Reasons and Rationales of the Commandments, Lecture 8 for Shavuot

Table of Contents

• Stopping the chain of reasoning and non-arbitrary axioms
• Non-Euclidean geometry and relativity against arbitrariness
• Language as a framework for thought and examples of conceptual deficiency
• The mirror puzzle, right-left versus up-down, and a distinction that is not symmetrical
• Maimonides in the eighth root: command, warning, and negation of obligation
• “She shall not go out as the slaves go out” as a tricky example of negating a law
• What positive commandments and prohibitions have in common: normativity, not “good deeds”
• The giving of the Torah: the birth of the prescriptive sphere, not the discovery of good and evil
• The ten utterances, the Ten Commandments, and David Hume’s gap
• “Greater is one who is commanded and does” and the status of command versus a “correct” action
• Maimonides: idolatry out of love and fear, and accepting something as a “god”
• Maimonides in the Laws of Kings and in the Commentary on the Mishnah: the commandments because of the Sinai command
• “That’s just how it is” without arbitrariness: the meaning of command and the question of “why”

Summary

General Overview

The claim is that every system of reasoning has to stop at axioms that are not arbitrary, but are “true in and of themselves,” and that without such a stopping point explanations lose their meaning. From there, it is argued that language and terminology guide thought, and sometimes hide deep conceptual connections, like the connection between positive commandments and prohibitions. On that basis, a fundamental distinction is built between descriptive statements and normative statements of command, along with the claim that the giving of the Torah was not a revelation of “what is good and what is bad,” but the birth of the category of binding command. Accordingly, Maimonides’ position is emphasized: commandments are fulfilled as commandments only when they are done because of the command given at Sinai. And the question “why keep the commandments?” breaks down on the very meaning of the concept of command, whose basic answer is “that’s just how it is” — not in an arbitrary sense, but in the sense that it defines obligation.

Stopping the Chain of Reasoning and Non-Arbitrary Axioms

Every argument rests on prior principles, and if you keep asking “why” again and again, you have to reach a stopping point where the explanation is “that’s just how it is,” because it is true by virtue of itself. The view that everything rational must be based on some argument outside itself cannot be correct, because then no starting point would be possible. The axioms are not “because I felt like it,” but foundations that do not need explanation because there is nothing “more correct” that could ground them. They are posited as basic assumptions because they are the most basic things there are.

Non-Euclidean Geometry and Relativity Against Arbitrariness

The fact that there are non-Euclidean geometries does not show that axioms are arbitrary, because for every given space there is one correct geometry, and different geometries describe different spaces. On the surface of a sphere, the sum of the angles in a triangle is not one hundred and eighty degrees — not because someone arbitrarily decided so, but because the metric of the space determines it. Relativity, too, does not prove that “everything is relative” in some meaning-destroying sense. Rather, it arose from the constraint that the laws of nature must look the same in all frames of reference, and therefore the differences in measurement describe one and the same thing.

Language as a Framework for Thought and Examples of Conceptual Deficiency

The conceptual system embedded in language guides thought, and when terms are missing it is hard to grasp ideas or see unifying structures. The example of the Eskimos and snow is used to describe a situation in which a large number of terms creates fine distinctions, but can also blur the common underlying basis — to the point of “seeing the trees but not the forest.” A research claim is also mentioned about the Pirahã tribe in Brazil, whose number system is “one, two, and many.” From that comes the idea that a limiting linguistic deficiency restricts the ability to compare nearby numbers, along with the comment that the real question is what causes what, and what follows from what.

The Mirror Puzzle, Right-Left Versus Up-Down, and a Distinction That Is Not Symmetrical

The puzzle of why a mirror “switches” right and left but not up and down turns out to hinge on a distinction between different kinds of concepts. Up and down have an objective definition in relation to the Earth, whereas right and left cannot be defined objectively in terms of spatial relations alone, which is why it is hard to teach a child right and left. The objective spatial relations are preserved in a mirror, and the perceived reversal of right and left comes from the observer and that observer’s symmetrical frame. The idea also touches on the possibility that creatures lacking that kind of symmetry might not understand the pair “right and left” at all. It is also noted that in physics there is an objective distinction between right and left, such as the screw rule in electromagnetism, so there is a meaning here that is not just a “simple spatial relation.”

