A Look at Torah and Torah Study – Lesson 5 – Rabbi Michael Abraham

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t matter. It could be that we wouldn’t be able to pray the same prayer, because for them it’s time for evening prayer and for us it’s time for morning prayer. But a zimun in Grace after Meals maybe; there too it might be problematic, but a zimun in Grace after Meals requires eating together, so here I’m less sure how to analyze it. But regarding prayer, my claim was that in the laws of joining together for a minyan, in the Shulchan Arukh, in the laws of prayer, it talks about a shared roof, a shared place, seeing one another—various physical rules like that, which don’t exist when we’re in the same Zoom meeting on different continents or in different places. But my claim is that the concept of a site, a place—what once meant you had to be in the same place—today can also mean a site. “Site,” literally, means place. Okay? What does that mean? In the conceptual world we live in, virtual sites are a place. Meetings take place in a virtual site too, not only in physical places. And therefore there is room—you can argue—but I’m saying the claim is a legitimate claim. There is room to argue that applying the rules for joining a minyan today has to take into account the circumstances in which we live now, not the circumstances that existed in the time of the Shulchan Arukh. In the time of the Shulchan Arukh, if you weren’t in the same place, you didn’t see each other, you weren’t together in any sense. But today it seems to me that anyone who lives in this world understands that we are in the same place. We are in the same place even though physically our bodies are in completely different places. Photo-bodies, more accurately, I don’t know, are in completely different places. But when we meet in a Zoom meeting, all of us have the immediate experience that we are talking, we are in the same place, and talking together. A site—it’s a place. That’s the feeling. Now, if you ask, say, a halakhic decisor who has never been on the internet, an old man sitting deep in Bnei Brak, who has never been on the internet, let’s say—because of course it’s forbidden, as everyone knows—what will he tell you? Obviously he’ll tell you that you can’t form a minyan on Zoom. Because by all the rules of the Shulchan Arukh it doesn’t work. You’re not under the same roof, you’re not… there are rules. Right? But that’s because he doesn’t live in another world. In his world he’s right. In his world, that really is the correct application of the Torah in its abstract sense. But we live in a different world. In our world, his application is not correct. The very same Torah has to be applied differently. Therefore, whether he’s right or not, one thing is clear: he is not the person to ask this question. You need to ask this question to a person—a rabbi, a halakhic decisor, whatever—who is immersed in these kinds of lives, which include Zooms and the internet and the like. And those people can argue: maybe it does count for a minyan, maybe it doesn’t. But someone who doesn’t understand, someone who doesn’t live this situation, this consciousness, these circumstances, cannot express an opinion about them. He has no idea what he’s talking about. And this is a very common phenomenon, yes, that rabbis there issue instructions about things they have absolutely no idea about. I’ll present the other side too—precisely those are the people you should ask. Okay, so you can ask them and do the opposite. Yes, I would also ask them and do the opposite. Yes. You know, a pathological liar and a pathological truth-teller are equally useful to me. I always know the truth. Right? If I ask a truth-teller, then what he tells me is the truth. If I ask a liar, then I know that whatever he told me, I should do the opposite. So it doesn’t matter—I know the truth either way. The most dangerous person is someone who isn’t pathological. Not a liar; sometimes he tells the truth and sometimes he lies. There you can’t know what the truth will be. As long as you’re consistent, everything is fine. So if you go to someone detached from reality, ask him, no problem, and do the opposite. Then it’s fine. Meaning, there too you’re operating correctly. Okay.

The concept of a deaf-mute, for example, has also changed completely. Right. Bnei Lau wrote an article some time ago about this. He went around among halakhic decisors asking: what is the status of a deaf person today, even a deaf-mute? Nowadays they learn to speak, and overall they can communicate and function within society. He couldn’t find a single decisor who would tell him, listen, their status has changed. In the end he got something from Rabbi Asher Weiss, I think—some weakly worded comment, something, I don’t remember exactly. That’s it. Meaning, he went to all the major, leading decisors, and none of them was willing to put his stamp on such a thing. And why? Exactly the same thing. Because from their point of view, the deaf-mute is what’s written there. He remains an idiot. Yes, that’s what’s written. No, he doesn’t remain an idiot. No, he doesn’t remain an idiot. That’s exactly the point. Jewish law. No, no, no. It may be that in reality they understand correctly and he doesn’t; they see that he’s not an idiot. But from their perspective, when the Talmud says that a deaf-mute does not join a minyan and is not obligated in the commandments and so on, that is the Torah. So the fact that now the deaf-mute is also intelligent—they may be aware that today he functions differently. And yet their conception of what Torah is, is incorrect. Because for them, what is written in the Talmud—that the law of a deaf-mute is such-and-such—that is the Torah. How can I change it? What, his law changed? How can I change it? By contrast, if you understand that Torah is not what’s written in the Talmud—what’s written in the Talmud is a certain expression of an abstract concept called Torah—then now apply it to your world, and you’ll see that the applications can change. From the way the Talmud handled these issues, you can certainly and should learn what to do about these issues in our circumstances. But not to learn in the sense of copy-paste; rather to learn in the sense that just as they operated there, we are supposed to operate here. In a certain sense, the Talmud teaches us a method, not a bottom line.

By the way, not for nothing—and we’ll get to this from many directions—not for nothing will you find almost no bottom lines in the Talmud. There are no bottom lines in the Talmud. In some places you have “the law follows him,” that can happen, or a refutation, or something like that—even “it is difficult” is still something where you can rule like him. There are almost no bottom lines. The overwhelming majority of passages end with: this one says such-and-such and that one says such-and-such. That’s it. There’s proof for this side and proof for that side, with no ruling. The rulings are always made by later halakhic decisors for this reason or that reason. There are no rulings in the Talmud. Why not? Because the Talmud itself understood—and we’ll talk about this, I think even today already—that it did not come to teach bottom lines. Why go through all the give-and-take? Just give me the bottom line, tell me the Jewish law, and that’s it. “One benefits and the other loses nothing”—liable or exempt? Why tell me stories about dwelling in another person’s courtyard without his knowledge, and this one said that and that one said this, and he blackens the walls, yes, all sorts of things of that sort. Forget it—just tell me: if one benefits and the other loses nothing, is he liable or exempt? Write the Kitzur Shulchan Arukh and be done with it. Why write Talmud? They write Talmud because the Talmud understands itself—it broadcasts this in every line—that it comes to teach us a mode of thinking, not to teach us. Bottom lines are the task of halakhic decisors. And Maimonides wrote bottom lines, and the Shulchan Arukh wrote bottom lines, and we need to write our own bottom lines, which will differ from Maimonides and the Shulchan Arukh, because we live in a different world in some respects. Not in everything, but every matter has to be judged on its own terms.

What do you mean there’s no flexibility? Religious law? It tells you exactly what to do. It says nothing at all—where does it say? What does it say? These commandments—you won’t be able to do even one step within what is written in the Written Torah. Everything is open to interpretations and applications; no, you won’t manage to do anything. If you stick to the Written Torah, you’ll get nowhere. Can you make tefillin? Tefillin? “And you shall take for yourselves,” yes exactly, “the fruit of a beautiful tree, branches of a thick-leaved tree, willows of the brook”—yes, what are you going to do with that now? Go to the brook willows and take them, and take a beautiful fruit—an orange—and what, what, what are you going to do there? Go to the wilderness and do something there with the orange and the willow. From the Torah alone you won’t get anything. There are interpretations, traditions, accompanying material—this text by itself says almost nothing. And therefore I say: when I speak about Torah, I’m speaking about method, not bottom lines. Torah is a method. Meaning: how you relate the commandments of the Torah to the world and so on—that method is passed down through tradition. Bottom lines change all the time. They change all the time because the world changes. And therefore, the very same method and the very same mode of thought, when applied to different circumstances, produce different results. And it is simply naïve to think that we are supposed to apply it as is, by copy-paste. That is a wrong conception of what Torah is. That’s what I want to say. In other words, the lectures I’ve given until now about what Torah is—those are exactly what lie at the base of these terribly current disputes over whether to change or not to change, the status of women, the attitude toward non-Jews, and all kinds of things of that sort. That’s what’s in the background there. It needs to be understood. Meaning, this is not just some abstract discussion about the meaning of aggadic literature in Tractate Shabbat, though that’s where we began with Moses on high.

