Disagreement and Truth – Lesson 4

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They’re not the same thing, but the question is where you put the focus, or in what proportions. There’s no such thing—as opposed to the myth at the beginning of Pirkei Avot—there’s no such thing as a hollow pipe. There’s a pipe that isn’t aware that it isn’t hollow. Whenever someone passes an idea on to me, it will always be colored by that person’s colors. Always. There’s no way around it—you can’t function as a hollow pipe. No two prophets prophesy in the same style. There is no study hall without some new insight. What does that mean? You pass on what you received in the study hall to someone else, but whenever you pass it on, it will always sound a little different. You’ll hear a lecture about migo—yes, argumentative leverage, “why would I lie,” and so on, the classic conceptual Talmudic lectures. Migo, argumentative leverage, “why would I lie,” etc. No two lectures sound exactly the same even when they discuss the same sources. In each one, you can hear different nuances. And that’s even though, ostensibly, you’re talking about the same things. Because this illusion—as though I can take information and transfer it as-is from one person to another—is just an illusion. There’s no such thing. If it passed through me, then it was colored in some way by me.

[Speaker G] Maybe. What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Other than mathematics and logic? That’s an interesting question; I’m not sure even about that. The statements themselves, yes—but what the statements mean is also a function of the one who grasps them. Think of an example that’s not just a metaphor. There’s a problem known as the philosophers’ palace. What does that mean? There’s a very difficult problem in philosophy—really, if you want, not only in philosophy but a scientific problem. How can I verify that when you and I talk about the color red, we mean the same color? There’s no way to do that. Suppose that when I call a certain color red, what I really mean is what you call yellow. But who would know? You call that color red and I call that color red—even though what we see is a completely different picture. But you see, our speech is synchronized not at the level of ideas; it’s synchronized at the level of language. Right? We both learn to refer to the same phenomenon using the same words. We can’t learn to see that same phenomenon in the same way. What we see, we see. The synchronization between people, the interaction between people, is through language. So it could be that all my life I talk about the color red and you talk about the color red, while we’re seeing different pictures. You’re actually seeing what I would call yellow. It’s just that you’re used to calling that thing red. I see red—what I call red—and both of us are completely synchronized all the time. You say, “That’s red,” and I say, “Of course, yes, that’s red.” Meanwhile we’re seeing a completely different picture. And if you want to get even wilder, then it could very well be that when I talk about the color red, you’re actually hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And you call that “seeing the color red.” In your language, you got used to that being what “seeing the color red” means. Or maybe it’s not even anything my five senses can perceive at all. Maybe you have entirely different senses that perceive different things, things my senses are blind to, yes, they don’t register them. Maybe. There could be creatures with senses that perceive other things—not color, not sight, not touch, not all the things we know, sound, yes, all the things we know, taste and so on. That’s possible. And therefore the claim is that when I tell you that I saw something colored red, what you hear from me may actually be something completely different from what I intended to convey. Completely different. Maybe I actually meant to tell you, in your language, that I heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In my language that’s called seeing red. Okay? But fine, we are completely synchronized in language—there is no way to verify whether we are synchronized at the level of consciousness. No way.

[Speaker E] “And all the people saw the sounds,” at Mount Sinai. Yes, okay, that gets me off your back, so to speak.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Yes, yes—gets me off your back, so to speak. As for Beethoven, hearing and seeing—you gave us a not-so-

[Speaker G] Right. If you say I hear Beethoven and see with my eye, those are different senses, so I can identify whether it’s through the eye—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or through the ear.

[Speaker G] No, about color you’re right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, you can’t identify it.

[Speaker G] Whether it’s through the ear or the eye?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. If my ear is connected to the visual center, then when I hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony striking my eardrum, what appears in my consciousness will not be sound but sight. It’ll be video, not audio. Consciousness and the brain. At Mount Sinai, the Jewish people saw the sounds. There is no problem at all with seeing sounds. Every oscilloscope shows sounds, right? Take an oscilloscope, play a sound, and you see the sine wave of that frequency. You see the sounds. Why? Because you connected the sense that receives hearing to a video display, not to an audio display. And then the visual center in the brain is connected to the senses that receive—to the perception that receives—hearing. That’s all. So you see sounds. Therefore there is no way to verify this—that we are synchronized at that level. It could be that we’re actually talking about completely different things, each of us living in a completely different movie, the Matrix, yes? Something entirely different, totally unrelated to what you see, and we talk to each other and exchange ideas and agree and argue, and everything runs perfectly, complete synchronization with the environment—while there is no connection at all to the reality each of us experiences, something entirely different. Now, that’s another question—you can ask what difference it makes, and that’s already a matter of taste. But I’m only claiming that first of all it is possible that at the level of consciousness or awareness we are completely different even though we are synchronized in language. If that doesn’t bother you, fine. Someone else may be bothered by it, and that’s also fine. Right. Okay.

[Speaker D] You—

[Speaker G] can say—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t interest—

[Speaker G] me, fine, I didn’t say it has to—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] interest you. I didn’t say it has to interest you. But if there’s a hole here, then there’s a hole here. Whether that interests you or not, fine. Usually people mean to say, “There’s no hole here, and don’t bother me,” not “It’s true there is one, but I don’t care.” And if you’re saying it’s true there is one but I don’t care—

[Speaker C] Fine, I don’t care. It’s a matter of taste whether you care or not; I’m not dealing here with taste.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This can also explain why there are problems that some people seem able to solve and others can’t, because understanding can be completely different—different in form. Yes, also in the mode of relating. There may be human beings who grasp things in some other way, and it’s much easier for them to deal with problems that are hard for others, and vice versa. They simply think about it differently. Ostensibly they’re thinking about the same thing, but maybe it’s represented differently for them, maybe—they approach it in some other way. In other words, there is a huge problem with the assumption that when we talk about the same thing, we are also thinking the same thing or experiencing the same thing. There is no indication of that. You can believe it, you can disbelieve it, but there is no indication of it, and probably there can’t be any indication of it either. I once thought that maybe, I don’t know—if someone talks about black versus white, how do I know he means something similar to what I see when I think of black and white? Maybe by the connotations? He says, “This color depresses me; this color seems more optimistic to me.” So I think maybe he sees black the way I see black when he talks about depression, and white—assuming, of course, that these moods are a result of the colors and not of some education or something acquired over time. Because if it’s something acquired, then he acquired regarding white what I acquired regarding black. Meaning, even that gives us no way to verify it. There really is no way to test this matter. It’s an unsolvable question.

