Morality, Faith, and Halakha – Lesson 10 – Rabbi Michael Avraham
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Values, command, and incommensurability
- A common measure between systems: the “measure of goodness” and the “measure of appropriateness”
- Jewish law versus morality: a practical conflict, not a principled contradiction
- Conflicts within morality: Sartre and the law of collision
- Apologetics versus criticism: Yisrael Shahak and the case of a kohen’s wife
- Polynormativity and particular acceptance versus sweeping acceptance
- Jewish law, democracy, and law: double commitment and decision
- Violence, the law of a pursuer, and equality between Jew and Arab
- The objectivity of values, Ariel Elion, and the critique of value “sovereignty”
- “The servant of God alone is free”: Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, Orwell, and Rabbi Kook
- Defining freedom as an asset, and the claim that freedom is not a value
- Defining liberty as a value, and the reversal between freedom and liberty
- Liberty in choice: the Syria–Switzerland parable and the fourth model
- Closing the circle: “There is no free person except one who engages in Torah”
Summary
General overview
The text presents values as givens that cannot be justified by anything external, and explains that command is what constitutes values. It then argues that despite the apparent incommensurability between values and between different systems of values, in practice people do make decisions because there is some abstract common measure, like a “measure of appropriateness.” It claims that clashes between Jewish law and morality, Jewish law and democracy, or Jewish law and civil law are practical conflicts rather than logical contradictions, and therefore there is no philosophical necessity to justify every halakhic command as moral. It goes on to distinguish between “particular” acceptance of a normative system and “sweeping” acceptance such as “We will do and we will hear,” and explains that multiple normative commitments are possible precisely because the commitment does not depend on particular agreement with every clause. Finally, it defines “freedom” as the absence of constraints and as an asset rather than a value, and contrasts it with “liberty” as autonomous conduct within constraints, as a value that cannot be taken away. On that basis it proposes interpreting the statements of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and the Mishnah about a free person and engagement in Torah in that way.
Values, command, and incommensurability
Values are presented as givens on the basis of which decisions are made, and as a framework for ethical thinking that cannot be grounded in anything outside itself. Command is presented as what constitutes values. The claim is that if values are not measured on the basis of some common standard, then there is no way to weigh a value or determine the relation between values, because they have no shared measure by which both can be assessed. And yet people do in fact decide even between values that are “in different languages.” The example of the actor who smokes a few cigarettes in exchange for a million dollars is presented as proof that in practice quantities are weighed across different metrics, and therefore one must assume that there is some shared scale that makes comparison possible.
A common measure between systems: the “measure of goodness” and the “measure of appropriateness”
Within the ethical world, a “measure of goodness” is proposed as the basis for deciding between conflicting ethical values. In comparing morality with economic gain, as in the question of theft versus profit, it is argued that the very ability to weigh between alternatives requires some shared abstract measure even between different systems. The “measure of appropriateness” is defined as a scale that allows one to compare decisions among the norms of morality, Jewish law, law, and democracy. The very assumption that one can decide in a clash between Jewish law and morality or between Jewish law and democracy is taken as an admission that there is a common basis that makes such a decision possible.
Jewish law versus morality: a practical conflict, not a principled contradiction
The text argues that the attempt to explain that Jewish law is always “really moral” is problematic, because it assumes as a necessity that Jewish law is supposed to be moral. The Holy One, blessed be He, is presented as caring very much that we be moral, and also caring very much that we observe Jewish law, but the two systems are described as independent, and therefore capable of conflicting. The clash is defined as a conflict on the practical plane, not a contradiction on the logical plane, similar to the desire to enjoy something versus the desire to be healthy. The examples of annihilating Amalekite babies, violating the Sabbath to save a non-Jewish life, and circumcision are presented as commands that may be morally bad, and the claim is that there is no need to turn them theoretically into something “good”; rather, one must decide what to do in practice.
Conflicts within morality: Sartre and the law of collision
Sartre’s example of the student in occupied Paris is presented as a clash between two correct moral values: caring for a sick mother versus fighting the Nazis. The claim is that the values do not contradict each other in content, but the situation creates a practical impossibility of fulfilling them both, and therefore what emerges is behavioral hesitation, not conceptual contradiction. Likewise, commitment to Jewish law and to morality is described as a legitimate double commitment that sometimes leads to a conflict of decision. The solution is defined as a practical decision between “doing X” and “doing Y,” not as a theoretical explanation that presents Jewish law as necessarily moral.
Apologetics versus criticism: Yisrael Shahak and the case of a kohen’s wife
Yisrael Shahak is described as someone who stirred up public uproar in the 1960s and 1970s by publishing cases that portrayed Jewish law as immoral, such as forcing a divorce on the wife of a kohen who had been raped, and not saving a non-Jew on the Sabbath. The common response is described as a mix of declarations about a “supreme morality” that ordinary people simply do not understand, together with attempts to deny the facts by calling them “fake news,” while ignoring the fact that Jewish law itself does indeed state the principle. The answer proposed by the text is to acknowledge the moral pain and the dissonance, and to explain that commitment to Jewish law adds another binding system beyond morality; it does not cancel moral commitment. The text emphasizes that halakhic decisors may feel the pain even more than the critics do, because they are the ones standing in front of the people who are hurt and are nevertheless bound by Jewish law. The legitimate argument is over the very commitment to Jewish law, not over the claim that “they have no heart.”
Polynormativity and particular acceptance versus sweeping acceptance
The text calls the multiplicity of commitments “polynormativity” and argues that most people are committed to several systems, such as morality, Jewish law, state law, and the rules of a professional guild. It explains that a clash between systems is not a contradictory state, and that even within a single system there are conflicts between values. The midrash about the Holy One, blessed be He, going around to the nations, and Israel’s agreement, “We will do and we will hear,” is explained as a distinction between particular acceptance of values—checking each clause to see whether it is “right”—and sweeping acceptance that stems from trust in the commander and in the source of the command. It is argued that two systems accepted in a purely particular way cannot consistently clash, whereas conflict is possible when at least one of the commitments is sweeping.
Jewish law, democracy, and law: double commitment and decision
The text rejects the two extreme positions of “only Jewish law” or “only law,” and proposes commitment to both, together with recognition that in a place of conflict one needs a deciding judgment. Examples like mixed prayer at the Western Wall and equal rights for same-sex couples are presented as cases in which democratic values and equality may prevail at the state level even if Jewish law forbids them at the religious level. It describes a consistent position of a religious person who fights for the right of others to violate the Sabbath or live in ways contrary to Jewish law, out of commitment to democracy and not out of lack of commitment to Jewish law. Public transportation on the Sabbath is presented as a complex case in which Sabbath violation as such is not necessarily the decisive consideration, but democratic considerations such as the ability of the religious public to make a living and integrate into the work sphere do enter the balance of decision.
Violence, the law of a pursuer, and equality between Jew and Arab
The text states that there is no principled difference between a Jew and an Arab on the question of shooting someone who endangers life; the only distinction is whether the situation is justified or not. It explains that someone who throws stones in a life-threatening way is defined as a “pursuer,” and according to Jewish law “you have to shoot him,” regardless of his identity. The claim is that the justification of violent action depends on whether it is justified self-defense or unjustified terror, not on ethnic belonging.
The objectivity of values, Ariel Elion, and the critique of value “sovereignty”
The text returns to the claim that values are given, and therefore not only are they not open to external justification, they are also not determined by the human being. Ariel Elion is described as someone who distinguishes between a “rabbinic Jew,” who receives values from rabbis, and a “sovereign Jew,” who determines values for himself, in a framework where “rabbinic” is seen as bad and “sovereign” as good. The text argues that this distinction misses the fact that a person can choose between good and evil but cannot determine what good and evil are. It brings the example of a person who “sovereignly” chooses to be a contract killer in order to show that choosing does not create value. It concludes that there are both “rabbinic” and “sovereign” types among both the religious and the secular, and that the real distinction is autonomy within a given framework, not creating values out of nothing.
“The servant of God alone is free”: Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, Orwell, and Rabbi Kook
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s poem, “The servants of time are servants of servants; the servant of God alone is free,” is presented as evoking resistance because it sounds like an Orwellian reversal of concepts, similar to the slogans in 1984: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” Olat Re’iyah, volume 2, by Rabbi Kook is brought as a response that identifies the way of Torah with the inner nature of the Jewish people, and explains that the feeling of coercion comes from “dross” that has attached itself to the soul and prevents the pure will from emerging into action. The text describes this answer as paternalistic, liable to function as a magic solution to every dissonance, especially when the issue is a clash between a moral “good inclination” and a halakhic command. Still, it points out that both Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and Rabbi Kook assume that freedom is a value, and therefore they are forced to offer a move that reconciles servitude with freedom.
Defining freedom as an asset, and the claim that freedom is not a value
Freedom is defined as the absence of constraints and as a quantity that depends on factors not under a person’s control. The text argues that the idea that freedom is a value arises from the fact that depriving another person of freedom without justification is viewed as an immoral act. It claims that this is a logical mistake: just as money is not a value but an asset, so too freedom is an asset, and depriving someone of it is wrong because it damages an asset or a right. From this it follows that freedom is a neutral factual condition that can be good or bad depending on the circumstances, but is not a value in itself.
Defining liberty as a value, and the reversal between freedom and liberty
Liberty is defined as autonomous conduct within a given system of constraints, and the text emphasizes that liberty too is not binary but comes in degrees. It argues that freedom and liberty are not synonyms but opposites: a person who is completely free lacks the conditions within which meaningful autonomy can be expressed, and therefore cannot be free in this deeper sense. Examples from the concentration camps in Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning are presented as situations of almost zero freedom in which peaks of liberty reveal themselves in small moral acts. Examples such as Rachamim Melamed-Cohen with ALS and Stephen Hawking are presented as expressions of the idea that very little freedom can accompany especially high human liberty.