But I want to return to our track. So last time we began looking at the issue of ukimta. Again, through the issue of ukimta I’ll demonstrate everything I’ve said now and everything we’ve said until now. So in the issue of ukimta we saw three examples. One example was the case of someone who placed a bill of divorce in the hand of her sleeping slave while he was being guarded, and then she is divorced. Yes, there’s a woman who has a slave; I place the bill of divorce in the hand of the slave, and the woman is divorced. The Talmud asks: but that is a moving courtyard, and a moving courtyard does not acquire. Meaning, for courtyard-acquisition the courtyard has to be stationary. A moving courtyard—a person who is a courtyard—does not acquire. The Talmud answers: when he is bound. Bound, and sleeping, and lame, and crippled. Fine, all sorts of additions. What, didn’t Rava know that it was speaking about a bound slave? So why didn’t he say so? If he didn’t say so, apparently he wasn’t speaking about a bound slave. So when you establish it as a bound slave, are you actually disagreeing with Rava? Are you explaining Rava? Something here doesn’t work. Now as for Rava, that’s an amoraic statement, so other amoraim can disagree with him. But when we make ukimtot on a Mishnah—we can’t disagree with the Mishnah. When I make an ukimta on the Mishnah, what am I doing—disagreeing with it? Am I explaining it? I can’t disagree, because it’s a Mishnah. To explain it—that’s not the straightforward explanation. When Rabbi wrote the Mishnah, he should have written it that way.

Yes, our second example was the egg that was laid on a Jewish holiday. The House of Shammai say it may be eaten; the House of Hillel say it may not be eaten. The dispute of the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel, the opening of Tractate Beitzah. Yes, further down on that page the Talmud brings an ukimta by Rabbah that this refers to a Jewish holiday immediately after the Sabbath, and to a hen kept for laying eggs. Okay? And the problem was that any egg laid today was “prepared,” in essence, the day before. Okay? And since that preparation happened on the Sabbath, it isn’t considered prepared, and therefore on the holiday it is forbidden to eat it. So therefore the setup is: a holiday after the Sabbath. Again the question: didn’t Rabbi know how to write? Why didn’t he write “an egg laid on a Jewish holiday after the Sabbath”? He writes “an egg laid on a Jewish holiday.” You have difficulties, so you say no no, this means a holiday after the Sabbath. No, you got confused. What do you mean, got confused? Why didn’t Rabbi write it? If he meant every holiday, or if he meant only a holiday after the Sabbath. We make an ukimta, right, that it’s a holiday after the Sabbath. And here there’s no option to say that we are disagreeing with Rabbi, right? We don’t disagree with Mishnahs, or with the House of Hillel. So with Rava, which is an amoraic statement, you can say okay, other amoraim make an ukimta for him out of respect but really disagree with him. But with a Mishnah that doesn’t work. So it can’t be that we are disagreeing with the Mishnah, but it also can’t be that we are interpreting the Mishnah, because that’s not a straightforward interpretation. Where is the intellectual honesty? Do you really think that the author of the Mishnah meant that? So there is some problem here.

A third example. The third example I brought was about leavened food. Before the time when it becomes forbidden, it is permitted—the Mishnah in Pesachim, chapter 2, says: before the time when it becomes forbidden, it is permitted. The Talmud asks: what do you mean, before the time when it becomes forbidden? That’s obvious! Of course. Leavened food on Hanukkah is permitted, right? Leavened food is forbidden on Passover, not on Hanukkah. So the Talmud says: no, it means that he charred it before the time and eats it during the time. He made toast, yes? Someone who makes toast on Passover eve in the morning can eat it on Passover. That is the practical ruling. But it’s well-done toast; it’s charred toast—not burnt. Not burnt. Not burnt to ashes; if it’s burnt to ashes there’s nothing to discuss. All the medieval authorities note that here. We’re not talking about burning; we’re talking about charring. Charring is not toast—I exaggerated of course when I said toast—but it is well-charred. Okay? Not turned to ashes. It is permitted to eat on Passover if you did this on Passover eve. That is the practical ruling in the Shulchan Arukh, in Maimonides, in everyone. Okay? The Shulchan Arukh and Maimonides, who are also relevant in our time.

So that’s what the Talmud says. Now, I don’t understand. The Mishnah says that before the time when it becomes forbidden, it is permitted. Who said anything about charring? You charred it before the time and you eat it after the time? What, what is this whole story? Rabbi didn’t know how to write it? He meant to speak about leavened food charred before the time, eaten during the forbidden time, and all this is missing from the text? All he says is: leavened food before the right time is permitted. That doesn’t sound like a straightforward interpretation of the Mishnah, right? It’s not likely that this really was Rabbi’s intention. So how are we to understand the phenomenon of ukimtot? That is really the question. And you’ll see the connection to our broader move in a moment. But for now the question is: how do we understand this strange phenomenon of ukimtot? Yes, I told you that I once had an argument with my son about ukimtot, and I showed him in the middle of the argument that he was making an ukimta. He was making an ukimta in the middle of the argument. And the explanation for this, as I explained to him—yes, the ukimta as I explained to my daughter, as the book says—so the explanation is what I’m now going to tell you.

Basically, I said that to claim that when amoraim make an ukimta on a Mishnah they are politely disagreeing with the Mishnah, as some people want to argue, is highly implausible. Implausible in two ways. Implausible because we know the rule is that amoraim cannot disagree with a Mishnah. When a Mishnah is brought against an amora, the rule in the Talmud is that his view is rejected—unless he finds an explanation or another tannaitic opinion that supports him, but in principle an amora is not supposed to disagree with a tanna. With the exception of Rav, who is a tanna and disagrees—there are a few transitional figures. But an ordinary amora cannot disagree with a tanna. So disagreement is not an option here. What will you say? That it’s basically—and the fact that it’s polite doesn’t help at all. Okay? And clearly if you already think that an amora can disagree with a tanna as long as he does it politely, then when a Mishnah is brought against an amoraic opinion, why is the amoraic opinion rejected? After all, an amora can disagree with a tanna. What, because the amora wasn’t polite? He didn’t find a polite solution, and therefore he is forbidden to disagree with the tanna? That’s completely implausible. So if they can disagree with a tanna, then all the more so let them disagree. But the rule throughout the Talmud is that when there is proof from a Mishnah or a baraita against you, your opinion is rejected—your opinion as an amora. So why, in an ukimta, if you do it politely, is everything fine? Since after all you are disagreeing with the Mishnah. Therefore I say: it cannot be that you’re disagreeing with the Mishnah. But on the other hand, how can it be a straightforward interpretation? It’s an extreme lack of honesty. How can it be that they produce such a bizarre interpretation of the Mishnah?

