beings, not just me personally, okay? But that’s the language in which we describe the world itself. It is wrong to jump from here to the claim that everything we say is a subjective matter and that we do not perceive reality correctly. We perceive reality excellently, and it is entirely objective. Okay? Only the formulation is always in a language, just as I formulate things in Hebrew. Can I formulate things without language? I formulate them in Hebrew because that’s my language. Does that mean that the phenomena I’m describing happened in Hebrew? No, they didn’t happen in Hebrew. Hebrew is the language I use to describe what happened. If someone describes it in English, we have no dispute, right? He’s simply describing the same thing in a different language. Okay? This problem is sometimes called the problem of color, sometimes the philosophers’ chestnut. Like pulling chestnuts out of the fire. What does that mean? It’s an unsolvable problem in philosophy. It looks like a scientific problem, but really it’s a philosophical problem that can’t be solved. Why? When I look at this marker, I say it’s red, right? I assume we would agree—anyone who isn’t color-blind, at least—would agree with me that this marker is red. Okay? Now I ask myself another question: is the image I see the same image that he sees? We both agreed it’s red, right? But maybe when you look at it and call it red, the color you see in your consciousness is the color that I call green. But every time I see red, you see green, so we got used to the language that that is called red. So what for me is called green, you call red. I call it red, and for me it really looks like red, and we are completely synchronized on the level of speech. Okay? But in fact the image we are describing could be totally different. Now there is no way to verify this—that we really always see the same color. There’s no way to verify it. We are synchronized in language, but the question is what the language describes—what image I have in consciousness that is being described by that language. There is no way to synchronize that. It’s a completely subjective matter. No help at all—wavelength is the same wavelength, what do you mean? We are both talking about the same wavelength. The only question is: into what color does that wavelength get translated in your consciousness? Why couldn’t it be? It absolutely could be. If his brain is built differently, then the same wavelength that I translate into red, he will translate into green. And that will be the image he has. What?
[Speaker E] Then how do we agree afterward on the same—the same thing? So from the outset we’re talking about the transmitted wavelength, that’s the same; the interpretation, you’re saying, may be different. But the meaning and what we do with it—there there is agreement.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, and that’s what I’m saying. That’s exactly my claim. Therefore my claim is that there’s no reason to get excited that maybe we’re using different languages. In the end, our claims are objective claims. Language is only the way we express these objective truths. That’s all. You can speak Hebrew, you can speak English. I can speak in a language of colors; someone else can speak in a language of sounds. But we’ll agree on everything that happens. Meaning, in the end, about what happens in the world, we’ll agree. You will always know that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony causes me the feeling that I call cold, and you’ll call it joy. Fine? So Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony causes you joy, fine. And for me too Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony causes joy. But when I talk about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, I’m not talking about an air conditioner; I’m talking about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And when I talk about joy, I’m not talking about cold; I’m talking about joy. Okay? We will agree completely in semantic language, and we will also agree completely on the factual plane, because for you too, what I call Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony will cause what I call joy. Only you’ll call that an air conditioner that gives you cold, causes you cold. Fine? This is just— we’ll agree completely on the facts, we’ll communicate well on the semantic level, meaning we’ll use the same words, okay? In the middle there is some mediation where it may be that we are in completely different places. Okay? This is an important point to understand, because I think it’s a good parable for what I’m trying to say here about Torah. The angels and we are studying the same Torah. We are not studying different Torahs. The very same Torah. Even though I don’t know how to speak about that Torah—what to say about it. Anything I say about it will be in the language of commandments, transgressions, legal categories, theft, forbidden foods, all kinds of things like that. That’s the language in which Torah was given to me, and I discuss those things because that’s the way I can discuss this abstract thing—like shooting an arrow or arranging flowers. But I am dealing with an abstract thing of which these are the expressions. Okay? So that abstract thing—that is what we are studying, just like the angels. We are studying the very same thing. Just as flower arrangement and archery are studying the same Zen. Or like the air conditioner and joy and cold and the symphony—we are basically describing the same phenomenon. We use a different language, and maybe also a different visual representation or sensory representation, but in the world itself we are dealing with the same thing itself. We are saying the same thing about it. We agree completely, even though it sounds utterly bizarre because the sensory representations built within us are radically different. But that doesn’t matter, because on that abstract level of what an air conditioner is in the abstract sense—what you call Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and I call an air conditioner—what is it really? I mean, what is it really? Anything you say about it will already be part of your language, and anything I say about it will be part of my language. So what is it really? What it really is, is that one thing about which all these things are said. That’s the only thing I can say about it: that it is the thing about which all those things are said. But every concrete thing I say about it will always be part of my language, and someone from another language will say it differently. That means—
[Speaker F] —that we can’t understand the Torah of the angels, and the angels can understand our Torah?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The garment—how Torah is clothed among the angels and among us—right. That’s a different conceptual world. We don’t know the concepts. I have no idea. Let some person come with completely different senses. You know that I’m—
[Speaker F] If they can understand, though?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea. I’ve never been an angel. Maybe yes. But on the principled level, on the principled level, it doesn’t have to be that we understand each other at all, even though we’re dealing with the same thing. Someone who has never heard of flowers in his life and studies Zen through archery doesn’t understand that that other person arranging flowers over there—something he has no idea about, he’s never known flowers— is engaged in the very same thing. Okay? But still they are engaged in the same thing itself, even though he doesn’t understand. Okay? Yes.
[Speaker G] So here, once we explained the angels—what their initial assumption was—but now what is Moses’ answer really? How does Moses, with his answer, reject—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The angels—so really, is it because the Torah isn’t with them? So I said that what Moshe Rabbenu is basically telling them is exactly that. That’s how it seems to me according to the interpretation I’m suggesting. He tells them exactly this: guys, you learned one certain garb of the Torah. We receive a different garb. What comes down below is not the Torah. What comes down below is a different garb that was created for the Torah. And the proof is—look—there’s father and mother here, there’s the Sabbath here, weekdays, eating pork. You understand that this is not your world of concepts. So understand that what came down below is not the Torah at all. Why are you getting worked up? Keep busy with your netzach within hod up there and everything will be fine. You don’t need to get excited in any way. We’ll deal with honoring father and mother; you’ll deal with netzach within hod. We’re dealing with the same thing and they do not come near one another—everything’s fine. The fact that the Torah came down below didn’t do anything to you, so why are you jumping? Okay? I only added that there’s something beyond that. For example, the Talmud brings the story of Rabbah bar Nachmani. There was a dispute whether the bright spot preceded the white hair, right, in the laws of leprosy. So there was a dispute between the academy of heaven and the Holy One, blessed be He, and they decided to come down here and ask Rabbah bar Nachmani. That’s how he died, right? They snatched him up above because they needed to ask him a halakhic question—a bit moral too—but that’s what they did there. So there you really see that the Torah came down below not only in the sense that it clothed itself in another garb besides the garb of the angels, but also in some sense the focus shifted here. Meaning, the decisions are made here. You need to make a decision, a halakhic ruling that’s relevant even for the angels, for the academy of heaven. You ruled for them that netzach within hod overcomes tiferet within yesod. I don’t know, something like that. Here it’s said in the form: if the bright spot preceded the white hair, then the lesion is pure. Okay? But it’s the same thing. Only now the question of who decides is already a question beyond different modes of looking, which are equivalent, on the same level. Here it already seems that even the status of the Torah that came down to earth became more dominant or more central. Decisions are made here. But again, of course, this is our Talmud, our point of view. In the Talmud of the angels I don’t know what’s written. It could be that in the Talmud of the angels it says that when there’s a dispute between Rabbah bar Nachmani and the Holy One, blessed be He, they went and brought the angel Gabriel to explain to them and issue the halakhic ruling about who was right. That’s in their Talmud. So therefore everything is within our conceptual system. By the way, just in parentheses, I’m reminded of something that bothers a lot of people. It seems to me that a person who grows up inside—someone who grew up in a Polish Christian village—worships his God properly, does what the priest tells him, and everything is fine. A good and loyal Christian. Okay? Now the common conception among us is that when he gets to the next world they immediately roast him in hell. Why? What do you want from him? Would you have done differently if you had been born there? If you would have done differently, then maybe you’d be blameworthy too. He did the best he knew. Maybe he could have investigated if he were a great philosopher and who knows what—fine. For most human beings that doesn’t happen; for almost everyone, it doesn’t happen. In the same way you can ask the same thing about us, of course—Christians can ask it about someone who grew up in an Israeli village. Okay? So therefore I say that many—
[Speaker E] times it’s just whichever someone was born into?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but where I want to get to—but I don’t remember where I started from.