Liberty in choice: the Syria–Switzerland parable and the fourth model
The parable about elections in Syria presents a fake “freedom” in which there is only one ballot, so the result is predetermined. The parable about “metaphorical Switzerland” presents a situation in which there is a choice among ballots but no real problems, so the choice has no meaning and becomes a lottery. The third model presents a choice that has costs within circumstances not under the person’s control, and there autonomy has meaning, and therefore liberty does as well. The fourth model is described as a situation in which there are problems and there is choice, but whoever is chosen does the same thing. It is likened to Israel by way of the story about the post office in Myanmar, where all the mailboxes end up emptied into one bag.
Closing the circle: “There is no free person except one who engages in Torah”
The text concludes that only liberty has moral significance because it is autonomy within constraints, whereas freedom is an asset and not a value. It proposes reinterpreting “the servant of God alone is free” as a claim about liberty rather than freedom—meaning, “the servant of God alone is truly free.” It connects this to the source, “There is no free person except one who engages in Torah,” and in that way offers an ending that returns the discussion from criticism of wordplay to a conceptual claim about liberty as a value.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s just locate ourselves within the flow. We talked a bit about the meaning of values. We saw that values are basically some kind of givens on the basis of which I make decisions, and they themselves cannot be grounded in anything else; they basically form a framework for ethical thought. And from there we got to the meaning of command. Basically, command is the thing that constitutes values. That’s an important point—we’ll come back to it later on as well. And then I spoke a bit about incommensurability, about override rules, about how we determine which value takes precedence over which other value. And broadly speaking, the claim was that apparently, if I can’t ground values in anything outside them, then I have no way to weigh a value, and also no way to weigh the relation between values, because they have no shared measure by which both can be assessed. And yet, as a matter of fact, we do make decisions. Sometimes we make decisions on the basis of quantitative considerations. Right, remember the example of the actor with the cigarettes? He has to smoke a few cigarettes in order to act in a film, and it’s bad for his health, but he earns a million dollars from it. So his doctor friend tells him, look, as a doctor I forbid it, but as a friend—go for it, and quickly. Now if this really were incommensurable, and if these really were two things with no shared measure, then why is it relevant that here we’re talking about only four cigarettes or five cigarettes, and there we’re talking about a million dollars? That’s like comparing kindness with water in the ocean. We can’t compare those two things to each other, so why should I care that there’s a little of this and a lot of that? If these are two different metrics, then how can you compare quantities that relate to two different metrics? It’s impossible. And yet all of us intuitively do make decisions of that kind. We are prepared to hear about decisions of that type, and the only explanation that really comes into play here is that there is in fact some shared measure. There really is some kind of scale on the basis of which I measure values and compare them to one another. I spoke about the ethical world itself—when there’s a clash between two ethical values, then we talked about the degree of goodness of each value. But after that I said: even when I want to compare an ethical matter with an economic matter. I want to decide whether to steal something. There is a moral prohibition, and there is the gain I get from the theft. When I decide whether to violate the moral prohibition for the sake of the gain, I am once again weighing between two alternatives. Now how can I weigh economic profit against a moral prohibition? What does that even mean? They’re not speaking the same language. So it turns out that apparently, even between different systems—not only within morality itself, between two values that belong to the moral world, but also between different systems—we manage to create some kind of shared abstract measure. I spoke about a measure of appropriateness—how appropriate it is to act this way or do something—and otherwise it’s simply impossible to make decisions. And of course this also touches on clashes, for example, between Jewish law and morality. Between Jewish law and morality we’re really talking about a clash between different systems of values, for example Jewish law and morality, and if we’re willing to accept the fact that a decision can be made—regardless of the question of what the decision is—the very fact that I assume a decision can be made already means that there is some common basis to the two sides. And again, that’s the measure of appropriateness or whatever you want to call it. All these things have a very interesting implication for current issues. For questions of Jewish law and morality, Jewish law and democracy, Jewish law and civil law, all kinds of things like that that very often trouble people a lot. How can it be that the Torah commands things that are not—just plainly not moral? How can such a thing be? The Holy One, blessed be He, after all expects us to be moral. And usually, the various ways of solving this—I spoke about this not long ago, I don’t remember where already. I think I mentioned it here too. What? Yes, right, in the Sunday lecture. Right. So there, when I talk about clashes between Jewish law and morality, or Jewish law and democracy, or whatever—Jewish law and civil law—people are always looking for some kind of solution that explains why Jewish law really is moral. We may be mistaken and not understand it, but the truth is that Jewish law is certainly moral, or the most moral, or the embodiment of morality. Everyone can exaggerate as much as they like. I think these various directions—I won’t get into all the details here—but these principled directions are problematic even before I get into what exactly they’re saying. Why? Because they assume that Jewish law is supposed to be moral. But that assumption is not necessary at all. And not because the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t care about morality, but because His concern for morality and His concern for Jewish law are independent. It matters to Him very much that we be moral, and it matters to Him very much that we also observe Jewish law. Both things matter to Him. But we are still talking about two systems that are independent, that are different. And therefore there can be clashes between them. And once there is a clash between them, that raises no principled problem whatsoever. Because yes—two different systems can clash. What tastes good isn’t healthy, right? What’s healthy doesn’t taste good, as is well known. So the system of health and the system of enjoyment clash with each other. Now you can still say that I want things to taste good and I also want to be healthy. I want both. Is that a contradiction? What, you can’t want to be healthy and want to enjoy yourself? Of course you can. But that double desire can, in certain situations, bring me into conflict. Conflict on the practical level: whether to eat something fattening and tasty or not to eat it, okay? But that’s a conflict on the practical plane. On the principled plane, though, there is no logical problem or philosophical problem with my wanting both to enjoy myself and to be healthy. It’s just that those two desires don’t always go together—or in practice, never really go together. Okay? And in certain situations I have to decide which of the two values prevails. But being committed to both those values—there is nothing contradictory about that. And so my claim is, for example—take the annihilation of Amalekite babies, or violating the Sabbath to save the life of a non-Jew, which we talked about a bit in the previous lecture. What? Circumcision. That too, yes—various things that look like halakhic commands that are not moral. So people are always looking for: no, no, this is actually moral, you just need to look more deeply. Usually they don’t even present the deeper look that shows it’s moral—they just declare that there must be such a perspective, okay? But I think it’s a philosophical mistake to look for that solution at all. Or to think it’s necessary. You can believe that the two are aligned—that morality and Jewish law should fit. That isn’t contradictory. But to think that this is necessary—that’s philosophically problematic; it’s not necessary. It can be that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants both, and still there can be a clash between them. I want to be moral, but very often one moral command clashes with another moral command. We talked about Sartre—with helping the sick mother there in occupied Paris, that student—whether to help his sick mother or go to the army of Free France and fight the Nazis. Both values are correct values. I think we all adhere to both of those values. And still, a situation arises in which it is impossible to fulfill both values. They clash. They clash not because their contents contradict each other—their contents do not contradict each other—but because the situation created a condition in which fulfilling one value contradicts fulfilling the other, okay? The clash is on the practical level, not the principled one. You can’t believe in the value of fighting evil and also think that fighting evil is evil—that’s a logical contradiction. But to think that fighting evil is good, and to think that helping my sick mother is also good—there is no logical contradiction there at all. These are two values that do not contradict one another; on the contrary. It’s just that there are situations in which, on the practical level, I cannot fulfill both of them. That’s what I call a conflict and not a contradiction. It’s a conflict only in the sense that I’m torn over how to act. As opposed to a contradiction, which is supposed to trouble me on the conceptual, logical level: how can it be that I endorse a system that contains a contradiction? I am committed to the values of morality and committed to the values of Jewish law—is that a contradiction? So the answer is no, of course not. I am committed to the values of morality and committed to the values of Jewish law. There are situations in which I will run into a conflict between the moral command and the halakhic command, and I need to find a solution, whatever it may be. But that’s a conflict, not a contradiction. Okay? And when I find a solution, I won’t find a solution to how I understand that Jewish law is moral—no, it isn’t. I’ll find a solution in the sense of what I am supposed to do, meaning how to behave in practice. We have to decide what to do: do X or do Y. But the solution is not of the theoretical kind in which I explain to you why this is really not bad the way you think—it’s actually good. No, that’s not the point. The point is that it doesn’t have to be good; it can be morally bad. A Torah command can definitely be bad. There are many Torah commands that are morally bad in the fullest sense. They are plainly immoral. So what? They are meant to achieve some religious value, and for its sake I must act that way. True, there is a payment in the currency of morality—to violate moral values in order to realize that. What can you do? In order to save a person by operating on him, you cause him pain, right? But what can you do—if I want to save him, I have to hurt him. So does that mean I’m immoral, or that I’m not committed to morality? Or that I’m committed only to part of morality—only to saving lives but not to causing pain? No, I’m committed to both. It’s just that the situation I’m in doesn’t allow me to fulfill all the values to which I am committed. But the very commitment to both values contains nothing contradictory. In exactly the same way, I want to argue—just a second—in exactly the same way I want to argue that commitment to Jewish law and commitment to morality, although there are quite a few contradictions—or conflicts—between them, these are conflicts on the practical level. There is no limitation and no obstacle to being committed both to Jewish law and to morality at the same time. On the contrary, it is even called for.
[Speaker B] And is that in the question not necessarily within the discussion itself, but maybe more in its apologetics—say someone comes to me now who isn’t a believer, or a non-Jew, and says to me, listen, your Jewish law is such-and-such. What do I tell him? You’re basically right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s what you tell him.
[Speaker B] Fine, also—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re not moral either. You go out to war, you’re a non-Jew, right? You go out to war, you kill people. That’s not moral. Why is that—
[Speaker B] Moral?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not moral. You’re killing people, what do you mean? Sometimes innocent people are even harmed—but leave that aside. Even killing the soldiers is not moral, right? You’re shedding blood. So you have the value of defending yourself, and it clashes with the value of the other person’s human life, and you have to decide which of the two overrides which. Meaning, you too are in a conflict between two values to which you are committed, and the fact that you ruled in favor of one, so that it overrides the other, does not mean that you are not committed to the other—you are committed to both. That’s what you have to tell him in our context too.
