An Overview of Torah and Torah Study – Lesson 8 – Rabbi Michael Abraham

Table of Contents

• The concept of ukimta and its application to a bound and sleeping slave
• Rabbah’s law of preparation regarding an egg at the beginning of tractate Beitzah
• Scorched leaven, temporal affiliation, and freezing halakhic status
• The language of the medieval authorities (Rishonim): Meiri, Ritva, and Maharam Chalava
• Muktzeh on a weekday and Tosafot on sukkah decorations
• Two time axes, time travel, and retroactive clarification and stipulation
• Connecting the argument to scorched leaven and the idea of ukimta
• The Mishnah as a casuistic system and abstract principles
• Torah study, cleaving to God, and the natural sciences as an analogy
• A critique of viewing Torah study as a commandment-enabling instrument and the implications for halakhic ruling
• The justification for the casuistic method and the question, “Why not just write laws?”
• Summary and continuation to the next lecture

Summary

General Overview

The text presents a systematic conception of ukimta as a solution to a practical problem that arises when a particular case does not reflect very well the general principle that the Mishnah or the saying is trying to teach. It applies that conception to three topics, especially scorched leaven, in order to argue that the Mishnah should be read plainly as conveying an abstract principle, while the ukimta merely provides a possible case in which that principle comes to light. From there, it expands into a broader argument about the nature of the Mishnah as a framework that is not a code of Jewish law but a vehicle for transmitting abstract ideas, and about Torah study as aimed at understanding principles and cleaving to God, not just knowing practical rulings.

The concept of ukimta and its application to a bound and sleeping slave

The Talmud assumes that the case presented in the Mishnah or in a saying is not the real subject, but rather an expression of a general principle, and therefore it allows itself to make an ukimta without seeing that as a departure from the original intent of the source. The law regarding a slave teaches that the slave is the property of his master or mistress, and therefore any acquisition made through him is made on their behalf. The property-law implication requires us to interpret the case as referring to a slave who is bound and asleep so that placing the item in his hand will count as an acquisition, but the principle itself is not limited to a bound and sleeping slave.

Rabbah’s law of preparation regarding an egg at the beginning of tractate Beitzah

The Mishnah that speaks about an egg laid on a Jewish holiday is understood as teaching a broad rule: on a Jewish holiday one may eat only food that was prepared beforehand. The Talmud’s interpretation that this refers to a Jewish holiday that follows the Sabbath stems from the fact that the example of the egg itself is problematic, because an egg laid on a Jewish holiday appears to have been prepared beforehand. The ukimta turns the egg into an example that expresses the general principle well; it does not turn the law into one that deals only with a Jewish holiday following the Sabbath. On that basis, the approaches of Rashi and Rashba in understanding the initial assumption and the conclusion become clear.

Scorched leaven, temporal affiliation, and freezing halakhic status

The Mishnah says that leaven before its prohibited time is permitted for benefit, and the Talmud asks why this needs to be said, since there is no prohibition of leaven before its time. The Talmud therefore interprets the Mishnah as referring to leaven that was scorched before Passover and eaten during Passover, and it is emphasized that scorching is not total burning, because ashes are not leaven at all. Rather, this is an intermediate state, like very well-done toast, which still bears the status-name of leaven in some sense. The central explanation argues that the novelty lies in the existence of a “temporal affiliation” to the leaven itself, so that leaven affiliated with the time before the prohibition is not considered leaven even if one encounters it during the time of prohibition. The scorching is the practical mechanism that freezes the halakhic status and allows a split between the time in which the person acts and the time to which the object is affiliated. The text emphasizes that the Mishnah is not coming to introduce a law about scorching itself, but rather the principle that leaven can be affiliated with a different time axis than the time of eating, and the ukimta merely provides a possible case in which this can happen.

The language of the medieval authorities (Rishonim): Meiri, Ritva, and Maharam Chalava

Meiri explains that there was no need to say that leaven before its time is permitted for benefit, and therefore the Talmud explains that the case applies even after the time of prohibition, where it had been scorched before the prohibition “to the point that it left the category of food.” He emphasizes that if it was scorched after its prohibited time, it remains forbidden for all benefit until it is completely burned into coals, because once the prohibition of leaven has taken effect, it is not removed except through full burning. Ritva uses the case of scorching in the fifth hour to show that the scorching freezes the status as it was at that hour, so that an object is created whose law on Passover continues the law of the moment it was scorched. Maharam Chalava writes that the permission in the case of scorching applies when one removed it from the category of bread and it became unfit even for a dog’s consumption, but he distinguishes that scorching after its time leaves the prohibition in force “forever,” because the person benefits from something that was prohibited to him, and he ties the prohibition to the act of scorching as producing benefit from the leaven, not to the eating itself. From the comparison, it is argued that Meiri fits better with the conception of ukimta in which the novelty of the Mishnah lies in its plain formulation and not inside the ukimta, whereas Maharam Chalava gives the impression that the novelty is a law about scorching that is not written in the Mishnah. The text suggests that perhaps even he can be read through the lens of the time axis of the act of benefit, but admits that this still requires thought.

Muktzeh on a weekday and Tosafot on sukkah decorations

The text brings a possible proof from Tosafot, who say that sukkah decorations during the intermediate festival days are forbidden “because they are set aside,” even though on the intermediate festival days there is no law of muktzeh the way there is on the Sabbath and on a Jewish holiday. From this it suggests that the concept of muktzeh may exist even on a weekday, except that usually there is no prohibition of moving the item, while other medieval authorities (Rishonim) explain that the prohibition regarding sukkah decorations is not because of muktzeh but because of some other prohibition.

Two time axes, time travel, and retroactive clarification and stipulation

The text argues that time travel is a formulation devoid of logical meaning so long as one assumes only a single time axis, because Monday is defined as prior to Tuesday and it cannot be both “after” Tuesday and on Monday on the same axis. It suggests that the only logical meaning of time travel and of the feeling of “the flow of time” is the assumption of two time axes, and it offers a formulation in which there are t and tau, with a description of t as a function of tau that can decrease and create a “sawtooth” graph. In this context it is argued that retroactive clarification and stipulation, which generate outcomes retroactively, require the framework of a duplication of time axes in order to have conceptual meaning. The book Berera Ve-Tenai in the Talmudic Logic series is presented as dealing with the logic of time in the Talmud and with the claim that there is no other way to explain the Talmudic passages about retroactive clarification without two time axes.

Connecting the argument to scorched leaven and the idea of ukimta

Scorching is presented as an act that splits between the time axis to which the leaven is affiliated and the time axis in which the person eats, so that the person is in the time of prohibition while the leaven remains affiliated with the time of permission. Physical freezing in a refrigerator is distinguished from scorching because the bread remains bread and can “go back” in the sense of preserving its identity as leaven, whereas in scorching we are dealing with freezing halakhic status, not physical cooling. The possible case of scorching is presented as a laboratory case that makes it possible to see an abstract principle about time and halakhic affiliation, not as an instruction whose practical purpose is mainly to allow people to “eat burnt toast on Passover.”

The Mishnah as a casuistic system and abstract principles

The text states that the structure of the Mishnah, including the presentation of disputes and the absence of bottom-line conclusions, shows that it is not a book of halakhic rulings but a framework whose purpose is to teach abstract principles through cases and laws. It argues that the Talmud understands this from the outset, and that is why it engages in ukimtot in order to remove “noise” that interferes with the appearance of the principle, much like constructing a laboratory experiment. It recommends that wherever there is an ukimta, one should ask what the general idea is and what practical problem the ukimta is solving, and one should determine that if the principle depends on the ukimta, then the understanding is mistaken, because the Mishnah has to be understood on its own terms.

Torah study, cleaving to God, and the natural sciences as an analogy

Torah study is presented as an end in itself, as understanding the will of God and as cleaving to Him, relying on Nefesh HaChayim, Gate 4, which identifies the study itself as cleaving to God and not as a means of producing some spiritual experience. The text offers an analogy to the sciences, in which the general laws are the goal and the cases are practical ramifications and experimental tools, and it argues that the same is true in Torah: the cases serve as “laboratory cases” for deriving principles. He uses this to explain why extreme Talmudic cases like “an elephant that pulled out an Egyptian basket” or “someone who has intercourse with himself” are not nonsense, but thought experiments that refine conceptual structures.

A critique of viewing Torah study as a commandment-enabling instrument and the implications for halakhic ruling

The text presents two approaches: study as an instrument in order to know what to do, versus study as the goal of uncovering abstract laws, and it argues that the second approach is what Torah study really is. It offers the theoretical example of an “artificial intelligence book” that would issue rulings for every case, and argues that according to the instrumental approach this would make study unnecessary, whereas according to the analytical approach it would specifically make it possible to begin the real work of extracting the rules from the full range of cases. It states that studying the Mishnah Berurah is an instrument-commandment for knowing Jewish law, not Torah study, and it distinguishes between the purpose of responsa, which issue a ruling for a particular case, and the purpose of the learner, who aspires to understand the mode of reasoning and the principles that emerge from the responsum.

The justification for the casuistic method and the question, “Why not just write laws?”

The text raises the possibility of criticizing the Talmud and asking why not formulate general laws like a physics textbook, and it answers that there are advantages to a casuistic method of learning through cases and analogies. It compares this to the discussion in the social sciences between quantitative research and “qualitative research,” which follows a small number of details very closely in order to uncover insights that are not visible in statistics. It distinguishes between the methodology of beginning from cases and the question of the goal, and states that the goal is the exposure of the laws, but that the preferred route is sometimes bottom-up, starting from cases.