[Speaker H] Angels, netzach within hod.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah yes, I was talking about the fact that here we make the decisions, right? So there is still an advantage to the Torah that was given below over the Torah that was given above. Yes, but even that is written in our Talmud. You’re now in the Talmud that is the human clothing of the Torah, okay? What’s written in the Talmud of the angels, I don’t know. Right? So by analogy to that Christian fellow: the Jew who grows up here is educated that all the Christians went to hell and all kinds of things like that. Fine, because that’s part of Jewish education; it doesn’t mean that that’s really what will happen. In Christian education they teach them the opposite. Who’s right? I don’t know. In our education that’s what’s written; in theirs, that’s what’s written. We’re supposed to live this way and they’re supposed to live that way. But this discourse—in my view, exclusive interreligious discourse, where if I’m right then you’re wrong and only one can be right and all the rest are wrong—to a large extent I think it serves internal needs. Meaning, we need to look at the world as though we are the ones who are right and everyone else will inherit hell, because that’s how we create attachment to our path and can devote ourselves to our tasks and so on. They do the same thing from their standpoint. And from the perspective of the Holy One, blessed be He—if one can look at reality from His chair, so to speak, not from our private chair—it could be that it’s exactly the same as the angels vis-à-vis Moshe Rabbenu. Meaning, this is one certain clothing, that is another clothing, each has its own role, and even the exclusive discourse—just as it is written in our Talmud that we are right and we issue halakhic rulings for the angels—in the Talmud of the angels it says that they issue halakhic rulings for us. Fine, so when we explain that everything is exclusive and we are the only ones who are right and everyone else is wrong—yes, that too is part of our conception. Okay, so yes.
[Speaker I] Let’s say there’s a difference between saying I’m right and he’s wrong, and saying I’m right and he’s okay, kind of. In the example of the Christian, say—the fact that we said he’s not going to hell and all that, that doesn’t mean he’s right, it means he’s okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No no, I didn’t say he’s right either. I said that… exactly. I said he won’t necessarily go to hell. He may even be right—that’s one step further—but that’s not what I claimed. Meaning, everyone has a task, and he needs to carry out his task, and within that task some internal discourse develops, which also includes references to what’s going on outside. But that too is part of the internal discourse. We can never stand in some objective viewpoint and grasp reality as it is. Right, it’s like the Talmud in Gittin, where on top of “these and those are the words of the living God,” the Talmud brings a dispute about the concubine in Gibeah: what happened there—did he find a fly or did he find a hair? A dispute between Rabbi Yonatan and Rabbi Yoshiya, or Rabbi Evyatar. So Rabbi Evyatar meets Elijah the prophet and asks him, well, what is the Holy One, blessed be He, learning now? You won’t believe it—He’s learning the section of the concubine in Gibeah. He asked him, and what does He say? He said: My son Yonatan says this, My son Evyatar says that. That’s what the Holy One, blessed be He, says. He said to him: Heaven forbid—can there be doubt before Heaven? Doesn’t the Holy One, blessed be He, know what happened there, whether it was a fly or a hair? We don’t know—we’re hundreds of years later—but the Holy One knows. The Talmud says, “These and those are the words of the living God”: he found a fly and was not particular; he found a hair and was particular. What does that mean? That they were both right. “These and those are the words of the living God”—there was both a fly and a hair there. Right? So what—what does it mean, he found a fly and was not particular, he found a hair and was particular? One might have thought that the one who said “a fly” was mistaken; really the objection was over the hair, so there’s an advantage to the one who said “hair” over the one who said “fly.” I read it differently. I say: the fly and the hair, each on its own, would not have brought about that objection. The fly and the hair together accumulated and created that objection, so both sides were right—both sides really were right. Not only was there both a fly and a hair there, but both the fly and the hair took part in creating that objection, that irritation. Okay, and both of them really were right, but partially right. One saw one aspect of the picture—the fly. The second saw another aspect of the picture—the hair. And what is the picture from the perspective of the Holy One, blessed be He? The fly and the hair together, which created the objection.
[Speaker J] That’s a new perspective on “these and those are the words of the living God.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly—that each one by himself is not “the words of the living God,” but together. Exactly. The claim is that each one grasps a certain aspect of the truth; the total truth is really the sum of all those aspects. So it’s not that both are right, and also not that both are wrong, but rather each is right in a certain aspect—like the parable of the elephant, the well-known parable of the elephant. Someone looks at an elephant and says: an elephant is a creature with two eyes and two legs very close together. Someone else looks at an elephant and says: what are you talking about? An elephant has one eye and two legs that are actually pretty far from each other. What’s the difference between them?
[Speaker B] Depends from which side he’s looking.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. If you look at the elephant from the front, then you see two eyes and two legs very close together, right? If you look at it from the side, then you see one eye and two legs very far apart. So who’s right? Both are partially right. Meaning, each one grasps a certain aspect—a projection in this case. So it’s easy for us because it’s a spatial projection, but there is intellectual projection too. Meaning, each one grasps a certain intellectual projection of the topic, and the grasp of the whole topic is the sum of all the projections. Right, when I want to describe a point in space I need to describe the X component, the Y component, and the Z component—that’s the full description of the point. If you project it onto the XY plane you get a partial description. Right—but partial. Here real arguments begin, right? That’s the meaning of halakhic disputes. Halakhic disputes are disputes between two sides that are completely right in their reasoning, but with respect to the practical halakhic conclusion, only one is right. “These and those are the words of the living God” speaks about the reasoning; it does not speak about the bottom line. On the bottom line only one is right. There are one hundred and fifty reasons to declare the creeping thing impure and one hundred and fifty reasons to declare the creeping thing pure. So Rabbenu Tam asks—I’m drifting a bit into other things—but Rabbenu Tam asks: what do I need these empty dialectics for? What is this? Are we looking for a Purim rabbi? So Rabbenu Tam says—well, what are you testing him on, his ability to engage in pilpul? So he says no—not he, sorry—he says yes, but the Maharal says no. The Maharal says that someone who comes to the Sanhedrin really does need to give one hundred and fifty reasons to declare the creeping thing impure and one hundred and fifty reasons to declare the creeping thing pure, because there are three hundred such reasons. On the bottom line, the creeping thing is impure. The Torah says that the creeping thing is impure. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t aspects for declaring it pure. It means that the aspects for impurity outweigh the aspects for purity. So when the various reasons are weighed, it turns out that the one hundred and fifty for impurity are stronger than the one hundred and fifty for purity. Therefore, on the bottom line, the creeping thing is impure. But when someone says “the creeping thing is pure—I have one hundred and fifty reasons,” and the other says “the creeping thing is impure—I have one hundred and fifty reasons,” who is right? Both are right. Both these one hundred and fifty reasons are correct, and those one hundred and fifty reasons are correct. On the bottom line, now you have to decide what to do—is the creeping thing impure or pure? Here it’s already an argument where only one is right. In the question of which reasons are more significant, who outweighs whom—only one?