So I brought some strange explanations that are offered for this—yes, that one does simple meaning and exposition to the Mishnah just as one does simple meaning and exposition to the Torah. Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner wants to argue that precisely because Rabbi decided to write down the Oral Torah—“It is a time to act for the Lord; they have violated Your Torah”—so he decided to write the Mishnah, and he intentionally wrote it in a distorted way so that you wouldn’t learn from the Mishnah itself, but would need a rabbi to explain the Mishnah to you. And then it would still remain a kind of Oral Torah and would not become Written Torah, which was the whole concern because of which it had originally been forbidden to write down the Oral Torah. Okay? Fine. To me that sounds a bit odd, because in the end, in the end, the damage outweighs the benefit. Because in the end you just confuse us. If the Mishnah is written in such a way that we can’t understand what it says, then forget it—why are you writing it at all, why are we learning it? To my mind this is completely implausible.

In short, what I want to say is the following claim, and here I need a somewhat long introduction. I want to argue—maybe I’ll first give the bottom line—that when we make an ukimta on a Mishnah or on an amoraic statement, our assumption is that the statement and the Mishnah, the interpreted source, are formulated precisely. That is the first assumption. The second assumption is that it comes to state a general principle, not a specific law. It states the general principle through a specific law, but its real purpose is to state a general principle. And now I say: since it states the general principle through a specific law, that specific law doesn’t work for us. So I make an ukimta so that it works. Let’s take an example, say, with Rava. When Rava tells me that if you put the bill of divorce into the hand of the woman’s slave, then the woman is divorced—the Talmud’s assumption is that Rava didn’t come to tell me stories about pathological forms of giving a divorce. That is not his purpose. His purpose is to state a general principle, a principle that is true of every slave, not only a sleeping slave, bound, and all such things. It is true of every slave: that a slave is the courtyard of his master. That is the principle Rava wanted to tell us. Now the Talmud, for its own reasons—which we’ll discuss—does not tend to formulate rules. It will not say: a slave is the courtyard of his master in every respect. It expresses this through a certain law. For example, that one can acquire through the hand of the slave by means of courtyard-acquisition. The master of the slave can acquire by courtyard-acquisition. But it is not coming to tell me stories about courtyard-acquisition. It is coming to tell me what the relation is between the slave and the master: that the slave is the courtyard of the master. It simply expresses or applies that through this specific law of acquiring a bill of divorce. But from that I am supposed to understand that the idea Rava came to tell me is that a slave is the courtyard of the master. That’s all. Even though he is a human being of flesh and blood, he is like a courtyard.

Now the Talmud says: fine, all well and good, but something here doesn’t work for me. In slave-law, okay, in the law concerning a slave belonging to his master, I understand. But in acquisition law, you are not right, because the slave is a moving courtyard. And in acquisition law, a moving courtyard does not acquire. So the example you chose in order to illustrate the idea doesn’t work. So Rava says: okay, then it’s a bound slave. Why make a big deal out of everything? So the slave is tied up. Leave me alone with this nonsense now; it’s not important. I’m not here to talk with you about the laws of acquisition through slaves. I’m here to tell you something that is true of every slave, not only a bound slave. Every slave is the courtyard of his master. True, in acquisition law it is not enough that it be a courtyard; it also has to be a courtyard that is not moving. Fine. So in acquisition law the slave must also be bound. Not interesting. Therefore the ukimta always comes to remove a side problem. It never touches the principle itself that was introduced in the interpreted source. That is the claim. And in that sense it is entirely sensible to work this way.

I just want to tell you that a slave is the courtyard of his master. That’s all. I tell you that if he dies in the hand of a slave, it effected acquisition. Now you start insisting, yes yes, but in acquisition law the courtyard must not move. Fine, so the slave is bound—leave me alone. Why is that important now? You’re asking klutz-kashes, that’s what you’re asking. You don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you. I’m not talking to you now about acquisition law; I’m talking to you about slave law, about the relation between a slave and his master. Okay? So there is also a practical application if the slave is bound, but that’s not the point. The practical application comes here to express a general idea, an abstract idea: that a slave is the courtyard of his master. For what practical differences? For example, acquisition; for example, I don’t know, if there is leavened food with him then maybe the master would violate “it shall not be seen.” I don’t know. He is the courtyard of his master in various respects. One of those respects is acquisition. Fine. I apply it or express it through acquisition, through the laws of acquisition. But I didn’t come to tell you acquisition law. If you have problems with acquisition law, put a bandage on it and say he is bound. It doesn’t matter. That’s not what I came to tell you.

And if that is so—that’s the bottom line, and we’ll get there step by step; you’ll see how sensible it is—but if that is really so, then it means that the general principle that a slave is the courtyard of his master is true of every slave. Therefore it is no accident that Rava speaks simply of “a slave”; he does not speak of a bound slave. Every slave is the courtyard of his master. Therefore there is no problem with Rava’s general formulation, because what he says really is a general statement; it is not a statement about a bound slave, it is a statement about every slave. Except that Rava chose to present this statement through a certain law, a certain halakhic implication. That halakhic implication requires the slave to be bound. Fine, so when he is bound, whatever. In the context of “it shall not be seen,” even an unbound slave is like that. I don’t need to speak to you about a bound slave; I’m speaking to you about every slave.

And already here, when I present this bottom line, I’ll show you why I needed the issue of ukimta, because you can see here exactly the picture I described until now. I am coming to tell you a general idea: that there is some sort of bond between a slave and his master like that of a courtyard. An abstract bond, a kind of ownership-bond like a courtyard—that is, he is considered his master’s courtyard—which is a very general and abstract statement. Now this has various halakhic implications—for example, that one can acquire by courtyard-acquisition if one places something in the hand of the slave. That is a halakhic implication of the abstract idea. But that halakhic implication always requires other things to be added—that the slave be bound, or something like that. Fine. But the Torah-content of the matter is not the halakhic implication at all. Torah is not that the slave can acquire a bill of divorce when you place it in his hand. Torah is that a slave is the courtyard of his master. That is Torah. It is a general abstract idea. That is Torah. The practical expressions of it are garments that this abstract thing wears in the circumstances in which we live: slaves and acquisitions and bills of divorce and all sorts of things of that kind. Okay? So I think the phenomenon of ukimta illustrates this beautifully, and I’ll now try to show it in a more concrete way through scientific examples.

Let’s start with a few scientific examples. Say, Newton’s first law, yes, in Newtonian mechanics, is that a body on which no force acts moves at constant velocity in a straight line. Right? In mechanics, in physics, you have velocity and speed. Speed is how many kilometers per hour you’re traveling; velocity is a vector, meaning how fast you are going and in what direction. Okay? Now in the absence of force, what is conserved is not only the speed but also the velocity. Meaning both direction and speed are conserved. Okay? Therefore, a body on which no force acts moves at constant motion—meaning it does not change its speed—in a straight line, and also does not change direction. Okay? This is the law of inertia, what is called Newton’s first law. Has anyone ever seen such a body? Including Newton himself, with all due respect? Of course not. There is no body in the universe on which no force acts. There isn’t. There is always friction; there are other bodies that pull it with mass; all sorts of things. There is no body in the universe on which no force acts. No such thing. Right? So what does this mean? How do I test this law? What I do is a laboratory experiment. And the role of a laboratory experiment is not, contrary to what people think, to simulate reality. Because if you want to simulate reality, go outside—that’s the best simulation of reality. Reality does it better than you do. The purpose of the lab is to detach from reality. To erase reality. To create a virtual, Platonic, abstract reality in which you clean away all the things that disturb you, so that you can see the general law in its purity. If you want to test whether a body on which no force acts moves at constant velocity in a straight line, if you go outside you won’t be able to test this law, because there is no such body anywhere. A force always acts on a body, in every context. You still want to test it? Build some lab with a Faraday cage so no electromagnetic field enters it, shield all the masses around so they won’t act on the body, lower the temperature to zero, make sure there is no air, that there is a vacuum, no friction, and all sorts of things like that. Now launch the body at some speed and track its speed. If no force acts on it, you’ll see that it continues moving at constant velocity in a straight line.