Summary and continuation to the next lecture

The text concludes by saying that the Talmud apparently operates from within a prior awareness of the rule it is seeking to expose, and the ukimta is a tool for “cleaning the conditions” so that the rule can appear in its purity. It presents the planned continuation as a lecture on the distinction between studying Jewish law and studying Torah, and on topics such as whether study is greater or action is greater.

Okay, so last time I went back to the topics that accompanied us in connection with the ukimta, and I tried to show, with two out of the three, how to apply the picture I described in order to understand the ukimtot in the Talmud. So we talked about the bound and sleeping slave. We saw there that the novelty of the saying comes to tell us that the slave is the property of his master or mistress, and therefore that statement is true regarding any slave, not specifically a bound and sleeping slave. And therefore they didn’t bother to mention that we are talking about a bound and sleeping slave, because really that’s not what they’re talking about. Rather, that statement itself was said through a property-law implication: he acquires, the slave acquires when something is placed in his hand, he acquires it for his master, for his mistress. And that property-law implication forced us to establish the case as a bound and sleeping slave, because without that the property-law implication is not correct. But the statement in itself is a general statement, and once again we see that the Talmud’s assumption when it comes to read a Mishnah or a saying or a baraita or whatever it may be, the Talmud’s assumption is that the case brought there is not the subject. They did not come to tell us the Jewish law in the specific case they’re discussing. They came to tell us a general principle that is expressed in this specific case, but really they are teaching us some general principle.

And we saw the same thing regarding Rabbah’s law of preparation at the beginning of tractate Beitzah, where the Talmud established the ruling “an egg laid on a Jewish holiday may not be eaten” according to Beit Hillel, and the Talmud established that this is a Jewish holiday following the Sabbath. And I explained there too that really what the Mishnah wanted to say was that on a Jewish holiday, any Jewish holiday—not specifically one following the Sabbath—it is forbidden to eat food that was not prepared beforehand. That’s it. Only, the example they chose was the example of an egg, and specifically with an egg, if it was laid on a Jewish holiday, then it actually was prepared beforehand, and therefore they established it as a Jewish holiday following the Sabbath. But that doesn’t mean that the law stated in the Mishnah relates only to a Jewish holiday following the Sabbath. No—the law is a general law: on a Jewish holiday, one must eat only food that was prepared beforehand. Okay? And the fact that we had to establish it as a Jewish holiday following the Sabbath was only in order for the egg to serve as a good example of that principle. That’s all.

And after that, in light of this, we saw Rashi and Rashba, how they understand the Talmud, the initial assumption and the conclusion in the Talmud, and we saw that all these things really fall exactly into place when we properly understand the meaning of an ukimta.

The third case, the third topic, yes, is charred leaven. So let me remind you once again: charred leaven. Basically, the Mishnah says that leaven before its forbidden time is permitted for benefit, and the Talmud asks: if so, what is it teaching us? Meaning, that’s obvious. Of course. What, is leaven on Hanukkah permitted? So the Talmud says no, we are talking about a case where he charred it before Passover and came to eat the charred leaven during Passover, that is, after the time of prohibition. Okay? That’s basically the law, and it is permitted. And once again, I said that charring is not burning. The medieval authorities (Rishonim) there already say that if it were completely burned, then it’s ash, it isn’t leaven. But we’re talking about charring—toast that is well done, right? So basically it still has some sense of leaven to it, some status of leaven, and nevertheless, if it was charred before the holiday, it is permitted to eat it. You’re allowed to eat well-done toast on Passover. That’s basically what the Talmud says.

And the question, again, is why didn’t the Mishnah state that we are talking about charred leaven before Passover that you then come to eat during Passover? The Mishnah just says: leaven before its time is permitted for benefit. That’s all. The essential point is missing from the text. This whole ukimta simply does not appear in the Mishnah at all.

So here I want to explain the matter in a similar way. My claim is this: since the Talmud reads the Mishnah through the lenses I described earlier, when it reads the Mishnah it is obvious to it that the Mishnah is talking about some principle, not about a specific law and a specific case. And the ukimta too, which presents us with a case of charred leaven and so on, is only there so that this case will reflect or express a general principle. Now the question is: what is the general principle they came to teach me? In order to understand the principle, you have to read the Mishnah in its plain sense, without the ukimta. You have to read the Mishnah in its plain sense.

What does the Mishnah say? That leaven before its time is permitted for benefit. Fine—that I also know. There is no prohibition of leaven before its time. Therefore, suppose you would come to eat it during the time when leaven is forbidden—that too would be permitted, because leaven from before its time is not leaven. Only—the Talmud asks—but how can there be such a case? In other words, how can there be a case of leaven from before the prohibited time that I eat during the prohibited time? If I eat it during the prohibited time, then it is leaven during the prohibited time. How can there be a situation where, during the prohibited time of Passover, I eat leaven that in its essence is leaven from before the prohibited time? How can such a practical situation exist? The Talmud says: through charring.

What does that mean? If you char the leaven before Passover, you basically freeze its status as it was at that moment, and from then on it has that same status even when you carry it into the prohibited time. So now, if it was charred before the prohibited time, then leaven from before Passover is permitted for benefit—it is not leaven. So once it is charred, it becomes fixed in that status, that it is not leaven. Now you come to eat it during the prohibited time. But what are you eating during the prohibited time? You are eating, during the prohibited time, leaven that belongs to the time before the prohibited time, and therefore it is permitted.

So this whole exercise, this wild ukimta of charring before the time and eating after the time, is really only meant to tell me the following: how can there be a practical situation in which you eat, during the prohibited time, leaven that in its essence is attached to a point in time before the prohibited time? If you are eating it now, then it’s leaven of now, not leaven of yesterday. How can you eat now leaven of yesterday? What does “leaven of yesterday” even mean? Leaven is leaven; if you eat it now, then it’s leaven. No, says the Talmud—yes, there is such a thing. There is something called a timeline, and on that timeline you mark what point the leaven belongs to. Not when you eat it. Leaven of when is this? Is it leaven from before the prohibited time or leaven from after the prohibited time? Leaven from before the prohibited time—there is no prohibition to eat it even during the prohibited time, because it is not leaven. That is what the Mishnah came to say.

The Mishnah came to say that leaven of before the prohibited time is permitted for benefit. Not that before the prohibited time it is permitted to eat it, but that the leaven that belongs to before the prohibited time is a type of leaven that is not leaven, and is permitted for benefit. If you eat it during the prohibited time, that too is fine, because it is not leaven. Only you ask yourself: but how can that be? If you eat it during the prohibited time, then it’s leaven of now, not leaven of yesterday. You are eating it now—what is special about yesterday as opposed to now? The Talmud says no—there is such a mechanism, and it is charring, and charring freezes the status of the leaven. It freezes it. So if this is leaven that was charred on the eve of Passover, then from that point on it is leaven of the eve of Passover. That’s it; it is already charred. It is leaven of—if it were ash, then it would not be leaven at all. If it had not been charred, not charred at all, just ordinary bread—when you ate it during Passover, you would be eating Passover leaven, not leaven from the eve of Passover. True, it also existed on the eve of Passover—so what? It also exists now. Why assume that it is leaven of the eve of Passover? It is leaven of now; you are eating it now.

The only case that succeeds in separating these two timelines—the timeline to which you assign the leaven, and the timeline in which you eat the leaven—the thing that separates those two timelines is the act of charring. The act of charring freezes the flow of the time to which the leaven is assigned. But the time in which I act—when I eat the leaven—continues to flow. When I am inside the holiday, I am in the prohibited time; but the leaven that I am eating is leaven that belongs to before the prohibited time, and therefore there is no problem; it is permitted to eat it.

It reminds me of Schrödinger, right. I once wondered whether there could be an object that is set aside even on Wednesday. On Wednesday there is no prohibition of set-aside objects, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t set aside; it just means there is no prohibition of moving set-aside objects. On the Sabbath there is a prohibition of moving a set-aside object, right? On Wednesday is it simply not set aside at all? Not that there is no prohibition of set-aside objects—the whole concept of “set aside” does not exist on Wednesday. I once had a proof from Tosafot that there is such a thing as set-aside on a weekday. Tosafot says that sukkah decorations during the intermediate days of the holiday are forbidden because they are set aside. Now on the intermediate days there is no law of set-aside—it’s not a holiday and not the Sabbath—there is no law of set-aside on the intermediate days. So how can you forbid sukkah decorations because of set-aside on the intermediate days? Only if you say that the concept of set-aside exists even on a weekday; it’s just that on an ordinary weekday there is no prohibition of moving something set aside. On the intermediate days, with certain set-aside items there is a prohibition, like sukkah decorations. That is because other medieval authorities (Rishonim) really do say it’s not because of set-aside, but simply that it is forbidden, though not because of set-aside.

What? There is no concept of set-aside on a weekday? I’m saying all things are set aside; there is simply no prohibition on moving them on a weekday, because on a weekday there is no prohibition on moving set-aside objects. It’s not set aside? There is no prohibition on moving it? No, there is no prohibition of moving on a weekday. No—why not? Move it, do whatever you want with it, play soccer with it. Why not? There is no prohibition at all on moving a set-aside object, a defiled object. No—that’s for a priest. A priest may not become defiled, not because it is forbidden for him to touch the object; it is forbidden for him to become defiled. He is forbidden even to become defiled when he is under the same roof with the object without touching it. It’s not a prohibition on touching or moving. It is a prohibition on becoming defiled.

Okay, so that’s only half a pilpul. But for our purposes, what I really want to say here—and this, in my opinion at least, is no longer pilpul—is that the Talmud understood the Mishnah this way: when the Mishnah says that leaven from the eve of Passover, or before the time of its prohibition, is permitted for benefit—do you understand that the question “isn’t this obvious?” is an unavoidable question, right? Anyone reading the Mishnah would ask himself: fine, obviously—what are you telling me, that leaven before the prohibited time is permitted? Of course it is permitted; there is no prohibition of leaven. Therefore the Talmud understood that what the Mishnah came to say—to teach us a novelty, a very great novelty, something that is absolutely not obvious—is that there is such a thing as leaven that belongs to the time before the prohibition. That is the timeline to which I assign the leaven, or the point on the timeline to which I assign the leaven. Okay?

