Mysticism – Lesson 13

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. Last time we talked—I tried to demonstrate the meaning of mystical claims, or how we can formulate a position about them—and I said that one of the indications that there is something to a claim is if the mystical theory gives some kind of depth perspective, or a more general perspective, on a collection of phenomena, a collection of things that at first glance we don’t see any connection between. But in the mystical view, through the mystical conceptual system, in the mystical picture, somehow they become connected to one another and suddenly receive some more comprehensive meaning. That was the thesis. And so I wanted to argue that even though the mystical world, or the mystical dimensions, are not directly accessible to us—that’s how I defined the concept of mysticism—we still have some way of touching it in some form, or through various indications understanding whether there’s something there or whether it’s just nonsense. And those indications, I said, are among other things like in a scientific theory: does it give me some deeper, broader meaning that includes under it many, many phenomena that seem unrelated? If so, then I understand that there’s something there. I spoke a bit in this context about explanations, two kinds of explanations: grounding in the familiar and grounding in the unfamiliar. Grounding in the familiar is basically finding meaning for a certain phenomenon within the framework of a known theory. I have a known theory, and I use it to explain something that I didn’t understand before the explanation. By contrast, grounding in the unfamiliar is basically taking a collection of phenomena that are in the end familiar to me from life or from the laboratory, and grounding them in a theory that I’m inventing now, a new theory, which is basically an explanation in terms of the unfamiliar. When Newton discovered the theory of gravitation, he was basically inventing a new theory, or finding a new theory, that was not known—and this is still considered an explanation for a collection of phenomena like tides, the paths of the stars, or the fall of objects to the earth, and so on—where the collection of phenomena is something we know very well, but the theory he has just invented is something not familiar to us. So in what sense can we treat this theory as something that explains the facts? And the answer is that once I have the theory, I see that all these cases are particular cases of it. In other words, they give me some deeper and broader meaning for a whole collection of phenomena. And therefore that constitutes some kind of indication that the theory is correct. Even though I have no way of testing or encountering the theory directly. I can’t feel or touch the force of gravity. I claim that there is a force of gravity because, as a matter of fact, objects attract one another, but I have no direct access to the force or to theoretical entities in general. And therefore the indication that this general theory is correct is that it is general, and that it gives meaning to a great many phenomena. That was the claim. To demonstrate this in the context of mystical matters, I began talking a little about the concepts of chesed and din.

[Speaker B] One—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The pair of concepts that is perhaps the most fundamental in the world of Kabbalah, and it contains under it many pairs of concepts, all of which are connected to it: matter and form, male and female, gevurah, chokhmah and binah. Many, many such pairs, which not only would we not connect to one another, but in most cases we don’t even see them as pairs. That is, we don’t see the two parts of the pair as something connected at all. Why is chokhmah and binah a pair, to begin with? Or chesed and din? Or gevurah? Chesed and gevurah? We wouldn’t even think these were pairs, and certainly we wouldn’t see a connection between these different pairs, and the meaning Kabbalah gives to the matter shows us that there is, after all, something shared by all these pairs, and that they really are pairs, and that each such two are really connected to each other in some way—they are reversals and complementary opposites of one another. And in that sense, I think that the Kabbalistic picture—if I can convince you that the Kabbalistic picture really does this job I’m describing—then that can be some indication that it has substance. In other words, that it really holds water. That whoever proposed it had good spiritual intuition; he grasped something that others do not grasp. So I want to expand a little on what I started last time. I said that in the simple understanding of the concept of chesed, it means doing good to another person. In other words, bestowing good on him. Charity to the poor, helping people in distress, all kinds of things of that sort. So basically it means beneficence, a kind of synonym for doing good, acts of kindness. And din—well, din, we know what din is: legal rules, Jewish law, that is, rules according to which we act, what the law says or what Jewish law says, something like that—that is the concept of din. So at first glance it’s not even entirely clear why chesed and din are some kind of complementary opposition. When I say complementary opposition—whoever remembers I mentioned this—when I say complementary opposition, I mean that on the one hand they are opposites, but on the other hand they belong to the same semantic field. In other words, there is both a connection and an opposition between them. Because if there is an opposition between two things, that means that fundamentally there is some connection between them. Two things that have no connection at all are not opposites either. I don’t know, say, air and triangle. They’re not opposites. There is no connection between those two concepts; they don’t belong to the same framework, the same semantic field, and therefore you also can’t speak about them as opposites. When I talk about opposites or contrasts, I often—or really always—mean two things that have some connection between them; they belong to the same whole, and within that whole they represent two opposites or two poles. But that’s within some shared whole. Yes? When I say light and dark, they are opposites because both are different intensities of color. And both belong to the field of color intensities. Only one is light and the other is dark, so they are opposites. They can be opposites because they belong to the same semantic field. Or light and heavy. Both describe weight. Only this is a light weight and that is a heavy weight. Or hot and cold, or light and darkness. All these oppositions are oppositions only because they belong to the same semantic field. And within that semantic field they describe two different poles. If you like, two species within one genus, but it’s more than species—it’s opposites, that is, polarized species within some genus. Therefore when you speak about opposites, it always means in the background that there is some connection between them. You first of all have to see what the connection is, and then understand in what sense they are opposites. So here too, in the context of chesed and din, first of all we have to understand very well what common field they belong to, and then see what distinguishes them. Yes, a beautiful example of this—this just occurred to me now, I won’t get into it—you can find at the beginning of the eighth root in Maimonides. Maimonides talks there about positive commandments and prohibitions. He basically asks why they are both called commandments at all. What is the connection between them? Positive commandments are things I’m supposed to do, and prohibitions are things I’m supposed to refrain from. Why are these two types, two species within a genus, and that genus is called commandment? Why is there a common genus for both of them? Is there really a connection between them, or have we just artificially joined together two things and made a synthetic whole out of them? We’re not used to thinking this way because we are so accustomed to the concept of commandment. And we are already used to the idea that there is a concept called commandment, a Book of Commandments, divided into positive commandments and prohibitions, which are two species within that genus called commandment. But the fact that this is some kind of genus with its own characteristics—that itself is not trivial at all.

[Speaker B] Because why do you act? You act from the fact that you accept someone’s authority over you, and you are commanded.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, commanded? What’s the connection between doing what he says and not doing what he doesn’t say?