What did I do when I built that laboratory experiment? What I did was erase reality. Not simulate reality—on the contrary, clean reality of all the mess that characterizes it. In reality there is friction. In reality there are other bodies. In reality there are electromagnetic fields. In reality there are many things. I want to build a Platonic world, yes, a pure abstract world in which the ugly things of reality do not interfere with my seeing the truth in its purity, detached from reality. Yes? And that is what I do when I build a laboratory. So for example, if you see, say, a certain law, a scientific law, and you want to test it, to see whether it describes reality correctly or not, you must detach from reality. Because if you test it in reality, it never works. Never. There is no law in the universe that works in reality. There is no law of nature that works in reality.

Now people live with the mistaken feeling that this fact shows us that the laws are not precise. That the laws are approximations. Nonsense. The laws are perfectly precise. Again, assuming we didn’t make a mistake, but in principle the scientific law is completely precise. Except that it is completely precise when it deals with a Platonic world, an abstract world in which there is only one body and no other body and no friction and no temperature and no all sorts of other things. There it is completely precise. What happens in our world? Here too it is completely precise—except that there are also other completely precise laws that also operate here. And now the result we observe is the result of all these laws and all these phenomena acting together, because in reality you cannot isolate one aspect from all the rest… The law is completely precise. It’s just that there are other completely precise laws, and they all reach out their hands toward this reality. Therefore the result is the result of their combination. So when I really want to do scientific work, on the practical plane or before the practical plane, on the theoretical plane, I need to take the phenomena that I have in reality and try to distill from them pure aspects. Okay? There is gravitation here, there is an electromagnetic field here, there is friction and temperature. Let us discuss each one separately. What happens when there is only friction? What happens when there is only temperature? What happens when there is only an electromagnetic field? Okay? How do I think about this? I build a Platonic world, fine, in which there is only—temperature is zero, no air, no electromagnetic fields, and one body affecting my body. Fine? Then I test the gravitational force: was Newton right that it is the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance? Yes? That’s Newton’s law of gravitation. So I can test it in that Platonic world. But how do you get to the Platonic world? El Al doesn’t fly there. Meaning, how do I get to that world? I build a laboratory in our world whose purpose is to approximate as much as possible a world that doesn’t exist, a Platonic world—a world in which there is only the gravitation of one body, no electromagnetic field, no friction, no temperature, nothing else. Okay? That is the role of the lab: to try to create the Platonic world I had in mind when I formulated the law, within our practical world.

And therefore this is a great art, and it’s not simple, and it is never completely right. There is always a little friction and a little temperature and you didn’t entirely manage to shield the electromagnetic field. There are small disturbances. You try to create a situation in which those disturbances are small enough relative to the main thing you are measuring, so that you can assume that what you see here is really the result of the theoretical law, the law you want to measure. Yes, right, exactly. So therefore the role of the lab is basically to try to create within our practical world some Platonic planet, some Platonic region, in which I can try to test some abstract law that deals with Platonic worlds. Okay? And therefore scientific laws can be seen only in the lab; you can’t see them in life. In life it is always a mixture of many many influences. And in order to understand those influences, the scientist’s job is to isolate those influences one by one, to try to identify what influences are here, separate each one, determine some law that deals only with it. A law that we will never see in life. Every such law is measured in its own Platonic world. The law of gravitation is measured in a world with no friction, no electromagnetic field, no temperature. The laws of friction operate in a place where there is no gravitation, no electromagnetic field, no temperature. The law of temperature in a place where there is no electromagnetic field, no gravitation, nothing else, only temperature. Every such law has a Platonic world that it talks about, and there supposedly one can see it. If, however, we truly want to measure, we have no way to get to the Platonic world, so we build a laboratory. One lab will try to model the first Platonic world, where there is only gravitation and nothing else. A second lab will have only friction and nothing else. A third lab will have only an electromagnetic field and nothing else. After we understand each such law separately and confirm what we thought was happening in the Platonic world, now we take all these laws—which we have convinced ourselves are correct—and try to see what happens when all of them gather together in our ugly reality.

Yes, it’s like the joke that a hospital could be perfect if only there were no patients—the patients only get in the way. Or a university could be perfect if there were no students—the students only get in the way. In our world too, the world only gets in the way. If we had Platonic worlds everything could be perfect, the laws would work, everything would be wonderful. Our problem is that our world is ugly. It is not Platonic. It is a mixed-up world in which everything comes together and you can’t isolate parameters, and it’s a complete mess. Okay. Fine, but this is our world, and the way to try to understand it is to isolate parameters, go to Platonic worlds, test them there. After I’m done, after I’ve formulated all these laws, I return to the ugly stew called our world and try to understand what happens when all these laws get mixed together and each one pulls reality in its own direction. And there is some chance of trying to understand that. Yes, “let the boys play before us,” exactly. And hopefully we succeed in doing that, and that is usually a very complicated problem: to combine all these laws and understand what happens when they all operate together. And it may be that one of them interacts with the other, and then you already have nonlinear problems and all sorts of things like that; it’s super complicated.

Every physicist knows that when you want to understand how a donkey works, you begin with a point-donkey. A donkey with no volume, no shape, no anything, just a certain mass at one point in space. Has anyone ever seen such a donkey? Not yet. Not yet. Right? So why is it useful to begin with a point-donkey? Because if you understand how a point-donkey works, you can then try to understand what happens with a real donkey, which also has biology and shape and lots of things. Okay, let’s begin with a point-donkey. Then I can try to see lines that depend only on the fact that the donkey is an object with mass. That’s all. Afterward I add: but besides mass it also has shape, it also has temperature, it also has physiology, and many things. So for that physiology comes in, thermodynamics comes in, all sorts of things like that, until we can understand what a donkey really does. The dumber the donkey, the harder it is to understand what it does. Right? Intelligent creatures are easy to understand, because you have a rational explanation for what they do. Stupid creatures—you can’t understand what they do. The stupider they are, the smarter you have to be to understand how the thing works anyway. What? Yes, and you can’t ask them either, because even if you asked him, he would know—he wouldn’t know how to answer you.

So the point, in short, is that understanding our world requires back and forth movement. We abstract, go to Platonic worlds, understand what the law says in the Platonic world, bring it back here—or by means of labs, it doesn’t matter. After I finish all that, I bring it back to reality itself and try to see what happens with all those laws. I’ll give you an example from an area that is not natural science, not physics. Say—my sister, who also studied here, among other things criminology, told me there are several interesting descriptions. She told me, for instance, that almost every course there begins with an attempt to define what science is. I told her: I don’t know, I study physics, and in no course did they devote even a minute to defining what science is. Yes, so it’s like what Rabbi Medan once said: he knows twenty-two explanations for why the Scroll of Ruth is read on Shavuot, but only one explanation for why the Scroll of Esther is read on Purim. When the connection is obvious, there is one explanation. When you don’t know what the connection is, you have twenty-two explanations. So there too, many explanations of why criminology is also a science—because obviously it isn’t. In physics no one deals with that.