And therefore what the Mishnah is really saying is that such leaven is not leaven even if you encounter it on Passover itself. But now the practical question arises: how does that happen in practice? In other words, how can you encounter on Passover leaven whose assignment is to the time before Passover? The Talmud says: charring. But it’s not that the Mishnah came to teach me a law of charring. That is not relevant at all. It came to teach me what the law is concerning leaven before the time to which it belongs. And that is what it says: leaven from before the time to which it belongs is permitted. That’s all. That is what it says, and that is exactly what it means to say. Nothing more and nothing less.

What? It’s permitted to eat leaven on Passover? This is from the laws of Passover. It means that leaven that is assigned to the time before the prohibited time began is not leaven. It has no status of leaven. Now if you come to eat it on Passover itself, you can eat it because it is not leaven. Only, I’m saying, ordinarily if I take a slice of bread, even if it existed on the eve of Passover, and I eat it on Passover, it is forbidden to eat, because it is Passover leaven, not leaven of the eve of Passover. So the Talmud wonders how there can be a practical situation in which I eat on Passover itself leaven whose temporal assignment is to the time before Passover. It exists now and I eat it now—so what does it mean to say that this is leaven from before the prohibited time? So the answer is that when you char it, that is what happens. It freezes the situation. Because of the heat, it freezes the situation.

Why, really? What is the logic behind that? Since it stops—maybe I’ll explain it this way: if you burn it completely, it turns to ash, so then it’s not bread at all, it’s no longer leaven at all, factually, not halakhically / of Jewish law. It simply is no longer the previous object that was here. Okay? If you do nothing to it, then it is the same object itself; it has no assignment to a particular time; whatever time you eat it, that is the relevant time. Right? If you char it, it is already no longer what it was. It is no longer the entity that was here, but it is also not ash. In other words, there is something here that still belongs there. So I say: fine, then I am really saying that the status it had when it was last bread is frozen. In other words, the last time it was ordinary bread, it had a status; that status remains as long as it has not turned into ash, in which case it really is something else and the whole thing is irrelevant. Charring creates a situation in which you are not ash, but you are also no longer the original bread. So it is something in between. Then the question is: what is the status of such a thing?

So think of it like a presumption of original status. In other words, it was leaven at that time, and that is the status that continues the whole time until you burn it into ash. And then of course it dissipates completely. But as long as you haven’t reached the stage where it is ash, its status is preserved as it was the last time it had some clear halakhic / of Jewish law status. Okay? All in all, this is halakhic / of Jewish law reasoning that exists in many places. So that is basically what the Talmud is saying. Not that I claim this is not a novelty—it is a major novelty—but I’m saying that the logic of this novelty is very understandable. And it is clear. When you read the Mishnah through these lenses, it is almost compelled. I would almost say I would have said it myself. If I had entertained this absurd idea that charring can freeze a situation, I would have said it myself. If this absurd idea had not occurred to me, then I would have said it in general terms without illustrating it with a practical case. I would have said: look, there is a status of leaven assigned to the time before the prohibited time, and it is not leaven, so it is permitted to eat it on Passover. You would ask me: yes, but how can there ever be a situation where you eat on Passover leaven that is assigned to the earlier time? I would say: I don’t know, I have no idea, but that is what the Mishnah says. The Talmud also brought the practical “how can this happen,” right—how this thing happens in practice. But really, that is not the novelty of the Mishnah. The novelty of the Mishnah is not what the law is regarding charred leaven, but rather that there is a temporal assignment attached to the leaven itself, not only to the time of eating. There is a different temporal assignment attached to the leaven itself, and it is not always the time at which you eat it. In ordinary leaven it is the time at which you eat it, but in charred leaven it is not the time at which you eat it. Okay? That is basically the novelty of the Mishnah.

A class—so, as it were, you can’t reverse this. If you freeze it, say, that doesn’t work. If you charred it, then you’ve kind of frozen its time. But if you physically froze it in the refrigerator, in the freezer, then that doesn’t—it doesn’t destroy the—because it can go back and become leaven again, as it were. Yes, correct. It is still leaven even if frozen. Its halakhic / of Jewish law status is frozen, not the bread. We freeze because—we, the heat warms the bread but cools the halakhic / of Jewish law status, freezes the halakhic / of Jewish law status. Yes, yes.

Why would they give such a novelty in the Mishnah? What? What comes out of this law in the Mishnah? That you can eat toast on Passover. That’s not a sufficiently good novelty for you? Huh? Charred toast. Why? It’s edible—what do you mean it’s not edible? It’s not ash. It’s well-done toast. Burnt, burnt—not toast the way people normally eat it. Burnt, fine. If you want, eat it, and if you ask me whether you transgressed a prohibition, the answer is no. The Mishnah came for this? No, the Mishnah did not come for this. That is exactly the point. This is the practical case where you see the idea of the Mishnah. The Mishnah came to tell me a general idea. What other practical case is there like this? There is no other practical case. The general idea is for betrothal of a woman. The general idea is that there is an assignment of the leaven between the leaven and a point on the timeline. That is the novelty that the Mishnah came to teach me. What is the practical aspect? That’s the charring and things like that. Okay.

It reminds me a bit—maybe to sharpen this point further—I know a lot of people amuse themselves with questions of time travel, right? What happens if one can go back to the 14th century or whatever exactly. And then of course there are all kinds of paradoxes. Suppose I go back to the beginning of the 20th century and murder my grandfather. If I murder my grandfather, then my father won’t be born, and then I too won’t be born. So who went back in time to murder my grandfather? I mean, right, if I don’t exist. So this creates all sorts of paradoxes. But people play with this in quantum theory and so on—Yakir Aharonov, yes, Tel Aviv University very much likes these amusements.

In any case, people often don’t understand that time travel is not a physical problem. It is not a problem in physics whether one can go back in time. It is a logically meaningless formulation. It is meaningless. What does it mean to go back in time? Let’s think for a moment. Let’s say I am here today—we are on Tuesday. Fine, I want to go back in time to Monday. What’s the problem? Yesterday I was on Monday—there, I went back in time. Why is that not called going back in time? Because that was before. Monday, by definition, is before Tuesday. What do you want—to return to Monday while finding myself after Tuesday? But Monday by definition is a day before Tuesday. Logically that is impossible. Right? There is some sort of logical problem with this thing. It is not a physical question whether it can be done or not done. After you explain to me what the task is, I can try to think whether physics allows it or not. But you won’t even succeed in explaining to me what the task is. No, no—so why should I even enter the question of whether physics permits or does not permit such a thing? It’s like asking me whether physics allows a good moral trait to be triangular. “A triangular good moral trait” is a meaningless combination of words. So that’s not a question. I can’t discuss that combination as long as I don’t understand what it means. Or the stone that God cannot lift, and all sorts of things like that.

So these claims about time travel—both the possibility and the impossibility—the common denominator is that they are devoid of meaning, devoid of sense. They speak about something that has no sense whatsoever. It is not true that it is possible, and not true that it is impossible. There simply is no subject for that sentence. All right? It’s like I can’t say that a good moral trait is not triangular—that’s also not true. The triangularity of a good moral trait is a meaningless phrase. So one cannot say that it is triangular and one cannot say that it is not triangular. Good moral traits do not have geometric shape. Okay. Therefore the subject itself is meaningless.

Now the only way to understand this concept of time travel—that is, to give it logical meaning, and only then can one discuss it physically—the only way is to define two time axes. Because think, for example, about this intuition. There used to be a professor here in physics, Professor Larry Horowitz—he has since retired—and a friend of mine did his doctorate with him, and one fine day they were working—Nadav Shnerb, who today is a professor here in physics—on formulating physics with two time axes. And one fine day I came to him with some brilliant idea I had, and he said to me: you know, that’s the first article on which the whole enterprise is based. That’s how they got going. Because I had an idea for the meaning, the philosophical significance, of this formulation. And the claim was this: we feel differently regarding the time axis than regarding the space axis, right? Space is static, and time somehow gives us the feeling that it flows, right? But understand that to speak of time flowing is an oxymoron, because everything that flows, flows along the time axis. And something that moves, moves along the time axis. At time t1 it is here, at time t2 it is there. What does it mean that time flows? That at time t1 it is at t1 and at time t2 it is at t2? I know—that’s true by definition. Time cannot flow. Time is static exactly like space.

So then why do we nevertheless feel differently, right? The feeling is that time is something flowing and space is something static. How can one understand such a thing? So my claim was that one can understand it if we assume there is another time axis over which the time axis flows. In other words, there is some static time axis, and the time axis we experience moves, or flows, over the static time axis. Now I don’t know whether such a time axis exists or not. But I do know that the only sense that can be given to the feeling that time flows is this. It could be that we live in an illusion and time does not flow and none of this is true—but if there is any meaning here, this is the correct meaning.

Now one has to discuss whether it actually exists or not, but at least the thing has meaning now. That is, once you speak about two time axes. Yes. So I wanted to tell him that this is actually an interesting philosophical basis, that it gives motivation to develop physics over two time axes. In relativity, if you know, there is t and tau. Tau is the interval and t is time; both are essentially time axes. And their claim was that tau is that static time and t is the time that flows over the tau axis. Okay? So these are basically two time axes.