[Speaker E] Here, let’s take an interpreter. What does the interpreter know—how many spoonfuls—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But you can’t do it. I mean, you can’t do it. It’s an optimistic assumption that the interpreter succeeds in doing it. The philosophical question whether the interpreter in fact succeeds—that’s an unsolvable question. Meaning, if you assume translation is possible, then you’re right. Yes, it reminds me that Maimonides in the laws of reciting the Shema says that although the Shema may be recited in any language—the Mishnah in the seventh chapter of Sotah says “these may be said in any language”—still one must pronounce its letters precisely. The Ra’avad asks him: but every translation is an interpretation, and who is there that can be precise about his own interpretation? What exactly are you being precise about in the letters of something you yourself formulated—your own interpretation? It’s not—yes, in other words, interpretations are things that depend on the person; there’s nothing sacred about them. Each person and his own way of seeing, his own interpretation. In other words, there is no objective thing here that you now have to be precise about, with a right and wrong. You interpreted it this way—okay. Anyway, to our topic: what I want to say is that very often you pass some information on to me, but what reaches me is something very different from what you intended to pass on. That’s the point, in all kinds of aspects. Okay? And therefore this illusion of a hollow pipe is an illusion. There is no such thing as a hollow pipe. A human being is not a hollow pipe, ever. By the way, every lawyer knows this. No two witnesses describe the same situation in the same way. You won’t find it in court. People don’t remember; people remember differently. And here I’m already talking about synchronization even at the level of discourse, not only the level of what stands in their minds behind what they’re saying. They don’t say the same thing. They don’t describe the situation the same way. And you’re sure—they’re not necessarily liars—they simply remember it differently. You remember a situation as it was colored for you. There are no two people who will grasp exactly the same statement in exactly the same way. There are connotations, contexts, lots of things. In short, that feeling that something can be transferred through a hollow pipe is an illusion. Maimonides, for example, claims that no dispute ever arose regarding a law given to Moses at Sinai. If a dispute arose about something, then by definition it is not a law given to Moses at Sinai. Okay? Now, the Havot Ya’ir has a long responsum on this matter—number 192, I think—where he goes through many laws given to Moses at Sinai in the Talmud over which there are disputes. He brings lots of examples; some he manages to reconcile according to Maimonides, some not. But what stands behind Maimonides’ assumption? What is Maimonides assuming? Maimonides assumes that something can be transmitted like a hollow pipe. Meaning, something can be passed from one person to another without anything getting garbled in the broken-telephone process, without anything going wrong along the way. That’s not true. There’s no way to do that. So to say that if a dispute arose about something then it is not a law given to Moses at Sinai—that makes no sense. Meaning, you can say that maybe it does not have the legal status of a law given to Moses at Sinai, because once you already know that some distortion crept in, then you can’t treat it as something sacred that descended from Sinai. Because who knows who is right—this one or that one? That you can say. But you cannot say that if something is transmitted through tradition, no dispute can arise over it. That’s simply not true. Of course a dispute can arise. “The disciples of Hillel and Shammai did not sufficiently serve their teachers”—that is exactly why the dispute arose. You can say that once a dispute has arisen, then the resulting ruling or law can no longer have the status of a law given to Moses at Sinai, because who knows who is right. I don’t know whether it’s this or that. For example, the Talmud in Temurah says that three thousand laws, three thousand verbal analogies and a fortiori derivations, and seventeen hundred laws that were laws given to Moses at Sinai, were forgotten during the mourning period for Moses. And Otniel ben Kenaz restored the derivations through his analytical reasoning. Laws given to Moses at Sinai cannot be restored, because there are no tools that generate them. It’s tradition. It passes from one person to another, and once the chain of tradition gets interrupted, once the connection is severed, there is no way to reconstruct it. The information is lost. I can’t reconstruct someone’s phone number once it’s deleted from my phone, right? Unless I ask him—but otherwise there’s no way. But I can reconstruct the result of a mathematical exercise if I lost it; I just solve it again. Okay? So when I derive laws using hermeneutic principles from verses, and then I lose the law that was produced in that way, I can make another derivation of general and specific, another verbal analogy, and try to generate the law again. But a law that comes through tradition, a law given to Moses at Sinai—if I lost it, then it’s gone. If I lost it, that’s it. “What is twisted cannot be made straight.” And one of the laws given to Moses at Sinai that was lost there, the Talmud says, is the sin-offering whose owner died. What is the law regarding a sin-offering whose owner died? Now, the Korban HaEdah on the Jerusalem Talmud says that because of this, the law regarding a sin-offering whose owner died that we have today is not a law given to Moses at Sinai. Even though we know that the law of a sin-offering whose owner died is a law given to Moses at Sinai, because it was forgotten during Moses’ mourning period, and our law today is apparently the result of some kind of reconstruction or derivation—I don’t know exactly how it was recreated—so it is no longer a law given to Moses at Sinai. Because you cannot give it the force of tradition, because it isn’t tradition. So that I am willing to