[Speaker B] No, you agree—you agree to be subject to what he tells you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obedience or subordination. Okay. Fine—again, I’m not going to get into that now. It’s a subject definitely worth discussing, and I’ve already talked about it, but I won’t get into it here. I’m just bringing it as an example of something that maybe on the linguistic level—on the linguistic level—we’re already so used to that it doesn’t bother us. But the truth is that it’s not trivial at all. And it’s worth thinking about. Very often language helps us think about some things and interferes with our thinking about others, because we are somehow captive to our linguistic conceptions. Okay. In any case, to come back to us—someone wrote here that it’s in Parashat Yitro on “a measure of good,” I don’t even remember myself anymore, but okay. In any event, I want to talk a little about the concept of chesed and din. So let’s start with chesed and din. I spoke about this a bit, I’m just continuing today, so I’m just summarizing. So: the concept of din, in its Kabbalistic meaning, means action according to the rules. According to laws, according to rules—not necessarily, by the way, human action; also natural behavior that works according to the laws of nature, it doesn’t matter—something that has laws or rules dictating its behavior. All right? That is called din. You already see that we’re making here a kind of abstraction, an expansion of din beyond the meaning of some specific Jewish law. Jewish law is an example, but basically Jewish law is one kind of law, while laws exist in many contexts. There are the laws of chess, the rules of basketball, the laws of the state, the rules of the bar association, ethical rules, moral rules, all kinds of things. So there are many systems of rules. When you act according to a law or some rule, that is called an action of the type din. And now we can understand what chesed is and why it really is a complementary opposite to din. Chesed is an action that is not required by the rule. There is no rule that obligates it. Yes? When I repay a loan to someone I borrowed from, to my lender, then I am acting according to din. Din obligates me to repay the loan. Din obligates me to repay the loan; that is an action of the type din. But if I give someone a gift, or charity that I give to a poor person, that is an action not required by din; there is no law that obligates it. It is my decision; it is voluntary. And because of that, it is called an action of chesed. Chesed is something that comes from outside the laws. The laws do not obligate it. It is an action not subject to laws, not derived from laws, not in accordance with laws, but something beyond. That is called chesed. And now we already see, first, why chesed and din really are a complementary pair, and second, we see that chesed and din in the meanings we’re used to are overall just a particular case of this much more abstract and general pair called chesed and din. Now I’ll show you various implications and how this picture expands and connects to many other contexts, and suddenly you’ll see how much this Kabbalistic way of looking at chesed and din enriches our understanding of our world. And that means that there is probably something real there. It probably captured some dimension of depth that exists in many contexts, in many pairs of contexts and contexts generally, and therefore this is an indication that there is probably something there. Whoever hit on this grasped something—something true. So let’s try to see a bit more. I brought two examples that I once heard from Rabbi Pinkus; I brought them in the previous lecture. Yes—about Rebecca at age three; according to the midrash of the Sages she was three years old, and Eliezer comes with the camels and she says, “Drink, and I will also draw for your camels.” Meaning a little girl of three drawing water—and camels drink, you know, huge amounts. She draws for forty camels, if I remember correctly, however many he had there—a lot of camels—and she waters them. That’s crazy labor. Fine, help him, give him the jug, let him rest a little, let him drink a cup of water, everything’s fine. But what is this madness of a little three-year-old girl watering an entire caravan of camels? That was one example, and the second was Abraham, yes, who slaughtered three calves in order to give the angels—yes, his guests, the Arabs, he thought they were Arabs—three tongues with mustard. Drumsticks aren’t good enough for them? I mean, each one has to get a whole tongue, and for that he slaughters a calf, in a period when there are no refrigerators. These cases are not cases—yes, “Arabs” is an anachronistic term, correct. These are not cases we are meant to take as an educational example in the sense of implementing what we see in these cases. I don’t think it is right to behave like that. A three-year-old girl is not supposed to volunteer to draw water for a whole caravan of camels when there is an actual grown man here, and he has strength—let him be honored and do it himself. She can help him, give him tools, direct him, show him where the water is, give him a glass of water and let him rest a moment, but not this madness. And the same with the tongues and the calves. Rather, these stories basically come to illustrate for us the concept of chesed. The concept of chesed means action out of proportion, irrational action, action outside accepted rules. That is why it is called chesed, and that is why Abraham was the pillar of chesed. And I mentioned that there were—

[Speaker C] A small question regarding Abraham? Yes. First of all, regarding Rebecca it is explicitly written in the Torah, all the verses, it’s very long there, right? But regarding Abraham nothing at all is written, only the midrashim say this. Why does the Torah choose to tell it explicitly here and not there?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Secondary question, I don’t know—ask someone who deals in interpretation of the Torah; I don’t deal in that. But I’m talking about the Sages; right now it doesn’t matter to me what exactly the Sages wanted to say.