Now, for example, think about concepts like retroactive clarification or condition in Jewish law, right? Things that become clarified retroactively, or a condition that creates halakhic / of Jewish law results retroactively, all sorts of things of that type. Again, this is essentially meaningless at the logical level. Therefore there is no point in discussing it at the halakhic / of Jewish law level, because first of all you have to define the concepts you are dealing with, and then we can see what Jewish law does with those concepts. But if those concepts have no meaning in themselves, it won’t help me if Jewish law tells me that one can go back in time or one cannot go back in time. Time travel is a meaningless concept. Just as Jewish law cannot tell me: what is greater, the amount of water in the ocean or the goodness of human beings—what is greater? So suppose there were a verse that revealed this to us, all right? Could a verse tell us? No. Why? Because the question is meaningless. It is not that I’m not smart enough to know and then the verse comes and teaches me the correct answer—it reveals information that I lacked. The question is meaningless. So even if there were a verse saying it, it wouldn’t help me at all, all right? Therefore there is no point in discussing something meaningless. Once it has meaning, that still does not mean it is true, that it exists factually. Then one can begin to discuss it, but only after we understand the meaning of the thing. If you want to discuss time travel, first you have to define the concept of time travel, and then one can discuss whether it is possible or impossible, physics or no physics, all these things. But first of all you have to provide some meaning at the logical-semantic level: what is the meaning of these concepts, okay? After that one can discuss them at the factual, physical level and so on.

So what happens with retroactive clarification and condition? Well, retroactive clarification and condition—there is a book in the Talmudic Logic series that we published. The fourth book deals with the logic of time in the Talmud, and among other things I talk there about this issue in the contexts of condition and retroactive clarification. And the claim there is that there really is no choice—there is no choice but to explain the sugya of retroactive clarification on the basis of two time axes. That is, there is one time axis that is static and one time axis that flows over it. Now it can flow over it backwards. So if I go from Tuesday back to Monday—we spoke about time travel. When I go from Tuesday back to Monday, in what sense is that not what happened yesterday, when I was on Monday? Why was yesterday not time travel? Because yesterday both t and tau were 2. t=2 and tau=2. Two is Monday, right? One is Sunday, two is Monday, three is Tuesday, and so on. So both t and tau were 2. Today t and tau are both 3. I am on Tuesday. Time travel means staying at tau=3 but moving on the t axis to 2. In other words, I am located at the static time point—I am on Tuesday—but now I go back and experience what we experience as the time of Monday.

Now one can discuss whether this is correct or not, whether it is possible or impossible, whether there is such a halakhic / of Jewish law definition or not. Now one can begin to discuss it, because the concepts have meaning. But you have to give meaning to the concepts before beginning the discussion. Therefore there must be some assumption of a duplication of time axes, and time travel essentially splits the time axes. On the tau axis I am on Tuesday, tau=3. On the t axis I am on Monday, t=2. So I have split the t axis and the tau axis. I am not in the same place; they are now not flowing at the same speed. Yes—if you can see it as a sawtooth graph: t as a function of tau. So it continues at forty-five degrees, t=tau all the time, and then I go back in time. Going back in time is not like this; going back in time is like this—and then you remain at the same tau but t goes back down. And then you continue advancing like a sawtooth. You go down, then continue advancing, then go down. So that kind of sawtooth graph is time travel. Because t decreases at the same tau. Tau never decreases. You cannot go back on the tau axis. You can decrease t at a given tau. Okay? So that is a consistent definition. Again, one can discuss whether it is correct or incorrect, whether there is such Jewish law or not, such physics or not, everything is fine. But now we can begin the discussion because the concepts have meaning.

How do you reconnect them again? Suppose there was retroactive clarification, so we went back to Monday, and how now does it become—? It could be there is a jump. It could be, although maybe not. Maybe you go back and you truly continue flowing backward; a phase difference will be created between t and tau. But that is already a question of models. The question is what the implication is; I don’t have to discuss it in terms of consequences.

So why did all this come back to me? Because here too, basically what we are doing is this: the time to which the leaven is assigned and the time in which I act when I eat the leaven normally flow together all the time. Right? Meaning, if the leaven is an ordinary slice of bread, we simply flow together. The time of the leaven and the time of eating are the same time. If I eat a slice of bread on Passover, then it is Passover leaven and I ate it on Passover—it is just together. Right? If the leaven was burned, then the time axis of the leaven evaporates at some point, it no longer exists. Only the time axis of my eating remains, but there’s no problem because I am not eating leaven. So it doesn’t matter if I eat this ash. Okay?

The only way to split the time axes—so that they do not continue together, but both of them still exist; not that one evaporated, but both exist and they do not flow together—that is called splitting the time axes, and that is charring. Charring splits the time axes; it essentially stops the flow of the time axis of the leaven itself. The temporal assignment of the leaven itself gets stuck at a certain point. I continue to flow with my own time, I enter the prohibited time, I am now in Passover time and I eat this leaven. That leaven is Hanukkah leaven. I am basically eating a doughnut now on Passover. Okay? An assumption that preserves some kind of freshness, but fine—charring won’t get you much further.

Freezing, as they do in space, where it really freezes its time, changes it—could that work too? I assume yes; I assume no. I assume, as he said, if you can restore it back again. Restore it back, but freezing is to keep the— I understand, but what do you do with it afterward when you eat it? Okay, so there is room to discuss it. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Okay, so that is basically the issue of charring. I want to show you this in the language of the medieval authorities (Rishonim). Look, there is Meiri and there is Maharam Halawa, one of the medieval authorities on tractate Pesachim. Look at the Meiri. “And the fact that he later mentioned ‘and it is permitted for benefit’—you see?—there was no need at all.” What does he need to tell me, that leaven before the prohibited time is permitted for benefit? “Thus they explained in the Talmud, and accordingly they explained in the Talmud, even after the time of its prohibition, and when he charred it before its prohibition, enough that it left the category of food.” Meaning, that it was charred even inside, “and it is permitted for benefit,” yes. Charred inside too, but it did not become ash; it was not burned. It is toast all the way through, including the inside, looking like the burnt part outside. Okay? It was charred inside too. That is what I earlier called well-done toast. So that is permitted to eat on Passover. All right? “And it is permitted for benefit, such as for fuel or some other use. And the same applies to eating: it is permitted, for even its eating is not considered eating, since it has left the category of food, and no prohibition applies to it, since it is mere ash.”

Now “mere ash” is not entirely precise, because it is not like actual burning; it is charring. Look: “But if he charred it after its time, it is forbidden for any benefit.” Right? After all, you are telling me that we’re talking about a case where he charred it before the time. From this we learn that if he charred it after the time, then it is forbidden to eat. Now the question is why. If it left the category of food, eat it after it is charred—it is already nothing. What is the difference between it and ash, right? That is really the difficult question.

So he says: “Since the prohibition of leaven had already taken effect upon it, its prohibition does not lapse until complete burning,” meaning “until it becomes coals. And in that case it would be entirely permitted even after its time. For if you had burned it completely, then even if you did that after the time, you may afterward make use of the ash. For with all items that must be burned, their ash is permitted, and coals have the same status as ash.” “Items that must be burned, their ash is permitted”—that gets us into a difficult sugya here, because leaven on Passover is not among those that must be burned; it is among those that must be buried. But okay, everyone here—fine, doesn’t matter, I’m not going into that whole affair right now.

What? But there would not be a case where someone would do this, because in general one may not handle leaven at all. What do you mean? If you found leaven in the house on Passover, you burn it. “And coals have the same status as ash. But as long as it did not reach that point, even though it was completely charred, it is forbidden, for the prohibition of deriving benefit has already taken effect upon it and does not lapse.” What does he mean to say? He is basically saying that charring freezes the halakhic / of Jewish law status of the thing. Right? That is essentially his claim. Charring freezes the halakhic / of Jewish law status. So what happens? No—not only before. Always. Charring always freezes the halakhic / of Jewish law status.

Therefore, the conclusions: if he charred it before Passover, what was its halakhic / of Jewish law status before Passover? Permitted. Charring froze the situation and it remains permitted, even if you eat it during Passover. If you charred it after the prohibited time began, that too freezes its halakhic / of Jewish law status. Only at that moment the halakhic / of Jewish law status was that it was forbidden. So now it is frozen as forbidden all the time. Therefore if you eat it afterward, it is forbidden. But it is forbidden not because you are now eating leaven. It is forbidden because you are eating the leaven as it was at the moment of charring. Only that the moment of charring was also after the prohibited time, so it is forbidden to eat it. In other words, notice: this is basically what he is saying. He is essentially saying that when you char it, the leaven itself is already no longer leaven. It is not like a slice of bread that you eat. But it is also not ash. Because ash—even if you made it after the prohibited time—is permitted. It is not ash. So what is it? It is that same thing—it is the freezing of time. It is the thing as it was at the moment of charring. What it was at the moment of charring remains afterward and accompanies us from then on. That is a freezing of the halakhic / of Jewish law status.

This may not be connected, but can you repeat what you said earlier, Rabbi, about Tosafot and the laws of set-aside on the second holiday day? Tosafot says that during the intermediate days of the holiday, the sukkah decorations are forbidden because of set-aside. It is forbidden to use sukkah decorations on the intermediate days of the holiday. Now on the intermediate days there is no prohibition of set-aside; that is, it is a weekday. Set-aside exists only on the Sabbath or on a festival. Right? So the claim is that apparently the concepts of set-aside exist and are sometimes even forbidden, because if the concept of set-aside did not exist there, then there would be no basis to forbid it under the law of set-aside. You could say it is forbidden, but not connected to the laws of set-aside.