[Speaker B] And does it seem reasonable that the Holy One, blessed be He, could bring a set of laws that by definition clash with morality? Like…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not? I don’t understand—what does that have to do with anything?
[Speaker B] Meaning it’s not that—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You want to achieve religious goals, and therefore you pay in moral currency, right? You want to save yourself, so you kill the soldiers on the other side. In war, soldiers are killed—that’s built in. That’s it.
[Speaker B] But in war that’s a case that’s a specific situation. There are Jewish laws that are—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s a situation too. The law of war too, by definition, brings about the killing of people—by definition, not just specifically. The very fact that you justify wars means that you justify killing people. There is no war without killing people. That’s essential, not incidental. The fact that it’s essential doesn’t matter at all. It may matter for the question—I don’t think I talked about this—it may matter for the question of how you decide the conflict. In a place where it’s essential, apparently Jewish law will determine it; in a place where it isn’t essential, the question remains open. But regarding the very fact that I live with this conflict—is that contradictory? Absolutely not. Even if it’s essential, it’s still not contradictory. Eating something tasty is always fattening. Does that mean that when I want to be healthy and also want to enjoy myself, I live in contradiction? No, I don’t live in contradiction; I live in conflict. And in practice I will of course have to choose what I do. But I’m not living in contradiction. A person wants both to enjoy and to be healthy—what’s the problem? Those are two legitimate desires that do not contradict one another in any way. They clash on the practical level. In terms of their content, they do not contradict one another. And the same thing here: when I say that morally I don’t—meaning, morally I certainly should violate the Sabbath in order to save a non-Jew, but halakhically it is forbidden. Is there a contradiction here? Not at all. From the standpoint of Jewish law, in order to achieve spiritual or religious goals—whatever exactly they are—I must not violate the Sabbath in order to save the non-Jew’s life. Morally, of course I must violate the Sabbath in order to save the non-Jew’s life. So I have a clash, but that clash is a conflict, not a contradiction. And in a conflict, you have to make decisions. The question is what takes precedence. But anyone who asks you that question—that’s exactly the point. Everyone tries to explain to him why it’s terribly moral. Is that how you’re going to convince him? He looks at you like you’re crazy—and rightly so. On the contrary, I think speaking directly is far more sensible. Direct speech tells him: listen, you also live in conflicts. Even within morality itself—leave Jewish law and Torah aside, you don’t believe in them—but within morality itself you have conflicts too. So with me, the arsenal of values is simply broader. It includes not only moral values but also the values of Jewish law. Once I’m committed to all that, there are clashes. So what? Just as there are clashes for you too. And in a clash, in order to realize value A, I violate value B. That’s the nature of a clash—what can you do?
[Speaker B] Say now—I mean, this is something I think, at least—that I go to a Muslim and say to him that your religion is not moral because Muhammad did such-and-such. He tells me—he could tell me exactly the same thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, of course. Not only could—he should tell you exactly the same thing. Obviously, what kind of question is that?
[Speaker B] But he won’t tell me that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Because he isn’t sophisticated enough. And the Jews won’t tell you that either, because they aren’t sophisticated enough either. That’s why we’re here. That’s the real answer. There was some chemist in Jerusalem named Shahak, Professor Shahak—Yisrael Shahak, I think, I don’t remember—who in the 1960s and 70s stirred up a lot of trouble, kind of an anti-religious provocateur, and anti-religious uproars. Every time he would publish some case that he had heard or seen or whatever, and there would be huge public uproars. Once he saw a woman who had been raped and was married to a kohen, and the rabbis forced them to separate. Because the wife of a kohen who is raped has to separate from her husband. Now think about it: she already went through one trauma—she was raped. And now she loves her husband, he loves her, they have children, and you forcibly break up their home. You put her, and all of them together, through a second trauma. Where is your morality? Have you gone mad? In another case he brought up saving a non-Jew on the Sabbath. People came out of synagogue, saw some non-Jew in distress, and did nothing to save him. And all kinds of cases like that. So everyone immediately starts polemics: what do you mean, this is the highest and loftiest morality and… no one understands it—not even I understand it—but it’s lofty and supreme morality that no one understands. Okay. Which of course convinced no one, including the speaker himself. And that was one explanation. The second route was to try to show that it never happened. The case simply didn’t happen; he invented cases. And that’s true—at least some of them he did invent.
[Speaker B] Fine, he invented them—but the question is whether that’s exactly—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What difference does it make whether he invented them? Factually, that is what Jewish law says, so what difference does it make whether it happened or not? Everyone says, “Ah, he invented cases, it’s fake news,” everyone relaxes, goes home peacefully. But what difference does it make? The Jewish law he cited is correct. Why should I care if he invented the cases? And the right answer is to say—I remember when there was that story with the kohen’s wife who was raped, I don’t remember whether that one too was fabricated or whether it was real—there really were such cases. So there I said to them, people told me: tell me, don’t you have a heart? How can you put her through an additional trauma after the first trauma of the rape—you put her through another trauma, and the whole family too, leaving the children without parents, a shock. So I said to them: look, I do have a heart. But I have other things besides a heart. The pain I feel is exactly the same pain you feel. But unlike you, I am also committed to Jewish law, and you’re not. Fine—that’s a legitimate disagreement. And you need to understand that when you judge me on my own terms, then you need to understand that I’m acting here out of tension dissonance, out of tension. It’s not that I’m not committed to morality, or that I enjoy abusing women. I don’t. It hurts me exactly as much as it hurts you—maybe more, because as a halakhic decisor I also have to decide this matter. You’re sitting in your armchair clicking your tongue. But there are people who had to stand in front of that woman and her husband and tell them to separate. It hurt them more than it hurts you. But they are committed to Jewish law. Now you can argue with them—you can say Jewish law is nonsense and there’s no reason to be committed to it. Fine, legitimate, a legitimate argument. But you need to understand that you cannot say they are not moral, that they don’t care about morality. Of course they care about morality. They just have other things they care about too. That’s all. Now you, as a secular person, are not committed to Jewish law. So obviously you examine this situation only through a moral prism. And through a moral prism, the correct answer is obvious. But when you examine—when you want to judge me, then you have to judge me on my own terms, or judge my system, I don’t care. But when you judge my action, you have to judge it on my terms, and on my terms I’m committed to morality exactly as much as you are; I’m just committed to more things. And sometimes that puts me into conflict. It’s like judging Sartre’s student who, say, stayed with his sick mother to help her, and saying: what, you don’t care about fighting evil? How can you—why don’t you go to the army of Free France to fight the Nazis? What, you selfishly stay home with your mother to take care of her? That’s nonsense, right? It’s obvious to everyone that it’s nonsense. Why is it nonsense? Because it’s obvious that he does care about fighting evil, but there are other values he cares about too, and sometimes he has to choose them at the expense of that value—what can you do? He can’t fulfill them all. It’s just that you’re looking only at the set of moral values—you as a secular person, okay? So just understand that in my case the set is broader. It’s not only morality; it’s also Jewish law.
[Speaker B] And practically speaking, say I’m now a halakhic decisor, and I ruled—let’s say—that morality wins here. So who can really come and complain to me?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, who can come and complain to you?
[Speaker B] Say I decided that in the case of the woman, morality here is really, really significant, yes? So I permit it. Who can come and complain to me?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who said anyone would complain to you? What do you want? I don’t understand. Fine, that’s what you ruled, everything’s okay. I rule that it’s forbidden to sort forks out from mixed cutlery—who can come and complain to me? That’s what I think. I don’t understand the question. That’s your opinion, everything’s fine. Someone else can come and disagree with your opinion—that’s fine too. Okay, like any dispute. How is this different from any other dispute?
[Speaker B] No, what I’m asking is whether I can make a mistake.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course you can always make a mistake. Even within Jewish law you can make a mistake. Even apart from a clash between Jewish law and morality, just in the analysis of a halakhic case you can make a mistake too—so what?
[Speaker B] Right, so I’m saying that it’s like a halakhic analysis—if I’m mistaken, then will that have, I don’t know, consequences in Heaven or something like that?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know what consequences there are in Heaven. If you made a mistake, then you made a mistake; you did something wrong. But if you acted according to the best of your understanding, then you were coerced—what can you do? So that’s why I say that in the end, when we look at this concept of value, and incommeasurability and clashes between values, once you broaden the perspective you understand that we can be committed to several different value systems. There can be clashes between them, and that is not a contradictory state. It’s a conflictual state, but not a contradictory one. Okay? A few more words about this matter: I call it polynormativity, yes—multiple normative systems. I’m committed to several; most of us are like that. I’m committed to morality, committed to Jewish law. Someone else might be committed to the rules of the guild of the Bar Association, to the laws of the state, and to morality. That’s almost a contradiction, but let’s say it’s possible to be committed to all three of those things. Okay? All kinds of things. I mean, I don’t know, every other guild too, not just lawyers—some guilds are even more moral. So fine, you can also be committed to several value systems; there is no principled problem with that. It can lead to conflicts, yes, but even within one normative system you can reach conflicts between different values from that same system. There is nothing essentially different here. And once I reached the conclusion that there is also some shared scale—not only the degree of goodness, which is a shared scale within the moral system, but the degree of appropriateness, which is what I called the shared scale for all norms, for all normative systems—then it really doesn’t matter. So this is in no way different from the situation of a person who is committed only to moral values. There’s no principled difference here. Okay?