[Speaker C] But according to the plain meaning of the verses it’s not clear at all that Abraham was such a man of chesed. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the Sages interpret it that way, so I’m asking what the Sages wanted to teach. All right? I’m not getting into the question now of whether it fits the plain meaning or not; that’s not my subject. So the claim I wanted to make—this is basically what Rabbi Pinkus said—is that Abraham is not presented here as an exemplary figure whom we are supposed to imitate. On the contrary, Abraham is presented here as some kind of figure that is not imitable and should not be imitated. He is a kind of figure beyond the logical rules according to which one should properly behave in this world. He is some kind of bursting chesed, paying no attention at all to logic, to rules, to proportion, to reasonableness; he has no such calculations. He is a kind of bursting chesed. Now for us it is not right to behave that way. Someone who does that should be educated to calm down. You don’t act like that; it’s not logical; one shouldn’t conduct oneself that way. In other words, this is not a model for imitation in the simple sense, but rather, I would even say, a typological figure, some sort of abstract type that doesn’t really live and act in our world, but it is appropriate to know the concept of chesed. And in that sense, when they say that Abraham held onto the attribute of chesed, they do not mean to describe him in some positive sense—well, it is positive, but that’s not the point. Abraham is an abstract idea in this view. I mentioned the allegorists, who actually took this one step further and claimed that Abraham and Sarah were not people who lived and acted here in the world at all, but abstract ideas, which myth describes as people who lived and acted here, but really the intention is to present us with concepts or ideas, not people. So again, without entering the allegorist question—whether it’s right to look at it that way, whether it’s a positive way to look at it, and whether it ever was right to look at it that way, since these are major controversies and I don’t want to get into them—I’m only bringing it as an illustration of the way of looking that I’m talking about here. Even if Abraham and Sarah did exist, the midrashim and the biblical and midrashic descriptions of them are not coming to tell me what they did, but to describe for me some sort of abstract idea that I am not really supposed to act on directly. It guides me in some way, but not as one-to-one imitation. I’m supposed to know the concept of chesed in its purity, not act on it in its purity. It is not right to act in the world according to the concept of pure chesed. I brought Rashi, who says that the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to create the world with the attribute of din and saw that the world could not endure, so He joined to it the attribute of mercy. But there isn’t even a thought that the Holy One, blessed be He, would create the world with the attribute of mercy—it’s not even a conceivable possibility. Why? Because pure chesed certainly cannot function in the world, cannot hold in the world. There was room to say that pure din might work here; it turned out that it doesn’t either. What can really work here is some combination of chesed and din. Pure chesed does not work; pure din—when someone acts only according to din or according to the rules and doesn’t move right or left, that cannot last. It cannot work. The world does not function that way. But a world without rules, a world of bursting chesed with no logic, no proportion, no rules, also cannot work. So there is something in the world that requires a combination of the two poles, these abstract, pure ideas: the idea of chesed and the idea of din. When they stand alone, they are abstract ideas. In our world that doesn’t work. It can’t work, and we should not aspire for it to work; that is not correct. What should be done in our world is a combination, a proper mixture of these two ideas, a mixture of chesed and din. By the way, at one point I thought that even in the socio-economic sense you can see these things. It’s a lesson that the world learned the hard way, in its own flesh. These instructions were written in blood, as they say in the army. The attempt to create a world without rules is anarchism. It cannot work, even though perhaps its motivations are positive. The anarchists were originally very idealistic people. Today anarchists sound like some kind of criminals or people who love violence for its own sake. That’s not the origin. Originally anarchism was a lofty ideal. These were idealistic people who did not want laws, did not want states, did not want structures, because all of that coerces them. They wanted freedom and liberty and doing good—a very, very exalted ideal—which of course is precisely why it cannot work. Because that is pure chesed. Anarchism is pure chesed. It cannot work. What is pure din? Pure din, I would say, is communism. Why? By the way, communism or radical Islam.

[Speaker C] Islam—maybe radical Islam?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know if that’s a case of pure judgment. I’m not sure. I need to think about it; there’s room to discuss it. I think communism is a better example. Because you should just notice that communism is the left. In Kabbalah, judgment is the left and kindness is the right. Maybe we’ll get to that later. So what is communism? Basically, in a capitalist world, private property is of course sacred. Each person has his own property, and alongside that there is the commandment of charity. Meaning, if you see a poor person, then help him—but you don’t have to. It’s voluntary. So in a capitalist world there is room for kindness. It’s not a world without rules; there are rules, but there is room for kindness. But you’re not obligated—that’s the whole idea of kindness, that it remains your own choice. It’s voluntary; you decide whether to give charity to someone or not. In a communist world, they take kindness and turn it into judgment. You are obligated to distribute property equally according to needs and not according to rights, not according to the labor you invested, but according to needs. Equality is forced upon you. You give charity from your money to someone weaker because you have to. In fact you’re not giving at all; it isn’t yours, rather it gets divided between you by law. Now, one might have seen this as the peak of kindness, supposedly. It’s the ultimate kindness. Today they keep talking all the time about social justice. By the way, they are always careful to say not charity but justice, and that is the big mistake. Because I think a world needs to exist on the basis of charity, not justice. A world that exists on justice is a world that cannot exist. What people today call justice, I mean. What do I mean by that? Because it’s a world that basically wants to erase the concept of charity. It doesn’t want charity. It wants to regulate everything through the law. The law has to take care of the weak, the law has to give the… yes, I see in the chats references to columns I don’t even remember writing. So you can use those. In any case, communism basically tries to do the… to turn charity into law. You are basically obligated to divide what you earned among all the residents, all the citizens, equally, or all members of the class equally—and no, it does not depend on your good will. It doesn’t remain at the voluntary level. You have to. Meaning, the rules determine that you have to share. So you understand that, on the face of it, what they are aspiring to here is complete kindness. But when you take kindness all the way, in the end there’s no kindness left here—it’s judgment. Now, you could say people won’t stand up to this, it’s not productive, those are the practical aspects, yes, why kibbutzim broke up or were privatized, because it can’t work in terms of human nature. But that’s too narrow a view. Through Kabbalistic glasses there is some metaphysical statement here: such a thing cannot work. A world run according to absolute judgment with no dimensions of kindness has no existence. It has no existence. That’s what the very first Rashi on the Torah says. Now, of course Rashi wasn’t talking about communism—it’s possible to call this some kind of midrash I’m making—but it’s not midrash; it’s the result of the Kabbalistic perspective on the concepts of kindness and judgment. That’s what comes out of it. And I think the collapse—what was so beautiful about