So that is basically what Meiri says. By the way, Ritva shows us this through a very interesting implication. Ritva asks: what happens if you burned it in the sixth hour? In the fifth hour? Let me remind you: in the fourth hour it is permitted both for eating and for benefit. In the fifth hour it is permitted for benefit and forbidden for eating. From the sixth hour onward it is forbidden both for benefit and for eating. Right? Now what happens if you charred it in the fifth hour? So he says: it will be permitted for benefit and forbidden for eating even on Passover. Now you take it into Passover, and that is the best sign of all for the meaning of charring. That is, charring freezes the status exactly as it was there. Meaning, if you tell me that after charring it is simply not leaven and therefore it is permitted to eat it—if that were so, then whether for benefit or for eating, do whatever you want, and even if you charred it after the prohibited time, what difference would it make? It would be like ash, right? But no—it is not ash. It is a certain type of residual leaven. In other words, its status with respect to the laws of leaven remains exactly as it was at the moment of charring. Okay? And if it was permitted for benefit and forbidden for eating, then that is the status that will accompany it all Passover, because you freeze the situation as it was.

Now look. But with regard to a rabbinic prohibition—this is rabbinic—so if he charred it then he would not be liable for karet? Maybe. Whatever was true at that hour. Exactly the same thing. I’m not one hundred percent sure. Let me first tell you the Maharam Halawa, and afterward we’ll return to this because I think there may be a difference.

Maharam Halawa says this: “And Abaye said: if he charred it before its time, it is permitted for benefit after its time.” Meaning, he charred it until it left the category of bread and was rendered unfit even for a dog’s consumption; then it is permitted for benefit after its time. “And he used the term ‘for benefit’ because it is not fit for eating, but the same applies if he wanted to eat it, since it is like mere ash.” That is like what Meiri said.

“And specifically if he charred it before its time. But after its time, since it was once forbidden as leaven, it is forever forbidden. For in that case one is benefiting from what was forbidden to him—unless he burns it completely until it becomes ash, in which case it is permitted, as we learned: all items that must be burned, their ash is permitted,” and so on.

This is not exactly like Meiri. There is a difference here. Meiri talks about freezing the halakhic / of Jewish law status of the leaven. Maharam Halawa claims no—the thing is not leaven at all. Only what? If you eat it now, then this has implications for many prohibitions of deriving benefit and all sorts of things like that. If you eat it now, then it turns out that the act of charring was an act of deriving benefit from leaven, right? Because when you charred the leaven you basically turned it into something that I can eat, even though it had been in a state where it was forbidden to eat it. So it turns out that the act of charring was itself problematic, because in the act of charring you derived benefit from the leaven, you transformed it from prohibited to permitted. Afterward, in practice, you perform this when you eat, but really the prohibition was transgressed at the moment of charring.

Now what happens? If you charred it before the time, then there is no problem. You derived benefit from the leaven, fine, but you derived the benefit at a permitted time. It was before the prohibited time—you charred it then—so there is no problem. But if you charred it after the prohibited time, then why do you transgress a prohibition? Because the very act of charring is considered deriving benefit from leaven. By charring the leaven, you effectively made it available to yourself as food; you added a few more toasts to your pantry. Okay? So the act of charring itself constitutes deriving benefit from the leaven.

Now notice: according to Maharam Halawa, unlike Meiri, it seems to me that even if I now eat the leaven, I have transgressed a prohibition of benefit, not a prohibition of eating. When I now ate the leaven, that itself is not the prohibition at all. The prohibition is: when did I char it? What did I do when I charred it? I created food out of this leaven, I derived benefit from it. The fact that I eventually ate it is not forbidden because I did not eat leaven. It’s just that the fact I ate it reveals that the act of charring was an act of deriving benefit from leaven, and that is forbidden. Therefore, whether I ate it or merely derived benefit from the leaven during the holiday, I really transgressed the prohibition of benefit, not the prohibition of eating. Exactly. And that is the practical difference. Right?

Because basically, if you char it in the fifth hour, then according to Meiri, you actually ate the leaven, you eat it on Passover, and this is leaven that was forbidden for eating. When do you transgress the prohibition? When you eat it. Only the status of the leaven was frozen at the moment you charred it. So on Passover you ate leaven that was forbidden for eating. It was permitted for benefit but forbidden for eating. So that is forbidden, right? But if you derived benefit from it, if you derived benefit from the leaven, then that’s fine; this is leaven that is permitted for benefit.

But according to Maharam Halawa, whether you ate it or derived benefit from the leaven now, that only reveals that the act of charring was a violation of the prohibitions on deriving benefit from leaven, because you derived—because you derived benefit from the leaven. Therefore, for example, Ritva would not be correct according to Maharam Halawa. Because Ritva would say that if you did this at a time when it was permitted—right?—then with respect to eating he did not transgress, and with respect to benefit he also did not transgress. He transgressed nothing, because then it was permitted to derive benefit. Yes—but then it was permitted to derive benefit from the object. So if I charred it at a time when it was permitted to derive benefit? No, I mean: on Passover itself, whether he ate or derived benefit, he transgressed nothing. Because all this means is that at the time of charring there was deriving benefit, but at the time of charring it was permitted to derive benefit from that leaven. So what is the problem? All right? That is the practical difference between these two formulations.

Now go back to your questions and let’s think about it again. Remind me. That if in the fifth hour, or before the seventh hour, and so on, and afterward he eats it on Passover, then basically what he transgressed is a rabbinic prohibition from before Passover, and not a Torah-level karet prohibition from when he eats leaven. But now the question again: if you say its status is frozen, then maybe if the transgression occurs now, as Meiri says, then maybe right now I am eating leaven. Now it is already a Torah-level prohibition to eat leaven. This thing is leaven; only if you had eaten it then you would have transgressed merely a rabbinic prohibition, right? Now you charred it and now you eat it. That is why I told you I’m not sure. All right? But according to Maharam Halawa, according to Maharam Halawa it is clear that you transgressed nothing. Because if you charred it at a time when it was permitted to derive benefit, then whether you ate or benefited from it now, all that happened was that charring involved deriving benefit, and at that time it was permitted to derive benefit, so that’s fine. Okay?

This means, I think, that according to Maharam Halawa, the formulation I presented earlier of “freezing the halakhic / of Jewish law status” is not precise. It is more accurate for Meiri. According to Maharam Halawa, I am not freezing the halakhic time. Rather, I am saying that whenever I derive some benefit from the charred leaven, that reveals that the act of charring was a prohibited act. I am not freezing any timeline here. Therefore the whole formulation I gave at the beginning is correct according to Meiri; it is not correct according to Maharam Halawa.

And now I will do exactly the same exercise I did with Rashi and Rashba in Beitzah, and I will ask: so which of them is more right—Maharam Halawa or Meiri? I think Meiri. Exactly the same idea we used with Rashi and Rashba. Once I properly understand the function of an ukimta, how an ukimta should be understood, then it is pretty clear that Meiri is right. Why? Because when I read the Mishnah, the Mishnah says that before the prohibited time it is permitted for benefit. That is what the Mishnah says. The principle we learned regarding ukimtot is that one must always read the Mishnah in its plain sense, without ukimtot and without anything. It says what it means to say. The ukimta does not take part in what the Mishnah wants to say. The Mishnah says what it says, not anything additional.

Now according to Meiri, the Mishnah really says exactly what is written there. No—what does it matter? Because maybe you said you think this is for burning as fuel? Doesn’t matter. For fuel, for benefit, or for eating—it doesn’t matter. You cannot use it even for fuel on Passover. There is a prohibition of benefit. Without the ukimta it says that leaven is permitted because it is before the time, before the prohibited time. Leaven before the prohibited time is permitted. That is what the Mishnah says. And what is— that takes me back to the beginning. That is what the Talmud asked, and that is why it made the ukimta. Now I’m explaining.

Basically, according to Meiri, how does the Talmud explain the Mishnah? No, no—another answer? This is the answer. I am proposing the Talmud’s answer. Explaining the Talmud. The Talmud now says—according to Meiri—no, it’s really not pilpul at all. It’s simply, simply, simply straightforward. If you understand the idea of an ukimta, it is compelled. I would have said it myself, if not for the creativity. I’m not sure I would have been creative enough to think of charring. But the idea itself I would have said myself.

Basically what the Talmud says is that what is written in the Mishnah, that leaven before the time of its benefit is permitted—that is what the Mishnah says. That is what is written there, and that is what it says. Not charred, not before and after, nothing. Leaven before the time of its benefit is permitted, that’s all. One asks: what relevance is there to saying it is permitted? If you eat it before the time of its prohibition, then there is no prohibition at all. No—it is permitted even if you eat it at a time when there is a prohibition of leaven, because it is not leaven. That is what the Mishnah came to say. And the charring is only the way in which this comes to practical expression. All right?

Someone might come and say: what if this leaven on Passover is forbidden to eat, then I— And someone could say: okay, on Passover there is some special elevation, so they forbade us leaven. So now I will be even more righteous. The Mishnah does not say—the Mishnah does not say there is no point in that. The Mishnah says there is no prohibition. According to your approach, it should have said there is no point in it, not that there is no prohibition. Obviously there is no prohibition; the prohibition of leaven is only on Passover. Right, but someone would say— I understand, but the Mishnah does not say that that person is wrong. If the Mishnah had wanted to argue against that person, it should have said there is no point in refraining from leaven before Passover, not that it is permitted. “Permitted” means there is no prohibition, and that there is no prohibition—we know already. You want to say there isn’t even any point in stringency? Then say that; don’t say that it is permitted.