[Speaker D] What? Only one. Meaning, strength—Christianity and Judaism, which of them is stronger—is that the one that’s right in the end?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be that they killed us—who said they were right? I don’t understand. Whoever is stronger kills the other. Up to there I agree. How is that connected to being right? If I’m standing at the elephant, and I—
[Speaker D] say that it has two—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] close-together legs,
[Speaker D] and I’m stronger, then if I’m stronger does that mean two close-together legs? What? Who is right in the end? The one who kills the other? No—the one I kill, then I’m right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How did you get to that? If I killed you then I’m right? I don’t understand the connection. Truth—being right means the one who says the truth, that’s what “right” means. Let’s synchronize the concepts. Right, because I killed him so there’s no one left to say otherwise. Excellent—Stalin solved problems that way. He was always right, because he killed everyone who said otherwise. The truth is in reality. What do you mean? What is an elephant? Why do I care if someone says it? If nobody says it, then is it no longer true that an elephant has four legs? If no one says it, then it isn’t true? Of course it’s true. It’s true because an elephant has four legs. If no one says it, that just means no one knows the truth. Since when does killing someone change the truth? It changes only the truth regarding the claim whether you’re a murderer or not. If you killed, then you’re a murderer—that claim indeed changed its truth-value. Right. So basically these different viewpoints are saying—incidentally, viewpoints are only a parable, because with viewpoints we’re really talking about two sides where each could also grasp the other side. Meaning, if I now move over to the side I’ll see the elephant the way he saw it. That’s not exactly the same as angels and human beings, but it’s a good parable. And it’s a good parable because it says there are different forms of clothing, different aspects. Right, aspects and forms of clothing are not the same thing. Aspects are partial truth. Forms of clothing are not partial truth; they are the full truth in a certain language, and there is that same full truth in another language. Meaning, in order to know the full truth I don’t need both the angle of the angels and the angle of human beings. No. The angle of human beings gives me the full truth, and the angle of the angels by itself also gives the full truth. Okay? It’s not like the elephant. I brought the elephant only as a parable to show that often truth—meaning, the fact that you’re right and I’m right is not a contradiction. It may be that you are completely right and I am completely right, like forms of clothing, and it may be that you are partially right and I am partially right—
[Speaker K] partially, like projections or like aspects. Okay? When we say “seventy faces of the Torah,” that concept—is that each one gives one facet and all of them together give a complete picture?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How does that fit? It’s an interesting question whether that belongs here or there—to aspects or to forms of clothing. On the face of it, I think it’s more similar to aspects. Because the one who says the plain meaning is not saying that the midrashic interpretation is wrong. Fine? He says: through the lens of midrash it looks like this; through the lens of plain meaning it looks like that. But these are things that speak to one another. For example, “an eye for an eye” means monetary compensation, okay? When you read “an eye for an eye” through the lens of plain meaning, then “an eye for an eye” means taking out a person’s eye, right? When you read it through the lens of midrash, a verbal analogy—“under” and “under”—then you say: I take money from him instead of taking out his eye. Now who is right? Both are right in principle. Meaning, the plain meaning says this and the midrash says this, and both perspectives are correct perspectives. In practice, in the end you have to do one of the two things. Right? In practice only one of the two things will happen. But clearly both grasp a certain aspect of the truth. And therefore in that sense it is more similar to the hair and the fly in the story of the concubine in Gibeah. Because with the angels and us, these are not two aspects that together make up the truth. My aspect is the whole truth, only in human language, and your aspect is the whole truth, only in angelic language. Therefore there should never be an argument. Meaning, we don’t argue. What kind of argument? The kind of argument they themselves have with the elephant, for the sake of discussion—that if you said one needs to—
[Speaker D] decide—whether regarding the matter you’re
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] discussing, what matters is the front legs or the side legs. I don’t know—one line of reasoning, another line of reasoning. It could be that we won’t manage to convince one another. That’s all fine, but a decision has to be made. So we’ll vote. No, no need for wars—you can vote and follow the majority. No, you’re very pessimistic today. It’s not always wars. Meaning, you can settle disputes in civilized ways too. No, everything’s fine—those are just the people who chose to resolve their conflicts that way. But that’s not a necessity of reality. Meaning, conflicts can also be resolved peacefully. It’s not that we are doomed—
[Speaker D] We saw that in our conflict too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But again, you’re bringing me examples of people who chose to resolve their conflicts by force. I understand. Of course there are such examples. The question is whether it has to be that way. No, it doesn’t have to be that way. And there are things that can be solved by peaceful means too. Yes, I once wrote a column about an amazing phenomenon. You know the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa? It’s unbelievable what happened there. After the revolution in South Africa, when the blacks received equal rights, and then of course the majority—once they have equal rights, then the government becomes a black government. And the expectation was that there would begin a bloodbath there, that the blacks would basically take revenge on the whites for everything they had done to them before. And did it work? It worked, yes, until it stopped working. No, it still—that wasn’t what people expected. I once saw a film by some woman whose son, I think, was a reservist who was killed by a terrorist or something like that, and she made a film—she was a peace activist, a left-wing activist, and for us peace activist and left-wing activist are synonymous terms—and she made a film about this phenomenon of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, hoping that maybe it could be imported here into our conflict. Now I’m a bit skeptical, although I’m sure that even there, if you had asked people, they would have been skeptical. I’m a bit skeptical because in a Christian world maybe that can happen. In a Christian world the concept of forgiveness is very deep, and turning the other cheek, and you know, the outlook is different. In a Jewish-Muslim world I think it’s much harder to implement such a thing. Again, without getting into the question now of who is right here and who is violent and who isn’t, generally speaking in Jewish and Muslim thought it’s harder to reach such a solution than in Christian thought. That’s what I think.
[Speaker D] If I draw the red stripe and the green stripe, and everyone we see—we see red—and someone comes and says no, it’s green. We start arguing, and I start killing everyone who says it’s green.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, be careful who argues with you. Say whatever you want me to say—I’ll answer amen.
[Speaker D] I’ll convince him in such a way that he won’t say anymore that it’s green. And now for generations everyone will say it’s red, but in truth it’s green. So excellent—you yourself just said it: the truth that it’s green remains as it is, no matter whether everyone says it’s red.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There you go—truth, right, that’s truth without witnesses.
[Speaker D] Like the tree that fell—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the truth still is… no, the tree that fell in the forest is not like this. Because the tree that fell in the forest really does not make a sound if no one is there. It’s not that if no one is there then we don’t know that it made a sound—that’s exactly the point. There it’s not the same thing. Because there the claim is that if no one is there, then it really didn’t make a sound. Not that no one says it made a sound. That’s exactly the difference. Precisely the point I wanted to illustrate—why it’s not the same thing. Do you understand what I’m saying? And not—
[Speaker D] Yes, but I took it further, because theoretically to decide now on different moral values, for the sake of discussion—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can’t decide on different moral values; you can behave immorally. Fine.