Maimonides in the Eighth Root: Command, Warning, and Negation of Obligation

Maimonides states that one should not count “the negation of obligation” together with a warning, because a warning is part of command, whereas the negation of obligation is the negation of a predicate from a subject, and there is no command in it at all. He explains that in Arabic there is no single term that includes both positive commandments and warnings, so one has to call both of them by the borrowed name “command,” whereas in Hebrew the inclusive term is “decree,” and the Sages call every commandment “the king’s decree.” Maimonides distinguishes between “no/not” as a normative warning and “no/not” as descriptive negation, and he brings examples of negation such as “And there never arose again in Israel a prophet like Moses,” “God is not a man, that He should lie,” and “Trouble shall not rise up a second time.” He emphasizes that command does not enter the story, because a story is built as predicate and subject, whereas a command is a complete utterance.

“She Shall Not Go Out as the Slaves Go Out” as a Tricky Example of Negating a Law

Maimonides argues that people counted “She shall not go out as the slaves go out” incorrectly at the beginning of the civil laws section, because this is not a prohibition but a negation of a legal rule. The logic is that one might have thought that if, in the case of a Canaanite slave, the loss of one of the extremities leads to freedom, then all the more so with a Hebrew maidservant. The Torah negates that by saying, “She shall not go out as the slaves go out,” meaning that it does not follow that she goes free through the loss of a limb. The verse functions by removing the applicability of a law, not by imposing a prohibition, and therefore it should not be counted among the prohibitions.

What Positive Commandments and Prohibitions Have in Common: Normativity, Not “Good Deeds”

The deep connection between positive commandments and prohibitions is that both belong to the normative category of command, not to the description of facts. A distinction is drawn between descriptive statements like “the law book says that murder is forbidden” and prescriptive statements like “murder is forbidden,” which do not have truth and falsehood in the same sense, but rather a language of obligation-forbidden-permitted. There is even deontic logic that describes such relations. The claim is that “good deeds” are not the same thing as positive commandments, because what is missing is the command that defines obligation and prohibition beyond the description of good and evil.

The Giving of the Torah: The Birth of the Prescriptive Sphere, Not the Discovery of Good and Evil

The revelation at Mount Sinai is not understood as a new disclosure of what is right and wrong to do, because such things were already knowable beforehand. The example given is “Our father Abraham observed even the rabbinic law of joining cooked foods for a holiday,” to express the idea that one could know what was right even without a command. The giving of the Torah is described as the birth of the very concept of command itself — that is, a transition from a world of describing good and evil to a world of obligation and prohibition that bind because they were commanded. An analogy is drawn to traffic law: even without legislation, crossing at a red light is dangerous, but the legislation does not “make it correct”; rather, it creates a legal prohibition and legal obligation. The distinction parallels the tension between natural law and legal positivism.

The Ten Utterances, the Ten Commandments, and David Hume’s Gap

The creation of the world through ten utterances is interpreted as the creation of the factual-descriptive sphere, whereas the Ten Commandments are described as the creation of the prescriptive sphere, in which reality is colored by categories of permitted and forbidden. David Hume’s “naturalistic fallacy” is mentioned — the idea that you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” because the description of facts does not generate a norm without some additional normative premise. The transition at Sinai is described as the creation of a new world of obligations that does not follow directly from facts.

“Greater Is One Who Is Commanded and Does” and the Status of Command Versus a “Correct” Action

The distinction between someone who does a good deed and someone who fulfills a command explains the saying “Greater is one who is commanded and does,” because the one who is commanded and does includes not only the act itself, but also the fulfillment of the command as such. It is also suggested that on the level of punishment versus warning, without a warning the system could be understood merely as a conditional sanction, and the warning is needed in order to establish a prohibition, not just a price. From here it becomes sharper that the normativity of command is not identical with the evaluation of something as “good,” but binds in its own right.

Maimonides: Idolatry out of Love and Fear, and Accepting Something as a “God”

In Maimonides’ Laws of Idolatry, a distinction is brought according to which someone who worships idolatry “out of love” for its beautiful form, or “out of fear” lest it harm him, is exempt if he did not accept it upon himself as a god, and is liable to stoning only if he accepted it as a god. A “god” is defined as a source whose word one obeys, which is why judges are called “gods” in Scripture — because their words are binding. The worship of God, or idolatry, out of calculations of benefit, love, or fear is presented as lacking the religious core of accepting a deity. The example of slowing down in front of a police officer is described as compliance out of interest, not as acceptance of authority in the religious sense.