In any case, another thing she told me was that whenever one of the lecturers would try to give an example, say, of a law in his field, he would say: let’s take for example the law… and then he’d think for a moment… frustration and aggression, say. And it was always frustration and aggression. He would think, as though scanning in his mind the hundreds of laws he knew, and then say let’s say frustration and aggression. For some reason they all chose frustration and aggression because that’s the only law they have there. Okay. So there is a law of a connection between frustration and aggression. Fine? Now how do you test that? This is not natural science; it’s already the human sciences, right? Psychology. Now let’s try to see how one tests the relation between frustration and aggression. If you look now at our world, you won’t be able to test it. A person may respond aggressively not because of frustration but because of other things: anger, nerves, other things, I don’t know what. Simple inability to sublimate. All sorts of things. A person may be frustrated and not respond aggressively because he is educated, because he knows how to restrain himself, because he—whatever—all kinds of things, right? So in our world you won’t find a direct connection between frustration and aggression. No, in practice it won’t happen. So what are you supposed to do? Since logically you understand that there should be a connection between them, you say: let’s build a Platonic world in which there is a person who is frustrated, and has no education, no social inhibitions, no other influence, only the frustration. He will react aggressively. That is basically what the law stating a connection between frustration and aggression means. But in our world, besides frustration, there are many other things. There is social inhibition, there is education, there are many things—morality, many things. Okay. Therefore in our world the connection between frustration and aggression will not really appear. Maybe there will be a correlation, but not an immediate connection. So does that mean that the law is not correct? The law is completely correct, one hundred percent precise. Except that there are also other correct laws. Besides the relation between frustration and aggression, which is one law, there is also the law that says that if the person is moral, then he does not immediately react violently even when he is frustrated. He restrains himself, overcomes it. That is also a law. There are many other laws. If you are in society, you don’t dare do things you might do when alone. That too is a law. That too is a law. And every psychological law like that—I could maybe suggest to them, besides frustration and aggression, here are some more laws. But I’m saying: every psychological law like this operates in a Platonic, abstract world of human point-donkeys, yes? Of a person who has only frustration and no other aspect in his psyche. There is no such person, but fine—that’s a point-donkey. Okay, so every such law is tested in its own Platonic world. And now when I go out to look at our world, I need to gather all the laws I’ve accumulated and somehow try to decipher from the mixture what is happening in our world. Sometimes frustration will win out, sometimes education will win out, sometimes social inhibition will win out. Maybe I can determine rules for when this wins and when that does, and to what extent—fine, that’s already how I manage all those laws.

That is to say, in short: when people say psychology is not an exact science—that’s a mistake. It is an exact science. It is a completely exact science. Except that this exact science deals with a Platonic world. A world in which there is an incredibly simple human being, with only one aspect of personality, and there it is completely precise. Assuming—it doesn’t matter, there may be incorrect laws—but in principle, if we reach the correct law, it will be completely precise. Why doesn’t it work here? Not because it isn’t precise, but because there are other laws that also operate here. This is the result of many things. There is an example that Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman once brought, yes, in his polemical writing against Zionism, but it doesn’t matter; the example itself is correct. He discusses a statement in the Talmud that one who recites havdalah over a cup of wine will have male children. Okay? Now I know several people who were careful to recite havdalah over a cup of wine and do not have male children. The Chafetz Chaim, for example, had no sons at all. So how can the Talmud say that one who recites havdalah over a cup of wine will have male children? I mean, what? So okay, you could say the Talmud was wrong. Right? That can happen. That can happen too, that’s true. But Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman did not assume that. And what he said was that this law—that one who recites havdalah over a cup of wine will have male children—is a completely precise law. But there are other considerations. There are other laws. For example, if that person was not careful about vows. The Talmud says that because of the sin of vows, a person’s children die. Now what sense would it make to give him male children as a reward for havdalah over a cup of wine and then kill them because he was not careful about vows? So they don’t give him the children. Fine? Now the continuation is mine, not Rabbi Elchanan’s, but that’s the idea. What does this mean? It means that you can relate to that law—even if we say the Sages knew this, never mind that I question it—but even if they knew and it is a completely precise law, it won’t work in reality. It won’t work in reality because there are simply other considerations, not because this consideration is wrong. This consideration is correct.

I hereby inform you: whoever has more strength will win in every struggle. But if the other person is very smart, he may defeat the stupid brute. Fine? I’m speaking of a situation in which they are equal in intelligence and differ only in strength. You saw that I made an ukimta? I’m talking about two human beings equal in intelligence, but with a difference in strength between them. There are no such human beings. What, do you know people who are exactly equal in intelligence? It doesn’t happen. Fine. But does that make what I did here worthless? Not at all. That is how one understands the world. If you want to understand what affects such struggles, then isolate it. There is a parameter of intelligence that matters, there is a parameter of strength that matters, there is a parameter of cunning, I don’t know, all sorts of things like that—each one has an effect. Only at the very end, since all of them are playing on the same field together, you cannot know clearly or deterministically what the result will be. Okay? But that does not mean the laws are not correct; they are completely correct. Do you understand? In short, science does not deal with our world. That may sound surprising. Science does not deal with our world. It cannot deal with our world. Science deals with nonexistent worlds. With abstract Platonic worlds that we create in our imagination. That is what science deals with. Afterward, when you want to apply it here, since scientists are experts in these laws, they also try to handle reality here with their limited means. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes less so. But that is really more technology than science. That is already applying scientific laws. Okay?

You’re assuming there are laws—what about the place of chance? No no, I’m ignoring that right now. Obviously there can also be chance; I’m not getting into philosophy of science now. I brought this only as an example to illustrate the logic of the matter. Okay? I’ll return to ukimtot in a moment, but I still want to stay here in our context. Let’s look for a moment at the process of scientific generalization. Okay? All of this will return to Torah—it’s exactly the same thing—but it’s easier for me to explain it there. “If you want to lie, keep your testimony at a distance.” If you want to persuade, keep your testimony at a distance.

Let’s look for a moment at the concept of generalization, yes? In information theory they measure how much information a sentence or a claim contains. For example: David Ben-Gurion is the first prime minister of the State of Israel. That’s a claim, okay? Now “the first prime minister of the State of Israel” is a very information-rich description, right? Rich in information: he was the head—he was the head of a government, not just any head. He was the first prime minister, not just any prime minister. And the first of the State of Israel, not of some other state. There’s a lot of information here, right? What happens if I give up some of the information? Say I say: the first prime minister of a state, without saying Israel. Then the information I gave decreased, right? It was reduced. How many people fit the new description? More. Exponentially or something like that, but more, right? Not everyone—everyone who was the first prime minister of a state. Not so many people, but more, right? Now I’ll remove something else: the first prime minister, period. No longer of a state and not of Israel. The information has decreased, right? The amount of information has gone down. The number of people who fit this description has gone up, increased, right? Meaning, the more information I remove, the more I am making a generalization. The claim I am making is true of all first prime ministers, not only the first prime minister of the State of Israel. So I made a generalization, right? To make a generalization I have to give up information. The more information there is, the more I am dealing with something narrower, more detailed, more particular. The more information I remove, the more I move to something general. Meaning, the process of generalization is always a process of abstraction. Abstraction means I strip away some of the garments. Now he is the first prime minister of a state, not of Israel, so I stripped away one garment. First prime minister, not of a state and not of Israel, I stripped away another garment. The more abstraction I perform, the higher the level of generalization I am at. When I am at a higher level of generalization, what I am describing is true of a larger group of objects. Right?

So notice: this is a process that says, if you give up information you expand the group you are talking about. Information times scope of the group is constant. If you reduce this you can enlarge that; if you reduce that you can enlarge this. There is a tradeoff between information and scope. Okay? That is information theory. Now what does this really mean? That when science generalizes—say I see this phone, I let go of it, it falls to the ground. Why does it fall to the ground? All I can say is that Rabbi Michael Abraham’s phone, black, made of plastic, on this day, at this moment, in this place, was let go and fell to the ground. That is what I saw with my eyes, right? Now if I say that this happens to every person’s phone or to every phone, I will have to remove a bit of information, right? It’s a phone—no longer plastic, not black, not Rabbi Michael Abraham’s, not specifically here. See how much information I gave up? Okay? I gave up a lot of information, but in this way I made a generalization. Now it is true of every phone. But let’s abstract even more. Let’s say it’s not a phone at all anymore; maybe every electronic device that you let go of falls to the ground. After that I say, forget electronic device—every object. Then I say, forget object—every object with mass. Not every object, but every object with mass. See how many generalizations I made until I reached the law of gravitation? That every thing with mass falls to the earth.