[Speaker D] No, suppose I’m a leader, for the sake of discussion, who manages to convince the whole world—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You manage to convince people to behave immorally, so what? It’s still immoral.
[Speaker D] What do you mean I’m changing it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right—and it’s still immoral. Truth doesn’t change because people say this or say that. Truth is truth. It’s not… there’s no one preserving it—“truth will be absent,” as the Mishnah in Sotah says. Right, it disappears, but it’s still the truth. Right.
[Speaker H] If I may just make a brief comment—two comments. Regarding the eyes: if I’m not mistaken, that question is an age-old question, and recently—correct me if I’m wrong—people reached the assumption that biologically it’s clear that all our human eyes are built in the same way. No.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can make the claim—you can claim that if I examine the mechanism of translation, our perception, it looks the same in everyone, and therefore it’s reasonable that if I see red, you also see red. But we’ll have no way to confirm that, to verify it.
[Speaker H] So that’s what I’m saying, that we do have.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We don’t. So what way?
[Speaker H] How do you verify it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Biologically. What? Not biologically. Biologically you can show me that my translation mechanism and yours are the same. Okay? But you can’t tell me that as a result what you see as red, I also see as red. We have no way to verify that. I now want to verify this theory that an identical mechanism produces an identical image. How do you verify that? I can’t enter your image. All I see is my own image. Right? Because in principle this image that is formed—the biological mechanism—is always only one… I’ll drift a bit here. There was once an interesting Jew named Professor Yosef Neuman, from the Hebrew University—no, from Tel Aviv University—in the life sciences. And he was a very active and militant atheist materialist. I made some remark about him in my book on evolution, God Plays Dice. So he called me afterward. We talked there about various things. He died a little later, so that’s why I’m speaking in the past tense. And he called me shortly afterward, and we talked about all sorts of things. It was a very interesting conversation. A nice and smart man, and interesting. At some point he says to me, listen, my friends—apropos of what you remarked, that’s why I remembered this—my atheist friends, the materialists—forget atheists, that’s not relevant there—the materialists, I can’t manage to convince them of something that is utter nonsense and they all keep repeating it. They say that our thought is basically neural activity. Or desires, or feelings, or whatever, are just electrical currents. Now I, as a materialist, he says to me, try to explain to them that they’re talking nonsense. You can say that the electrical currents create the emotion. You can’t say that the electrical currents are the emotion. Emotion is something we feel directly; it’s not an ammeter. Okay? You can say, if you’re a materialist—and he was a materialist—he said this from a materialist point of view. This is what’s called emergence. Meaning, emergence means that the mental, psychic phenomena are not the result of another substance that exists within us—spirit—apart from matter, but rather are an outgrowth of the material whole. The material whole produces this as some sort of collective phenomenon. A collection of many neurons creates sensations. Like Gestalt. In some way, yes, a kind of Gestalt. Okay? But Gestalt doesn’t move from matter to spirit. They make a Gestalt from matter to spirit.
[Speaker D] And that doesn’t change the heartbeat or—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter. But I’m saying in the end, when you talk about emotions, desires, thoughts—those are mental phenomena, not electrical currents. You can say that the electrical currents create or generate the mental phenomenon, suppose. Okay? And even there it depends what “generate” means. I too can agree that they generate, because there is an influence of body on soul. But the materialist says there is no soul. The body has nothing to influence. Therefore it’s a property of the body. Meaning, the mental is a property of the biological, the bodily, the physiological. Fine—that can be debated separately. I also don’t agree with it, but it’s a legitimate debate that has to be carried out within materialism. But to say that thought is electrical currents is simply a misunderstanding. It’s not a worldview, it’s just a misunderstanding, just confusion. Okay? He says, listen, I have lots of materialist friends, and I can’t explain to them why they’re talking nonsense. Now that made me very happy, because I encounter the same phenomenon, only I’m not a materialist. So then I always… he, as a materialist, complained about this thing. Why am I saying this? Because I’m returning to your question from before—what? Yosef Neuman. Yosef Neuman, yes. I’m going back to what you asked earlier: even if the mechanism of translation, my perception, looks the same in everyone—exactly like yours—in the end an image is formed in me. That image is not the currents in the biological mechanism. Okay? It is something that perhaps the currents create. Now in that process there is another step, and that step is the transition from matter to spirit, let’s say in my dualistic language. From matter to spirit. Therefore even if the biological perception mechanism is built in the same way, you cannot know that the image formed is the same image. You can raise such a hypothesis. How do you test it? There’s no way to test it. Meaning, because in order to test it I need to enter the image that you see. All I can do is ask you what you see. I can’t test it directly. Okay? And asking you doesn’t help, because you’ll answer me according to your own framework, and I’ll never get out of that. By the way, I just remembered something else. There’s someone here from the psychology department named Daniel Algom—he was in the psychology department, I don’t know if he still is—Daniel Algom. He wrote a book called Psychophysics in the Open University-style series, a series of books—it’s called Psychophysics. This topic had bothered me for a long time already, from some article by Rabbi Shem Tov Gafen who dealt with it. And there he talks about how traditionally there was a dispute among psychophysics researchers over the question: what is the law that links the physical phenomenon and the mental phenomenon? Is it logarithmic or a power law? Say I double the intensity of the light, the intensity of the electric field. By how much does the intensity of the light that I see in my consciousness increase? The mental phenomenon of light, yes? Now this is a problem in psychophysics—the influence of physics on psyche. Right? Now think about it: there is no way even to define this. Not only is there no way to measure it; I myself don’t know how to tell you whether it increased twofold or not. Double the intensity of the field. Now I see a stronger light—yes, that’s clear. Ask me: by how much stronger? You’re asking for a report on what I myself see. I don’t know how. How do I determine whether it’s double, one and a half times, four times, pi times? I don’t know, I have no idea. I don’t know how to say by how much, right? There’s no way to measure it, because it’s a subjective phenomenon. But the intensity of the field—that’s no problem to measure. I measure it and I doubled it; meaning, no problem, the measuring instrument shows me that. Okay? So there is some transition between the physical phenomena, including the phenomena inside our biological mechanisms—which are also physical phenomena—and the meaning or the visual or subjective presentation that we give to those phenomena. And there is no way to test it. So there are those who claim it’s a power law. If you doubled this, then that grew by two to the power of I-don’t-know-what, some critical index like that. And others claim it’s logarithmic, meaning like decibels. Right? If you doubled it, then it grows by adding ln 2 or something like that. Okay? Meaning, it’s logarithmic. But there is no way to measure it. How do you test it? You take a survey among people: tell me by how much. No one knows how to say by how much, even about himself. So you have to put forward some estimate, like in many surveys where they ask you how satisfied you were on a scale from one to five. There’s really no way to answer that. Okay? But you give some sort of estimate, and they average many people, and that is considered the subjective result, and then I draw a graph. I doubled it objectively—what is the subjective result? I quadrupled it—what is the result? And then I draw some line. And the question is whether that line comes out a power curve or a logarithmic curve. And since the dispute is an existing dispute, then you understand how much this whole measurement is worth. Because after we did all that there is still a dispute whether it’s logarithmic or a power law. Meaning, there’s no way to do this. We have no way to get at these subjective dimensions, which we’re constantly talking about, and really those are the only things we’re talking about. When I say that I see more light, I haven’t said anything about the electromagnetic field outside; I reported the level of brightness I see in the image inside me. That is the meaning of the statement “I now see more light” or “it’s brighter.” Okay? Now how to translate that into what happened outside? So somehow we translate it, but I don’t know how this mechanism is built. Okay? And we have no way of knowing how this mechanism is built, and today there isn’t even a hint of a language in which one can even begin to deal with this question. Meaning, it’s not just that the neurosciences are not there or are not even scratching the question. They don’t deal with it at all. They have no tools to deal with it. Many of them are not aware of this, but that’s the truth. Okay? Fine, they’re not aware of it because they think emotions are electrical currents—that’s the same mistake. Fine. I’m saying that even from a materialist perspective this is a mistake. Meaning, not that the mistake is because they are materialists. No—even from within a materialist perspective, this is a misunderstanding. It is not the debate between materialism and dualism.