Maimonides in the Laws of Kings and in the Commentary on the Mishnah: The Commandments Because of the Sinai Command

Maimonides rules that anyone who accepts the seven Noahide commandments and is careful to observe them is among the pious of the nations of the world and has a share in the World to Come only if he does them “because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Torah and informed us through Moses our teacher.” But if he does them “because of intellectual conviction,” then he is one of their wise people; he is not a resident alien and not among the pious of the nations of the world. In his Commentary on the Mishnah on Hullin, regarding the phrase “it was said at Sinai,” Maimonides formulates a great principle: everything from which we refrain or that we do today is done because of God’s command through Moses, not because of commands to prophets who preceded him. He gives examples: the prohibition of eating flesh torn from a living animal, circumcision, and the sciatic nerve are not observed because of the command to Noah, Abraham, or Jacob, but because of the command given at Sinai. The answer to the Sages, “It was said at Sinai, but written in its place,” is read as a normative determination that defines the source of obligation, not merely as a historical claim about where the verse appears.

“That’s Just How It Is” Without Arbitrariness: The Meaning of Command and the Question of “Why”

Command is described as a category whose very understanding includes the obligation itself. So someone who asks, “Why keep the commandments?” is seen as someone who does not understand what “commandment” means — similar to someone who says, “I understand that it’s immoral, but why not do it?” The answer “that’s just how it is” is presented as a basic answer that is not the result of lottery or arbitrariness, but an expression of the fact that the foundation is self-evident and has no higher basis beyond it. The service of God is defined as acting because “He said so,” not because of external reasons, and recognition of the command born at Sinai is described as “accepting Him as a god,” which constitutes religious life.

We’re in the topic of the reasons for the commandments, the rationale of Scripture, and I wanted to take some kind of—I don’t know what to call it—a timeout, or maybe it’s part of the issue itself, but I’m going to devote this to the honor of the holiday of Shavuot. So I took a certain section from within this topic, and I think it’s very connected to Shavuot. When we talk about explanations for commandments, or explanations in general, an explanation is always based on some other principles. You ask: why is a certain thing true? Because of this. And of course you can keep asking: and why is that true? Because of this. And in the end, this chain has to stop somewhere. So this feeling that many people have—that explanations always, meaning every rational thing, must really be based on some explanation outside itself—can’t be correct. It simply can’t be correct. In the end we have to arrive at something whose explanation is simply: that’s how it is, because it’s true, not because of some prior principle. There are definitions, there are axioms from which one begins. Yes, exactly. It’s just that among mathematicians there’s often a feeling that this is somehow arbitrary. Meaning, the axioms are an arbitrary matter—you can do whatever you want, as long as it’s fruitful, as long as you can derive nice and useful things from it, then great. But when we apply this to other places, and if we treat our foundational assumptions the same way, then we basically get that our whole world is arbitrary. Because it’s based on assumptions that we simply accepted, and we could just as well have accepted their opposite. So when I explain something, I explain it on the basis of a certain set of assumptions. But I could just as well have adopted the opposite set of assumptions. So in what sense do the explanations we give have any meaning at all? Therefore the meaning of an explanation very often rests on the fact that I treat the assumptions or the axioms not like a mathematician—or rather, I treat axioms not the way mathematicians commonly do, though there are disputes there too. I treat them as something that is not arbitrary, but rather as something that is true, just not in need of explanation. Meaning, those are not the same thing. There are things that are arbitrary—this is how I decided. And there are things that are simply true in their own right; they don’t need to be explained by means of something else that is more true. I don’t have anything more true—that’s as true as it gets. So I adopt that as a foundational assumption. Yes, when I’m talking about “a straight line passes through two points,” an axiom of geometry, right? I once talked about this, I don’t even remember when. Say: through two points there passes exactly one straight line. So you can ask people: why is that true? It’s an axiom, after all; it’s not a theorem derived from something else. So we ask: why is that true? The answer is: just because. What do you mean, why is that true? So what is that “just because”? There are mathematicians who’ll tell you: because I felt like it. Meaning, it’s a good definition, it’s fruitful, you can derive all kinds of interesting conclusions or interesting theorems from it, so I adopt it for the sake of discussion and let’s see what it implies. But usually you begin from—what I’m going to do with them is not defined. No, it doesn’t matter, it’s always true, the basic concepts are by definition undefined, because if they were defined then they wouldn’t be basic concepts. But why do you begin with a straight line or a point? Doesn’t matter, it’s not important where I begin, but you begin somewhere. And even though there is non-Euclidean geometry. Yes, right, so that’s one of the things people bring as support for the view that assumptions are arbitrary, because there can be a geometry no less consistent that is non-Euclidean, meaning that it doesn’t assume the assumptions of Euclidean geometry. That may be the accepted mathematical view, at least as it seems to me, but I don’t think it’s correct, and this example doesn’t demonstrate that either—non-Euclidean geometries—because for every given space there is one correct geometry. Meaning, when the space is Euclidean space, there is a set of axioms that are true in that space, and other axioms that are not true in that space. Non-Euclidean geometries simply describe a different space. That’s all. When I’m on the surface of a sphere and I draw a triangle there, the sum of the angles is not one hundred and eighty degrees. But that’s not because I can decide arbitrarily what the sum of the angles in a triangle is. On the contrary—it means I cannot decide arbitrarily, but in every situation, give me the space, what’s called the metric, and I’ll tell you what the sum of the angles in the triangle is. Therefore these examples—or relativity, which people often bring as an example, right? After all, you can see velocity or time, even the rate at which time flows, or location, lengths, in different ways depending on which frame you’re in—whether the frame is moving, standing still—so you’ll see these things differently. And once again people say, there you see, so really everything is relative, everyone sees things differently, and there’s no meaning. And again, that’s the same mistake. It’s a mistake. Meaning, the conclusion is the opposite. Relativity was born out of the need to synchronize the laws of physics across all frames of reference. That’s why Einstein came to the conclusion that time and space are measured differently in different frames of reference—because only that way would the laws of nature look the same from all frames of reference. That was the constraint that led to relativity, and therefore on the contrary: what relativity shows is that in each frame it may look different to you, but in fact it describes exactly the same thing. So both these examples—non-Euclidean geometries and relativity—point, I think, to the fact that our basic assumptions are not arbitrary. When you ask me why they’re true, I’ll tell you: just because. But that “just because” doesn’t mean because I drew lots in the morning, because I got up on the left side or the right side of the bed and that’s it, because that’s what I felt like. Rather, that “just because” means: it is simply true in its own right. If someone doesn’t understand that, I don’t know how to give better explanations. It’s obvious that it’s true; it doesn’t need explanations. It’s the most basic thing I can bring as a justification, so that thing itself I can never ground. So that, in fact, is what underlies any system that seeks explanations. It’s an important point—every system that seeks, say, explanations for commandments, which is what we’re dealing with here. It’s clear that even when you talk about explanations, in the end you have to assume some initial infrastructure that you accept without explanation, namely principles that are obvious. Now I say: fine, in light of those principles, let’s see whether the commandments can be explained in a rational way. But the assumptions themselves you can never explain. Either you accept them or you don’t accept them. And there is some initial framework, some initial foundational assumptions, and even when we speak about reasons for commandments, those reasons will be given within that framework, and about it there’s no point asking, “And who said it’s true?” because there are no explanations. Simply, if someone doesn’t understand it, then I don’t know what to do—he doesn’t understand it.