accept—the normative determination. A normative determination that says that if there is a dispute over something, then you cannot treat it as a law given to Moses at Sinai. But to say that if something was passed through tradition, then it is impossible that a dispute arose over it—that is a factually incorrect claim. Obviously disputes arose about things passed through tradition. The Talmud itself brings examples. So I need to check Maimonides again; it may be that this is exactly what he means. I never thought of that. He may mean a normative statement, not a factual one. The Talmud in Shevuot brings that Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Asi both swore regarding something they heard from Rav. One swore X and the other swore not-X. Both swore that this is what they heard from Rav. Okay? So they go to Rav to ask who was right. He says that one of them was right. By the way, the Talmud doesn’t say who, because that would be evil speech—the other one would have sworn falsely. But he tells one of them that he was right, and the other asks him, “Wait, so I swore falsely?” And he says, “No. A person can be exempt from an oath under coercion. You were coerced”—meaning, it doesn’t count as a false oath because you were under compulsion; you truly thought that was what you heard from me. And first of all we see just how much you can hear something from the rabbi and come away with opposite claims: two students who heard something from their rabbi in the same situation say they heard opposite things. So how can one then say that no dispute arises over things transmitted through tradition? It’s simply denying reality. Fine. I need to check Maimonides again; maybe that’s what he meant. That’s an interesting insight—I hadn’t thought of it. In any case, let me just finish the point about Rabbi Eliezer. I think that Rabbi Eliezer himself actually lived within the consciousness of a traditionalist, within the consciousness of someone who transmits the tradition like a hollow pipe, someone who “never said anything he hadn’t heard from his teacher.” But in fact the Talmud says that he said things “no ear had ever heard before.” And that’s not—if you look from the outside, you say, wait a second, that’s not exactly what his teacher told him. Looking from the outside, you see that he wasn’t a hollow pipe, but the person himself often isn’t aware of that. He is ready to swear that the teacher said such-and-such, because he was certain that’s what the teacher said—that’s what he heard. So when you look at it, there is a difference between the consciousness of the person himself, who receives and transmits the tradition, and the question of what is actually true. A person can live in the consciousness of being a complete traditionalist, someone who never says anything he didn’t hear from his teacher, but the truth is that he isn’t really a hollow pipe. He only lives with the consciousness that he is; he isn’t actually that. And perhaps that is why the vow was released on the day of Rabbi Eliezer’s death—we talked about this last time—because he suddenly understood that there is no such thing as a hollow pipe. You can’t live with hollow pipes, and in practice there is no such thing as a hollow pipe either. And then he came down from his great rebellion, which he held onto until the day he died, and then the vow was released. My uncle—he’s a Hasid from Monsey, New York—always says that Abaye and Rava surely studied in Yiddish. That’s obvious. Abaye and Rava studied in Yiddish, obviously. They knew how to learn, after all. Anyone who knows how to learn learns in Yiddish. Anyone who doesn’t learn in Yiddish doesn’t know how to learn—that’s well known. Now, of course he himself doesn’t really believe that, and he doesn’t think Abaye and Rava walked around in kapotes and a gartel in Hasidic dress, even though he says they did. Obviously he doesn’t really believe it, but he does live within an ethos that understands that everything we have today is exactly what descended to Moses at Sinai. Nothing changed. They didn’t change their dress, didn’t change their language—not a thing changed. But their consciousness is such that they don’t change their dress and their language and their names. Everything changes; everything is constantly changing, everything flows, as Heraclitus said. But many times the people inside the process don’t feel it. It feels natural, like a completely natural continuation, and they are sure they are continuing exactly the tradition of their ancestors, when in truth it’s really not at all how their ancestors did things. It goes through a kind of metamorphosis. And therefore it could be that a person lives in the consciousness that he is a hollow pipe, and that we are really only transmitting tradition and adding nothing of our own, and what changed over the generations in Pirkei Avot—what I discussed in previous lectures—is the awareness of it. We suddenly become aware that we are not really hollow pipes. In earlier generations—and this is certainly true historically—there was much less awareness of the impact of the person on what he says, on his positions, on the tradition he transmits. Today we are much more aware that we have many biases, that we are under many influences, that we have many things that seem terribly obvious to us, but only because we are who we are. And this reflexivity, this awareness of my influence on what I say, of my personality, my opinions, and all sorts of things of that kind—that is a relatively modern awareness. It is not an awareness that existed in the past. And I think it may be that this description in Pirkei Avot basically does not describe a real change. The Torah was never passed down through a tradition of hollow pipes, but there did gradually arise an awareness that tradition is not a matter of hollow pipes. That tradition is always something loaded; it is not hollow. Every person through whom it passed added another “the craftsman is recognized in the excellence of his vessel”—added another layer, another color of his own, his own perspective. Okay, so that’s the story up to this point of the formation of tradition and dispute and its significance. Which Mishnah?