[Speaker D] I take all these waves and also what happens in the brain and what happens in all my organs in the body with electrical indicators after some change in the light, and I see that ten people… and I’m saying that the light went up by some amount, and they measure it for the whole body, what happened to me in the body.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not only in the brain. Fine, the whole body, I don’t care. What difference does it make whether it’s the brain or the body? It changes nothing.
[Speaker D] If it affects, say, the heart—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But in the end the report—the dependent variable—the independent variable is measured. We measure in the body by how much, I don’t know, various sensors respond more strongly. But when I ask you at the end what the dependent variable is—the dependent variable is by how much light you saw. So that comes only from your report of how much you saw. There’s no measurement here. No, you can’t tell me. You can’t tell me. All you can tell me is about the physical generators of the matter, but I’m asking about the generated phenomenon. There is no way to say anything about it. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, in his booklet on the psychophysical problem, basically speaks about the psychic realm as something that in principle is not open to scientific research because it is subjective. Meaning, it is inaccessible. My psyche is inaccessible to anyone outside me. Meaning, only I can connect with it and say things about it, and even I can’t really measure what I feel. It’s not a measurement; it’s an impression, a sort of general statement. And it’s this kind of thing that is inaccessible to scientific research. Science can’t deal with it except through questioning. Some time ago on the site I wrote about queerness. I said there is sex and there is gender, and sex is defined biologically—say XX or XY. Physiology. And gender is some kind of something, and there is also sexual orientation—there are three things. And gender or sexual orientation is something that is not really measurable. It is fed by a person’s report. He can tell me what his orientation is; someone else can tell me what his gender is, what he feels, whether he feels like a man, feels like a woman, and all that kind of thing. But it’s all fed by their reports. By the way, that’s why all these arguments arise around it, because many people don’t believe the report of a person who says: I was born male, but I feel female. Now others don’t believe him, so how is he supposed to prove it to them? You don’t know what he feels—that’s inside him; he knows what he feels. So if you believe him, you believe him; and if not, then not. By the way, even if I believe him, that still doesn’t mean anything. You don’t have to disbelieve him in order to be a good Jew. Meaning, you can believe him. If the phenomenon is real, then it’s real. Now the question is what to do with it. That’s a further discussion. But I think it is very hard to deny the fact that there are people who feel like a woman even though chromosomally they are male. That’s a different discussion—we won’t get into it now—but I’m saying this is another example of arguments that are born from the fact that we deal with concepts that entirely belong to the subjective world inside us—to qualia, as it’s called in philosophy, to phenomena as we experience them and not to phenomena in their objective sense. And about that, all we can do is talk, believe, question. It is not accessible to measuring devices. Meaning, we cannot deal with it using the ordinary tools of science. That is true regarding all mental illnesses. Completely true. Only once you find a link between a brain state and a mental illness—say you find a connection, everyone who reports such-and-such a mental illness, I can measure that in his brain there is some such-and-such phenomenon—then you can say: for me the brain phenomenon represents the mental illness. But you will never be able to test whether there really is a mental illness there. You can only ask him and form an impression from what he reports to you, or perhaps from what he does indirectly or something like that, but you have no way to experience what he experiences. The connection between psychiatry and neuroscience is built on the fact that we find correlations. Meaning, what happens in the brain has a correlation with mental feelings or such-and-such mental phenomena, and then they say: let’s examine the brain—which is open to objective examination; you can check it with measuring instruments—and through that I’ll diagnose whether he is this or this or this. That’s fine, you can do that if you believe in the psychophysical connection. But if someone challenges that psychophysical connection, you have no way to convince him that he’s wrong. Under the assumption that there is such a connection, no problem—you can test this in order to know that, because there is a correlation between them. Okay, I drifted in many directions here. Look at the author of the Tanya. I went into this at length not for nothing, because I think this is a point that is important for many things, not only for the definition of Torah, and many people miss it in many contexts, some of which I mentioned here. I think it’s important to be aware of this matter. This is the basis of Kant’s distinction between the thing in itself and the thing as it appears to our eyes, and people don’t understand that this is what Kant himself says, and therefore some of the interpretations there are, in my opinion, incorrect. And more—wait, let’s get back to Tataias.
[Speaker M] It works, it works. Probably iOS 14.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Another try. Here apparently this thing got stuck. Acmat Unibel, did you see? Okay. “And every divine soul has three garments, which are”—what does he want from me here?—“thought, speech, and action, of the 613 commandments of the Torah. When a person fulfills in action all the practical commandments, and in speech he engages in explaining all 613 commandments and their laws, and in thought he grasps everything he can grasp in the orchard of Torah, then all 613 faculties of his soul are clothed in the 613 commandments of the Torah. And in particular, the aspect of Chokhmah, Binah, and Da’at”—wisdom, understanding, and knowledge—“in his soul are clothed in his grasp of the Torah that he attains in the orchard, according to his capacity of understanding and the root of his soul above.” Meaning: every divine soul has—and the central theme of the Tanya, at least in the beginning, is some kind of move between the divine soul and the animal soul—and the divine soul within a person has three garments: thought, speech, and action. Right? The higher part of the person, let’s say: thought, speech, and action. And what the Torah is essentially trying to do is to clothe the parts of our divine soul in the Torah. That’s how the connection between us and the Torah is created. How is that done? We engage with Torah in thought, speech, and action. What does that mean? Thought—we think what the Torah says. Speech—we speak those thoughts. And action—we keep the commandments, we carry them out in practice. What happens as a result is that we ourselves become connected, in some sense, to the Torah in all those dimensions. That is basically the way to cleave to the Torah, or to the Holy One, blessed be He, through the Torah. Okay? Therefore this is the purpose of the clothing, and that’s why I’m bringing this here. All this clothing I talked about before—what is it meant to do? Why did the Torah descend below and become clothed in laws of prohibitions, honoring father and mother, and the like? Because if it enters our conceptual world, then we can grasp it through our thought, speech, and action, and become one thing—or something connected: the Holy One, blessed be He, Israel, and the Torah are one. So this clothing makes it possible for us to grasp the thing and connect to it. And I already said that grasping can always be done only in the terms of the one who grasps. You can never grasp the thing if it remains in itself; it has to be clothed in the concepts of the one who grasps, in the principles of the one who grasps. Then some kind of interaction can arise, some kind of connection between him and the Torah. That is the meaning of Torah study, both for the author of the Tanya and in Nefesh HaChayim, his Mitnagdic opponent—they both write very similar things. Essentially, the value of Torah study—Nefesh HaChayim presents this as an antithesis to the Hasidic view, where Torah study is a means for creating the religious experience. And Nefesh HaChayim—the Mitnagdic, Lithuanian approach; he is the father of this view—basically says that learning is not a means of creating an experience of cleaving; it is itself the cleaving. When you study, you are attached not because an experience is produced as a result. The learning itself is the attachment. Now, that’s what is written here. The author of the Tanya, who comes from the Hasidic camp, is actually writing very similar things. Right? And he says: “therefore the totality of the 613 faculties of his soul are clothed”—365 and 248, right? These are the faculties of his soul, of course, the soul itself, not the limbs of the body; this is the soul side—“are clothed in the 613 commandments of the Torah, and in particular the aspect of Chokhmah, Binah, and Da’at in his soul are clothed in his grasp of the Torah, which he attains in the orchard according to his power of understanding and the root of his soul above. The emotional qualities, which are awe and love and their branches and offspring, are clothed in the fulfillment of the commandments in action and in speech, which is Torah study, which is equal to them all.” Therefore Torah study is equal to them all, because that is basically the way to connect to the Torah, “for love is the root of all 248 positive commandments, and from it they are drawn. Without it they have no true existence.” Never mind, this is 248 and 365 and so on. I just want to get for a moment to what follows. What? What? Yes, I’m putting it up. Yes.