Now maybe a few words after all about this situation—how does such a state of double normativity arise, yes, where I’m committed to several normative systems, or when can it not arise, and when can it. So, a few… The Talmud says that the Holy One, blessed be He, went around among the nations in order to give them the Torah before the giving of the Torah. And they said, “What is written in it?” He said, “Do not steal”—that doesn’t suit us; “Do not murder”—that doesn’t suit us. Doesn’t matter, He went among them; none of them liked it, until He came to Israel, and they asked Him how much it cost and said, bring two—that is, yes, the well-known joke. But He said—they said, “We will do and we will hear.” Okay? What is this story trying to say? This is like the sectarian who asked Rava: “You rash people, who put your mouths before your ears”—you put speech before hearing. First hear what the merchandise is and then agree; why are you agreeing before you hear what it’s about? There is an essential difference here; there is a very important principle behind these midrashim.
The gentiles, when they came, weighed the matter. Whether to accept the Torah—none of this literally happened, but this aggadah is coming to say something. Yes? So when the gentiles weigh the issue of whether to accept the Torah or not, what are they weighing? Does it sound reasonable to me? Is it right? Is it suitable? Do I think it’s correct? Okay? And if not, then they don’t accept it. The Jews accept it blank. They didn’t weigh what is written in Jewish law. It may contradict what you think or what you want, or not—they didn’t weigh it. Why not? Because these are two different kinds of commitment to a normative system. You can be committed to a normative system by being committed to each and every value within it. You simply examine each one of them, and after I reach the conclusion that they all look right to me, then I’m committed to all of them. By the way, that’s what happens in the realm of morality. Right? I’m not committed to morality in general and then let’s see what morality says. I’m committed to each moral imperative, and then I call all these things moral imperatives. Here it’s clear that I identify with each one separately. I identify with the value of life, I identify with property, respect for property, the ownership of another person, and so on. In other words, each of these things I identify with separately. That is one type of taking on commitment to a normative system.
There is another type, and I call this the principle of a particular value. The principle of a particular value means that each value I accept individually, because it seems right to me. Right, suitable for me, whatever—each person according to his own judgment. Okay? There is also the principle of a sweeping value. What is a sweeping value principle? I accept whatever the Holy One, blessed be He, commands me, without checking what He is going to command. Why? For example, because I trust the commander. I trust the Holy One, blessed be He. My commitment is to the Holy One, blessed be He, no matter what He commands. Okay? Therefore, what difference does it make what He commands? He can command me to stand on one leg, command me to steal, command me to keep the Sabbath, desecrate the Sabbath, keep Tuesday, desecrate Wednesday—it doesn’t matter. In other words, I accept it not because I agree with the content of the things. That’s not the point. I accept it because I am committed to the source of those things. Right? There is authority to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, and it is not conditioned on the question of what the Holy One, blessed be He, commands. That is another kind of accepting value.
Okay? Now, if I look at two systems and I want to know whether I can be committed to both of them—okay?—then it depends a lot. If I accept, say, system A and system B: if I accepted system A in a particular way, meaning every value within that system appeals to me and I am committed to it, and system B too I accepted in a particular way, then it can’t be. I cannot accept two particular systems that include conflicting values. One tells me to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save life, and the other tells me to save life too—not to save life, rather to keep the Sabbath. I can’t—I mean, you can’t accept two contradictory value systems if the value principle is particular. Because if I accepted that desecrating the Sabbath—that saving a life overrides the Sabbath—seems right to me, because after all I checked each of the values individually, then it seems right to me. So how can it be that when I checked the second system individually, it seemed right to me not to desecrate the Sabbath? That can’t be. It’s a frontal collision, right?
But if the value principle is a sweeping principle—I accept this system because I am committed to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, and I accept morality because each of the values there seems right and binding to me, which is particular; one sweeping and one particular, or two sweeping ones, okay?—then there is no impediment at all to there being a clash. Suppose the Holy One, blessed be He, tells me to kill an Amalekite infant, and morally I reached the conclusion that it is forbidden to kill Amalekite infants—or any other infants, doesn’t matter—particularly, yes? Is it impossible that I would be committed to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He? Of course it’s possible. I’m committed to everything He says. Among other things, I discovered, to my surprise and sorrow, that He also says to kill Amalekite infants. So from a religious point of view I’m obligated to kill them; from a moral point of view I’m forbidden to kill them. But there is no principled impediment to being in that state. Why? Because I didn’t examine the values included in Jewish law individually. I’m committed to them because of “we will do and we will hear,” unlike the gentiles who said, wait, what’s written there—let’s see. I want to know each thing that’s written, and then I’ll see whether I’m committed to the system or not. They wanted to accept it on the basis of particular acceptance. In other words, we’ll check each clause, and if everything suits us, then all is well. When you accept it sweepingly, you can discover surprises—that suddenly within this system of commands you discover something that doesn’t sound logical, reasonable, moral, whatever. Okay?
You are committed to the law, okay? Suddenly the law tells you to desecrate the Sabbath, fine? Is that a contradiction? Am I not committed to the law? I am completely committed to it. But I am also committed to Jewish law, which contradicts it—desecrating the Sabbath. So now I am in a clash between commitment to the law and commitment to Jewish law. But this clash is a conflict; it is not a contradiction. Why? Because my commitment to the law is a commitment based on a sweeping value principle, not a particular one. I am committed to the law not because all the laws are just and proper and moral. I’m committed to the law because there is some agreement that this is our system, and we are committed to what the legislative institution determines. And its specific determinations may contradict my beliefs or my other commitments—moral, religious, guild-related, whatever. Therefore, if at least one of the two sides is based on sweeping acceptance and not particular acceptance, then the clash is possible. If both sides rest on particular acceptance, the clash is impossible.
Now, for example, when I talk about the question of a clash between Jewish law and state, democracy, law—whatever, call it what you want—what do people always do in such a case? There are those who scrupulously emphasize: we are only for Jewish law. Even if we are committed to state law, that is only because Jewish law says I need to be committed to state law. But they are not willing to accept commitment to state law in an independent way. And there are others who say, what are you talking about, the law is above all; if it contradicts Jewish law, then it contradicts Jewish law—and of course someone who isn’t committed to Jewish law will say that, and that’s fine. What I’m saying is: you don’t need to arrive at either of those two views. They’re not necessary. I’m committed to both. And where there is a clash, I am in conflict and I need to decide what prevails. That’s another discussion; I don’t care right now what answer I’ll find there. But the very existence of double commitment has nothing contradictory in it. I am committed to democracy and I am committed to the values of Jewish law, for example.
Do I think—questions, so you can see that this isn’t trivial, even though to me it sounds completely trivial—but it’s not trivial because people don’t think this way. For example, they ask you: should mixed prayer at the Western Wall be allowed? So let’s say that according to Jewish law it is forbidden. That’s not true, that it’s forbidden, but let’s say it is forbidden. So what? From the standpoint of democratic values, yes—you should allow it. Now you ask me: but I’m a religious person, I’m committed to Jewish law. True, I’m also committed to democracy. Now when there is a clash between the two, that’s a clash. It may be that this prevails; it may be that that prevails. You can argue about it. But this double commitment itself has no contradiction in it. Suddenly people say to me: do you think the state should give equal rights to same-sex couples? Obviously yes. Obviously yes. Even though they are probably sinners, unless they refrain from forbidden acts. But usually that is probably not the case. So they are sinners. So what? But from the standpoint of democratic values—equality—there is a value of equality, and a state should give equal treatment to all its citizens, and leave their outlooks to themselves. I don’t want the state going into people’s innards and imposing religious values on them. Not even values that I myself like. Doesn’t matter. I’m against it. If the state does that, I will fight against it. Even though in terms of the values themselves I’m in favor of them. But if the state does it, I’ll oppose it, because I’m also committed to democracy just as I am committed to Jewish law.
[Speaker C] It’s a question of intensity—the intensity of one of the sides.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. So I said: there is a conflict here. How do you decide the conflict? That’s another discussion. So you can carry on an additional argument. But that’s a different discussion. First of all I want us to agree that it is a conflict, not a contradiction. Meaning, I can be found committed to these two systems. Double commitment. There is no contradiction in that, no problem in that. Therefore—and about this one can argue—but it is a coherent position, a legitimate position, to say that in certain cases, such and such, the democratic value prevails over the halakhic / of Jewish law value. And I will fight for your right to be a sinner. A religious sinner. Not a democratic sinner like Rousseau, yes? But a religious sinner. Yes, I will fight for your right to be a sinner.
Now, you can bring utilitarian arguments for this, like: you know, if the state starts imposing values, then you don’t always know what values it will impose. Sometimes it will impose values you like; sometimes it will impose on you things you don’t want to do. Therefore it’s better to leave them outside the game. And that is a utilitarian consideration. But I’m talking here about a more essential consideration. I am committed to democracy just as I am committed to Jewish law. Not because I’m afraid of something. I really am committed to it. I think equal treatment should be given to every citizen—really, that is one of my values. The Holy One, blessed be He, expects that of me. And at the same time He forbids homosexuality from the halakhic standpoint. So morally it’s one way, and halakhically it’s another way. What do I do now in practice? Conflict. I need to decide what prevails.
In other words, these things have many implications that, if you hear them without the background, sound surprising: that a religious person would fight for people’s right to desecrate the Sabbath, or to establish a same-sex household, or various things of that sort, and against the state imposing itself on them. So immediately people will say, what are you, Reform? Aren’t you committed to Jewish law? This is simply a logical misunderstanding. It’s not true. I am committed to Jewish law, and I am committed to additional values—democracy, morality, and so on; equality is one of them. And now I’m in conflict. In this particular conflict I decide in favor of equality. Someone else may say: I too am in conflict, and I decide in favor of the halakhic value. Fine, legitimate; you can carry on that argument. But you cannot say that a decision of that sort is illegitimate, or that it indicates that the person who made it is not committed to Jewish law. Not true, absolutely not true. Okay?
[Speaker B] A lesson on an example that interested me—transportation on the Sabbath, public transportation on the Sabbath. It’s democratic, but on the other hand there’s the public—not only is there the religious public, the religious public also pays for it through its taxes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Everything the state does, the public pays for through its taxes. Also for the fact that you study here in the kollel, secular citizens pay through their taxes.