[Speaker B] Aaron’s transmission?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No transmission is a hollow pipe—that’s what I just said. It’s the same thing as Pirkei Avot. Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders. There too—it doesn’t matter. But here it says it four times, so what? Obviously not. There is no transmission from one person to another that is a hollow pipe. None. There is awareness or lack of awareness that causes you to think you are a hollow pipe, but that is lack of awareness. There is no such thing. There is no transmission from one person to another where what exists in him is exactly what I transmitted. Such a thing can hardly exist. It simply can’t—and certainly not in a corpus as broad as the whole Torah. Maybe one item by chance might come out exactly the same, I don’t know.

[Speaker C] Maybe that explains why everyone heard it four times. Heard it once from Moses, once from Aaron in order to receive—maybe.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, you can make homiletic interpretations about that, I don’t know. But that is certainly the truth. With homiletics, everyone can make whatever interpretation he likes. But it is clear that transmission is never transparent. There is no such thing. Okay, now I want to add maybe one more supplement to this point before I move to the normative perspective on dispute. I’m still dealing with the formation of dispute or its meaning. I talked about the process of maturation, yes, the three-stage model, where one of the three options for reaching the final stage is the narrative, postmodern option—yes, everyone with his own discourse, and so on—which on the face of it seems to describe what I just said. What I just said is in fact that everyone who holds something colors it in some way. Meaning, there are no two people who really truly say the exact same thing. But I still want to make a distinction that in my view is very important and also very timely. Not only is what I said not identical to postmodernism—in my opinion it is the opposite of postmodernism. Postmodernism basically says there is no truth. Everything I said is that there is truth, and one truth, one single truth. Except that each person who says the truth and grasps it colors it with some personal color of his own. Let’s say I look at a certain object through red cellophane, and someone else looks at the same object through green cellophane. So I’ll say the thing is red and he’ll say the thing is green. What would be the truth? The truth is that I see it in red and he sees it in green. That is not a multiplicity of truths. There is one truth: I have red cellophane and he has green cellophane. That is the one and only truth. What? What color is it objectively? No, I’m not now talking about the philosophers’ harmonious synchronization. He says green and I say red. We know we are talking about different colors. There’s no question about it; it’s not that both of us say red, like what I discussed earlier. I’m in a different story now. Okay? But it is clear to us that this is simply the result of different cellophane over our eyes. The thing in itself has certain objective properties, and there there is one truth. One is right and the other is wrong. The fact that each of us formulates it in his own language is not to say there are many truths. On the contrary, it means there are many ways of looking at the one truth. Yes, like—many times people bring relativity as an example of multiple truths, of pluralism. Because you see that every system in motion sees space and time and all sorts of properties of bodies in different ways. So apparently there are many truths, pluralism. But that is exactly the opposite. Anyone who knows relativity knows that the whole path Einstein took in order to reach the conclusion that different systems see reality differently was precisely in order to synchronize things so that there would be one truth. Precisely because truth is one truth, systems moving relative to one another must be assumed to have time and space flowing differently, because only then can we synchronize things so that the laws of nature are the same laws, the phenomena are the same phenomena, and so on. The whole move is the opposite. Or non-Euclidean geometries. Fine—non-Euclidean geometries too are often brought as an example: look, you see, everyone has his own assumptions, everyone has his own narrative, everyone can look at things differently. And that, of course, is nonsense. It’s nonsense because when you talk about geometry, you are not making a claim about reality. You are constructing some mathematical structure with certain assumptions and certain conclusions. Assume different assumptions, derive different conclusions. No problem. That is not pluralism. If I now claim that our world is a Euclidean space and someone else says our world is a non-Euclidean space, that is a claim about our world—not a claim in mathematics. That is a claim in physics. Okay? Here, one is right and the other is wrong. One is right and the other is wrong. Here there is one truth. By the way, again, relativity: relativity claims that our world is non-Euclidean. Not a straight space. Okay? So that can be tested. Meaning, it’s not that everyone has his own truth and his own forms—it’s not different viewpoints. It’s different realities. If you give me the metric of space, the geometry comes out of the metric. You do not get two different geometries from the same metric. The question is: what is the metric of space? Okay? So here there is one truth. Either the metric is like this or it’s like that. And all these examples prove exactly the opposite of what they are brought to prove. Okay? The claim, really, is that multiplicity of perspectives is a result of the fact that there is one truth. There is one truth, and because we are different human beings, who look differently, who inhabit different conceptual worlds, we often grasp that one truth in different ways, and we offer it in different formulations. But there is a point in arguing. Because you can convey your way of looking to me, and I can try to convey my way of looking to you, and then see perhaps who is right. To try to translate—assuming translation is possible—yes, and so on. Another example that illustrates this point: once I was invited to give a lecture at a conference for the publication of Rabbi Shagar’s book, Tablets and Broken Tablets. The Broken Vessels edition came out during his lifetime, I think, and after his death they put out a somewhat broader edition, gathered various other things, and called it Tablets and Broken Tablets. I had written a review of the book that came out while he was still alive, and then they invited me to speak about the expanded book at the conference. And there I basically spoke about these points. Rabbi Shagar’s claim is that in a postmodern world, faith too must be postmodern. Multiple narratives, multiple angles, no truth, and all sorts of things of that kind. In my eyes this is nonsense. But I brought there an example, one I’m fond of in this context. Two people argue whether to eat chocolate or not. One says eat chocolate because it’s tasty; the other says don’t eat chocolate because it’s fattening. Who is right? Both of them. It is both tasty and fattening. So the fact that each of them sees things differently—does that mean there is a multiplicity of truths here? No. It means that from different angles I see different things, that’s all. What would the truth be? The truth is the sum of all those angles: that chocolate is both tasty and fattening. And that is one truth, with no other. Not a multiplicity of truths. One truth—just a complex one, because it can be seen from many angles. Yes, like the well-known elephant parable. If you look at the elephant from the front, you say an elephant is a creature with two legs very close to each other and two eyes. And if you look at it from the side, you say an elephant is a creature with two legs very far from each other and one eye. Who is right? Neither—or the truth is the combination of both. Take the two viewpoints, the side projection and the frontal projection, and then maybe you’ll get a better picture of the elephant as it really is. So the fact that each of us has his own point of view does not mean there are multiple truths. It means there are multiple angles onto the truth. It means it can be formulated in various ways. But on the contrary, many times that is an indication that there is one truth. Exactly the same way when we talk about disagreement. Very often people understand it this way: there is disagreement about principles of morality; therefore there is no single morality. Moral pluralism. In my view this is total nonsense; it’s exactly the opposite. The fact that there is disagreement about principles of morality only means that there is one morality. Because if there were not one morality, then what are we arguing about? What are we arguing about? You want to send the elderly out into the snow—you’re an Eskimo—and I want to put them in a nursing home. Do we have an argument? Well then, you do that and I’ll do this. There isn’t some one thing that both of us are trying to understand and arguing about what it says. If we are arguing, that means we understand that there is a binding morality. You think that morality says to send the elderly out into the snow, and I say it says to put them in a nursing home. Let’s argue and see who is right. But the fact that we are arguing is an indication that there is precisely one truth, not that there are many truths. You don’t argue when there are many truths. If there are many truths, then what’s the argument? There is nothing to argue about. Will we decide it? That’s another question. Maybe we won’t decide, maybe we’ll remain in doubt—it doesn’t matter. But I’m saying that the very existence of an argument assumes that there is one truth. It is not always accessible to us, we won’t always manage to agree about it—that’s a different discussion. But the existence of an argument is not an indication that there are many truths. This is the kind of thing you hear every day—you can hear it almost every five minutes. “Ah, there’s no one morality—look, these think this way and those think that way.” What does the Sabbatical year have to do with an omelet? So what if these think one way and those think another? Does that mean there are many truths? Maybe these are right and those are wrong, that’s all. What does it prove?

[Speaker D] Maybe the Eskimo is right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe. We need to discuss it—no problem. We need to listen carefully to him, discuss it, and see. But still there is one right answer. I didn’t say I’m necessarily right. I said there is one truth, and we need to discuss and clarify in order to see what it is.

[Speaker G] Here you could bring Kant’s approach regarding the noumenon—that there is a thing as it is in itself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the noumenon is something a bit different, because—

[Speaker G] We have no access to it, and what the truth really is—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I’m speaking on levels to which we do have access. Because about the noumenon it is hard to say anything at all. Everything you say about the noumenon really belongs to the phenomenon. It’s about its properties, not about it itself. Fine, so I’m speaking entirely on the level of the phenomenon, yes. Zeitlin brings this in his book—what’s it called, Philosopher? Lev Shestov, a Russian philosopher. By the way, have you ever thought about why there are no Russian philosophers? There are writers and poets of the first rank, but no philosophers.