[Speaker D] Do you have all of it on the website…?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. All of it is on the website, but I’m aiming it, so I’ll upload it there. So he says: “Now these three garments, from the Torah and its commandments”—you see?—“now these three garments, from the Torah and its commandments, although they are called garments for the nefesh, ruach, and neshamah, nevertheless their virtue and greatness is infinitely and boundlessly higher than the virtue of the nefesh, ruach, and neshamah themselves.” What does that mean? What he means to say is that the Torah itself—what is clothed in these garments—is not them. These are its garments. But what is the thing that is clothed in these garments? It is altogether above; it is not thought, speech, or action. It is something else. Thought, speech, and action—the three interactions we have with that thing—are made possible as a result of garments that it wears. This is the descent of the Torah to earth and its entry into our conceptual world. But that thing which is clothed in these garments is not itself the garments; it is something else, abstract. That is the Torah as it is in itself. Not the Torah of the angels and not the Torah of human beings. As it is written in the Zohar: “The Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are entirely one.” You see? This is basically saying what I said before, in his language. “That is, the Torah is the wisdom and will of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Holy One, blessed be He, in His glory and essence, is entirely one, for He is the knower and He is the knowledge,” and so on, as is written in Maimonides. “And although the Holy One, blessed be He, is called infinite, and His greatness is unsearchable, and no thought can grasp Him at all, and so too His will and wisdom, as it is written: ‘His understanding is unsearchable,’ and it is written: ‘Can you find out God by searching?’ and it is written: ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts’—about this they said: ‘Where you find the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, there you find His humility.’ And the Holy One, blessed be He, contracted His will and His wisdom into the 613 commandments of the Torah and their laws, and in the combinations of the letters of the Hebrew Bible and their interpretations in the aggadot and midrashim of our sages of blessed memory—happy is the believer—in order that the neshamah, ruach, and nefesh in the human body should be able to grasp them.” Okay? Exactly what I described earlier. That is, the Holy One, blessed be He, contracts Himself, clothes Himself in the garment of an ox goring a cow, and honoring father and mother, and theft, and forbidden foods, and so on. And for the angels, in some other kind of garment. Why? In order to enable angels and human beings to connect to this abstract thing. Without archery or flower arranging, you won’t manage to study Zen. You have no access to Zen as such. It has to be clothed in something you can engage with. Only through that, and by engaging with it in thought, speech, and action. There too it’s like that, by the way. It’s a universal phenomenon; it’s not unique to Torah. It’s true of anything spiritual, of anything, of any world of ideas. Okay? Yes: “so that the neshamah, ruach, or nefesh in the human body can grasp them in its understanding and fulfill them.” What? Zen? I don’t know whether it’s the same truth, but you reach some spiritual aspect that they are trying to transmit to you. Whether it’s true or not true can be discussed; I don’t know. I’m making an analogy there to the logical structure of the matter. I’m not saying Zen is necessarily Torah. Maybe yes, maybe no, I don’t know, I have no way of knowing. But independently of that, I’m saying: this chain from the abstract thing and its clothing in practical conceptual worlds, which allows you to create direct interaction with the thing, to handle it with your fingers, to see with the bow and arrow, and to tie the world of thought to the world of action and speech—that happens both in Torah and in Zen. Okay? Without getting into the question of the relation between them themselves. That is what he says: “and by means of this it will be clothed in all its ten aspects in these three garments. Therefore the Torah is compared to water. Just as water descends from a high place to a low place, so the Torah descended from the place of its glory, which is His will and wisdom, may He be blessed, and the Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are entirely one, and no thought can grasp Him at all.” Why can no thought grasp Him at all? Not because it is so holy. Even in Zen no thought can grasp it at all. Because there is no way to grasp the thing as such. You can grasp it only when it is clothed in something with which your senses can interact. Sound, hearing, audio, video, and so on. Right, those are what my senses grasp. I don’t have—therefore many times we think that when it says no thought can grasp Him at all, that is some statement about the transcendence of the Holy One, blessed be He. It’s a simple logical statement: no thought can grasp a table in itself either. All I can say is how the table appears to me. But what is this thing itself that has these properties? What can I say about it? Nothing. I simply cannot speak about the thing as it is in itself, regardless of whether it is the Holy One, blessed be He, or a table. Okay? And then he says: “And from there it journeyed and descended in the hidden gradations”—that’s emphasized—“from level to level in the chain of worlds, until it clothed itself in material things and in the matters of this world, which are most, indeed almost all, of the commandments of the Torah and their laws, and in the combinations of physical letters in ink upon a book, the twenty-four books of Torah, Prophets, and Writings, so that every thought may grasp them.” Fine? And this is speech, and afterward it also passes into action—you translate it. Now notice: what we’ve done up to now is basically to see the first stage of the descent down this slope, in this chain of worlds. Right? There are abstract ideas, which are not connected to father and mother, not connected to forbidden foods, not connected to anything. And they are clothed in ideas described in the Torah. And those ideas, let’s say in the halakhic context, are commandments, transgressions, and the like. He also speaks about aggadot and letter combinations; I’m leaving that aside for now. I’m talking about Jewish law, okay? Now, even that isn’t the end. Because even the clothed ideas ultimately undergo another chain downward. Another concretization—the opposite of abstraction is concretization, the descent of the abstract and its becoming concrete. Okay? So it doesn’t end with the abstract ideas now becoming concrete ideas of father and mother, Sabbath, and forbidden foods. There is wording. Now I formulate those more concrete ideas, because those can already be formulated; the others cannot be formulated. But the formulation itself is a kind of further chain. Once again you trap it even more inside something too rigid. Because the idea of honoring father and mother is not exhausted by the statement “Honor your father and your mother.” There are many aspects and ideas there, and that sentence by itself is trying to express the thing, to represent the thing in some form, but that too is in fact another kind of clothing. That is the second stage, actually the third. What?
[Speaker L] This is the author of the Tanya.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, we’re reading the author of the Tanya now.