This is connected to— I once spoke about the prohibition of leaven. You know, all those Hasidic homilies—and it already starts in the Sages, by the way, in this case it wasn’t the Hasidim who began it—about leaven as the yeast in the dough, the evil inclination, and all sorts of nonsense of that type. If that were the case, then there would be a point in not eating leaven the whole year. Right? Or say: Passover is perhaps special. Fine. But still there would be a point in not eating it the whole year, right? But no—the Mishnah does not say that. It says “permitted,” not “there is no point.” If it wanted to say there is no point, it should have said that. Okay? It came to teach me a halakhic / of Jewish law rule. You want to innovate and say it came to teach me something non-halakhic, or not a rule at all. Obviously it is permitted—I know that by myself. It is written in the Torah. It is written in the Torah: “For seven days you shall eat matzot,” and leaven is forbidden to eat, “you shall not eat leaven.” That’s it. Which means that the rest of the year it is permitted. No need to teach that.

So I say: sure, a smart aleck can still be one even after the Mishnah. The Mishnah does not prove that he is wrong. It only says that it is permitted. He too knows it is permitted, but he is a smart aleck and wants to be more stringent. Fine? I’m saying: according to these conceptions that leaven is the evil inclination and yeast in the dough and all that, I think the obvious implication would be that someone who wants to be especially pious should be stringent and not eat leaven all year, right? We are not obligated beyond the seven days of Passover, but there is a point in being stricter. And I think we do not find such a thing anywhere. It is really absurd. Therefore I say: all those homilies have their place, but the prohibition of leaven is something entirely different. But that is a topic for a separate class.

Why did you say Maharam Halawa does not fit with Meiri? Right, now Maharam Halawa—let’s try to think according to his view, what is the novelty of the Mishnah? After all, it is not a splitting of timelines. It is not that the leaven has its own temporal assignment regardless of when I eat it. According to Meiri it has some temporal assignment of its own. And that is what the Mishnah came to say: that leaven before its time—that is, its temporal assignment—is permitted, right? So according to Meiri I read the Mishnah in its plain sense. According to Maharam Halawa, none of this is written in the Mishnah. According to Maharam Halawa this is a novelty in the laws of charring: that when you char something, the charring itself constitutes deriving benefit that will be realized later. Right? It is a law in the laws of charring. How do you see—now, charring does not appear in the Mishnah. The main point is missing from the text. And our rule about ukimtot is that the novelty of the Mishnah never lies in the ukimta. The novelty of the Mishnah lies in the formulation the Mishnah uses. The Mishnah formulates itself exactly. The ukimtot are made only to solve practical problems. And that is exactly the structure in Meiri. But according to Maharam Halawa, that is not true.

So how would Maharam Halawa explain “leaven is permitted for benefit before…”? If you are allowed to derive benefit from it as long as you do so at a time when deriving benefit is permitted—even during Passover—and that is basically the charring. How does that happen? It happens through the act of charring, in which case you derive benefit from it at the time of permission, and afterward during Passover you are already benefiting from it as from something already destroyed. You are saying that in fact according to Maharam Halawa too there is a novelty, only the opposite of Meiri. The novelty concerns the timeline of the eating, not the timeline of the leaven. And you are saying that the novelty is that the timeline of the eating is essentially frozen at the moment of charring. So when you eat it during Passover you actually ate it then, not now. In other words, the timeline of the eating stops, not the timeline of the leaven. That is what you want to say.

That supports what I’m saying, if that fits what you’re saying, but I’m just—how do you put that into the Mishnah, in short? According to Maharam Halawa, read me the Mishnah: “Leaven before the time of its benefit is permitted for benefit.” What is the Mishnah coming to say? That it is permitted for benefit as long as you derive benefit from it at that time. Obviously. The act of benefit is now. Obviously. So afterward too, if you eat it, it is already as if— Yes. You understand that the last sentence you said—you didn’t manage to finish it. Yes. There is something problematic here. But it could be that in the translation I proposed earlier, maybe one can say such a thing. I didn’t think about it. Meaning, it may be that according to Maharam Halawa one can also read the Mishnah this way: the timeline of the leaven is always the ordinary timeline. Leaven that you eat during Passover is Passover leaven. But the timeline of the eating is frozen at the moment the leaven is charred. When the leaven is charred and you eat it charred, you did not eat the leaven now—you ate it when you charred it. Okay? And when you charred it, then the act of eating, although in practice it is done now, halakhically / of Jewish law we view it as though it was done then. And therefore the timeline that stops is the eating timeline, not the leaven timeline. Yes. And then maybe one can indeed read the Mishnah that way, that is, read the Mishnah similarly to Meiri. And one can indeed read the Mishnah that way. That is, to say that “leaven before the time of its benefit”—the meaning is leaven that you ate before the time of its prohibition is permitted. You ask: but isn’t that obvious? Obviously, there is no prohibition. No—we are talking about a mode of eating that is physically within Passover, but the halakhic / of Jewish law eating is regarded as eating from before the time of prohibition. All right? And that is what the Mishnah is discussing. Maybe yes, I don’t know. We have to think about it.

Would that specifically be only with charring according to Maharam Halawa? Again? Specifically with charring? Because if it is the action, maybe there could be another action that causes me benefit. I don’t know, maybe. For example, with prohibitions of deriving benefit—regarding prohibitions of deriving benefit—they discuss there, say, orlah. Orlah transfers to its monetary value—that’s a Mishnah in tractate Kiddushin. Orlah—meaning, if I sell my orlah produce—no, it doesn’t transfer to its monetary value, except for the owner according to Rashi’s view; that’s a dispute among medieval authorities (Rishonim). Orlah does not transfer to its monetary value. So now basically, when I sell you my orlah produce, I received money from you. Okay? Now it doesn’t transfer to its monetary value, so I am permitted to use the money—not that you are permitted to eat it, it is orlah, but I am permitted to use the money, if I sold it to a non-Jew, whatever. Okay?

And what does it mean that I am permitted to use the money? After all, when I use the money I have basically derived benefit from the orlah, and orlah too is forbidden for benefit, not only for eating. So I have in fact derived benefit from the orlah. I sold it, and as a result I have more money. So that money is really benefit produced from the orlah. Okay? Therefore Rashi indeed writes that if you are the owner of the orlah, you may not use the money. If you are not the owner, that is another matter. If you are the owner of the orlah, then you may not use the money, whereas Ran claims that you may. And this is the question whether one can betroth a woman with money obtained from orlah. That is a dispute.

So this too is basically connected to our issue, because it raises the question: when did you derive benefit? Not when you betrothed the woman. You derived benefit when you received the money. Then you produced benefit from the orlah. After that you can take that money and do all sorts of things with it, but the moment when you derived benefit from the orlah is not the moment when you spent the money and did something with it, but the moment when you sold the orlah and received money in return. This too is somewhat similar to what we are discussing here.

And all things that transfer to their monetary value—there are prohibitions of deriving benefit that transfer to their monetary value and prohibitions that do not transfer to their monetary value. The prohibitions that do transfer to their monetary value can at least be understood this way: they transfer to their monetary value in the sense that when you spend the money, it becomes clear that the act of selling itself gave you benefit from the prohibited item in that you sold it and received money. Not that the money itself became intrinsically prohibited for benefit, as an object, so that the money itself is prohibited for benefit like the fruit. Rather, when you use the money, it turns out retroactively that you derived benefit from the prohibited item by selling it and receiving money. And therefore you may not use it—that is the meaning of a prohibition of benefit that transfers to its monetary value. “Transfers to its monetary value” does not mean that the money becomes prohibited in itself like the prohibited item, but that once you use the money it turns out retroactively that you derived benefit from the prohibited item, and that is forbidden. Okay, so there too we have a connection to the sugya in Pesachim, but I’ll leave that here.

I want now to move for a moment to the conceptual discussion. So basically what I want to say as a result of this whole discussion—I’m now returning to our overall line of thought, I’ve finished the matter of ukimtot—what do we really see here? We see that when the Mishnah—or a baraita, or some statement—brings a case and attaches a law to it, “in such-and-such a case the law is such-and-such,” the Talmud naturally assumes that they did not come at all to teach me the law of that case. That is not the subject at all. That is not what they came to teach. What they came to teach is a general idea that is expressed through that specific case. That is the simple assumption. And then begins the game with ukimtot and everything else, all that we saw.

And always, in every sugya where you see an ukimta, I strongly recommend trying to think: what is the general idea that this case is meant to teach us, and what problem is the ukimta meant to solve? And that is always a practical problem. If the general idea the Mishnah came to teach depends on the ukimta—that is, without the ukimta you would not understand it—then you did not understand the sugya correctly. The Mishnah has to be understood from within itself. You do not need the ukimta for that. The ukimta comes to solve a side practical problem; it is not important to the principle itself that appears there.

But this really says something much broader. It basically says, as I spoke about the unfolding of the Torah, its concretization and specification—it means that the cases with which we deal are in fact expressions of abstract principles. And you asked me earlier: hold on, so what is the practical significance besides charring? Is there anything else—? The practical significance is not what matters. The practical significances are just practical differences. What matters to me is the idea. The Mishnah comes to teach me a meta-halakhic / of Jewish law idea, an abstract idea, that there is a time assigned to the leaven itself. That is an idea. Whether there are halakhic / of Jewish law consequences or not—that is just a practical difference for betrothal of a woman. That does not interest me. Okay?

So that is exactly the point. This whole way of looking at an ukimta actually sharpens for us that the Mishnah is really a casuistic system—or tannaitic literature generally is a casuistic system—that teaches us a law about a case, but really its purpose is to convey to us an idea or a general principle, and that specific law and case are a particular expression of that general idea. And this is obvious to the Talmud from the outset. Even when a case is presented to it, it is obvious to it that they did not come to teach the case; they came to teach an idea. Therefore it allows itself to make ukimtot and everything else, and it does not think that it is deviating from the authorial intention of the Mishnah or the baraita, okay? Because it is obvious to it that this too is what the author really intended to do.