the Soviet Union was that the whole thing fell apart without a war. Yes? After all, a lot of people talked about that—how one day it was there, and the next day it disappeared. It no longer existed. All the time people feared a war between the blocs, yes, the Cold War; that was always the great threat, that a hot war would break out between the blocs, that terrible fear that was there all the time, that delicate balance. And in the end what happened? One side of the story simply collapsed completely without a war, without a shot being fired. And again, you can see what I’m saying now as a kind of homily, but in my view it isn’t—it really is an implication of the Kabbalistic outlook. It means that a world built only on judgment has no existence. It cannot endure; it will collapse on its own. You don’t even need to fight it. Meaning, it will simply disintegrate. It’s something that cannot hold up. Human nature doesn’t withstand it—that is a consequence, not the reason for the collapse. That is a consequence of this Kabbalistic view I described earlier. One of the expressions of human nature is that human nature won’t produce anything if everything is shared. Yes, I think I also mentioned this once. There was once a nice lecture by Bibi; I enjoyed it very much. He stood there with a board and tried to explain why lowering taxes helps the economy. Okay? You know what, I’ll give you a short demonstration. Very simple, but it was very nice; I really enjoyed it. Let’s look at it like this, see. I’m drawing a coordinate system: here on this axis is how much there is in the state treasury, how much money there will be, and here is the tax rate. Okay? Let’s say this is one, or 100 percent, and this is zero. Fine? Now Bibi says this: if the tax rate is zero percent, we are here—how much money will there be in the state treasury? Zero. Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that the state treasury consists only of tax revenues, okay? So if there’s zero percent tax, the amount of money in the state treasury is zero. What happens when the tax rate is 100 percent? At one. How much is there in the state treasury? Also zero. Why? No one goes to work. Because if you pay all your income to the state treasury, why go to work? So nobody works, there is a 100 percent tax on zero income, and therefore there is zero in the state treasury. That means the graph basically starts here and ends here. Assuming it is continuous, that means there is something like this here. And that means that somewhere around here there has to be a tax rate at which the amount of money in the state treasury is maximal. If it’s symmetric it’s 50 percent, but there’s no reason to assume it’s symmetric. His claim was that studies around the world show that the maximum is something like 30 percent. Fine? Up to here it’s 0.3. Sorry for the crooked writing, but I’m doing this with the mouse. So here is the maximum. Okay? So that means that… basically zero percent tax is anarchism. Right? There is no state treasury; it can’t function. One hundred percent tax is communism, because in the end the state distributes it to the public, but everything you do basically goes to the state, and afterward they divide it up for you like for everyone else, so there’s no reason to go work. Therefore neither of these can endure. Neither anarchism nor communism can endure. There will be no state treasury, there will be no state, the whole thing won’t function. It can’t work. You need to place yourself somewhere in the middle. And the art or the wisdom that we need to hit upon, or try to conduct ourselves by, is where in the middle to be. So he says that being around a 30 percent tax rate is basically the optimal point. By the way, according to this it turns out—wait, let this be clear, I hope the drawing is still there. Look, if for example we are here, yes? Let’s say the tax rate is 0.1. In order to raise the state treasury, you need to raise taxes. Right? If you raise taxes to here, then the state treasury will grow, you’ll have more. But if you’re here—say if taxation is 50 percent, you’re here—then in order to increase the state treasury, if you increase taxes that will lower the state treasury. In order to increase the state treasury you need to lower taxes. And he claims that since we are here—at least the marginal tax rate is 50 percent—therefore we need to lower taxes so there will be more money in the state treasury. I simply forgot Bibi’s punchline; I don’t need it for our purposes, but that was his punchline there in the lecture. Very simple but charming. I think it’s a very nice presentation of the issue, and of course terribly simplistic—never mind—but there is something correct in it. In any event, I used it to illustrate the fact that these two sides of the graph are basically anarchism and communism, and neither of them can endure. The world exists in models of what today is called social democracy, or something in between communism and capitalism, or between anarchism and communism. And anarchism is basically a right-wing idea—you need to understand that; I assumed that was obvious. In any event, the claim is that the accumulated experience of the world has basically led us to the conclusion that pure kindness and pure judgment are models that don’t work. They simply fall apart; they do not work. And therefore we need to combine kindness and judgment, and of course there are arguments over what the right mixture is, how close to be to this pole or that pole. There are still arguments between right and left, but those arguments are not between anarchism and communism; no one today really believes in those models anymore except for a truly bizarre and not especially intelligent minority. The arguments are over the question of where in the middle to position ourselves. What is today called piggish capitalism is, say, a tax rate of 0.1 or 0.2, and what is today called socialism or crazy communism is a tax rate of 0.7. Okay? And the arguments are somewhere in the middle, around 0.3, 0.5, 0.6. Okay, of course this is all a terribly simplistic description; I’m just using Bibi’s description to say what I want to say. So basically the lesson we learned the hard way is a particular case of the idea Rashi brings, or the Sages say, that a world cannot endure on pure kindness or on pure judgment. And therefore now we need to argue about what the right mixture is—morally, economically, there are various aspects to it—but what the right mixture is. But it is always a mixture. Abraham our Patriarch stands in pure kindness, and communism stands in pure judgment. And both are wrong; one must not behave that way. It is not proper, not correct to behave that way; the world will not endure that way; it is not right to educate toward such a thing; these are not models that it is fitting to educate toward at all. They are extreme models that should not be educational models. You can tell stories about them in order to learn the two poles, to understand what pure kindness is and what pure judgment is, and then of course to move from thesis and antithesis to synthesis—to social democracy in the economic context, or to a mixture of kindness and judgment in the broader metaphysical sense. That, for example, is one aspect in which one can see the fingerprints of this Kabbalistic division between kindness and judgment in our world, in the arguments that cut through our world, and I think this Kabbalistic division gives it some deeper, broader meaning. It puts it in a context that seems to me worth thinking about for a moment—that is, it may be that there is something to this. It’s not just an interesting play on words, not just a coincidence that there is some pair of concepts here that enriches our perspective; perhaps there is something substantial in it. And now I’ll show you more places where it appears, which strengthens the claim even more. Where else does this outlook appear? In the context of what I spoke about now, it’s basically the relation between kindness and strength. But in the ten sefirot there are Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge; Kindness, Strength, Beauty; Eternity, Splendor, Foundation; and Kingship below. There are three triads and then—yes, standing in threes like in the army—and above there is the Crown in certain perspectives; there are several descriptions of this. So each such triad is basically built according to the same idea. After all, there are ten sefirot, yes: Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge; Kindness, Strength, Beauty; Eternity, Splendor, Foundation; and Kingship. In the simple picture these are sefirot on a straight line, one above the other or below the other. But there is an arrangement of the sefirot in three lines. There is the middle line, the right line—which is the line of kindness—and the left line—which is the line of judgment. When you arrange them in three lines, then the first sefirah is on the right line, Wisdom. The second on the left line, Understanding. The third in the middle, in the middle and below. Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge; Kindness, Strength, Beauty; Eternity, Splendor, Foundation; and Kingship below. That’s how they are arranged—three lines. So basically on the right line you have Wisdom, Kindness, and Eternity. On the left line you have Understanding, Strength, and Splendor. And on the middle line you have Knowledge, Beauty, Foundation, and Kingship. Yes, altogether ten sefirot. Three, four in the middle, and another three. Okay, so that’s ten sefirot in all. So that means the right line is basically the line of kindnesses, the left line is the line of judgments. I understand this when I speak about Kindness and Strength, the middle triad. That’s the triad I explained earlier. That’s the economic triad, the triad of social conduct. Okay? Economic-social. That is Kindness, Strength, and Beauty. In the context of Kindness, Strength, and Beauty, by the way, they really are also located in the belly. In the human figure, those three lines are basically two arms and two legs for the two side lines, and the body is the middle line. So Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge are in the head; Kindness, Strength, Beauty are the body; and Eternity, Splendor, and Foundation are the legs, and the sexual organ is Foundation; Eternity and Splendor are the two legs; and Kingship is below, under the body. Okay? So that’s interesting, because Kindness, Strength, and Beauty really are in the belly—in our consumption, our economy. What sustains us as a body is basically this dialectical triad of Kindness, Strength, and Beauty. And Eternity, Splendor, and Foundation are basically the physical activities—not nutrition or consumption, but output, physical activities, the legs that walk and do things. And Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge are in the head. Now what happens in the head? Exactly the same dialectical structure. Wisdom—“wisdom, from where shall it be found?” “Where” is the Crown, yes? Wisdom—actually let’s start with Understanding. Understanding is easiest. Understanding, I think—it may be the Sages, but I think it’s the Ari, of blessed memory, who says that understanding is to understand one thing from another. That’s why it’s called understanding. I don’t know if this has a source in the Sages; I don’t remember at the moment. What does it mean to understand one thing from another? It means to derive conclusions from premises. To derive conclusions from premises. In other words, logic. The tools of logic are tools of understanding. What is wisdom? So the Ari writes that wisdom is “the power of what.” What does that mean? It is true by virtue of itself; it is not derived—it’s not simply understanding one thing from another. Wisdom is something true by virtue of itself; it does not come out of something else. Or in other words, these are first premises. Wisdom is first premises, and understanding is deriving the conclusion from the first premises. Okay? And knowledge is the connection of the two. Kindness, Strength, and Beauty. Kindness is anarchism and Strength is communism, and Beauty is social democracy, the combination of the two. So in Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge there are also expressions in our world, and this mapping is really beautiful. You’ll see—you suddenly see the map: all our existence is basically arranged according to these lines in an amazing way. And it’s the same logic in the intellectual context and in the economic context and in the physical context—the same logic. You can really show this mapping; this conceptual system is so beautiful. So in the intellectual context, Understanding is basically the approach that says logic is everything. I want proofs for everything. Yes, I’m not going to go back over all my sermons that I’ve already said quite a few times: postmodernism basically comes out of this, analyticity—that’s what I called it in the books, analyticity. That is basically the view of extreme understanding, absolute judgment. It is the parallel to communism. By the way, that too is the left. The left of the past was communism; the left of today is postmodernism, the post-everything people—post-Zionism, postmodernism, it doesn’t matter—all of that is today’s left. Even though seemingly there is no connection between the two things, there is a connection: this is pure Understanding and pure Strength, but both are the pure left line. And what does that mean? I work only with what works through rules. In the context of communism, these are the rules of distribution—yes, equality. I don’t leave anything for action outside the rules, charity; the rules determine everything. In the intellectual context this is pure logic: I work only with rules of reasoning, only logic. What has proof I accept; what has no proof I do not accept. Okay? So that is pure Understanding, that pole of pure Understanding. But then what? That pole leads to a vacuum. Why? Because when you derive one thing from another, the first thing from which you derived the conclusion itself is not derived from something else. So if you don’t accept things unless they have a proof or a logical argument that derives them from something else—that’s what a proof is—then in practice you end up with nothing. Because proof is always built on premises, and you will not accept the premises, so what good is it to derive conclusions from the premises? The premises themselves you do not accept, so you are left with nothing. Therefore pure Understanding—someone who works only with logic, for whom only logic is the sole and exclusive criterion—ends up with nothing. He cannot accept any claim; he remains an absolute skeptic. And therefore this is basically postmodernism. Postmodernism is extreme logicism. Meaning that if you make a claim consistent with certain premises, and I make a claim consistent with other premises, then we are both equally right, because we are both consistent. There is no way to test the premises themselves, to determine who is right; all I can test is whether the conclusion follows from the premises. And from here comes narrativism, yes, multiple kinds of discourse, each person and his own discourse, and each person imprisoned inside his own discourse, and as right as everyone else who is in a different discourse. There is no way to compare and test one against the other, because all we test is logical consistency, and logical consistency can never decide anything; it can eliminate contradictions, but once the system is consistent, then it is consistent, period. So pure Understanding leads to a vacuum, exactly as pure Strength or pure judgment—yes, communism—cannot endure economically; this cannot endure intellectually. Yes: economic left and intellectual left cannot endure; they have no existence; they are left with a vacuum. But the same is true of the right. That is, pure economic right—yes, anarchism—also cannot endure. Pure intellectual right is someone who ignores logic, says we are above logic, we don’t know, we have all kinds of intuitions, and remains only with declarations and slogans. French philosophy, in short. Meaning, yes, I’m waiting for someone to send me a reference to my column about the law authorizing summary judgment on Frenchmen and their helpers. So the claim, basically, is that pure right on the intellectual plane, pure wisdom on the intellectual plane, is basically some kind of mysticism—that is our topic—or intuition alone. Meaning, without logical control, we are above logic. I ask you for a moment: but are there contradictions in your doctrine? And he says yes, but I am above logic. I hear this so many times that I get a fever from the sentence. But that is basically pure intellectual right. And once again it leads to a vacuum. It leads to everybody and his nonsense; everyone invents for himself some kind of mysticism that doesn’t stand up to any rational scrutiny, and he doesn’t even submit it to rational scrutiny. He has no problem with that; he doesn’t need logic, he is above logic. Faith is above logic and everything is fine, so he’s all set. That too