[Speaker B] True, but they’re imposing on me a value that I—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And you are imposing on them a value they don’t want. That’s how a state functions. A state collects—after all, the whole meaning of a state is to take money from a person for purposes he would not want to give it for. Because for purposes he would want to give it for, he would give it even without the state. The state’s role is always to take money and put it in places you don’t want it to be. That is the state’s role.
[Speaker B] So that’s the democratic part. The question is what the ruling is.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s already another discussion—what the ruling is. You really do understand that this is a possible view; there is no problem with it. In the end, you have to make decisions. Regarding public transportation on the Sabbath there are also harder problems, because if it operates on the Sabbath, then by tomorrow morning they won’t hire religious people to work in Egged, or Dan, or all those companies—which really is already a problem. So that’s a consideration you have to think more carefully about. But okay, to think what to do with it does not automatically mean that okay, then no. No. It’s a complex question, and you have to decide what to do with it. Okay? But on the principled level, in terms of the Sabbath desecration involved, in my view that wouldn’t be a consideration I’d take into account at all. It is obvious that public transportation should operate on the Sabbath. The second consideration, which is ostensibly self-interested, not spiritual and not that—precisely that is, in my view, the more important consideration. Because that is a consideration that operates within the democratic framework, and it basically says: look, I also need to make a living, not just you. That is a democratic value, not a religious value. So therefore I say: true, what prevents me from making a living if they work on the Sabbath is a religious value. Fine. But still, I live here, and I have the right to preserve my values, and there still has to be some way to enable me to make a living and preserve my values. So I think that is a consideration that can be accepted within a democratic framework.
But when you conduct the argument on the plane of religion versus state, you are shooting yourself in the foot. You are shooting yourself in the foot because most people basically prefer the state over religion. Only because of coalition politics do we somehow manage to preserve this pathological situation, but in the public it has no hold whatsoever. Okay? And in the end, in the end, you pay prices for these things. In my opinion it’s a mistake to conduct the argument on that plane. On the democratic plane, run all the public transportation you want on the Sabbath. Everything is fine; I’m fighting so that you can do it. I will fight against anyone who tries to stop it. Okay? But there are the interests of the religious public, who need to make a living. Okay. What?
[Speaker C] This is really an issue, for example regarding terrorists—a Jewish Israeli terrorist. Okay. You’re not allowed to murder him. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You mean a Jew. What do you mean, Israeli?
[Speaker C] Also a Jew. Well?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Every wild man out on the hills. So? You have to kill them. What do you mean? Not necessarily. Like any terrorist—what’s the difference? What difference does it make whether he’s a Jew or not a Jew? If he is dangerous, you have to kill him. What? No sentimentality.
[Speaker C] On this I disagree with you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But this, by the way, has nothing to do with Jewish law versus democracy. What does it have to do with that? This is the law of a pursuer. According to Jewish law you have to kill him. He is a pursuer.
[Speaker C] The law of the pursuer says that he preserved the territory of—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, don’t drag me into situations where if they’re right—
[Speaker C] right—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] then they’re right; the terrorists too, if they’re right then they’re right. What does that have to do with anything? You’re talking to me about Jewish terrorists. A terrorist is someone who is not right. No—if you mean someone defending himself, of course I won’t kill him; he’s defending himself, he has a right to defend himself. What kind of question is that? But it’s the same for an Arab. An Arab too, if he’s defending himself, I won’t kill him because he has a right to defend himself. There will be no difference here between a Jew and an Arab. The difference is the question whether the situation is justified or not—that’s the question. If the situation is justified, then he is not a pursuer. If it is not justified, then he is a pursuer and then you kill him. That’s all. Those people throwing stones out there on the hills, all those guys with sidelocks—you should shoot them, unequivocally. Fine, by the law of a pursuer. Halakhically I have to shoot them, not democratically—halakhically. He threw a stone, you want—
[Speaker C] No—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A stone that endangers life, throwing a stone at cars. Endangers what? The passenger in the car, of course. Throwing a stone at a car—someone is driving in the car. And when Arabs do that, everyone says it’s danger to life, you have to shoot them, right? Where did the danger to life disappear to when Jews do it to an Arab vehicle?
[Speaker C] Let’s say, for example, a group of Arabs came and he threw stones at them without a car, just like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. If it endangers life, you have to kill him.
[Speaker C] Endangers whose life?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Arabs’ life. You have to kill him.
[Speaker C] If they came to attack you—you’re going back to the same argument.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so if they came to attack me then it’s justified; I’m not talking about that. I’m talking—you were talking about terrorists. Terrorists are someone who kills unjustifiably. If he kills unjustifiably, you have to shoot him, and it doesn’t matter whether he is a Jew or an Arab. If it is justified, you must not shoot him, whether he is a Jew or an Arab. Again, there is no difference. There is no difference between Jews and Arabs, none at all. Not halakhically, not democratically, and not for any other reason.
Okay, now I want to move into a topic that approaches things from a slightly different angle, something we already saw. I want to go back for a moment to the objectivity of values, and the fact that we cannot justify them. I now want to sharpen further the fact—and I mentioned this a bit in one of the first lectures—that not only can we not justify them, we of course also do not determine them. They are a given. And here I want to present this issue through a claim I already mentioned in one of the first lectures. If you remember, I spoke about Ariel Elón, yes, the son of Justice Menachem Elon, who is basically no longer religious—he’s a kind of secular preacher, that is, a secular homilist—and he often talks about the difference between a rabbinic Jew and a sovereign Jew. A rabbinic Jew is a Jew for whom the rabbis determine what is right, his values; a sovereign Jew is a Jew who determines for himself his values—or, more generally, a sovereign person and a rabbinic person. And of course the framework is that rabbinic is bad and sovereign is good; yes, that’s clear. It’s basically a criticism of the religious conception or religious conduct.
Now this connects to the point I want to sharpen now—the difference between freedom and liberty. Rabbi Yehuda Halevi writes in his famous poem called “Slaves of Time”: “Slaves of time are slaves of slaves; only the servant of God is truly free. Therefore, when every person seeks his portion, my soul says: the Lord is my portion.” Fine, that’s the epigram. What does it mean, “Slaves of time are slaves of slaves, and only the servant of God is free”? Usually when I hear this, I get a fever. Why? Because it sounds like some Orwellian statement, yes? You know George Orwell’s 1984? One of the slogans there is: ignorance is strength, slavery is freedom, war is peace—or whatever, he has a series of aphorisms like that. Here I have it: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” Okay? Which of course is a parody of communist rule. Communist rule essentially tried, through brainwashing, to plant such mantras in people’s heads and persuade them that their lives were the happiest and that the combines on their collective farms reached output greater than those despicable American capitalists—when of course the truth was exactly the opposite, and so on. But if you repeat something enough times, if they numb your brain, then in the end their hope is that eventually you’ll be convinced too.
Okay, so Orwell presented it through “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” In other words, turn everything upside down, but repeat it, and in the end it will sink in. And the feeling I get when I see this poem of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi is the same feeling. You tell me stories that “slaves of time are slaves of slaves; only the servant of God is free.” What freedom? What kind of freedom? The servant of God is restricted in every step he takes. All the time you have to see what’s permitted, what’s forbidden; they decide for you—yes, the rabbinic person as opposed to the sovereign one. So all the time they decide for you what is permitted and what is forbidden at every step. You can’t breathe.
Once Aharon Barak, arguing in favor of judicial imperialism, basically claimed that even the right to breathe is a right granted by law. And he had an argument with Menachem Elon about this. The argument was whether “the whole earth is full of law.” Aharon Barak argued yes. Everything is justiciable. The whole earth is full of law. Now, there are things in which the law will decide not to intervene, but there are no things outside the domain of law. In other words, law can govern everything. And Menachem Elon says, what are you talking about? So the fact that I breathe—does the law permit me or not permit me to breathe? That’s a natural right; it has nothing to do with law at all. That’s obvious. Not turning on the pump—that’s obvious, that’s not law, it just happens biologically. But my right to breathe, my right to activate the pump—what does that have to do with law? So the claim is that basically everything is justiciable, yes? Everything. So Jewish law, basically—there is an article by Yedidia Stern about this. He has a booklet that came out from the Israel Democracy Institute, with an article that basically discusses where Jewish law stands on this. Does Jewish law see itself as reaching into all areas of life? Meaning, does it have the right to determine everything. Not that it makes use of that right—meaning there are things it leaves open. You can eat a roll, you can eat bread, it doesn’t matter. Jewish law doesn’t intervene in that decision. But in principle it could have forbidden that too. In other words, it’s not a matter of principled inaccessibility; rather, Jewish law simply does not make use of the rights it has to intervene in your life. Yes, so is the whole earth full of Jewish law or not? He discusses there whether yes or no, and defines several kinds, several levels of accessibility, and so on.
In any case, for our purposes: how can one say that only the servant of God is free? It sounds like an Orwellian mantra. They explain to us: I constantly have to think at every step whether something is permitted or forbidden, I can’t breathe. No, no—only the servant of God is free. You are the freest person there is. The freest person there is? I’m constantly in chains. Yes, it really is an Orwellian statement.
Rabbi Kook addresses this question in several places, but for example in Olat Re’iyah, volume two, he writes: “The matzah is a remembrance of freedom, whose foundation is the recognition that every way of God as Torah is a faithful offspring directed according to the truth of our general naturalness, from the standpoint of the totality of Knesset Yisrael”—from the standpoint of the totality of the Jewish people. “Therefore true freedom is to develop according to the inner nature without the admixture of foreign elements that oppress.” Basically the claim is that the whole Torah is really the natural way of conduct. It is what we truly want. Torah is not something imposed on us from outside; rather, Torah reveals our authentic inner will.