[Speaker D] They killed them all. They killed them all?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m—

[Speaker D] talking—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] talking about a period before they killed them all. They killed the writers and poets too, even more so than the philosophers. I don’t know—it’s a national trait. Very interesting. The Russians have lots of ideology, very little philosophy. Everything has to be in the ground, realized in practice. Not for nothing was communism realized in the Soviet Union, in Russia. Why? They take philosophy and implement it; that is, they don’t deal in—

[Speaker G] Also a Russian aesthetician whom they called a philosopher.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that I don’t know; I’m not familiar. But in the gallery of major philosophers in history, you’ll hardly find Russians—there just aren’t any. And it’s not like literature and poetry, where there are lots of them. Anyway, that’s not the point. In any case, that’s how I got to it.

[Speaker C] From what angle did you say Zeitlin wrote?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so Lev Shestov—Zeitlin brought some Russian philosopher named Lev Shestov. They have some philosophers, apparently; I just don’t know them. He argued against Kant’s distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. He said that the distinction itself belongs to the phenomenon. How do you know there is a noumenon? If you have no access to the noumenon, how can you determine that there is a noumenon at all? The distinction between phenomenon and noumenon itself belongs to the phenomenon. That was his claim.

[Speaker F] Do you accept that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t accept it. I wrote about it; I can point you to it if you want.

[Speaker F] Fine.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, yes—so the claim in the end is that truth can be complex, multi-angled, but that does not mean multiple truths. Those are two entirely different things. Not multiple truths. By the way, very often in conceptual Talmudic analysis too you find: there are two laws. One says this is a law in the object, another says it is a law in the person. If you keep digging into the passage, you’ll see that both laws are true. You’ll need to build some complex picture that contains both laws together. And there’s some fairly subtle dance between those two laws—when this one appears and that one recedes, when that one appears and this one recedes, and they have different effects. Reality is complex—but complex does not mean multiple truths. Complexity and multiple truths are not the same thing, and I’ll define that a bit more later, because it’s very important for the topic of dispute. Okay, now I want to begin the next chapter in this series. I want to talk about deciding disputes. Following the majority, democracy—what do we do with disagreement? We’ve already seen how the dispute took shape with Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, and there a kind of dispute was created that could not be decided. And therefore, in the end, the whole revolution I described in previous lectures. The big question is why. What’s the problem? Hold a vote. “Incline after the majority,” and that’s it. What’s the problem? You need to agree on the rules. No? But those are the rules—“incline after the majority” is written in the Torah. So what—

[Speaker E] are the rules?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is what counts as the majority. Ah—so here Tosafot writes that the dispute between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, besides all the specific disputes they had, was also over the question of what it means to follow the majority. Do you follow the majority of wisdom or the majority of people? Yes? Do you count heads or do you count feet? Okay? Beit Hillel says you count feet—you go by the majority of people, that’s what decides. They also happened—or perhaps not happened—to be the majority. Beit Shammai says no, you go by the majority of wisdom, you count heads, and they too happened to be the sharper side—they were intellectually keener than Beit Hillel. Everyone agrees on that, even Beit Hillel agrees that Beit Shammai were sharper. Okay? So there was a meta-halakhic dispute over how disputes are decided. And what did they do in the end?

[Speaker E] They killed one another. They killed one another.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. That’s what I described in the previous lectures. In any case, there really is a kind of inescapable tangle here. Now Tosafot asks in Eruvin—Tosafot asks: after all, in the story of the oven of Akhnai, we saw that the rule is, “It is not in heaven.” Right? “Incline after the majority.” “And You already wrote in Your Torah: It is not in heaven; incline after the majority.” So why, in the dispute between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, did a heavenly voice come out and say, “These and those are both the words of the living God, but the Jewish law follows Beit Hillel,” deciding in favor of Beit Hillel? But we don’t pay attention to a heavenly voice—“it is not in heaven.” Tosafot asks this, and gives three answers there, somewhat forced answers, but the question doesn’t exist in the first place. You don’t need the answers. It’s not a valid question.

[Speaker D] Exactly—when is it “not in heaven”?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “It is not in heaven” tells you: don’t wait for a heavenly voice coming down from heaven; you have halakhic rules, so use them. But here there are no halakhic rules.

[Speaker C] In our case—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What happens here is that Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel are arguing about the rules themselves. There is a halakhic rule, “incline after the majority,” written in the Torah. But if “majority” means the majority of people or the majority of wisdom—majority of wisdom or majority of people—that too is disputed. So what do we do now? Follow the majority? What, take a vote about that? Well, there too we’re stuck in the same tangle. There is no way, according to the rules of Jewish law, to decide this dispute. In such a case, it does not say “it is not in heaven.” It’s like saying, “It is not in heaven, therefore we will not accept the Torah that was given at Sinai.” Do we have another source for knowing what the Holy One wants? We do not. If He doesn’t come and tell us, we don’t know. So obviously regarding the Torah from Sinai, we do listen and we do not say “it is not in heaven.” Same here: we’re stuck. We have no way, according to halakhic rules, to make decisions. So what do we do? A heavenly voice comes out and says, “The Jewish law follows Beit Hillel.” And it is not true that in such a case we do not pay attention to a heavenly voice. “We do not pay attention to a heavenly voice” means go by the rules of Jewish law—but if I have no option of going by the rules of Jewish law, that is precisely why the heavenly voice comes out. So there is no question why there they followed the heavenly voice. But what really stands behind this tangle between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel? The question whether one follows the majority of wisdom or the majority of people. That question continues throughout Jewish law, across the generations, all the way to the later authorities. When there is a dispute in a court, and a minority of more learned judges stands against a majority of less learned judges, the question is whether to follow the majority of judges or the majority of wisdom, which is the minority of judges. Many decisors dispute this from all directions. Apparently the heavenly voice did not settle that.

[Speaker F] It—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It said to follow Beit Hillel. No, that’s a different discussion; I’ll touch on that in a moment. Assuming we know and agree who is wiser and who is not—

[Speaker E] What does—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the question whether you follow the majority mean? We know. Why did this strange case happen, where the majority of people and the majority of wisdom were on opposite sides of the barricade?