doesn’t hold water; that too is empty, that too is a vacuum. The only way to hold on to something on the intellectual plane is not to belittle intuitions, but not to take them for granted as if they are certainly true and need no logical scrutiny. I have intuitions, but I do logical analysis; I see what the conclusions are, I check whether there are contradictions, whether it makes sense, whether it fits with other intuitions I have, and gradually I build—with a combination of wisdom and understanding together—that is what is called knowledge. Wisdom and understanding are the right side and the left side, and knowledge is the synthesis. Thesis and antithesis, and knowledge is the synthesis. Just like Kindness, Strength, and Beauty; anarchism, communism, and social democracy. Okay? Now the structure is the same structure. The question is whether you go only with rules or whether you go completely without rules. Neither of those can endure, neither on the intellectual plane nor on the economic-social plane. Okay? Therefore this model of two lines, this dialectical model of outside the rules, only with the rules, and this synthesis of willingness to go with the rules but not to see them as the whole picture—to deviate from them sometimes, to understand that rules are not the whole story but that you cannot do without them—that is the combination that can hold water. I have often spoken about the relation of Jewish law to rules. In several places one can see that Jewish law displays no small amount of disdain for rules. Even though we are very used to the idea that there are halakhic rules and all the time we apply one halakhic rule or another, and we also invent tons of rules, some of them with no basis and no foundation, but they have become binding rules and nobody dares deviate from them. That is pure judgment. And therefore we have ended up where we have ended up, because pure judgment doesn’t hold water. But in the sources one sees in quite a few places that Jewish law is not excited by… yes, exactly: “one does not derive from generalizations.” I also wrote about that; I’ve already written all these things. The Talmud in tractate Kiddushin, yes, says that women are exempt from all positive commandments bound by time, except for several exceptions. Then the Talmud asks: what about Hakhel? Women are obligated in Hakhel too, so why don’t you write it in the list of exceptions? So the Talmud says: one does not derive from generalizations even in a case where “except” was stated. What does that mean? You tell me that women are exempt from all positive time-bound commandments. Suppose you had phrased it that way—you would say, okay, there are some exceptions; I gave the generalization, I’m not going into all the details now. Fine. But in a place where I phrase it so meticulously, I say: women are exempt from all positive time-bound commandments except A, B, C, and D. Then I would not expect there also to be E, right? Because I gave the exceptions too; I didn’t make do with only the rule. So in a place where “except” is stated, I would expect that there we really do follow the rule. The rule, apart from the exceptions enumerated in the “except” list, in the list of exceptions. The Talmud says no. Even such a rule that is formulated with an “except”—don’t take it too seriously. Even there there are more exceptions. They didn’t mention them; don’t make a big deal out of everything. It seems to me that this is a blunt statement against rules. For example that kind of thing. “What additional case does the common denominator come to include exactly?”—that’s the second example I always bring in this context. But here I’ll bring something else. Maimonides… no, not Maimonides, the Talmud says that in disputes between Abaye and Rava—there are many such disputes—the Jewish law follows Rava except in six cases, ya’al kagam, right? Six topics in which the law is ruled like Abaye. And that really is a rule formulated in terms of an exception. Right? The law follows Rava except for ya’al kagam—“unconscious despair,” conspiring witnesses, and so on, a beam standing on its own; that is the acronym ya’al kagam. Six topics. Now in Maimonides—at least two places I’m thinking of, but I think there are more—he rules like Abaye in other topics besides these six. For example in “do not form separate factions,” or “do not make yourselves into separate groups,” he rules like Abaye that one may not establish two study courts in one city because of “do not form separate factions.” In principle that is Abaye’s view, and according to Rava it is permitted. Maimonides rules like Abaye. And regarding “if one transgressed, it is ineffective,” at the beginning of tractate Temurah, there too Maimonides, according to some of his commentators at least, rules like Abaye. How can that be? Everyone wonders about him: how can he rule like Abaye? After all, it is an explicit rule in the Talmud. These are not later invented rules. There are all kinds of rules that were invented later. And these are rules—when I say invented, not for nothing; many of them really are inventions. But this rule is written explicitly in the Talmud: the law follows Rava except for ya’al kagam. And Maimonides allows himself, without batting an eye, to rule in additional topics like Abaye. So immediately the rule-people, of course, formulate more rules. That is, they say sub-rules. In a place where Abaye and Rava are not really disputing each other directly but are disputing the opinions of other Sages or tannaim, then maybe one can rule like Abaye. Only in disputes that are directly between them does the law follow Rava. That is already really an invention, and I think it has no basis whatsoever; there is no logic to it. It is just an invention to force Maimonides’ exceptions back into the game. The simpler truth is that there is also a rule in the Talmud that one does not derive from generalizations even where an exception is stated. That too is written in the Talmud. Maimonides knew that Talmud passage as well. And when the Talmud formulates a rule with an exception—every dispute of Abaye and Rava follows Rava except for ya’al kagam—Maimonides applies to that rule-with-exception the other rule from tractate Kiddushin: one does not derive from generalizations even where “except” was stated. And if you have good reasons to rule like Abaye—logical reasons, or reasons from other Talmudic passages—then rule like Abaye. If you have no other reason, then you go with the rule. The rule is the default. You don’t know how to rule? Aside from ya’al kagam, you rule like Rava. But if you have a definite position like Abaye in an additional passage, then rule like Abaye in an additional passage. So yes, correct, amoraim here and there rule like the school of Shammai even though the heavenly voice already decided that the Jewish law follows the school of Hillel and that the words of the school of Shammai in place of the school of Hillel are of no legal weight. And still they rule like the school of Shammai. At the beginning of tractate Beitzah there are several amoraim who rule like the school of Shammai in several passages. So in short, what I learn from these examples—and there are more examples—is that there are indeed rules in Jewish law, but Jewish law keeps hinting to us: don’t take these rules too seriously. Make exceptions to them when you find it appropriate to do so. Carefully, but firmly, as they say. Meaning, on the one hand we do not give up on formulating rules. There are rules in the Talmud. It’s not as if we say, okay, then just rule however you feel like it. If you are going to deviate from the rules, why do you need rules? The answer is: no, we cannot do without rules. Pure kindness does not work. Working without rules doesn’t go. But even when rules are formulated, we don’t cling to them too orthodoxly. You need to use your nose, your intuition, for when it is right and when one deviates from the rule. This is that mixture of kindness and judgment. That mixture of going with the rules and deviating from the rule when necessary. Therefore, in this overall perspective on the concepts of kindness and judgment, when we suddenly see how many implications there are and how many branches come out of this central trunk of the distinction between kindness and judgment, this gives us some kind of indication that there probably really is some distinction here that captures dimensions of depth in reality. It’s not just made up. There is probably something here that is correct—I don’t know—there is something here that captures