And then he continues: “This is indeed from the standpoint of the essence of the soul’s nature, but there are also drosses that have attached themselves to us, and they do not allow the pure Israelite nature to emerge into actuality.” Why do we feel chained? What I said before. Because the will we feel is not really our authentic will. There are drosses mixed in there that somehow distort us, and therefore we have some sense that our inner will is in conflict, in struggle, against the will of Torah. But no—the will of Torah is exactly what we want from within; there are just drosses. “We compel him until he says, ‘I want to’”—right. Maybe we’ll get to that and comment on it later as well. “And they do not allow the pure Israelite nature to emerge into actuality; therefore from their side we need also to accept the pleasant servitude, the service of a servant to the Lord God of Israel, who formed me from the womb to serve Him”—which is a capacity we also acquired in the servitude of Egypt. Therefore we need to relate to servitude to the Holy One, blessed be He, as though it is not servitude, even though we feel that it is servitude. Why? Because this is illusory servitude. It is a servitude whose purpose is to cleanse away the drosses, to allow our authentic will to come out, and then suddenly the dissonances will disappear. Because then everything will actually fit.
And that is what he says: “Indeed, after all the bad aspects of servitude are removed from us, its beautiful side will remain, by means of which a person can lovingly bear even something against his will and inclination—which is the foundation of the bitter herb.” This is in the context of Passover. “To accept with love the bitterness of life, when one knows that before him stands a higher and morally exalted purpose; therefore the bitter herb comes after the matzah.” The matzah is freedom, the bitter herb is servitude, and that is basically what he is trying to describe.
So what is really the subtext? His subtext is that only the servant of God is free. True freedom is to serve God, because every time we feel that this is not what we want, it is simply because we are not aware of what we really want. The drosses play a role here, not the authentic will. And again, when I hear this, my feeling is even worse than with Rabbi Yehuda Halevi. Once again Orwell has come back to life here. What are you telling me stories for? What are you basically saying to me? Look, what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants—against which I rebel—no, no, that’s just the drosses. What you really want is exactly what the Torah says. The communists also said that. What you really want is to be slaves of slaves. That is what you really want; that is true freedom.
[Speaker C] The evil inclination—that’s something familiar to us. Okay, and this is basically an introduction.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s not talking about the evil inclination. I’m talking about the drosses. No, no. For example, I’m talking about a case where the good inclination clashes with the Torah, not the evil inclination. The good inclination?
[Speaker C] Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For example, in a place where they tell me not to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a gentile. Why do I feel uncomfortable with that halakhic statement? Because of my good inclination, not because of the evil inclination. It’s not self-interest; it’s the value of life. What do you mean? How can you leave a person to die? Or not separate a woman from her priestly husband if she was raped? The good inclination clashes with the Torah, not the evil inclination. And they tell me, no, no, this is true morality; this is what you really want. Yes, basically with Rabbi Kook too there is an identification between Torah—we talked about this on Sunday—there is also an identification between Jewish law and morality. And the same thing applies to this supposedly servile feeling—it’s just dross. The authentic will is completely aligned with the command of the Torah, yes? It is completely identified with, merged with, the command of the Torah. Okay, and again, that’s just Orwell for advanced students. What are you telling me stories for? Anyone who enslaves me can say to me, no, no, deep inside I know that this is really what you want.
As they always say: women want to study Torah? No, no, inside that’s just distortion, that’s dross. What you really want deep down is to stay home and cook, not study Torah. That is your true will. Yes, it’s a kind of paternalism that tells a person what he really wants, when what you are actually telling him is: be quiet and keep doing what I tell you.
[Speaker C] And is that true in every area? Maybe, maybe not. You see that Sarah, for example, was in the tent. “Where is your wife?” I didn’t understand. “Where is your wife?” “Your wife is in the tent.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. So what? People there were messed up—so what?
[Speaker C] Maybe that was the woman’s freedom there?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe yes and maybe no, but women said no. So do you want to tell them in a paternalistic way: no, no, that’s your dross. You don’t understand what you really want. I’ll tell you what you really want. What you want is to stay home, knit and cook and take care of the children. You don’t want to study Torah; you don’t want to study other things.
[Speaker C] Wait, wait, here there is a situation where the women really are the judges here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, wait, I didn’t take that into account.
[Speaker C] Among the men that never happened.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What are you saying? It never happened? Let’s go on a short tour of the rabbinical courts, where only men sit, right? In the rabbinical courts? Yes, the rabbis. They look much worse than the civil courts, much worse. There’s no comparison at all. And only men sit there—and not just men, but Torah scholars, rabbis.
[Speaker C] You got to the right point—that sometimes not by chance—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A very right point, but it’s not by chance. These are Orwellian folk tales, what you’re selling me here.
[Speaker C] With the sins, this externalized soul. Yes, exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s exactly that Orwellian folk tale. You’re trying to persuade me of something that even you know is not true.
[Speaker B] As if there is a case where, say, a person is really, really addicted to sugar, he wants to stop, he truly wants—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s something else. I’m not claiming there can’t be such a situation. Of course there can be a situation where what you feel you want is not what you really want. I didn’t claim that can’t happen. What I claimed is that this is not a magic solution for every place where I feel dissonance. Every time you come to impose something on me and I say, wait, that’s not what I want, then you explain to me: no, no, really deep inside that’s what you want. Leave me with what I want. Even if I crave sugar, I myself know that I don’t want the sugar. You don’t have to tell me that. In other words, when you tell me that—that’s the problem. Not because dissonance can’t exist. Of course it can. Many times a person is in a situation where he feels he wants one thing, and deep inside that isn’t true; he really wants something else, or sometimes he’s not even aware of it, sometimes he is aware of it, doesn’t matter. Of course. But this attitude as though it’s the ultimate instrument—that is, if you feel that I’m bothering you, then actually you want to be my slave; that is what you really want. The fact that you feel you don’t want it—you don’t know how to feel; I’ll tell you what you feel. It’s this irritating paternalism. So that’s exactly statements of that type, okay?
In the end I’ll qualify this—it’s fine, I also have an explanation. I won’t leave it with criticism of them, although that wouldn’t bother me either, but in this case I agree; it just needs a bit of explanation. The claim is that the simple feeling is that servitude to the Holy One, blessed be He, is servitude in every respect. It is full-fledged servitude. Don’t tell me that this is freedom, that only the servant of God is free. Freedom it is not. You can tell me it’s the right thing, you can tell me it’s the thing that repairs the world, you can tell me whatever you want—say whatever you want. But don’t tell me it’s freedom. That it is not. Okay, there is a limit to word games.
Now, one thing I nevertheless do want to put on the table here: both Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Yehuda Halevi reveal one thing—that freedom is a value. Why are they forced to say these problematic things? Because they too understand that freedom is a value. And if the servant of God is not free, they see that as some kind of theological problem. So they offer some kind of solution, which maybe I don’t accept, but let’s leave that for a moment. But the very need to make this move tells us that on this point they do accept that freedom is a good thing—that is, that a good thing ought to be bound up with freedom. Okay? Good.
So now I want to move one step further. Okay, now I want to try to define the concept of freedom. Freedom, in its simple definition, is the absence of constraints. Right? If I have no constraints, then I am free. There is no person who has no constraints at all, but the degree of freedom depends on the number of constraints. A small number of constraints means a lot of freedom. A large number of constraints means little freedom, right? Whoever has fewer constraints on him is freer. Fine? In other words, freedom depends on the number of constraints.
Now obviously, no one is completely free. I can’t fly, for example. I have constraints. I can’t memorize the entire Talmud by heart in an hour. Right? That too is a constraint. In other words, we have all kinds of built-in constraints. That only means that freedom is never complete. But still, conceptually, freedom means the absence of constraints. Yes? Or the amount of freedom is one over the amount of constraint. Fine? That is the claim. When constraints mean everything that is not under my control. Right? That’s what constraints are called. So constraints are those things that do not depend on me; they are the circumstances within which I act, which are imposed on me. Okay? Therefore, from the determinist’s point of view, for example, there is no freedom at all, because the determinist claims that everything I do is basically forced on me; nothing is in my hands. Yes? The compatibilist, for example, says no, what I decide is what is called being free, and I am the sum total of my systems—that’s me. So once I decided it, that is called freedom. But that’s just word games. In the end, you do what the internal and external circumstances dictate to you.
That is the first datum—a definition of freedom. Fine? Freedom means the absence of constraints, or the amount of freedom is one over the amount of constraints. Now, second point. Today it is accepted—what I highlighted earlier in Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and Rabbi Kook—today it is accepted to relate to freedom as a value. Freedom is a value. People fight for freedom, right? They have… freedom is a value. Okay? But this view, that freedom is a value, is really puzzling. Because freedom is simply the absence of constraints. It’s a datum, not a value. How many constraints I have—which don’t depend on me, yes?—however many constraints I have, I have; however many I don’t, I don’t. That determines my degree of freedom. In what sense is freedom a value? Values are things for the sake of which I act; they are things that tell me what is right and what is not right. But the amount of constraints is a fact, not a value. It is the amount of constraints imposed on me. You have a different amount—not important. How is that related to value? Why would such a thing be a value? I’ll tell you why people get confused about this matter.
[Speaker D] I claim that not adding constraints to someone else.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. In other words, what confuses people is that denying freedom is morally wrong. Adding constraints to a person when it is unjustified, yes, is an immoral act. Okay? Therefore a feeling is created that freedom is a value, because after all depriving someone of it is an immoral act. But that’s a mistake. A logical mistake. Is possessing money a value? No. Whatever money I have, I have, right? It’s a fact. Okay? It’s not morally problematic—it’s what I have. Taking someone’s money from him without permission is a wrongful act. In other words, the fact that depriving someone of something is a wrongful act does not mean that the thing itself is a value. So what is it? How would you define money? An asset. Right? Money is an asset. When you deprive me of my asset, you have committed a wrongful act. Okay? Therefore, the fact that taking away someone’s freedom is a wrongful act means that freedom is an asset, not that freedom is a value. And to deprive someone of his asset without justification is a wrongful act. Right? That is certainly true. But freedom is not a value. I don’t think there is any interest in acting so as to be in a state where fewer constraints are imposed on me—suppose that were somehow in our hands. No. If constraints are imposed on me like that, that’s fine. There are good constraints and bad constraints, but the very fact that there are constraints is a fact; it is a neutral state. It could be good, it could be—it is neither good nor bad. It is simply the fact. Therefore freedom is not a value. It is simply a conceptual mistake to think freedom is a value. It is not a moral dispute. It’s not a dispute where we have an argument about values. No. It’s a categorical mistake to think that freedom is a value. Freedom is a fact.