What did I see with my eyes? What I saw with my eyes were very concrete objects. I never saw an object whose only property was that it has mass. Every object with mass has shape, material from which it is made, maybe an owner, a location, many many things, right? The claim of the law of gravitation is that all those parameters are irrelevant. Let’s give them up; let’s abstract. The moment we abstract, we get a result that is a generalization. This is no longer true only of this specific phone at this moment in this place; it is true of every body with mass—a much larger set of objects. Why? Because I abstracted a great deal of information from the statement in which I directly observed that this phone fell to the ground. Okay? Meaning, the process of scientific generalization is always—always, that is the meaning of generalization—done through abstraction. Abstraction literally. We usually think abstraction means moving to something abstract. That’s true, but why is it called abstraction? Because we strip things away. We strip away more and more pieces of information, more and more characteristics. When I speak about prime matter, that’s matter without form, without characteristics, so I have abstracted, I have stripped. Meaning, generalization and hylization—or abstraction—are the same process. To generalize you have to abstract, and every abstraction creates a generalization.

Why is it important to understand this? Because it basically means that the objects in our world are all concrete objects; they are not abstract in any way. Right? It’s either a phone like this, or that bag, this computer, that sheet of paper, a table, an air conditioner—very concrete objects, each of which has many many many properties. How can I determine that there is a general law that applies to all objects with mass? Never mind if they are black, white, plastic, belong to someone, where they are and what they are—every object with mass falls to the earth. How can I determine that? It concerns many many kinds of objects, and for every object I test I can always say: okay, maybe it fell to the earth because it is made of plastic, or because it is electronic. How do I know it’s true of all objects with mass? So I’ll test another one, but no matter how many objects you test there will still be some common denominator narrower than merely having mass. I simply make some particular guess and say: look, the Platonic world I have in mind is a world of bodies with one and only one property—they have mass, that’s all. They are not electronic devices and not non-electronic devices, they are nothing; all they have is the fact of having mass. That’s it. Yes, point matter. They have nothing else. I invent a world, and only thus can I invent a theory. Fine? Meaning, you see that the moment science deals with generalizations, that itself means that it does not deal with our world but with the Platonic world. Because generalization means dealing with abstract objects. That is what generalization is. Therefore this is simply another angle on what I said before: when science deals with generalizations—and it always deals with generalizations; science does not deal with the question of what this will do at a particular moment; science establishes some general principle, that is its purpose—to establish the general principle. Okay? And if it establishes this general principle, then it means that the objects it is speaking about are not objects from our world at all; there are such abstract objects, which have only mass.

Mathematics even more so? What? Mathematics even more so. Yes, in mathematics it is not even objects but abstract concepts. Higher? No no, that can be debated, but mathematical Platonism is a branch of Platonism generally. Whoever believes in the existence of Platonic ideas, in the mathematical world this is called mathematical Platonism. Okay, but the idea is the same idea. In any case, what I am trying to show here is that when you deal with generalizations—and to understand the world I always have to deal with generalizations—what is understanding? When I see this phenomenon, understanding it means placing it in a broader context, understanding that this phone fell not because it is a phone but because it has mass; all objects with mass fall. That is what it means to understand a phenomenon: to relate it to some broader phenomenon, a more general law. Okay? So understanding always means generalization; generalization means abstraction; abstraction means that in fact you aren’t dealing with phones at all. You are not dealing at all with any object that exists in our world. You are dealing with some abstract world with abstract objects moving around in it.

It doesn’t deal with the falling? What? It doesn’t deal with the falling in this case? No, in this case I do deal with falling—that a body with mass falls to the earth. Maybe if there is air it doesn’t fall. Right, so I’ll say that a force acts on it, but there is another force that balances it and therefore it does not fall. The more precise formulation of the law of gravitation is that a body with mass has a force acting on it, not that it falls, and that is always true. So sometimes there is another force balancing it and therefore it does not fall. Fine, I formulated it this way only for the sake of the discussion. You are right that I really should have said that a force acts on it, not that it falls.

In any event, that is the point I wanted to emphasize here: it is not accidental that science does not deal with our world. It cannot deal with our world. It does not claim to deal with our world, because when you claim to understand something, that always means moving to an abstract conceptual world. Okay? Now in this context there is—let me make one more remark. This transition, the transition of abstraction and generalization, is a nontrivial transition on the philosophical level, and all this will later help with Torah study too; every detail I say now is the same thing. This transition is nontrivial. Why? Because you really do have to decide what property of the phone caused it to fall. Maybe it really is because it is black or because it is made of plastic? How do you know it is because of its mass? You say, fine, I’ll test that too. I’ll see—this too is black. I’ll take this sheet of paper, fine? It has black writing on it, maybe that is enough? In short, you won’t get out of this. There is no way to take a set of experiments and derive a theory from them—there is no way. That is a theorem in mathematics. There is no way. There are always infinitely many general theories that will explain any discrete set—even not finite—any discrete set of observations. We are never dealing with an infinite set of observations, however large it may be. So how do we know what the real influential parameter is? The relevant parameter? We have some sort of sense of smell. Right? Some kind of intuition that says: here it seems to me that color plays no role, surely not. Nor does the material, whether it’s plastic or not plastic. It’s probably just the fact of having mass. Then afterward I test it, because maybe I’m wrong, but intuition gives me a direction. It tells me where to go.

Notice that this is something that troubles philosophers of science and of history from various angles. I’ll give you an example. There is a book called What Is History? by a historian named Carr, a British historian, from the early twentieth century I think. And he asks what history is; he tries to understand the historian’s mode of operation. So he says: look, there is a certain paradox here. What is the paradox? Think, say, of Napoleon’s Battle of Waterloo. Okay? Where he was defeated there by Wellington the Briton and Blücher the Prussian. Okay? Now you ask yourself why he was defeated. Why they won and he lost. And let’s say you know nothing about armies and war and anything; you are a tabula rasa. You now come and begin building your military theory, your military understanding. You know nothing. Assume this for the sake of discussion. You’re at the beginning of military research. Okay? So I am trying to understand what happened there, what affects victory. Now the Baconian theory—the naïve Baconian theory—says: you collect facts, and from the facts you generalize and create a law of nature. But that’s nonsense. Why? Many still think that today, but it’s still nonsense. Why? Because you don’t know which facts to collect. Maybe it was the name of the mother of the adjutant of the fourth regiment from the left. Maybe that’s what determines who won. Or what was the average height of the mortar soldiers. Or who knows what. Do you understand that there are infinitely many data points? Now if you don’t know anything at all about the theory, and you need to begin collecting data and from them build the theory, you will get nowhere. There are infinitely many data points. So what—how do you know which data are relevant and which are not? By means of the theory. If the theory is that strength can matter, then you check how much they worked on physical fitness or strength or something like that—that’s a relevant parameter. If you understand that the quality of equipment or military weapons matters, then you check who had higher-quality weapons. So do you see that I already know the theory—what affects victory in war—and only then can I collect the facts. But the question is: how do I know the theory if I haven’t collected facts yet? To collect the facts, I need to know the theory. So in short, I need the facts in order to know the theory, and I need the theory in order to know which facts to collect. So this business never gets started. How does the whole thing work?