Okay, that’s just in general. Let’s get a bit closer to our topic. I want to begin with Maimonides in the eighth root, and then branch out a bit. Maimonides’ roots we’ve already encountered more than once—they’re principles by which he explains his decisions about the enumeration of the commandments: what enters into the 613 commandments and what does not enter into the 613 commandments. In the eighth root he talks about what he calls “negation of obligation,” negation of obligation. So he says like this—let’s see. The eighth root: that it is not proper to count the negation of obligation together with a prohibition. A prohibition is a negative commandment, right? So if there is a verse that Maimonides calls—he’ll soon explain it—“negation of obligation,” that is not a prohibition. Meaning, it does not enter the count of the negative commandments. And now he explains; that’s the heading. “Know that a prohibition is one of the two parts of command. And this is so because you command a commanded person either to do one thing or not to do it. As when you command him to eat and say to him: eat; or you command him to refrain from eating and say to him: do not eat. And in the Arabic language there is no term that includes these two matters together.” Meaning, Maimonides says that in the Arabic language—and remember, these things were written in Arabic, what we’re reading here is in translation. Originally these things were written in Arabic. Maimonides says: in Arabic there is no shared word for positive commandments and negative commandments, for prohibition and command. There is no shared word; these are simply two different words. There is command in Arabic, huh? There is command. Yes, there is command, but command and prohibition are two concepts for which there is no single word joining them. It looks like two completely independent things, two concepts. There is prohibition and there is command, and there is no semantic connection between them. “And the logicians have already mentioned this in the art of logic and said, in their words”—now he quotes—“However, command and prohibition do not have in the Arabic language a name that gathers them together,” that joins them into one thing. “And we were forced to call them both by the name of one of them, and that is command.” So in Arabic, when people want to talk about positive and negative commandments, or prohibition and obligation together, they use the word “command.” But really, says Maimonides, that’s a borrowed usage, because originally “command” means only positive commandment; but since there is no shared word for command and prohibition, for prohibition and obligation, they use the word “commandment.” In truth, in Hebrew too it’s like that, of course, but we’ll soon see. “And the word well known in the Arabic language, assigned to prohibition, is the word ‘do not.’” Yes, that’s “do not.” And that’s the word used to warn; when speaking of prohibition, they use the word “do not.” “And this matter itself undoubtedly exists in every language.” Meaning, that you command the commanded person to do a thing or not to do it. The question is only what concepts are used to describe it, and in Arabic they use two different concepts that have no connection between them.