[Speaker E] Property rights too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A right or an asset, yes. A right—well, right or asset, for me it’s the same thing. To violate someone’s rights is a wrongful thing. The fact that he has rights is not a value; it’s simply that he has those rights.
[Speaker E] And preserving the right can’t be a value?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does that mean? Not to violate! What is preservation? Not to violate a right! Yes, so that’s a negative value. It’s a prohibition derived from a positive command. Right, a prohibition derived from a positive command means that when you do it, you don’t have a positive commandment, but if you don’t do it, then you have a prohibition. Okay? So exactly. To deny freedom is a wrongful act. But acting on behalf of freedom is not a value. If you want to, act; if you don’t want to, don’t act—but that’s your business, that’s a matter of taste. Okay? Therefore the claim is that freedom is an asset, and depriving someone of it is a wrongful act in the moral sense. Okay? Now I’m moving to the other side of the coin. I want to define liberty. What is liberty? And again, leave the dictionary out of it. I don’t care how the dictionary defines freedom and how it defines liberty. I’m defining it for the sake of our discussion. I just want to say that there are two different concepts here. One I call freedom, the other I call liberty. As far as I’m concerned, switch the names—it really doesn’t matter. Okay? But it’s still important to me to distinguish between them. Liberty is a state in which I act autonomously within a given system of constraints. Right? I’m given certain constraints, okay? To the extent that I succeed in acting autonomously, in expressing myself and my values within those constraints, I am more free in the sense of liberty. I have more liberty. Someone else who succeeds less at this is less free in that sense. Someone else acts in an even less autonomous way. Therefore liberty too is not a binary concept. There are different levels of liberty in a person. But, yes, for example—it doesn’t matter—so there are different levels of liberty, and there are different levels of freedom. What is the relationship between these two concepts? Very often people use these terms synonymously, interchangeably. Right? Freedom, liberty—synonyms. Again, I don’t care; my claim is not lexical. I’m not talking here about synonymous concepts, synonymous terms. They’re actually opposites, not just not synonymous. A free person cannot be a person of liberty. Because a person of liberty is defined as someone who conducts himself autonomously within a given system of constraints. But a free person has no constraints. Therefore, on the principled level, a free person—completely free, right, without constraints—cannot be a person of liberty. More than that: the more constraints there are on you, the greater, at least potentially, your ability to be a person of liberty, or to be more of one. Right? Maybe the best example of this is Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. And there he describes—the first part of the book, before he gets into logotherapy—the first part of the book describes the concentration camps. Logotherapy, right, that’s Viktor Frankl’s psychological method. It basically means healing a person by helping him find meaning in life. Logos—right, to understand your life, to understand the meaning of your life. Therapy. Logotherapy is basically doing therapy by means of… There are claims that the basic force—some defined him as the fourth Viennese psychologist. There are three famous ones: Adler, Jung, and Freud, I think. Freud said what drives a person is sex, eros, right? The second is honor, and the third—I don’t remember anymore what. And he claims that what drives a person is meaning. In other words, what causes all the problems is that you don’t find meaning in your life, and the way to get you out of that is to try to help you find meaning in your life. Okay? That’s basically the fundamental thesis. Now that’s the second half of the book, where he talks about his theory. Afterward he survived the death camps and really developed the theory and treated people that way and so on. But the book is about his experiences; the first part of the book is about his experiences in the camp, in the concentration camp. Okay? And there he describes all kinds of people and all kinds of situations in which you see that people acted as people of liberty in a world where the amount of constraint on them was astronomical. That is, they couldn’t—you can’t do anything. You’re just a beaten dog. In other words, every creature passing by can do to you whatever it wants, tell you to do whatever it decides—nothing is in your hands. And even within such a freedomless system, there were people who acted like people of liberty in the highest sense. People who gave—I don’t know—a quarter of the slice of bread they got that day to someone who was sick and needed to eat something more—those are people who did something unbelievable in that context. In our context, giving a quarter of a slice of bread is nonsense, what difference does it make. In other words, the fact that you are inside a system devoid of freedom—that is, with a very small measure of freedom—actually gives much greater meaning to your liberty. The more you are a person of liberty—in other words, the concepts of freedom and liberty are not only not synonymous, they are opposite, contradictory concepts. The more freedom you have, the less chance you have of being a person of liberty. If you are completely free, you cannot be a person of liberty. The less freedom you have, the more possibility you have of being a person of liberty. Your liberty has more meaning. Okay?
[Speaker E] Isn’t the other side the opposite? What? The other side. Someone who isn’t free also isn’t a person of liberty.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the extreme, when he’s totally not free, then he has no options, so how can he? All he can do is maybe decide how to relate. That still remains yours. Inwardly, inwardly—how you relate to what’s happening. But nothing else, like Hasdai Crescas, right, who says that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, but we can still decide how to relate to what happens to us. Not what we will do, but how we relate to what we are forced to do. Okay? What? If that’s… Yes, it’s contradictory—not only that… It’s a contradictory statement; it’s not a complete paradox. Because my attitude is also an event in the world, so does the Holy One, blessed be He, not know that? How I will relate? Meaning, if what the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance dictates what will happen, then it also dictates my attitude, because after all He is supposed to know that too. And that too is an event in the world—how I relate to something. I don’t see what he gains there. Okay, never mind, but for our purposes, the claim is that people who are in a state devoid of freedom can be more free in the sense of liberty. Okay? There is—there was, I don’t know if still—a supervisor in the Ministry of Education, Rahamim Melamed-Cohen. A Jew who came down with ALS in 1999, and at least up until five or six years ago he was still active. He couldn’t move anything anymore except, I think, his eyelids, or one of them. I don’t remember. That’s it. The rest of his body was completely paralyzed. He wrote books and he… gave lectures. Unbelievable. Created things—an amazing man. Truly an amazing man. Wait, wait—just with his eyelids. He was like Hawking. In other words, there’s scanning—he blinked three times for the letter G. Then there are machines that write what he’s, you know, saying, and he wrote books like that. There are books you can buy; they were published. Who—what’s his name? Rahamim Melamed-Cohen. About his experiences as a supervisor, as a teacher—I don’t remember exactly. I read at least one of his books. And he has several. And he wrote all of them during that period, only after he already had ALS.
[Speaker C] And Hawking the same way, Stephen Hawking, also the same thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now, that is exactly an expression of this—of a person who is at an almost zero level of freedom. Rahamim Melamed-Cohen. That is exactly the situation, exactly the expression of a situation in which a person is in a completely freedomless condition, and there everything he does expresses liberty in perhaps the purest, most sublime form possible—precisely because he has no freedom. Okay? Now, I want to make a comparison between freedom and liberty. I think I’ve already said almost everything, but this will organize the picture. We saw that freedom is an asset, right? Not a value. It’s an asset. To deprive someone of freedom is an immoral act. To deprive—without justification, right?—is an immoral act. Liberty is not a fact. Liberty depends on you. Freedom does not depend on you; the constraints are everything that doesn’t depend on you. The degree of your freedom does not depend on you. Liberty depends only on you. The constraints are some kind of framework within which you behave, but what you do within those constraints depends only on you. So on the one hand, liberty is certainly a value—to behave autonomously—and not an asset like freedom. And at the same time, if someone were to take your liberty from you—it’s impossible. It’s impossible to take liberty from a person. In the end, the amount of freedom left to you depends on the circumstances, but what you do within the amount of freedom left to you—that is your liberty, and that depends only on you. Like in the concentration camps, right, what I mentioned before. In other words, the Nazis could not take from people their liberty. It is much harder to be a person of liberty when there is no freedom, obviously. But in the end, that is only your decision. Okay? So it turns out that freedom and liberty are really opposites. Freedom is an asset and not a value, and liberty is a value and not an asset.
[Speaker C] The name of that book, by—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By Rahamim Melamed-Cohen?
[Speaker C] No, mine. Viktor Frankl? What was it? Viktor Frankl.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s a book—a very well-known book all over the world, a very— And it—
[Speaker C] He’s right in terms of his personal principle; across the whole philosophy, he’s right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A person without meaning—in the end, happiness really has nothing to do with how much money you have and nothing to do with anything else; it mainly has to do with the question of meaning. If you find meaning in your life, if you know why, then you can bear any how, as they say—those popular sayings, I don’t know who invented them, but it’s true. Okay?
[Speaker C] I think I know someone who retired and died earlier because he didn’t find himself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And in the end a person—
[Speaker C] He didn’t find himself here, didn’t find himself there, didn’t find himself there—and however you define it, without meaning.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There was no meaning, so—
[Speaker C] He decided that he—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] was closing up shop, returning the equipment, as they say.