[Speaker L] He’s talking about contraction, that from the infinite light of the Holy One, blessed be He, it had to…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The contractions already exist in the Ari. So yes, that is one of the ways to look at contraction. Okay? So the point is that after this abstraction, which moves from abstract ideas to concrete ideas from our world, there is now another concretization. The next concretization is the formulation of those ideas in words. Which of course also commands me to do and not do things. And then I also move to performance. Meaning, performance is already in action. There is thought, speech, and action. Thought is the ideas; speech is the verbal formulation—not necessarily speech with the mouth, but the verbal formulation, okay? And action is the implementation of the instruction given to us in speech. So notice that we are basically moving here from the Torah itself in its abstract form, to a first garment, which is thought, which essentially becomes a set of ideas but already touching our world, okay? Then speech—that formulates it in our language. And action is the practical implementation of the instruction given to us in speech. Now obviously, when I do something, if I cling to the speech as such, I’ll miss it. I’ll miss it. Because speech does not really represent the abstract thing. It is the best concise representation I found. And therefore I think that when we look at wording in the Torah and compare it with Jewish law as we know it today, there isn’t much connection. Meaning, from this wording we try to distill what actually stands behind it. But what stands behind it is broader, more complex. This wording is an approximation that you can’t do without—you have to formulate it somehow in order to pass it on—but it is a base around which, or behind which, there is actually something much larger, more complex, and more abstract. Okay? Therefore I think this explains very well the lack of connection, or the connection, the lack of connection, between what we call Torah in the general sense and the Written Torah, the verses. It is simply a meager skeleton of what we know in the full picture.
[Speaker H] Is the Oral Torah the whole point of that?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, the Oral Torah. That’s also why it is forbidden to write down the Oral Torah. The moment you write down the Oral Torah, you’ve turned it into Written Torah, and the Oral Torah has to remain oral. Why? Because it needs to allow you to go beyond the linguistic formulations. And in the Oral Torah there are intuitions. And in the Oral Torah there are things you don’t know how to formulate, and yet you understand that this is what’s right. And this just doesn’t fit, this can’t be. And it’s obvious that this is right. You ask me why? I don’t know. But that’s how it is. Therefore the formulation cannot capture the Oral Torah. It’s an attempt somehow to turn the wheel back, to reverse the wheel of concretization and do the abstraction backward. To go to the text, which is the speech, and return from it to the thought. Because only then do I know what to do. The action is not supposed to realize the speech; it is supposed to realize the thought. Speech only represents the thought. Now, how do I know what the thought was? I have to carry out some process of abstraction from the speech, understand what the thought was, and then I can implement. In a certain sense, action is the lowest thing, but it aims at something higher than speech, something belonging to thought. I want to realize the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, not the verses of the Torah. The verses of the Torah are a representation of the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, but from them I need to understand what the Holy One wants. And after I understand what He wants, that is what I am supposed to do. Action, in a certain sense, takes us back, backward. You know that in kabbalistic language there are Malkhut and Binah, which are linked to one another. There is Chokhmah, Binah, Da’at; Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet; Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malkhut. And Malkhut is considered not only lower than all of them, but also higher than all of them, because it is composed of all of them. There is no king without a people. All the sefirot converge and create Malkhut. But in the very end, Malkhut takes us back to Binah, to the ideas within the things, the Binah within the things. Binah and Malkhut are almost synonymous names in certain places, even though this is the second or third sefirah and that is the tenth. Right? Because it is the totality of the sefirot. It is precisely the tenth. Therefore I say that from all the sefirot that concretized what happened above, you need to return and reconstruct, as you gather them, what the idea was that actually stood at the root of this process. And therefore Malkhut returns back to the basic idea.
[Speaker K] Is that something that isn’t in the box?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It contains the practical expression. The thoughts by themselves are still nothing; you now have to translate that into Jewish law. What do you do now? What is forbidden to do? What are you obligated to do? Therefore in the end it descends to the lowest plane, all the way down. But you want the thing from above to be realized as well as possible below. That is, there should be correspondence between what you do and the original thought that generated this process. Right? Not only can you—you probably also make use of that ability. Yes, of course we made many mistakes, no doubt. We’ll still talk about that. A large part of the Torah in our hands is clearly not something the Holy One, blessed be He, even dreamed of, or intended. Obviously, human interpretations can often be mistaken. “These and those.” We’ll still see the connection between that and “these and those.”
[Speaker D] If, say, we met here someone who—let’s say the sages had told him in the third century BCE—and he would do today what we do today, would he then have reached a higher level than today, or what is the purpose?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know how to rank these things. I think there is an advantage in closeness to the source. In tradition, in the process of tradition, the closer you are to the source, the more of an advantage you have. Right? Fewer distortions happened on the way. Okay? On that level—not only that fewer distortions happened on the way, you are closer to the mindset of the initial stage, of the original stage. You haven’t gone through many processes. Maybe yes, maybe no—again, I don’t know how to measure it. I’m saying in general: closeness to the source is an advantage. Distance from the source is a disadvantage. But because we have that disadvantage, because we are far from the source, then like a blind person who develops his hearing to compensate for sight, we develop our analytical abilities, because they help us reconstruct intellectually what perhaps in the past people understood intuitively. Because our intuition is a bit weak; we are far from the source. I don’t know what it means to say it worked—who tested what worked and what didn’t work? How do you check? What feedback do you have? You go back again to murder: if we survived, then that means it’s true? Why would that mean it’s true? Because we survived—so what?
[Speaker H] Regarding intuition and analytical ability, I think maybe you can really find a good example of that in Torah today, in the verse we talked about before, “a tooth for a tooth.” The sages say that “a tooth for a tooth” was never intended to be literal. Meaning, it’s an expression—money instead of actually taking out the tooth. And the source for this is the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia, and there too it says word for word “a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye,” and there too there was never a case where they related to it literally. There too it was metaphorical from the outset, and the interpretation of the law, for example if someone was punished under that law, was that he paid. Meaning, they never actually took out someone’s eye. Right. So it’s not a midrash; it’s really the plain meaning itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Interesting, although in our case it comes out not from interpretation of the verse but from a verbal analogy of “under” and “under.” So the sages didn’t get there that way, and you got there—they took it as a midrash, not as a plain-meaning interpretation. What you are describing is a plain-meaning interpretation; metaphor is part of the technique of peshat, meaning metaphorical wording is a kind of wording people use; it’s not midrash. Midrash means departing from the plain meaning and offering another interpretation. Now when the sages did this, it seems from their words that they are making a midrash. They are not claiming that this is the plain meaning. You understand? But you are saying that de facto in the end they hit the original plain meaning. Nice. Could be. In any case, this clothing of the ideas in formulation—I now want to talk a bit about that. Meaning, until now I basically focused on the transition between the Torah in its abstract sense and the collection of ideas that we know in our Torah. Again, we’re talking about Jewish law at the moment: commandments, transgressions, halakhic concepts in our world. Okay? Now I want to move to the second part that we saw in the author of the Tanya too, which is the transition from the idea to its formulation. That’s already a second transition. Okay? The Mishnah in Berakhot on page 15 says this: “One who recited the Shema but did not make it audible to his ear has fulfilled his obligation. Rabbi Yosei says: he has not fulfilled it.” A dispute among the tannaim: if he recited the Shema but did not make it audible to his ear. The Talmud asks: What is Rabbi Yosei’s reason? Because it is written, “Hear”—make your ear hear what comes out of your mouth. You need to hear what comes out of your mouth. And the first tanna holds: “Hear” means in any language that you hear. He interprets the word “hear” differently. He says “hear” means that it can be in any language. This is tractate Sotah, chapter “These are said,” these are things that may be said in any language. “And Rabbi Yosei derives both from it.” Under the Talmud’s assumption that Rabbi Yosei too says that the recitation of Shema may be in any language—that there is no dispute about that—then how does that fit with what we saw, that “hear” means that he must make it audible to his ear? So he says: I learn both from the word “hear.” On this the Rashba asks there in Berakhot: “Rabbi Yosei could say to you: I derive two matters from it—‘in any language that you hear.’ Rashi explained: I derive two things from it, because when you also interpret ‘hear’ as in any language, you also derive from it hearing, namely that one must make it audible to his ear. But this does not seem correct to me, for from where do we know that two things are derived from it? And furthermore, that would not be automatic.” Meaning, he says: we know in the Talmud that when you learn something from a word, immediately they ask the tanna who disagrees with you: what does he do with that word? Right? Or if someone else does not accept that law—what if someone else accepts the law but not the exposition, then from where do you derive the law that you accept? The Talmud always assumes a one-to-one relationship. That is, from each word or letter—it doesn’t matter, scriptural—you derive one law and vice versa. Meaning, never two laws from the same word. Fine? That’s the Talmud’s assumption. You don’t derive two things from one word. If the word is already occupied, they immediately ask you: then from where do you derive the second law? What’s the problem? From the same word. No—each word teaches one law. Right? That is the assumption. So the Rashba says: then why does Rabbi Yosei derive two things from the same word? He says there were two possibilities, but neither is correct. One possibility is that this is simply the literal meaning of the word—it really means both things. Here, by the way, what you said earlier. It’s simply the meaning; it’s not an exposition, it’s the meaning of the word. The meaning of the word is both “hear in any language” and “make your ear hear.” He says that’s not correct. Meaning, “from where do we know that two things are derived from it? And furthermore, it is not automatic.” You could say that one of them follows from… I learned only one thing, but the second is a consequence of the first. Not that both are the meaning of the word; the meaning of the word is the first, but the second law is a necessary consequence of the first, so in fact both come out of the same word. But that too is not right. And then he says as follows: “It appears to be explained this way: since you derive from it ‘in any language that you hear,’ automatically you also derive from it that he must make it audible to his ear. For if not, why would the Merciful One need to permit any language that he hears? It is obvious. For if he need not make it audible to his ear, then even mere contemplation in the heart would be permitted, as seems later with regard to one who had a seminal emission, where in contemplation of the heart language is not relevant. And from this we automatically hear that there is no insistence between the holy tongue and all other languages. Rather, certainly, from the fact that the Merciful One needed to permit any language, we automatically hear that he must make it audible to his ear.” What is he saying? He is saying that what we learn from here is that it must be in any language you hear. That is Rabbi Yosei’s exposition. So we asked: then from where does he know that it must also be audible to his ear? From where does he know that? So it is a consequence of the first—the Rashba’s second mechanism from before—it is a consequence of the first. Why? Because he says: if you did not need to make it audible to your ear, that is, if contemplation were enough and you didn’t have to speak, then in contemplation there is no language. Since that is so, you would not need a derivation to permit you to say it in any language, because language would not be a factor at all; you could just contemplate it. So therefore, from the very fact that a derivation is needed to teach me that one may say Shema in any language, it is obvious that speech is required here and contemplation alone is not enough. Therefore these two things can be learned from the word “hear.” Thus says the Rashba. Now there are several later authorities—it doesn’t matter, we need to finish soon, so I’ll do this briefly—there are several later authorities who understood that the Rashba essentially wants to claim that thought is not carried out verbally. When we think, we don’t think through language. Therefore there is a Talmud in Shabbat on page 40—what does it say there? “Rabbah bar bar Chana said in the name of Rabbi Yohanan: In every place one may contemplate, except in a bathhouse and a lavatory.” “And if you say that he said it to him in the vernacular”—he gave him an instruction in the bathhouse—“then how could he do such a thing? Perhaps he said it in the vernacular, not in the holy tongue.” “And Abaye said: mundane matters may be said in the holy tongue; sacred matters may not be said in the vernacular. Clarifying a prohibition is different”—that’s the answer. Tosafot there says: “And if you say that he said it in the vernacular, and even though it is forbidden to contemplate, let us say that the prohibition of contemplation applies only in the holy tongue, and he contemplated in the vernacular.” Fine? That doesn’t fit with the Rashba we saw. The Rashash there comments as follows: “that the prohibition of contemplation is only in the holy tongue. From here there is proof for the Sha’agat Aryeh in responsum 7, where he was astonished at the Rashba who wrote that in contemplation language is not relevant. Here we see that in contemplation language is relevant.” Because Tosafot says there that what is forbidden in contemplation is only contemplation in the holy tongue, but if contemplation is not done through language, then what is contemplation in the holy tongue as opposed to another language? So the Chazon Ish in one place and several other later authorities claim that there is some dispute here between Tosafot and the Rashba, and apparently this is difficult from the Talmud in Shabbat and elsewhere. But the simple straightforward reading is of course not like that. The Rashba does not say that language is not relevant in contemplation. What, we don’t understand that we contemplate in words? Everyone knows that we contemplate in words. There is also a big debate among researchers, by the way—there is a book by Damasio and his wife, two well-known brain researchers—about the question whether we must think through words. It may be that we can think not through words, but think the ideas themselves. Maybe not; there is a debate about that. But no one disputes that we do think through words. The question is whether it has to be that way or not, okay? That can be debated. It is obvious that we think in words. What, it’s impossible to think words? Of course it’s possible to think words.
[Speaker N] Fine, so I—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. I’m saying: the question is whether it is necessarily in words or not; on that there is a debate. But it is obvious that language is relevant to thought. I can think in words, in one language or another. It’s not that it’s impossible, that when I think there is no language. What the Rashba means to say is something else, and therefore it does not contradict Tosafot. The Rashba means that if there is a law that applies to thought and not to speech, then the language doesn’t matter. Not that we do not think in words, but rather: why is speech unnecessary and thought enough? Because what matters to the Torah is that you have the correct thought in your head, and it does not care how you express it, because you do not need to express it; you only need to think it, to hold the correct thought in your head. So even if you think it using words, obviously no one is going to tell you: make sure to do this only in the holy tongue and not in the vernacular. Not because you cannot think by means of language, but because if the law is a law of thought and not of speech, then I am not interested in the language. That is the point. And why? Because laws stated about thought deal with the ideas themselves, whereas laws stated about speech deal with the representation of the ideas, the linguistic representation of the ideas. And there it may be that they tell you: represent it in this language or in that language. The Torah may care in which language you represent it. Okay? So here we have a demonstration of the second stage of concretization that I spoke about: the transition from idea to formulation, not from an abstract thing to an idea. The transition from idea to formulation. And this transition from idea to formulation can be… it depends on the question: formulation in which language? And in what formulation—short formulation, long formulation, complete formulation, incomplete formulation. There are many assumptions about the relation between the idea and the formulation. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of the relation between the idea and the abstract thing that it expresses. The idea is the garment, between the thing and the garment that the thing wears. That belongs to the issues of the previous lesson and the beginning of this lesson. Now I move to the second process of concretization that the Torah undergoes, from dealing with ideas and concepts from our world—that was the first transition—to formulation. And the Torah we know is a Torah that has undergone both of those stages. Right? It deals not with the abstract things but with things from our world, and it is also formulated in a very particular formulation that was chosen. And what we call Torah is the thing after it has already gone through both of these processes, and that is very important, because the Torah in its origin is not even the ideas, but the abstract thing. But even the Torah we speak about is not this formulation; it is the ideas that are expressed in this formulation. And this will connect—I’ll talk about it next time—to the introduction I gave about what poetry is and why Torah is called poetry. You may already be able to understand on your own what direction I’m going in, but we’ll get to that next time. That’s it for now.