And this actually means that the whole purpose of the Mishnah—this casts the Mishnah in a completely different light. The Mishnah is not the Shulchan Arukh. The Shulchan Arukh is a book of Jewish law. Okay? A halakhic / of Jewish law book that comes to tell us what needs to be done in every situation. The Mishnah is not the Shulchan Arukh. Its whole structure shows that it is not the Shulchan Arukh, because its structure lacks final bottom-line rulings, it brings conflicting opinions—that is not how one writes the Shulchan Arukh. Okay? Or Maimonides, doesn’t matter. The Mishnah is something else.

But why? In the Mishnah too there are cases and laws, cases and laws; the Mishnah too is like that. No. Because it is obvious to us that the Mishnah is really coming to teach us general abstract principles. It does that through cases and their laws. But its aim is not halakhic / of Jewish law. The aim of the Mishnah is not halakhic / of Jewish law. The Mishnah did not come to teach me Jewish law. The Mishnah uses halakhic / of Jewish law implications in order to teach me ways of looking, conceptions, abstract principles. That is really the point.

Or in other words: the Mishnah comes to teach me Torah. Because Torah is not the collection of laws and cases with which we deal in practice. Torah is the abstract ideas that we understand to stand behind the cases. Therefore, when we study a sugya analytically, we distill from the cases the abstract ideas. Why? Because that is really how we learn Torah. We learn Torah because through the cases in which the abstract ideas are clothed, we try to understand the abstract ideas themselves. And Torah is the ideas, not the cases. That is what I said about the unfolding.

And this really casts the meaning of Torah study in a completely different light. There are people who think that Torah study means learning in order to know what to do. “Studying practical halakhic conclusions,” “study is great because it leads to action,” and all sorts of nice quotations from various sugyot. We are basically learning so that we will know the Jewish law for all cases and know what to do. But if that were truly the conception, then Torah study would be a mere preparation for a commandment. Right? A preparation for a commandment—you simply have to learn in order to know what to do. Okay? But Torah study is not a preparation for a commandment. It is not even a commandment, as we will see later—something much more fundamental. Torah study means understanding the principles that constitute the will of God. It is a kind of cleaving to the Holy One, blessed be He. Torah study is cleaving to the Holy One, blessed be He.

This is developed at length in Nefesh HaChaim, gate 4, unlike Hasidism. Hasidim, for example, understand cleaving to the Holy One, blessed be He, as a religious experience, some sort of experience of cleaving. And study is a means to create the experience of cleaving, to create cleaving. Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin argues against them that study is itself the cleaving. It is not a means to create cleaving. When you study, you are cleaving to Him. Why? Because He and His will are one. And once you understand His will and occupy yourself with His will, then you are cleaving to Him. Physically? Not because you are having religious experiences—not physically—but mentally, yes. You are mentally cleaving to Him. You are simply occupied with things that—yes—He and His will are one. When you occupy yourself with His will, then He Himself is inside your intellect. You are essentially trying—“the reward of a commandment is the commandment.” Yes, there too it speaks about reward, and you take the reward as the goal. The goal of the commandment is the commandment itself. There one could say that “the reward of a commandment is the commandment” means the reward of the commandment, I don’t know. But yes, you could also interpret it that way.

In any case—his point is really words of Torah, so to say that—completely, completely. Those two disputants say extremely similar things. It’s quite amazing how similar they are, even though on the face of it there is a very sharp disagreement here. I think I mentioned this in the first classes, didn’t I? We saw a bit from the author of the Tanya and Nefesh HaChaim.

Maybe I’ll illustrate this through the attitude to science. In the scientific context, if I were to ask why engage in scientific research? Why study science? Many people would say: in order to understand the world, to know how to explain phenomena, to know what will happen in every situation, to make predictions, to know what will happen in every situation. In other words, learning the laws of nature, the general laws, is a means to explain specific situations. In every situation, you will now know what will happen because you know the laws of nature, so you know what will happen. That is a technological view of studying science. Basically, science is a means to understand situations in the world. Okay?

But I think most scientists do not approach scientific study and research that way. For them, the cases are only practical implications. They want to know the laws. Not in order to understand the situations—they want to know the laws. How do we know the laws? Through examining what happens in various situations, and then making generalizations, where the situations are merely an instrument for them, not the goal. They are the instrument, while the goal is to understand the general ideas, the general laws. And the cases, the practical implications—there are practical implications to these laws, and the practical implications are practical cases, what will happen in practical cases. But the practical implications serve me in order to understand the general ideas.

And in that sense, I think that in Torah study too it is the same thing. There are those who understand Torah study this way: the principles—we engage in study, analysis, principles, and so on—in order to understand how to rule in each and every case that comes before us. That is the technological view that sees study as a preparation for a commandment. Okay? By contrast, there is the view I described earlier regarding science, the scientific view, which sees Torah as the goal, not as a means to know what to do. I learn Torah in order to learn Torah, in order to cleave to the Holy One, blessed be He. How do I do that? How do I know these abstract principles called Torah? Through the cases. In other words, the cases are laboratory cases through which I derive the laws of nature.

You see that the ukimta, which served me as a laboratory case in order to understand the general laws, is really not an accidental phenomenon. It is exactly the analogy I make between Torah study in general and scientific research in general. The ukimta is merely the laboratory case we have in the context of Torah study—what in scientific research is called a laboratory experiment. Okay? It is the same thing. That is, the implications of understanding what an ukimta is are really much broader than just what an ukimta is. They really say what Torah is and what Torah study is. That Torah is abstract things and not the laws of specific cases. And that Torah study is about distilling the abstract and general principles, not about dealing with cases and knowing what the Jewish law is in each and every case. All right?

So there are much, much broader implications here. That is why I went into this issue of the ukimta, because I really wanted to reach these conclusions.

With the ukimta, does the Talmud already know the rule? I think yes. I think that behind—after all, the Talmud doesn’t state the rule, but I’m saying that when it makes an ukimta, it seems very clear to me that behind it there sits some assumption of what the rule is. Is there a process of discovering the rule? There really is a process of discovering the rule, but it doesn’t fit the case, so they make an ukimta. But you begin by saying to yourself: what is the rule written in the Mishnah? Then you say: wait, but in the case the Mishnah is talking about, the rule does not appear in its pure form; there is some problem here. I will make an ukimta so that it will appear. But how do I know which ukimta to make? Because I know what rule needs to appear here, and then— So I say: let’s clean away all the things that interfere with the appearance of the rule, make an ukimta, and then the rule will appear in its purity—exactly like creating an experiment in a laboratory. Okay?

So this basically means that there are two approaches to Torah study. One approach sees study as a means, and another approach sees study as an end. A means in order to know the laws in specific cases, and the opposite approach that says: I take the laws in the specific cases and see them as a means to understand the general laws. This can also shed light—for example, I once saw… there is that format, you know, “coming to the professors”? There is such a podcast by Alex Tseitlin, right. In one of his podcasts he brought some dentist—I think he was a dentist, some physician of some sort—who claimed that he had studied Talmud for some years and then understood that in the end the whole thing was nonsense, and he has criticisms and writes about it in articles and all sorts of things like that. He brought him in for some lecture there of two hours with all those academics. And he began to explain there, giving examples of how this whole business is so foolish and so idiotic that it is really unbelievable. And of course no one there was knowledgeable or understood or—so naturally they all applauded him and identified with him and everything. It was simply completely absurd. I had a bit of correspondence with Tseitlin because I wanted to—I wanted to come and do a correction, but somehow it didn’t work out.

The same thing happened with Yaron Yadan. I once had some debate with him too on these matters and the same criticisms. It seems to me that fellow took the examples from Yaron Yadan. Now, all sorts of examples, like wheat that came down through the air. Right? What is the law regarding wheat that did not grow from the ground but fell with the rain from the clouds? What is its law? Can one bring it from— An elephant that carried out an Egyptian basket. Right? An elephant that carried out an Egyptian basket. Or someone who has intercourse with himself. Right? There is a person who has intercourse with himself, and the question is whether that counts as male intercourse, lying with a male, or not, and all sorts of things of that type.

And this seems terribly bizarre to people. Now this is a complete misunderstanding of the material. I want to explain—and we’ll see this later too—that even people immersed in study, if you ask them this question, most of them won’t know how to answer. This is not occupation with stupid things. So what is this? What are these pathological cases? I’m not even speaking about a father handing over his daughter to a tax collector who is a priest, and things of that type. I mean, what is the meaning of these discussions? And the claim I want to make in light of what we saw here is that the cases are of no interest at all. We are not dealing with cases. The cases are merely a laboratory case through which I can examine a general abstract idea.

So if, for example, I want to discuss someone who has intercourse with himself—right, with himself. Okay? I’m not actually interested in what the law is regarding someone who has intercourse with himself, or whether such a thing is possible. I say: suppose there were such a situation. Is the state where a person has intercourse with someone else, and that someone else is myself—is that the same state? Or no, does it have to be someone else? And that is a question you can also ask in the context of shaving the corners of the head. I spoke about this in the class on philosophy. Right? The corners of the head—when I shave my own head, do I transgress both as the shaver and as the one shaved? When I shave my own head, or not? All right? It is the same thing.

In other words, the question is not a technical halakhic / of Jewish law question of what the ruling is in such a case. It is that too, but that is not the purpose of the discussion. The purpose of the discussion is to try to understand a general idea. The same could be asked about charred leaven. Who cares about a discussion of leaven charred on the eve of Passover that you eat during Passover? Have you all gone crazy? Are you bored? Don’t you have anything to do? The answer is that we are not dealing with leaven or with charring or with anything—that interests no one. This case is a laboratory case that comes to tell me some general idea about the prohibition of leaven, about the assignment of the time axis of the prohibition of leaven, which is already a philosophical idea, and I don’t think it is any worse than a hundred thousand articles or books of philosophy dealing with far stranger issues. And here the claim is that this is understanding the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, or a Torah-based way of looking at the world. How do you see the world? What is time? Is it possible to split time axes? These are questions dealt with by the best philosophers and physicists. Okay? It’s just that among us it is always done through discussion of a case and ukimtot and someone having intercourse with himself and someone charring leaven—a collection of lunatics. A madhouse.