[Speaker C] If not, then there wouldn’t have been a dispute and we wouldn’t be talking about it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s one possibility. A second possibility is that there is something essential here. You know, a kind of pyramid of talent, where there are many fools and few wise people. So usually the few are the wise and the many are the fools, right? Well, that’s not exactly true, because the pyramid is really an ellipse, not a pyramid. There are also few who are very, very foolish, few who are very, very wise—a kind of Gaussian distribution. Fine, but in any case, for our purposes, this dispute over whether to follow the majority of wisdom or the majority of people reflects something more fundamental. What stands behind this dispute is basically Plato’s question. Rule by philosophers. Right? Plato basically asked—or rather claimed—that one should not go by the majority of voters in a democracy, but by philosophy, by letting the philosophers decide. Because why should I care if there are many ignoramuses “as numerous as those who left Egypt,” as Sefer HaChinukh says—they cannot determine matters against a tiny group of wise people. Why should I care how many feet they have? The question is what they have in their heads. So Plato says that power should really be given to philosophers, not to the majority of voters, not to the majority of the public. And that question, in one form or another, accompanies us to this day.

[Speaker G] Replace the people, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Like Gad Yaacobi once said: replace the people, because the people are idiots. He’s right, but what can you do—we don’t replace the people. So this tension around the Platonic proposal leads us to ask why not really give—or let me make a more moderate proposal so it won’t sound as abrasive as it does. Fine? I say: let’s hold the vote in elections for the Knesset—or any issue at all—and weight each person’s vote according to his IQ. Whoever—

[Speaker E] decides? The IQ?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Take an IQ test, do tests, the psychometric exam, whatever you want. You have criticisms of the IQ test. We’ll get to that in a moment. So basically you can weight the votes: give a person with 150 IQ a weight of 1.5, 100 IQ gets weight 1, 70 IQ gets 0.7, and 20 IQ—I don’t know if he can even vote at all. But what?

[Speaker E] What about people in between? Someone who was a cook? Someone who was a cook—he wouldn’t be able to vote?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. In ancient Greece too, the cradle of democracy, yes, there too only free men—about twenty percent—participated in the democratic game. In any case, what stands behind this question? Or I’ll put it differently: what do you answer? Why not really give the wise greater weight? Let them decide. They’ll make better decisions, no?

[Speaker D] When people decide that what’s good for them is, I don’t know, driving at ninety kilometers an hour, then we should do what’s good for them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, and maybe that really is the wise thing.

[Speaker D] It could be that that’s true, but the point is that that’s what people want.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But why do they want that? Why do they want it?

[Speaker D] Democracy is supposed to—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —express what they want.

[Speaker D] Why do they want it? Because it’s convenient for them.

[Speaker C] People like having control over their lives.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why should that matter? What?

[Speaker D] Why do they want it? They want it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I’m saying: Plato tells you, I have a way to reach more correct decisions—why not adopt it?

[Speaker G] If the people want it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You don’t want correct decisions?

[Speaker G] Intelligence has nothing to do with morality. Not only morality. So here—so let’s—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So let me sharpen this for a moment. We heard two kinds of answers, okay? One answer is that if you give power to the philosophers, the philosophers can misuse it. They may be the smartest people, but they can certainly use that wisdom to take care of their personal interests and not the public interest. So even though in principle there’s logic in giving the decision to the wise, it’s dangerous. Okay? That’s one answer. A second answer, which we heard earlier, tells you: who knows who counts as wise? What, because he knows how to solve math exercises, does that mean he’ll make better political or economic decisions? Who says? Who says that in the area of morality there even is such a thing as wise and unwise? There are values: you believe in these values, and he believes in others. Is there wise and unwise here? These are moral disagreements, or value-based, ideological, whatever you want. Communism, capitalism, various economic systems. Is that a debate between smart people and stupid people, or between right and wrong? It’s a question of which value guides you—equality or freedom. Freedom is the right, equality is the left. Roughly speaking. So that’s a different kind of answer. The second type of answer basically says that there is no guarantee—or no way for us to know—who is wise, or what wisdom is relevant to the questions we’re dealing with: political, economic, diplomatic, security-related questions, and the like. So these are two technical answers, and they do have substance. I definitely don’t dismiss them. What I do dismiss is the need for them. The question is based on a mistake. You don’t need those answers. Why? Because basically you’re assuming—both of those answers assume—that what we’re really supposed to do is reach the correct decision; that the role of the democratic mechanism is to ensure arrival at the most correct decision. That’s the basic assumption. So then Plato’s proposal naturally arises: let’s give it to the wise. And then there are two rejections: either the wise will behave self-interestedly, or you can’t tell who is wise and who isn’t, and therefore it’s simply not practical. It would have been proper to do it, but it isn’t practical. I claim that the basic assumption that starts this whole story is wrong. Who says the role of the democratic mechanism is to arrive at the most correct decisions? That’s simply not true. On the contrary. Usually it’s a mechanism that brings us to the least correct decisions. Because what the majority thinks is usually less correct than what the minority thinks. So what, then? What is the rationale behind following the majority in a democracy? The problem in democracy is not the question of what the truth is. That’s not what we go to elections for.

[Speaker F] We—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —go to elections over the question of what the public wants. Meaning, the democratic decision is grounded not in an algorithm that brings me optimally closest to the truth, but in an algorithm that expresses, relatively optimally, what the public wants. It’s a question of rights, not a question of truth. The assumption is a value assumption: that every citizen in society, in the state, has an equal right to shape its conduct, the way it is run. And from beneath that moral-value assumption comes the conclusion that what should actually be done is what the public wants. But what, then? “What the public wants” is a very ambiguous statement. If there are disagreements, then what does the public want? How do we know? If the whole public wants one thing, no problem. But if the public does not want one thing—there are disagreements—how do we determine what the public wants? Actually, this is a very complicated question. There’s a Professor Shmuel Nitzan from economics—

[Speaker E] There are elections.

[Speaker D] You—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’ve already decided on elections; we’re not there yet, in a moment. Shmuel Nitzan here from economics wrote a book—there’s a book in the Open University, a fascinating book by the way. I met him once; we were together at a conference here in Nitzotzot, so we talked about it. We both spoke there about this issue, and he gave me the book to read beforehand. And the book really deals with the question—among other things—the question of how you represent what the public wants. What does the public want? And there are theorems there in mathematics, partial theorems, several theorems. In the end I forgot the name of the fellow who formulated it at the end—I think he was French. Arrow’s theorem?