something true. Here I am remembering my famous homily—we won’t get into it—about the forty-nine gates of understanding and the fifty gates—fifty gates of understanding and the forty-nine gates of impurity. Yes, the question of Nachmanides and the Vilna Gaon: how can that be? After all, “God made one opposite the other,” so it ought to be 49 and 49. How can there be 50 and 49? And there I made a whole move with understanding versus wisdom, to show that understanding cannot work alone and wisdom cannot work alone, and so on. A sermon for Yom Kippur. That too is written somewhere, I think. Wow, virtuoso control. But I think it’s also somewhere on the website; there’s also an article on the site, maybe I even wrote it in one of the columns, I no longer remember. Anyway, these many implications—or the organization of a great many aspects of reality into one overall picture—are some kind of indication that there is something in this picture, in this conceptual system, that probably captures some dimensions of depth in reality. That is basically the claim I wanted to make here. If I continue this a bit more: these concepts of kindness and judgment in the Kabbalistic world, they are… the whole Kabbalistic picture is basically spread out through them. Yes, in the Kabbalistic picture, how were all the worlds created? There was infinite light filling all of reality, yes, the beginning of Etz Chaim of the Ari, of blessed memory: there was infinite light filling all of reality. Then the light withdraws to the sides in some kind of circle that remains empty, and into that circle a line of infinite light enters from above. The infinite light is around the circle, but there is an empty circle in the middle. Then a line of infinite light enters from above—not all the way down, yes, almost to the bottom, and it stops. And that is the world of line and contraction. What is that? Contraction means the withdrawal of the light to the side, and the line is the infinite light entering in the middle. So there is a world of infinity that existed at first, and then it withdrew to the side, the circle with the line was created—this is the second world, the world of line and contraction. And then on this line—why do we need such a line? Why doesn’t it go all the way down? Why doesn’t it touch the bottom? Because the function of this line is to define an axis on which there is higher and lower, an axis of hierarchy. If it touched the bottom, then there would be no bottom. Then what would be the difference between below and above? Yes, like turtles all the way down. We are used to the fact that there is above… what defines this as below and that as above? Proximity to the earth. Here there is no earth; all that exists is just this circle. That’s it. So there is no above and below here. In order to define above and below and hierarchy, there is a line entering that does not reach the bottom, the floor of the circle; it does not connect to the infinite light below. In the language of the Ari he writes that if it were there, if it connected all the way to the bottom, the world would return to chaos and void, it would go back to being infinite light, the circle would be erased. What does that mean in our analogy? That if you don’t have hierarchies—sefirot arranged along this line from top to bottom—there is no hierarchy. When the line reaches all the way down, there is no above and below. If there is no above and below, there is no difference between the sefirot, no hierarchies, no laws. So the world returns to chaos and void. In order for the world not to return to chaos and void, you need to create laws. What are laws? Laws determine what is yes and what is no. Right, that’s law. Law says this obeys the law, this deviates from the law. Therefore judgment in Kabbalah is also always associated with separation. Judgment is separation, and kindness is connection. Why? Because judgment always says: this is permitted, that is forbidden; this is obligatory, that is not obligatory. Judgment always separates this from that. Law’s function is always to separate what fits the law from what does not fit the law. Therefore separation, in the Kabbalistic conception, is also judgment, and connection is kindness. Like fire, which crumbles things apart—that is judgment; water, which joins the dust and turns it into one mass—that is kindness. Okay? So all these things—you can see that from every direction and on every side, these things somehow connect into one overall worldview. After these sefirot are created, and then there is hierarchy, basically—Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, Kindness, Strength, Beauty, Eternity… now there really is hierarchy, there is above and below—more detailed laws begin to be formed. This is now divided into three lines, and then Adam Kadmon, Atzilut, Beri’ah, Yetzirah, Asiyah, all these worlds. Okay? One is born gradually out of the other. And the differences depend on the question of what the mixture is between kindness and judgment. The higher you are, the more kindness and the less judgment—or the less contracted it is. It is still infinite light with fewer contractions. It is more revealed; the contractions are basically the coverings that conceal it. The more concealed it is, the lower the world, and the more it is a world of judgment. The higher it is, the more it is a world of kindness. What is infinite light? What is infinity? Infinity is something in which there are no separations, no laws. Right? That’s called infinity—you cannot see in it right and left, above and below, everything is the same. That is the world of—yes, that’s postmodernism, actually. Everything is the same, everyone is right, there are no rules, no one is more right, no one is less right, there are no hierarchies, there is nothing. Infinite light. Such a thing cannot exist. You need to contract it, to create a reality that has hierarchy, into which a line enters, in which there are laws. And the combination between the laws created around the line and the line, which is itself infinite light—the combination, or vessels that contain light inside them—the vessels are the limitations or separations or judgments, yes, and the infinite light is the kindness that enters into the judgments. This combination of the two together is basically matter and form, if you like; it is basically the thing that can function and live in our world. If there is no mixture, if there is only judgment—what is only judgment? Only judgment is only contraction. But you need something that is being contracted, in order for there to be something here. If there is no thing being contracted, then contraction by itself—what is it contracting? It has nothing to contract, so it has no existence at all. You understand? It’s exactly the same as logic without premises. You derive conclusions from what? If there is nothing to derive them from, then what value do these tools have, which derive conclusions from premises? Judgment cannot stand alone unless there is kindness at its base, unless kindness is found within it. It cannot work. It is intellectually empty, economically empty, metaphysically empty, empty in every sense; it cannot work. But pure kindness is infinite light; our world does not endure like that. It cannot endure because you need hierarchies. There is more and less, there is good and evil, there is right and wrong, there is male and female, there are distinctions. These are not arbitrary things; they are not merely social constructions—statements that are not politically correct today. It’s not only constructions. There are such things. I’m not saying one should be ultra-conservative and cling to whatever was accepted until now, but on the other hand the absolute blurring and saying that everyone defines whatever he wants—that’s nonsense. Again, the mixture is what matters. Don’t go all the way here and don’t go all the way there. Be a social democrat on the intellectual plane too, not only on the economic-social plane. Understand that, true, conservative definitions are not always absolute, and maybe they were constructions and need to be updated—I’m absolutely willing to accept such claims. But on the other hand, the anarchy that people end up with, where there are no definitions and no hierarchy, no male and no female, and you can do whatever you want with whomever you want, you are bound by nothing—that’s nonsense. It does not hold water. It basically means there is nothing. You cannot even open your mouth; you cannot speak at all. Okay? This current madness, which of course leads