Now in exactly the same way there is a philosopher of science named Carl Hempel. In the Open University, in philosophy of science, they attach his little book. And he describes the case of a Jewish doctor in Vienna—Hungarian, but in Vienna, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—who was head of a maternity ward. There were two maternity wards in that hospital. In his ward there was a high mortality rate from puerperal fever, significantly higher than in the second ward. And they tried to understand why. What was there in that ward that caused the women giving birth to die? Now they had no idea what caused it. You see the parallel to Carr, right? It’s exactly the same thing, just in different fields. They don’t know each other, and they are simply saying the same thing. Apropos Zen, by the way—flower arranging and archery—you can say the same thing in completely different fields. It’s not…

So he says the following. He describes what happened there. They tried to check the direction of the windows. Maybe changing the direction of the windows would have an effect. But it didn’t. Maybe where the priest entered the ward from, or the pitch of the priest’s bell. You are shooting in the dark. You have no idea which facts are relevant. Since you have no idea which facts are relevant, you have infinitely many facts. Now go and begin testing all those facts, isolating each one and seeing whether it affects or not. They got nowhere. And at some point someone had some idea and said: let’s try this—the pathology students would come from dissections of the dead into the ward to treat the women giving birth. Okay? And they didn’t wash their hands. No one thought they needed to wash their hands. What is this—some kind of voodoo ritual, washing hands before treating patients? You need to understand that if we know nothing about microorganisms, then it sounds like a voodoo ritual. What do you mean wash hands? What’s there? So those students washed their hands, and lo and behold, morbidity and mortality dropped. Mortality dropped to the level of the second ward. So they suddenly discovered that handwashing by the students was the relevant parameter. And gradually they understood: microorganisms and infections on the hands—this causes puerperal fever. And they understood more about the whole story.

Now do you understand that if we are not equipped with the theory that microorganisms cause mortality and so on, you have no way to begin checking facts. How do you begin such research? Which facts do you collect in order to understand the phenomenon you are dealing with? Obviously they had some kind of intuition. They did not go through infinitely many facts, otherwise they would never have reached that fact of handwashing. That’s fact number 159 billion 748 million and so on, yes. How would you get to that fact? There are millions of facts. Okay, so obviously you had some sort of intuition that helped you perform an initial filtering. These are facts that might perhaps be relevant; these obviously are not; these I don’t know, but they are worth checking. But the intuition—and you don’t yet have the theory; you didn’t know about microorganisms and you knew nothing—but the intuition preceded your conceptual thought. It already knew how to direct you toward which directions not to go, and toward which directions there was some chance of finding the answer. It doesn’t give you the answer; the answer you will have to find in observation. But it does direct you where to observe and where not to observe. It keeps you from wasting time in places where—sometimes we make mistakes—but without it the scientific process could never get started.

So do you understand that when I now want to test the law of gravitation, I say: this falls to the earth, and this falls to the earth, and the paper falls to the earth. What do they all have in common? What they have in common is that they are rectangular. Fine. Or that they exist at this moment in the world—that too they all have in common. Or that they were manufactured in Israel—that too they all have in common. There are infinitely many things common to these three, infinitely many. Okay? That their size is less than a square kilometer, that their names begin with odd letters—you can find a million things, a million parameters common to any group you want. So how did we nevertheless reach the conclusion that mass is decisive? That because of mass it falls to the earth? Intuition led us. We formulated a hypothesis, and indeed saw that everything with mass—we changed every other parameter we could—and we reached the conclusion that if it has mass, it falls to the earth. But intuition guided us.

Meaning, this selection of relevant aspects, taking this whole huge mess and saying okay, mass affects falling; the ability to communicate is affected by the electronic mechanism behind it, not by mass. Okay? Each such thing has its own law and the field that studies it. And each scientific field studies a different aspect of the phone. It has many aspects connected to many scientific and technological fields. Okay, the ability to distinguish among different aspects, to distill, to isolate the aspects each separately—that is some kind of intuition for which we have no good explanation of how it happens. By the way, AI raises many philosophical questions around this point, how it manages to do this.

Okay, but for our purposes: after we do this isolation—and intuition guides us, and for that reason I am a Platonist, by the way, among other reasons, because I think that this intuition is some kind of viewing of worlds of ideas, and therefore they need to exist in some sense, because otherwise how do we truly manage to move in the relevant direction? Clearly something in reality—we see something in reality that directs us toward those relevant directions. And that is basically the idea behind Platonic approaches. In any case, after I have made these isolations, different scientific fields emerge, different scientific laws. Each such scientific law deals with an abstract Platonic world. After we finish the abstract research, we return to this world and try to understand it in the phone, and what it does. Now of course the phone is a bad example, because a phone is the work of our hands. We built it, knowing it would work that way; it was designed, we designed it so it would work. And that brings me to the other side of the equation.

The scientific process is to take facts, observations, and create theory from them. The technological process is to take a theory—the laws—and try to apply them to specific cases in order to achieve results I want to achieve. For example, a device through which one can speak. Okay? Or all kinds of other things like that. That is technology. Or a device one can travel in, a car, or something like that. Here the laws of nature are given; they are known, okay? And now I use them, trying to see how I can harness them for my purposes. That is what technology is. Technology is not scientific research. Technology begins from known laws, and it tries precisely—and it tries to solve a problem or achieve some accomplishment by harnessing scientific laws for the matter. So the scientist moves from facts to theory; he abstracts. The technologist takes the theory and tries to produce facts. In this case artificial facts, the work of his hands, it doesn’t matter, or to explain existing facts, it doesn’t matter. Okay? This is a process of concretization, not abstraction. It is the reverse process from the scientific process. Okay? So that is what happens in the context of science.

And therefore, for example—maybe one more point about science. Many times when you say there is a generalization—yes, in my first book, Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon, I made a distinction between analytic thinking and synthetic thinking, and explained by means of it many social, intellectual, and ideological phenomena, and all sorts of things like that. Then people told me: look, this is simplistic. Not the whole world revolves around one distinction between analytic and synthetic. Now accusing an intellectual thesis of simplicity is a misunderstanding. That is the very essence of intellectuality: simplicity. An attempt to create simple thinking—that is what intellectuality is. You are trying to take something complex with many aspects and abstract it—therefore it is simplistic—strip it of many things and leave one thing, which is a ridiculous way of looking, because a phone is far more complex than merely being an object with mass. But for the purpose of falling to the ground, I think that is enough. And this intellectual claim will be accused of simplicity—and correctly, but not correctly. I admit the facts and deny the charge. Meaning, the facts are that this is simplistic thinking; I deny that that is a charge. Simplistic thinking is intellectual thinking; it is scientific thinking. By definition it has to be simplistic. Someone who tries to think about things themselves not through abstraction and transition to these Platonic laws will understand nothing. At least if his mind is built like our human minds. The human mind, in order to understand a phenomenon, has to use simplistic thinking, strip it into its components, think about each component separately in a simplistic way, and afterward return and try to understand what happens in actual reality.

Therefore, the accusation of simplistic thinking is a misunderstanding. Simplicity is an accusation if you think that because of the sin of vows a person’s children die, and that one who recites havdalah over a cup of wine will have male children, and you say: ah, he didn’t recite havdalah over a cup of wine, so why doesn’t he have male children? He did recite havdalah over a cup of wine, so why doesn’t he have male children? That is simplistic. Why? Because it means you are taking abstract thinking, which is right to do in Platonic worlds, and applying it to our world. In our world that is simplistic thinking. In our world simplistic thinking is indeed a charge, because you think science deals with our world. No—it deals with an abstract, Platonic world. Therefore the accusation of simplicity is not a charge against the scientific law; the scientific law ought to be simplistic. But applying the scientific law to our complex world as is, without considering the complexities and additional influences—that is simplistic thinking, and incorrect, not good.