[Speaker C] Huh? Arrow’s theorem? Arrow, exactly! Arrow’s theorem, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There cannot be an adequate representation of what the public wants. He lays out, I don’t know, five criteria—I don’t remember how many criteria—for what could count as an adequate representation of what the public wants, and he has a theorem proving that you can’t satisfy all the criteria together. In other words, there is no way to express unequivocally what the public wants. I’ll give you an example. We take it for granted that the majority represents it, but suppose, for example, that the issue is very, very important to the minority, while for the majority it is less important. That’s their position, but it matters to them less; it’s not critical for them. Okay? Think about Sabbath desecration, all right? For religious people it’s very, very important that the Sabbath not be desecrated, but they are a minority. For secular people, they don’t care that Sabbath be desecrated; it isn’t some article of faith for them that one must desecrate the Sabbath, okay? So there is room for an argument that says that even though the majority favors Sabbath desecration, one can take the minority into account because from their standpoint—even though they are a minority—it matters much more to them, for example, okay? The tyranny of the majority—this is connected somewhat to concepts like tyranny of the majority and so on. That’s just one example out of many. In other words, it is not true that there is a simple solution to the question of what the public wants where there are disagreements. Democracy chose the simplest and easiest option, and that is the majority. You follow the majority, that’s it, the majority decides. That too is not exactly how it works—not always does the majority decide—but never mind, in general, yes. Those are exactly the conflicts we’ve known until three months ago. What? Right, exactly. But even in a referendum you go by the majority.

[Speaker E] If the state is separated from—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Never mind, we’re not going now through all the election methods. But I’m saying that on the principled level we chose, basically—with various nuances—the mechanism of the majority as representative. Why? Because it’s simple enough. Other mechanisms are very complicated and not always successful either, and in any case we can’t represent it properly, so let’s go with the majority. And the majority is the representative. What does that mean? It does not mean that the majority is right. It means that for us, the majority is the representation we chose as the representation of what the public wants. That’s all. That’s what the public wants. So you understand that if that is the meaning of a democratic majority—that a democratic majority is basically an expression of what the public wants—then following the majority is not a tool for knowing what the truth is, but simply the expression I have for what the public wants. It is the public’s right to determine how its state is run. If there are disagreements, then the public is defined by the majority. This is a principle that in Jewish law is called “the majority is like the whole.” Not following the majority, but “the majority is like the whole”: when there is a majority of something, it is considered as though that is what the whole is. This whole story about what the public wants isn’t relevant. Wait, wait, I’ll get there in a moment—you’re jumping ahead of me, in a second. So that’s regarding a democratic majority. With a democratic majority, the Platonic question doesn’t even arise, because we’re not dealing there with the search for the way to arrive at the true answer. So I have no reason at all to hand it over to the wise, and therefore there’s no need for excuses like “they’re self-interested.” Okay? Now this brings us to a halakhic majority. In a halakhic majority, we are looking for what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants—what the Torah wants. There, in principle, we are looking for the truth. Therefore there the question can indeed arise: what is the best way to arrive at the truth? And then Plato’s proposal is compelling. So let’s give it to the wise. And maybe if there’s a dispute in a religious court, we should follow the minority if they are wiser, and not the majority if they are less wise. And that is indeed what the Sefer HaChinukh says. He says: there can be ignoramuses as numerous as those who left Egypt, and they cannot overrule a minority of wise men. What do I care if a lot of feet are against me?

[Speaker C] Is there maybe some kind of probabilistic consideration here? Maybe if we say that someone who isn’t wise is right with a sixty percent probability?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That means you believe in the wisdom of crowds. But not necessarily.

[Speaker C] It depends how unwise they are and how wise he is.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a consideration. The wisdom of crowds does not mean that the crowd is necessarily right. The wisdom of crowds means that if you have a crowd, that’s an advantage. Okay? Fine. It depends on the statistics and all that. I don’t buy this whole business of the wisdom of crowds. In my eyes, if there’s a crowd, that’s a sign it’s wrong, until proven otherwise. In other words, to me that’s a disadvantage, not an advantage. But that’s a different question. By the way, where is the wisdom of crowds said to apply? It applies where the law of large numbers works. Those are the examples of the wisdom of crowds. When you’re counting cattle in a pasture, right? You ask people to throw out a number—how many animals are there here? Say, I don’t know, a few hundred. You can’t count them. So they estimate. Do the statistics, take the average of what they say, and it comes out very close to the truth—better than one person highly skilled in counting cattle. Or counting leaves on a tree, or things like that. And why? Because the assumption is that people’s counts are distributed somehow symmetrically around the true average. Some are mistaken upward, some are mistaken downward, but it’s around the true average. If you again apply the law of large numbers and average it out, it will come out in the right direction. But most questions are not like that. In most questions, it’s not a shot in the dark distributed symmetrically around the truth. It’s a matter of considerations this way and considerations that way, and the question is whether you understand or don’t understand. So the law of large numbers won’t work there, and therefore the wisdom of crowds is, in my opinion, a very bad measure for most questions.

[Speaker E] Even if you go with the majority—even if they’re ignoramuses? So you go with the majority even if they’re ignoramuses, like in a community, like in a government that is supposed to be—fine, okay. Or the committees—no, I’m saying—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even if there are professional experts in government, I wouldn’t bring that in here.

[Speaker E] Experts, I mean, experts.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. In any case, that’s not the question I’m dealing with right now. The claim is, in the end, that the Platonic question does arise—but not in the context of following the majority in democracy. It arises in the context of majority as a measure of truth, which is basically the question of majority in Jewish law, majority in a religious court. And there it really is a serious question, and there are disputes about it, and that’s what I spoke about earlier. I just want to sharpen a bit more the meaning of this, because I’ll get to that itself next time. There is a book by Professor Haym Soloveitchik, the son of Rabbi Soloveitchik, who is a historian at the Hebrew University. Or was, I don’t know. In any case, he has a book called Responsa as a Historical Source, a sort of study booklet. Interesting—I think it’s worth reading. He tries to show how you can extract historical information from responsa, responsa that deal with halakhic questions. By the way, for example, one example: if you have two manuscripts, one corrupted and one corrected, which is authentic? The corrupted one. Right. Nobody corrupts a manuscript; people correct manuscripts—

[Speaker D] —manuscripts.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So if you see something corrupted, you correct it. Nobody takes a corrected manuscript and corrupts it. Fine, that’s not always true; if the corruption is accidental, that can happen. But if it’s a correction—if it’s the result of editing—then yes, it’s true.