“Thus it is clarified that positive commandments and negative commandments are both complete commands. There are things He commanded us to do, and things He warned us not to do. And the name of the things commanded to be done is positive commandments, and the name of the things warned against is negative commandments. And the name that includes them both together in the Hebrew language”—he claims that in Hebrew, unlike Arabic, there is a common word for command and prohibition—“is decree. And so the sages called every commandment, whether positive or negative, the decree of the King.” So Maimonides argues that in Hebrew the common word for command and prohibition is the word decree, something that doesn’t exist in Arabic, and therefore in Arabic they use a borrowed term, the word command or commandment. And at the moment they have positive commandments and negative commandments, but really, in Arabic these should have been two separate words. One of the usages is borrowed. “Negative commandments” is not, in truth, the proper expression in Arabic. They simply want to demonstrate that positive commandments and negative commandments belong to the same kind in some sense, so they use the term commandment also with respect to prohibitions.

This introduction is very interesting, and I think it takes me straight to the heart of the issue. Because in several contexts we see that the conceptual system we use—that system, to some extent, guides our thinking. And therefore very often, when there is some structure in a language, or something missing from a language, then very often we truly won’t manage to grasp that idea, because we don’t have concepts for it, we don’t have terms for it. The examples people always bring in this context are the Eskimo terms for snow. That among Eskimos there are, I don’t know, thirty different concepts to describe snow. When we see snow—I don’t know, I’ve barely encountered snow in my life—I see snow, I think: snow. What is snow? It’s snow; I don’t distinguish among them. Now from the Eskimo’s point of view, I assume—at least that’s how I understand it—when he sees those thirty phenomena, from his perspective these are different phenomena. Meaning, each has its own word, and it’s obvious to him that they’re not the same thing at all. It’s doubtful whether he understands that all of these together are even the same phenomenon that I call snow. Meaning, in a certain sense the Eskimo grasps more than I do, but in another sense he grasps less. He grasps less because he may understand why each one is different, but he may not understand that there is something which, basically—I don’t know if he doesn’t understand, but it’s possible that he doesn’t understand—that there is something common to all these phenomena. He sees the trees but not the forest. Exactly, exactly. Meaning, he doesn’t see that all of these are really different expressions that have some common substrate.

There are several very interesting examples of this. I’ll bring maybe two. One example: someone who dealt with this was a linguist named Whorf, a kind of autodidact, but he’s quoted a lot and people deal a lot with what he wrote. He really dealt with the influence of language and terminology on the shape of thought. Once I saw—I forget whether it was in Nature or Science, I always confuse the two—one of those two had an article about a tribe in Brazil, the Pirahã tribe, that’s what they were called, in Brazil, whose language is what anthropologists call a one-two-many system. Meaning, they don’t have numbers. They have one, two, and many. That’s it. They have no numbers for three, four, five, and so on. It’s not really that funny because, in a way, we also no longer have words; we just use combinations of words—one, two, three, up to nine; from there on it’s already combinations. Nineteen—we don’t have a word for nineteen. So they just have three and not ten. Okay? It’s not as funny as it sounds at first glance, but still, we have the rules of combination, the rules for joining these combinations. We can indeed give a name to every number. True, that name is a combination of our ten digits, but still we have a way to give a separate name or separate designation to each number. And there’s decimal freedom. No, that’s obvious. That’s why I’m saying: but it’s not that they use base three. Are they binary? No, that’s what I’m saying—they’re not. If they were binary there would be no difference between us and them. They’re not binary, because they have one, two, and many, but they have no way of expressing four through one, two, and many. For them, three and four are the same thing. Therefore it is not binary. Binary is a perfectly legitimate base of description, just like decimal; there is no difference. That’s exactly what I’m saying. So we too have only a finite number of concepts by means of which we describe all the numbers, but we have a way of combining the numbers—or the descriptions—to produce a separate description for every number. Okay? More or less. There’s some paradox there, if you know it, about the smallest number that cannot be described using one hundred words. All right? There is such a number. Take all the numbers that have no description using fewer than one hundred words; the smallest among them. Well, if there is a set of numbers there’s always a smallest among them—I’m exaggerating, not always, but in certain sets at least; let’s talk about integers. Okay? And the claim is that there is some number that is the smallest number that cannot be described in fewer than one hundred words. Well, I just described it in fewer than one hundred words: the smallest number that cannot be described using fewer than one hundred words. I described it, didn’t I? Using fewer than one hundred words. So even for us it’s not clear that we have a unique verbal description for every number. But you know it exists. No, the assumption is that it should exist. It’s a big question whether it exists or not; apparently it does not, because the description is not correct—not because there is some number that doesn’t exist.