Okay. Now look, for example—say I want to summarize for a moment what we said in the scientific context and begin returning toward ukimtot. I can already see I won’t have enough time to get there, so at least let’s make the return in the realm of science. Suppose we are reading a mechanics book and there is a mishnah in the book. The mishnah says this: every body with mass that is subject to the influence of another massive body, a body with mass, feels a force proportional to the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Fine? Newton’s law of gravitation. So let’s say that’s the mishnah. Now the Talmud asks: but many bodies have electric charge, and therefore the force acting on them is completely different from what is described in the mishnah, right? After all, they are also under the influence of electric fields. And furthermore, in our real world there is friction, which also changes the force and the acceleration and so on. Questions. The Talmud says: what are we dealing with here? With a body with mass that carries no electric charge, located in a completely empty universe, without air and without any other bodies or force fields, and at zero temperature. The ukimta of a bound and sleeping slave is a joke compared to the ukimtot made in every mechanics book. A bound and sleeping slave—at least you can see a bound slave. Has anyone ever seen such a body? Half of those things you’ve never seen. They make crazy ukimtot there in the context of mechanics, and nobody peeps.

Yes, so immediately let us continue with this parody, if you want to call it that. Tosafot asks: if you say so, then this is a simplistic generalization that has nothing to do with the real world. Where do we ever find a world empty of air and of every object other than a single pointlike massive object? Yes. And furthermore, a crucial point is missing from the text, for the mishnah explicitly says “every body,” and no more. It says every body—not only a body empty of this and in such a world. So what are you doing making an ukimta? The mishnah says every body. Every body, right? Now does anyone even think to ask these questions when learning a mechanics book? Nobody. It’s obvious to everyone. Why is it obvious to everyone? Because everyone understands that when you formulate a general scientific law, you are not talking about our world. You are talking about the Platonic world. You establish a pure abstract state; what behavior will occur there. You understand that this has value, and later you’ll want to apply it also to our complex world. But when you learn it, no one asks the Talmud’s questions and none of Tosafot’s questions. Nothing. Everything is fine. We make ukimtot and move on. They don’t even bother saying there is an ukimta here. No one asks the question: wait, but there are also electromagnetic fields? It is obvious to everyone that we are talking about an ukimta—a world without electromagnetic fields, without temperature, without air, without anything. We are talking about that world. But this is not even a question that gets asked in class, and the teacher also doesn’t answer with an ukimta because no one asked. It was clear to everyone that the discussion was a discussion in terms of ukimta.

So now I’m saying that the concept of ukimta is the same with the bound and sleeping slave. If everyone understood from the context that Rava came to teach me not the law of acquiring a bill of divorce by the hand of a slave, but a general Platonic principle—that a slave is the courtyard of his master—and this was clear to everyone, he says it through a case, but it was clear to everyone, then no one asks: wait, so what about the ukimta? How did Rava mean this or not mean that? It is clear to everyone: Rava meant exactly that. He meant to say that a slave is the courtyard of his master. That’s all. You say correctly that he stated it through acquisition law, and in acquisition law there is the problem of a moving courtyard. Fine—the slave is bound. Rava didn’t think about a bound slave at all; that question didn’t interest him. If you ask a stupid question, you’ll get a stupid answer too. Fine, so he is bound. Why are you bothering me? It’s like in mechanics: if you ask the mechanics teacher, wait, you’re telling me that every body, yes, on which a force acts proportional inversely to distance—what do you mean? But there are also other bodies, and friction, and this. So he tells you: ukimtot. But that doesn’t happen in class, because in physics class intelligent people don’t ask idiotic questions. Okay? And I claim that asking such a question in the Talmudic context is the same thing; it’s an idiotic question. Everything is fine. An ukimta is a simple matter.

Now there is only one difference—and with this I’ll finish, and we’ll continue next time. There is one conspicuous difference between mechanics and the Talmud. Everything else is the same: there too we make abstractions, there too we deal with Platonic worlds, it is all the same. And that is why it connects to everything I’ve been talking about until now: that Torah is an abstract thing in the Platonic world, and when it is realized in our world it becomes much more complex and changes and is not exact and all sorts of things of that sort. It is all one-to-one, exactly like in the scientific realm. There is just one difference, and it is a difference of formulation. What do I mean? When you read a mechanics book, the general law itself is formulated there. It does not present a case there. It doesn’t say: when a phone falls downward, or when a phone is in the air, it will fall downward. You won’t see that in a mechanics book. A mechanics book says: every object with mass falls downward, right? It is already written there as a general abstract law. Okay? Therefore it is obvious to everyone that we are dealing with a general law.

Now Rava, when he formulates his general and abstract law, does not say “a slave is the courtyard of his master.” If he said that, no one would ask questions. He chooses to formulate it through a case. He says: if one puts a bill of divorce in the slave’s hand, then the woman is divorced, his mistress is divorced. Fine—but that is already a problematic formulation. So you don’t tell me the general law, I don’t understand that you mean a general law, and therefore I ask you: wait, but that slave is a moving courtyard. So he says: no, he is bound. When he tells you “no, he is bound,” what he means is: perhaps you didn’t understand me. I’m talking about a general law, not a specific law. In acquisition law the slave is bound—that is not the point. What accompanies the ukimta is an explanation to the questioner: know that I am coming to tell you a general law, not some specific law. Okay? That is basically the claim. And therefore ukimtot seem less natural than in a mechanics book. Because in ukimtot, what you say out loud—what is written—is a specific law about a concrete case, not a general principle. What I am arguing is that the Talmud understands that every such case does not come to state a law about the case at all; it comes to state some general idea that is expressed in that case or realized through that case. If one understands the context of the Talmud’s statement in that way, then everything is understandable and everything is fine, and it works exactly like in science or in any other intellectual field.

Okay? Now the question that arises—and that we will have to deal with, and then return to the passages and I’ll show you that too, and its implications—the question that arises is: why? Why does the Talmud really formulate things in such a confusing way? Why not like a mechanics book? So what could Rava say? He won’t say it’s about a bound slave, right? That’s nonsense. But what would he say? He would say: a slave is the courtyard of his master. He would not say that if someone places a bill of divorce in the hand of this slave then the woman is divorced. Why are you confusing me with cases where it also isn’t true and you need him to be bound and so on? It’s complicated. If you mean to state a general law, state the general law: that a slave is the courtyard of his master. Then no one will ask questions and everything will be fine. The question that remains here is why the Talmud chooses a formulation—and I’ll already give the name—the name is casuistic. Cases. In law, a casuistic approach is an approach whose basic unit is the case rather than the rule. As opposed to a positivist approach, where we begin with rules and apply them to cases. The British system, for example, is a casuistic approach. It begins from cases that came before a court, and every future court draws an analogy from what the previous court did. There, at least in the past, there really were no general laws that you apply to cases. It worked in a casuistic way. By contrast, in German law, Bundeslaw, the approach is more positivist. Today the two sides have already moved closer to each other. Everyone understands the limitations of the two extreme methods. But still, these are two polar examples. There they really work according to rules. Germans—that’s the Yekke, yes? There is mechanics, there is logic, there is a rule and these are its applications. That’s how they got to everything they got to—or not to everything, to some of what they got to. So the approach there is a positivist approach: from the rule to the particulars, not from the particular to the rules. And every such approach has advantages and disadvantages. The Talmud chose a casuistic approach. And many times it looks kind of primitive, as though unaware of more logical and more general formulations. Not true. In my view it is the more sophisticated approach. But that’s for next time. Be well.