[Speaker E] Nice, I said here some attic stuff.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s why I’m saying the question is how the corruption came about. In any case, never mind. In the book there he demonstrates his ideas on the halakhic topic of following the majority in a community: communities that need to make decisions—not halakhic decisions, but decisions about taxes in the community, institutions in the community, how to build the community. And various questions came up there about how to run communities. And these questions began to arise around the tenth or eleventh century. And the reason is that until that period the Jewish people were run in a kind of clear hierarchical structure. True, they were already in exile, but even in Babylonia there was some hierarchy. We were all there more or less, all in Babylonia. There were the two great academies with the heads of those academies, who were the leading sages of the generation, the chief rabbis, with all due distinctions. And things were run in a kind of hierarchical way. If you didn’t know something, you asked the rabbi above you. If he didn’t know, he asked the rabbi above him. In other words, there was a certain uniformity, a clear hierarchy. Everything was fine. In the tenth, eleventh century, the people began to disperse. The myth of the four captives, for example, who arrive in various places—in North Africa and Italy and France, Germany, and so on—so the people begin to scatter. And when the people begin to scatter, then in some fishing village you can have four Jews sitting there. One knows how to read, one knows how to write, and the other two aren’t even sure whether they’re Jewish. The question is: how do those four make decisions? And they have no one to ask. They look upward—empty. There’s a vacuum. There’s nothing. It’s not inside a framework. Communities that once existed were communities within a district, a district within a country, and so on—there was a hierarchy. And here you are in some fishing village somewhere, under nobody and nothing. You need to make decisions. How do you make decisions? And this was a relatively new problem. There are hints of it in the Talmud too, in the first chapter of tractate Bava Batra, but it’s a relatively new problem. Now there arose questions there, for example—there was also rule by representatives, what was called the seven leaders of the city, and there were also referendum-style votes in the town square, like Athenian democracy before representative government. Okay? And the question that came up in both contexts was whether one follows the majority. Both among the seven leaders of the city and among the public in general. When you hold a vote and go by the majority, is the majority binding? This question was asked of almost all the leading halakhic decisors, and there were disagreements. Most said that one follows the majority, but Rabbeinu Tam, for example, claimed no—the majority has no authority. Decisions are made unanimously. What is not unanimous—in other words, the minority has a veto, in short. So that question remained open. It was decided more or less in the fifteenth century. From the fifteenth century onward it was already clear that one follows the majority. That is how it was ruled, and it also appeared in the Shulchan Arukh, and all these discussions quieted down. There is an important person—never mind—there are various qualifications and rules that were created there: you need the agreement of an important person, and so on. But there’s something very interesting there. The early medieval authorities (Rishonim) who hold that one follows the majority all bring the verse, “Incline after the majority.” What’s the question? Obvious. You follow the majority because of “incline after the majority.” Didn’t Rabbeinu Tam know that there’s a verse, “incline after the majority”? Did he miss it? Rabbeinu Tam says that the Babylonian Talmud is mixed with everything, so you don’t need to study Scripture, only the Talmud, because it already includes everything. But I assume he knew the verse “incline after the majority”; it appears in the Talmud. So what do you do in such a situation? Rabbeinu Tam says: how can you follow the majority? Doesn’t it say “incline after the majority”? Didn’t he know what they were saying?

[Speaker G] He knew the verse unanimously. But why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? There is “incline after the majority”—that’s what the Torah says. The answer is that when the Torah says “incline after the majority,” that is a rule stated with regard to a dispute in a religious court. In a dispute in a religious court, we are looking for the truth. They say the measure of truth is the majority. In wisdom, most people don’t enter into these disputes, but the majority is a measure of truth. The question with a democratic majority, in communal decision-making, is not what the truth is, but what the public wants. Now who says that the majority is a representation of what the public wants? You certainly can’t learn that from the verse “incline after the majority.” The verse “incline after the majority” says that the majority is an indication of what the truth is, but I am asking how I determine what the public wants. That’s a completely different question. By the way, Haym Soloveitchik opens his booklet with a quotation from an article—not by Ben-Zion Dinur, another historian, I forgot his name, never mind—Yitzhak Baer, exactly. Yitzhak Baer says that democracy basically came to us from Roman law. Following the majority came to us from Roman law. And then Haym Soloveitchik protests. He says, what do you mean? We invented democracy. It says “incline after the majority,” so what are you talking about, Romans and all that nonsense? But of course Yitzhak Baer is right. I don’t know whether it came from Roman law, but it certainly isn’t that we started this. And that’s simply wrong. It doesn’t come from “incline after the majority.” “Incline after the majority” has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy. Democracy is a method for representing what the public wants. When you say that the majority is the representation of what the public wants, that is one solution—the accepted democratic solution. “Incline after the majority” is the question of how one arrives at the truth in a religious court. That is a Platonic question. And on the Platonic question the Torah says: follow the majority. What does that have to do with democracy? Therefore Rabbeinu Tam says: when the question was raised before me how to make political decisions in a democracy, I cannot learn it from the verse “incline after the majority.” More than that. Look consistently at the responsa of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) who disagree with Rabbeinu Tam—it’s really amazing, one after another. They say: it says “incline after the majority,” and besides that it’s impossible to function otherwise. Because if you don’t follow the majority, every minority will impose a veto, or everyone who disagrees. Now why do you add that? So what? “Incline after the majority,” we’ve said everything, all is well—why do you need to add the argument?

[Speaker D] Because they—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because they know that “incline after the majority” is not really a source. It isn’t a source. What they’re really saying is: it’s impossible to function, and so I take “incline after the majority” and expand it also to a democratic majority, not only to a majority in a religious court. It isn’t really the same thing, and they also understand that it isn’t the same thing. In other words, there is a difference between following the majority in a religious court and following the majority in a democracy. Following the majority in a democracy is a question of rights—how you represent what the public wants. Following the majority in a religious court is the question of what the truth is. And from this point we’ll begin next time. Right, right.

[Speaker E] It could have been a nice custom to bring Sinai into it. What? It could have been a nice custom to bring Sinai into it, to do Sinai, to bring a protest, and we still would have achieved the novelty. Okay. There’s nothing—

[Speaker B] Wrong. Worth doing in the end.