Anyway, for our purposes—what do they do with pi, by the way? Exactly. What do they do with pi? What do they do with four, you see? There was some fellow who went there to study them. By the way, there are others too. There are tribes like this in East Asia as well; there are several known tribes that are one-two-many systems. Soon enough, with the phone. No problem, they can study the Talmud; in the Talmud pi is three, pi is four, so it’s fine. The circumference of a circle is two r times four. In any case, some researcher got there and tried to see whether, despite their lacking words for these things, they still manage to understand what is more than what. For example, he put batteries in front of them—he took batteries there—put four batteries here and ten batteries there, and asked them where there are more. Apparently the concept “more” did exist for them, which is also an interesting question. But it did. So he asked them where there were more. He said that if the difference was large, they managed to answer, even though they had no word to describe this and that, but they could still answer. But, say, between five and seven they couldn’t say which was more; that is, it seemed they didn’t know how to describe what was more than what. And the claim there was—and by the way I had many comments on that article; we once had a seminar on it—how many commandments are there in the Torah? Some would say too many. In any case, the claim there was that this linguistic absence, this linguistic deficiency, the fact that they have no terminology to describe numbers, prevents them from thinking about these things, and so there is a certain kind of thought or certain kind of ideas or structures that they won’t succeed in understanding. They won’t, because we need concepts in order to understand. What I commented there—I thought about sending a response but in the end I couldn’t be bothered—the question is of course what causes what. Does lack of understanding cause the linguistic deficiency, or does the linguistic deficiency cause the lack of understanding? And in my opinion that article had some issues around that. In any case, it’s clear that they’re built like any other human being. Meaning, once he taught them and explained it, they got it and could use arithmetic. So that’s not the point. They had those abilities in principle, but they didn’t have the language, and therefore it limited them in their mode of thought. It affects things, like commerce. Yes, commerce. A lot of things. Obviously it affects a lot of things, but on the other hand it’s pretty clear that they’re human beings who can make up the gap. Meaning, it’s not as if they were—yes, of course, it’s a broad field for speculators. There you can go in, give them lots of money, ask a lot in return. And it’s like that famous joke about the fellow who couldn’t do math, couldn’t do basic arithmetic. Thirty years later his math teacher meets him with a car three kilometers long and says, tell me, what, you succeeded so nicely? And so on. He says, you couldn’t manage elementary mathematics, so how did you become so successful in life? And he says, what’s the problem? I sell—I don’t know what—ice cream. So I say it costs two shekels. Then if someone gave me one hundred shekels, I gave him three shekels change, and that’s all. What’s the problem? Meaning, with a lack of mathematical knowledge sometimes you can go far. Provided the buyer also belongs to the same problematic group. All right, anyway—or the judge. Anyway, so that’s one example of a linguistic limitation that doesn’t let us grasp ideas or parts of reality.

Another example—I think it’s really tricky and beautiful, because it applies to us too, not just to tribes in Brazil—is the famous riddle that once stirred up the world. It appeared in Haaretz—the first place I saw it—and in faculty lounges at universities, lecturers’ rooms, everyone was talking about it at the time. The question basically was: when you stand in front of a mirror, the mirror swaps right and left. Correct? When I stand in front of a mirror, my right side is the left side of the person facing me. Okay? And my left side is—so it swaps right and left, but it does not swap up and down. The question is why. After all, the mirror is completely symmetric, so why does it swap right and left and not up and down? It’s completely symmetric. Now, someone used to mathematical thinking is more bothered by questions like this; otherwise he’ll dismiss it as some kind of lawyerly pilpul. But someone used to mathematical or physical thinking understands there’s a serious problem here, and it is not simple at all, it’s very tricky. So the claim is this: people say, well, the human body has a sort of right-left symmetry. I’m standing opposite it, I have right-left symmetry; I do not have up-down symmetry. That’s not true. Put a circle in front of the mirror, all right? And put a dot on the right side of the circle. In the mirror you’ll see a circle with the dot on its left side. Now the circle is symmetric in every direction. Put the dot below, and the dot on the mirror’s circle will also be below; it won’t go up. So it’s not because of the symmetry of the object standing before the mirror. But if the object standing before the mirror is symmetric along the x-axis and y-axis, and the mirror is also symmetric along the x-axis and y-axis, then how can it be that it reflects right to left but not up to down? Very simple, but at the same time very tricky.