[Speaker C] Heaven forbid, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Anyway, so I’m saying: freedom and liberty are two—they are two opposites in the end. It’s not just that they’re not the same; they’re actually opposed. Right, this is basically the difference between liberty and freedom in English. Freedom is freedom, and liberty is liberty. I think I mentioned this parable of the elections in Switzerland and Syria—I think I mentioned it on one of the previous occasions, no? I mean, yes, there are democratic elections. Think about elections in a country, right? The first model is elections in Syria. Okay? In Syria, in the days of Assad the father and Assad the son, it doesn’t matter, it’s always Assad or the Holy Spirit, but it’s always Assad—you enter the polling station completely freely, choose a slip, put it in the ballot box, and whoever gets the majority of slips is elected president of Syria. There’s just one small point: in the polling station there is only one slip. That’s all. But aside from that, completely free, everything’s fine. Free all by yourself, as they say. Okay, now obviously this is a facade of freedom, right? There is no freedom here; it’s completely deterministic. The results are dictated by the circumstances; nothing depends on you. Maybe you don’t feel that if you’re an idiot, but in fact this is determinism, right? It’s not freedom. Now there are elections in Switzerland—that’s the second model. What happens in Switzerland? In Switzerland you enter the polling station, there are several slips, whoever gets the most slips is president of Switzerland and runs the country. Seemingly this is freedom in its purest form, right? Democracy at its best. There’s just one problem: in Switzerland there are no problems. There are no problems in Switzerland. Why should I care who the president is? Draw lots. There just aren’t any problems. Right, no—metaphorical Switzerland; Switzerland has problems, but metaphorical Switzerland is a place with no problems. What does that mean? It means it really makes no difference who the president is. Why should I care who the president is? Draw lots. In a place where there are problems, then it matters whom you chose, because that will determine how he deals with the problems, whether he succeeds or not, what prices we pay, what prices we don’t pay. But in a world where there is no shortage of money, no shortage of security, no shortage of health, no shortage of food, nothing is lacking and nothing threatens anything—why should I care who the president is? Let them do whatever they want, put a monkey or a rabbit there as president, what difference does it make? You don’t run into problems. Only when there are constraints or problems and you have to deal with them do you need to choose between different options for how to deal with the constraints, right? Therefore truly democratic elections are neither in Switzerland nor in Syria, but in countries where you enter the polling station, there are several slips, you choose one of them, whoever gets the majority of slips is president or prime minister—and there are problems to solve that do not depend on you. You don’t choose the problems; they don’t depend on you. There are problems to solve. And if you chose well, then you chose a person who will deal well with the problems, so you will gain, your life will look better. If you chose badly, you chose someone who will not deal well with the problems, and your life will look like garbage. Meaning, here there are costs to your choices. In Switzerland there are no costs, because there is as much money as you want and as much health as you want and as much food as you want, and therefore there is no problem at all; no one is dealing with anything, so nothing depends on whichever choice you make. In a place where there are problems, then your choice has consequences, and those consequences are determined by circumstances that do not depend on you—you do not determine them. Okay, and therefore my claim is that liberty is actually the thing that has value, not freedom. Freedom is Switzerland, right? No constraints, everything is fine. So what significance is there if I choose Van den this one to be president or Van den that one to be president—why should I care?
[Speaker C] But there too, all the daily confrontations, how many? Tens of thousands of slips there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in metaphorical Switzerland. Switzerland has problems, but in metaphorical Switzerland, right? There’s no point at all, right? Nothing. Maybe they run for the honor, I have no idea. It’s just pointless; it has no meaning at all. Fine, put a tomato there as vice president and that’s it—why should I care, what difference does it make? Nothing depends on it. Okay? You could draw lots. So if Syria is determinism, Switzerland is indeterminism. The elections are basically a lottery there, because it has no meaning. Just a lottery, right? You don’t make calculations whether to choose this one or that one; you just toss a coin. There’s no difference between the different candidates. So this is determinism, that is indeterminism. The third model is free choice. There are circumstances that dictate good and bad costs. Within those circumstances you have to act, and if you act autonomously within those circumstances and choose the right choices, then you will improve your condition. Okay, so that is parallel to autonomous behavior, to the behavior of people of liberty, behavior of liberty. So freedom is Switzerland, prison is Syria, and liberty is, let’s say, countries that have problems—we know one or two like that. Okay? Although my feeling is that in Israel there is a fourth state. There’s another state that we haven’t covered in this map. A state in which there are problems, you choose freely—
[Speaker D] And it doesn’t matter—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] who gets elected, he does the same thing. Yes, the options are imaginary. It always reminds me of a story that a friend of a friend of mine, who has since passed away, told me—that his friend took some backpacking trip to Myanmar, Burma, right, Burma back then, today it’s called Myanmar, Myanmar. There are crazy forests there where no human foot has trodden—no person who isn’t a native, right? In short, he got to some little hut village in the middle of the jungle, and to his amazement he sees on the wall a division into lots and lots of boxes, compartments, divided according to continents and countries. Now you’re in a little shack, you don’t know if anyone here even knows how to read and write, so what are they doing here with a post office better than London’s. And you get there, and you can sort by continents and countries, and you put your letter according to where you want it to arrive. Fine. He keeps walking like this, there’s a little window here and the boxes. Right? He comes to the window, and when he wants to buy stamps, he sees the back side of the mailboxes: there’s one big sack there, so all the letters, no matter which box you drop your letter into, end up in the same sack. That’s Israel. That’s the fourth model. You can choose freely among all kinds of options, there are costs and there are circumstances, and it matters very much what we do with those circumstances—but everyone you choose does the same thing. So what difference does it make? That’s the fourth model. Okay, anyway, so for our purposes, the claim is that this isn’t all that far from the truth, in my opinion. Not completely, but it isn’t all that far from the truth. In any case, if I want to return to our subject, what I really want to demonstrate through this parable is the difference between freedom and liberty. Understand that freedom has no value—in Switzerland, the freedom you have has no value. You have freedom, wonderful, life is good, life is great. But there is no value in the moral sense, right? In the human sense, in the fact that you choose freely, choose here, choose there—what difference does it make? Draw lots. You can attribute value only to a state in which the circumstances dictate costs. And then you pay or gain. You chose well or you chose badly. There the fact that you can choose freely, conduct yourself autonomously, has value, has meaning. And if you chose well, then good—the situation is good. If you chose badly, the situation is bad. Whether the situation is economic, whether the situation is ethical—in the analogue, of course, this is talking about the moral situation. But in the parable it’s the condition of a state, not necessarily moral but economic, social, whatever a state needs. So this parable is actually a good example of the fact that only liberty can be a value, and freedom cannot be a value. Freedom is an asset. An act has value only if there are costs attached to it. You choose freely, and each of the choices has costs. Moral costs, right? Whether it is good or bad, costs of one kind or another. Why am I saying this? Because maybe just one more sentence. I started with Ari Elon, right? With the rabbinic person and the sovereign person. What would Ari Elon say about a sovereign person who freely chooses the career of a contract killer? Is that an ideal you would educate toward? I assume not. I assume he too would agree that it isn’t. I haven’t yet spoken with him about it, but I assume he too would agree that it isn’t. Why not? This person legislates his own values; he is a sovereign person, and the value he legislates is to be a contract killer. It pays very nicely—what’s wrong with that? The problem is that it’s bad. Right? That being a contract killer is bad. Who determines that it is bad? If a person’s choices are what determine the values, then what is the problem? Then it’s good—that’s what he chose, so apparently it’s good. If you claim that this is not an optimal model, not an ideal model, that basically means that there is some determination here that does not depend on the person, of what is good and what is bad. A person has the freedom to choose good or to choose bad, obviously. But he cannot choose what the good is and what the bad is. That is given. You can choose whether you go with the good or go with the bad. That is the free choice you have. And in that sense, the distinction he makes between the rabbinic person and the sovereign person is simply a conceptual mistake. There are people who allow themselves to choose to do good or to do bad and not just be dragged along—they choose, they are people of liberty. And there are people who do not; they are dragged along. But neither these nor those can choose what the good is and what the bad is. That is given. Okay? And therefore this is not at all a distinction between a religious person and a secular person, as he thought. There are rabbinic and sovereign religious people, and there are rabbinic and sovereign secular people. There is a secular person who does not conduct himself autonomously, who is dragged along. Fine? And there is a secular person who does conduct himself autonomously—meaning, he chooses to be good, chooses to be bad. Either way, he does not choose what the good is and what the bad is. That is given to him. Rather, he chooses whether to be good or to be bad. That is an autonomous person. Fine—a sovereign person, as he calls it. And the secular person who is dragged along, for whom others determine things—that is the rabbinic secular person. Now religious people are like this too. The Holy One, blessed be He, determines what is permitted and what is forbidden. But even so, there can be a rabbinic person who follows this not because he decided, but because that’s his comfort zone, that’s how he felt. And there is a person who decides to do what the Holy One, blessed be He, said. That is a sovereign person, a sovereign religious person. Does he identify sovereign secular people and rabbinic religious people? No. There is rabbinic and sovereign on the religious side, and rabbinic and sovereign on the secular side, in both places. And the difference between rabbinic and sovereign is not the question of whether you have religious values or not; that only means you have more values, not only moral values but also religious values. The difference is the question of whether you conduct yourself autonomously or not autonomously. The secular person is at most free; he is not a person of liberty, because in his world there are no values that someone legislates for him. Fine? The religious person has values that someone legislated for him, that’s true, but he decides whether to adopt them or not, whether to act according to them or not act according to them. And that is what determines whether he is sovereign or not—not whether he determines what the values are. You too, Ariel Elon, right? You did not determine your own values. You don’t believe in the religious values, so you left them, but because you don’t believe in them, not because you decided they are not values. You did not determine them yourself; rather, you reached the conclusion that they are not correct. And the moral values—you do accept them, and you did not determine them. And therefore I claim that all meaningful acts are always acts done within a given framework that does not depend on me. Only liberty has meaning; freedom has no meaning. Liberty is conducting oneself autonomously within a given framework that does not depend on me. Okay? Just one sentence to close the circle: I think that both Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Yehuda Halevi meant liberty and not freedom. “Only the servant of God is truly free”—not “only the servant of God is truly free from constraints.” You are not free; you have many constraints on you. But only if you are a servant of God can you be a person of liberty. And that I still need to explain—why—but I just want to close the circle so that it doesn’t remain hanging. In terms of the words? No, I said freedom and liberty are his terms.
[Speaker D] No, that really is what you want; it’s less the idea.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I think not. I’ll explain a bit—I’ll try to explain at some point. Okay, let’s stop here.
[Speaker D] “There is no free person except one who engages in Torah”—that’s from the Mishnah, from the Talmud, from the source—it’s the same thing.