to a vacuum—it’s fine, we see it before our eyes—it leads to a vacuum. But notice how many aspects of reality are mapped onto this simple distinction between kindness and judgment. The intellectual plane, the economic-social plane, the ideological plane, the philosophical plane, everything. By the way, Hasidism versus its opponents—that’s also there. At the root of the dispute between Hasidism and its opponents is a dispute between the conception that contraction is literal and the conception that contraction is not literal. That is the theological or metaphysical root of the dispute. What does that mean? The Litvaks, yes, the opponents, basically work with laws, with rules. The Hasidim toss the rules aside. If they don’t pray until after the time for reciting the Shema, not so terrible; yes, sitting in the sukkah—if the encompassing light doesn’t work out, then they don’t sit in the sukkah. They don’t make such a big deal of the rules. And at root it begins with the Hasidim saying that contraction is not literal. What does that mean? Contraction is judgment—the judgment that limits the infinite light. They say, leave it, contraction is an illusion, it’s not literal. In truth there are no rules in the world. We supposedly need to live with some awareness that there are rules and that we act according to rules, but the truth is that there are no rules. And once that is the truth, then you can no longer fool yourself too much, and in reality the rules are often broken. And the Hasidim of later generations already understood this, and therefore they no longer really speak in this language—not really. Sometimes yes, when teaching Hasidism and it obligates nobody to do anything, but in practice nobody really lives that way anymore. Because it cannot work. The opponents, on the other hand, for them everything is with the rules, everything works by the rules; you have to decide what is permitted and forbidden, and there is nothing apart from that. And that is basically the polar opposite of the Hasidic pole. That is pure judgment. Hasidim are pure kindness, and the opponents are pure judgment. And the truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle. Again, religious social democracy. We talked about economic-social social democracy, intellectual social democracy; there is religious social democracy too. Between the pole of pure judgment and the pole of pure kindness. Likewise one can talk about male and female: the male gives basically the matter, and the female gives it the form, and therefore the female is the left side and the male is the right side. That is already closer to the world of homiletics, but I think there too one can see it. But I won’t go into that here; it’s more complicated, more delicate, and in some of these things I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t just a homily. But I think there is something in that division too. Even right and left in today’s political division, as I said earlier—for some reason somehow that fits. After all, the origin of right and left is the French parliament after the Revolution, where the right sat on the right side and the left sat on the left side. That is where these concepts of right and left were born. But somehow it fits—even the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere of the brain fit this division of right and left. And maybe there was some mystical or spiritual intuition, I don’t know exactly, among the people who associated these ideas with right and left. I don’t know. But there is some kind of correlation that is fairly surprising to me. All the time I’m afraid here that I’m crossing the line into mere homily, but it seems to me that maybe I’m not. I’m not sure it crosses that line. There is something here that is hard to ignore. A great many things line up along this axis and fit very well. And therefore I think this presents very strong indications that there is something here. The same thing, for example, with the worlds of Creation, Formation, and Action. What is Creation? Creation is basically the creation of something from nothing, the creation of matter, let’s say. Formation comes from the word form—that’s the root. Formation and form come from the same root. So when you take matter and give it form, the matter itself is the created thing, something from nothing. Creation is something from nothing; formation is something from something. So Creation is basically to create the matter, that there be matter here. Formation is to shape it. Then the world of Action is after we have given form to the matter. In our world we do not know objects that are matter without form or form without matter. Form without matter means ideas or angels or whatever. Matter without form is just an abstraction, prime matter. We don’t know such a thing. Everything we know has matter and form. But what we know in our world is Action. So again, Creation, Formation, and Action are once again the same dialectical triad. Creation is basically that there are not yet laws—it is this breakthrough of something from nothing against the laws. Formation is to shape form for the matter created in Creation, and that is something from something. You take the matter and shape it, because you make from it a chair, a table, a ball—you make it into something. And the thing created after you clothe it with form, that created thing, is what is in the world of Action. That is what exists in our world: objects that have matter and form. This is exactly the same dialectic we saw between kindness and judgment. Because formation—the form of the thing—what is form? To give form to something is to say: triangle. Triangle means to delimit a certain domain, so that what is inside it is the triangle and what is outside it is outside the triangle. Form is always something that sets a boundary between inside and outside. Therefore limitation, judgment, and form are almost synonymous words in the Kabbalistic world. Therefore the world of Formation gives shape—it is judgment. Creation is kindness, and Action is the synthesis; it is physical social democracy. We talked about the economic, we talked about the intellectual; this is already physical. In the physical world there is a combination of matter and form, of kindness and judgment. And all these connections, as I said earlier—all these aspects, how everything connects to the same issue—that means there is probably some true conception here. And we already talked about the fact that these complementary pairs also appear in other mystical teachings—yin and yang, or various pairs in other mysticisms, not in Kabbalistic mysticism—which map onto this. There too they call it something else, but these are basically the same spiritual intuitions. And if this appears in different places among different people from different cultures, all putting their finger on it, and it connects to many contexts, then I think that is a good indication that there is something here. That we have grasped, captured, something in reality; it’s not just made up. And to that I will get—I’ll get to that later. Okay, let’s stop here. Any comments or questions?

[Speaker B] Thank you very much, have a peaceful Sabbath.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A peaceful Sabbath.

[Speaker C] What are

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the last sefirot?

[Speaker C] You didn’t talk about them—Netzach, Hod, Yesod.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, what—I didn’t understand?

[Speaker C] You didn’t explain them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The dialectical process in the lower sefirot? I need to think about that a bit, because there it’s more complicated. But I think it connects more to the physical realm, what I said at the end about creation, formation, and action. The right leg is the beginning of movement, the left leg is the continuation of movement. Yes, this is the beginning of movement, this is the coming-into-being of the thing; the continuation is one thing emerging from another—that’s formation; and Yesod is the reproductive organs, the creature that is ultimately produced and goes on from there. Okay, so that’s already less—let’s say—less easy to see in the reality around us, so for me it’s less compelling. We can think about it a bit; maybe there too something more concrete can be drawn out. I’m constantly afraid here that I’m slipping too much into homiletics—I don’t know—but somehow the connection among all these things, I think, is indeed an indication that there’s something to it. Okay, you decide.