In any case, there are various explanations. I think that at the root of the explanation—not various explanations, there’s one correct explanation—but I think at the root of that explanation lies the phenomenon I’m talking about here. We often don’t notice that the concepts of right and left and the concepts of up and down are not the same kind of concepts. We think right and left are like this and up and down are like that; it’s just a matter of turning things—if we looked this way, then up and down would turn into right and left. Not true. Up and down are a pair of concepts with an entirely different meaning than right and left. Up and down have an objective definition: closer to the earth and farther from the earth—that’s up and down. Right and left, there is no way to define objectively. Anyone who has ever tried to teach a child what right and left are has encountered that lack of objectivity. There’s no way to teach it. It’s a miracle that people manage to learn it. Someone in space, an astronaut in space—then really there is no up and down there. Yes, then really there is no up and down there. Only closer to the floor of the spaceship—fine, then once again there’s up and down. No, there won’t be up and down there. If there were right and left and we said east and west, that’s exactly what it is. If it were east and west, then that would be closer. But right and left are a different kind of concept. Up and down there’s no problem teaching a child. Right and left—it’s very hard to teach a child. You have to tie something to his hand and accustom him to the fact that this is the right hand until he gets used to it, and then you can remove that ribbon. But in truth it’s a concept that you can’t really teach children at all. There’s no way. And why not? Because it has no objective definition in terms of spatial relations among objects.

Stand in front of the mirror now. Say I’m standing in front of the mirror and I have a watch on my right hand. The person facing me—I myself, my own reflection—is wearing the watch on his left hand. Right? It switched right and left. But suppose next to the hand with the watch there is a closet. In the mirror you’ll see that the closet remains next to the hand with the watch. That doesn’t change. Why doesn’t it change? Because that is an objective spatial relation. Objective spatial relations are preserved in the mirror. Meaning, the relation between right and left gets switched because the relation between right and left exists only in our heads, not in the world. It exists in our heads because of our symmetry. And this is indeed connected to our symmetry, of course, but it exists in our heads because of our symmetry, not because the symmetry of the thing standing before the mirror is right-left symmetry. It can also be a circle. But there is another participant in the game here, and that is me, the observer. When I put the circle in front of the mirror, I say: wait, the circle has symmetry of up-down and right-left; it’s symmetric. The mirror is also symmetric. So what breaks the symmetry here? The answer is: I do. I, who am looking at it and asking where it is—whether it’s on the right or left, or up or down—I break the symmetry because I have right-left symmetry and not up-down symmetry, and therefore I can even understand this pair of concepts called right and left. Creatures that don’t have that symmetry may be incapable of understanding what you’re talking about forever. You won’t be able to teach them—just as it’s hard for us to teach children, but that’s possible because they also grow up with the same symmetry we do and they understand from within themselves the relation, the relation between right and left. A creature that did not have this symmetry, it seems to me, one would have to speak to in the language of east and west. It would not understand what you mean when you say right and left. “Decide—is this right or is this left?” Because the one standing opposite me explains this is left, and I explain this is right. That creature would say: these people are completely crazy. You’re pointing to the same direction; one calls it right and the other calls it left. And that’s how it would understand it. It simply would not be able to understand what you want, because one who lacks that symmetry will not understand the pair of concepts right and left at all.

By the way, what’s interesting is that in physics this has an objective expression, and so it’s clear there’s something objective here in the relation between right and left, like the direction of spin. So it has objective meaning—but no, it’s not spatial, not simple spatial meaning. Otherwise it couldn’t appear in physics; otherwise it would be an effect connected to us, not to physics. So if physics distinguishes between right and left—like the right-hand rule and left-hand rule in electromagnetism, or all kinds of things like that—then apparently there is a real distinction between right and left. And that makes what’s happening here even more interesting. Because it basically means that there really is such a thing in the world, a real distinction between right and left. But since it isn’t a simple spatial relation, there may be creatures that would fail to grasp it. Meaning, if it were something subjective, then fine—they speak in that language, I speak in another language. But if I say no, this is part of physics, then creatures without that symmetry might not have been able to discover this part of physics or understand this part of physics. They would have all kinds of paradoxes there that they wouldn’t be able to solve, because they lack this perception that lets them distinguish between right and left. Maybe they would grasp it differently, I don’t know, but on the principled level it may be that such creatures would be unable to grasp some phenomenon in the world because they don’t understand the concepts, because they lack in their language—or not only in the language, but in the perception expressed by the language—and therefore they would fail to grasp this distinction between right and left.