But every scientific laboratory experiment—every laboratory is a madhouse. What is a laboratory? It is creating a madhouse here inside the world. Something totally absurd, totally disconnected from the world—there is no friction, no temperature, no— You create some impossible case. Why? Because only there can you see the law you are interested in, in its purity. So the case is like coming and asking a scientist: tell me, what’s the point of dealing with an experiment talking about zero temperature in a vacuum with no bodies? There is no such situation in the world—what good is that? Why are you dealing with such an absurd situation? And there, for some reason, no one asks that question. All the professors sitting there do the exact same thing and none of them says a word when they do exactly the same thing. Because they do not understand that it is exactly the same thing.

And all this difficulty that people have with the phenomenon of ukimta stems precisely from the fact that the Talmud presents it not as a law, as in a physics book, but as a case. But someone learning the Talmud has to understand that the cases are not the goal here. The cases are a medium through which we try to understand a general idea or principle, an abstract principle. Okay? Once you understand that, all these things—all these difficulties—simply do not arise. Now it is no wonder that the difficulties arise, and again, this is not antisemitism; it is misunderstanding. Why? Because when you open a science book, the science book describes the law to you, formulates the general law: every body upon which no force acts moves in uniform motion in a straight line. It doesn’t tell you: if you were to throw this marker and there were no air here, then it would keep moving forever that way. If that were how it was put, people would say: tell me, why are you dealing with markers without air—have you gone insane? Right? In a physics book we do not ask that question because it does not talk about markers; it speaks directly about the general law: a body upon which no force acts moves in uniform motion in a straight line. And that is perfectly fine: you understand that it is a general law, you understand that it is not applicable as is in our realities, and everything is fine.

What is confusing in the Talmudic sugyot is that we deal with cases and not principles. That is, what is written is a case. So there really seems to be an impression that we are discussing the case, not the principles. Who cares about this case? It is like the marker. Okay? But if you understand that the context is really that whenever a case appears before you, it is only there to be a laboratory situation reflecting a general principle, then everything is fine. What difference does it make if it is a hypothetical case that cannot happen, a strange case? So what? What does it matter? On the contrary, the strange cases often help us distill much better the situation we want to discuss. Because I knead the situation with my own hands, I build it exactly as I decided, because I truly want to discuss the law in itself without interference from other things. Once one understands this, the whole story disappears—not ukimtot and not the strange cases.

The claim is really that Torah study is some kind of Platonic activity. We are uncovering a world of ideas, a world of ways of seeing things, a world of general abstract laws, that are not in our world—they are in the Platonic world of forms. In our world there are some shadows of them, shadows playing here on the field, mixing with one another and creating something terribly complex. To see things in their purity, separate all these shadows, show what—yes, this is really Plato’s cave allegory; that is exactly how he gets to it. Reach the abstract principles; there they appear in a lucid, clear, and distinct way, okay? And discuss them there, not here. And then after you discuss them there and understand each one separately, you can try to understand how all the chaos they make down here comes about.

All right? Which is basically what—only, and one final point in this summary is that one could still criticize the Talmud even after understanding all this and say: okay, so I understand, your goal is really the general laws. Then why do you use cases? Write like a physics book; write the general laws themselves. Why write the cases? So about that I spoke, I think, in the class before last, where I discussed the advantages of a casuistic method, of case-based discussion, by analogy between cases and not by way of general principles.

By the way, in the scientific context—as I said, there it seems to me somewhat laughable—but in the context of the social sciences, I don’t know, there has been a new fashion there in the last few decades called qualitative research. Right? There is that Israeli woman who wrote about prisoners of war—she has a book about POWs—and she is the guru of qualitative research; I forgot her name. She does qualitative research, meaning psychological or sociological research that is not built on large populations. I follow one person, or three people, in a very consistent and meticulous way, okay? And I record a whole book about what happened with three people.

Usually the accepted approach there was different: let’s take a thousand people and opposite them a control group of a thousand, make all the comparisons, and derive some general statistical conclusion. And the claim is that when you look at one individual, many times—even though he may be an exceptional case and not representative of the general group—a careful look at an individual case sometimes gives you something you will not see in the statistics of large groups. Okay? And in that sense, I suspect this too is some expression of the limitations of positivism and of giving value to casuism, to attention to cases and not just to rules, or of beginning from cases and from them trying to understand general insights. Because in the end, the goal is to understand general insights, not to understand what this particular person himself experienced or did or thought. But if I follow a particular person in detail, that can give me insights into how human beings in general behave, even though he is not a representative sample and even though one must always take into account that there may have been factors in his case that do not appear in others.

Therefore it is a somewhat complex story. It is a kind of delicate dance between top-down and bottom-up, between examples and rule, and from the rule back to the examples, trying to see how I can understand things more completely.

But for our purposes—one second—but for our purposes there is one important point beyond methodology, beyond where you begin and where you are aiming. There is the question of what your goal is. Is your goal the cases or is your goal the laws? Now, what your goal is does not always determine the method of treatment. That is a different discussion. Until now I was speaking about the method of treatment: whether to deal with casuistic cases or with laws. Now I am not speaking about the methodology of how I study, but about the question of the goal of study. Is the goal of study to know the Jewish law in all the cases?

Suppose I gave you a book in which all the laws for all the cases appear. Fine? You open the book, and I give you all—in every case you enter into it, it’s an AI, artificial intelligence—enter a case into it and it gives you the ruling. Fine? Suppose it covers everything. There won’t be a situation it doesn’t know how to answer. According to the instrumental view, yes—that would make Torah study unnecessary, because basically you study Torah only in order to know what to do in cases you have not yet encountered. Cases you have encountered are already in the halakhic decisors. Cases you have not encountered—you need the rules, because through the rules you understand what happens in those cases. Therefore those people too deal not only with cases but with rules—but for them the rules are only a means to know what the ruling will be in other cases they have not yet encountered. Fine?

So for such people, if they already have solutions for all the cases, then they do not need to study. Certainly not analytical study. Nothing is needed; everything is fine, everything is solved. The rules have no significance, because they come to help me with cases I haven’t encountered, but there are no cases I haven’t encountered—I have the answers for all the cases. Okay?

By contrast, those who understand analytical study not as an instrument but as an end in itself—even if you gave me all those cases, it would make no difference at all. On the contrary. It only means that now I can begin to work, because now I take all the cases and try to extract from them what the general laws are. And when I know all the cases, then there will no longer be blind spots. I will, I hope, arrive at the most correct general laws, because whenever we have only partial information we can miss the general laws. We strive to understand the general laws, but we can never know that we really reached the correct law. Therefore one must always be careful with rules. That is all true. But the goal in the end, as distinct from the methodology—methodologically, beginning with rules is a mistake, but the goal really is to uncover the rules. That is, in order to do this I very much recommend beginning precisely with the cases and not formulating rules. But that is unrelated to the question of the goal. The goal of study is to learn Torah, not to learn Jewish law. Learning Jewish law in order to know what to do in each case is learning Jewish law.

We will see this in the next class—I want to speak about it. What is the difference between learning Torah and learning Jewish law, in light of what we have seen here? And we will see there that learning Jewish law is really not Torah study. If you are studying Mishnah Berurah, that is not Torah study; it is simply a preparation for a commandment, in order to know what to do. Responsa too? Those responsa—responsa, that is not learning Jewish law? Certainly not. In understanding—if we are talking about a book of halakhic rulings, how is that connected? It is connected; that is what I’m talking about regarding responsa, all the cases that are brought before a decisor. Is he basically making inductions and then bringing the rules? A responsum comes to answer a case brought before him; its goal is a halakhic / of Jewish law goal. But within the discussion he also clarifies general questions. Fine? What is his goal as a learner? It may be that his goal is the rules, but the goal of the responsum is the case—that is, to rule regarding the case before him. But if I learn the responsum, from my perspective what is far more important than the bottom line is the path to it, because there, in the path, I see the modes of thought, the rules, the principles that he uncovered in the course of it, even though his goal there was halakhic / of Jewish law.

Yes. As a private instrument for the need, yes. Good.

Rabbi, are you basically saying in what you said that this is relevant to all Mishnayot, not only to the weird Mishnayot for which they made an ukimta? And there are Mishnayot that seem to come tell me Jewish law, for example “with what oils may one light, and it is permitted to light on the Sabbath.” So I say no. When they tell you with what oils one may light on the Sabbath, that tells you something about what the purpose of Sabbath lighting is. Why specifically with those oils and not with the others? It’s not so simple, because it’s popular, it’s supposed to be for everyone. What? Never mind. But that itself is already a principle, for example. But I’m saying: once they bring you those oils, it is obvious that behind them there sits a principle. And the principle is that one should light with common oil, with pure oil—yes, like Hanukkah perhaps—or something like that. There is some general principle standing behind it. You can then continue asking further: and why specifically with common oil? Or why specifically with oil whose light is clear? Then that already gives you some still more abstract idea. You can keep moving from abstraction to abstraction upward and arrive at general principles. Behind everything sit general principles. That is my assumption, at least.

The fact that at the end you heard that one could say “study is greater” or “action is greater”—to that I’ll get in the next class. In the next class I’ll talk a bit about studying Jewish law versus studying Torah. And then we’ll also discuss the question of “study is greater because it leads to action,” and all these things. Fine. Okay, we’ll stop here.