And this is what the Maharsha says: “The sages tell you that right is left and left is right.” Usually, if they had said that east is west and west is east—meaning, if this were being spoken in the language of those round creatures, or those point-like creatures—then Rashi wouldn’t formulate it that way, because they wouldn’t understand what he wanted. It’s not Rashi, it’s the sages. But he would say, if they tell you that east is west; he wouldn’t say, if they tell you that right is left. Because in their language they don’t really understand what right and left mean. Just stand this way, then there’s right and left, what’s the problem? Also in the Prophets there is Jonah chapter 4, at the end, where Jonah the prophet says about the city of Nineveh that there are many people there “who do not know between their right and their left.” The law of induction. Fine, so what is south and north? What? Fine, the map here is such that south and north—what? Left and right, yes, that’s south and north. But the left and right there are right and left. No, but he meant that if you’re demonstrating I’ll go north. Yes, obviously, very obviously, right and left. If you stand in a certain place, it always points to certain directions, and that’s clear. The point is that the relation is not one-to-one; it depends on how you stand. In both Biblical Hebrew and Arabic, today in Arabic north is “left.” Okay? And in Hebrew too, “left.” You face east; “kedem” is forward, the western sea is behind, “teiman” is right, which is south, and “smol” is north. And how beautiful—it’s not only with us, it’s in all the Semitic languages. Okay. But what is “the western sea”? It’s the rear sea. There’s some concept of time here. Why are there different words? Never mind, I’m coming back to that. Now I’m coming back. After all this introduction, now I’m returning. Let’s go back to the matter of the commandments.

Forget the examples for a moment—we’re done with the introduction and the illustration. But now I want to return to the issue of the commandments. What does Maimonides preface with? Maimonides says here that in Arabic there is no common word for positive commandments and negative commandments. And therefore, in terms of right and left, say, the distinction between right and left—it could be that some other creature that doesn’t think like us, say, it could even be a cultural matter, not necessarily physiological or whatever, would see no connection at all between positive commandments and negative commandments. Really—why does there need to be a common word? There’s no connection. One forbids you from something and the other obligates you to something. Why should there be a common word between them? What joins them? We’re so used to the concept commandment, positive commandments and negative commandments, that it has already become obvious to us that they’re two kinds of the same thing. In English too there, “good deeds,” commandment is “good deed.” I don’t know what that means. Positive commandments. So they have no definition of commandment that can also be not doing something. No—even if we try to translate it. Let me explain. That’s actually a wonderful example—let me get back there for a moment. The common concept here is—yes, exactly where I’m heading. What happens is that without it, a certain culture or certain people could look at these two phenomena—what we call positive commandments and negative commandments—and see no connection at all. What’s the connection? This obligates you to do things and that forbids you to do things. Fine, there are many kinds of sentences. This is a table and this is a chair. That one obligates you and that one forbids you. A table and a chair have no connection between them—why should obligation and prohibition? What joins them? What is common to both? We’re already so accustomed to it—and we’re captive, you have to think: because our language has one word, commandment, that describes both, it already seems self-evident to us that it’s the same thing. But try for a moment to free yourselves from the terminology we’ve gotten used to. To say to do something positive, and to say not to do something, and this too is called for us a commandment—the question is why? What is the connection?

There are many times when the Torah also uses—I don’t know. Again, regardless of Maimonides’ discussion whether it’s really true that in Hebrew the word used is decree and not commandment—I’m talking about the example he brought from Arabic. I don’t care right now whether Hebrew is different. I just want to illustrate the phenomenon because it’s very important for what I’m about to say. So what we see here is that there is something common to positive commandments and negative commandments that we could in fact have completely missed. If our language didn’t have the linguistic connection between them—if both were not called commandment, or decree as Maimonides says, it doesn’t matter—then perhaps we would understand what positive commandments are and what negative commandments are, but we would see no connection between them. The fact is that in Arabic, despite the lack of a common word, they still understand that it’s of the same type. Therefore they use the word commandment in a borrowed sense also to describe prohibitions. Otherwise, if they were like those Pirahã Indians, they wouldn’t use one word for both. One word for this and another word for that. Why use the word commandment in a borrowed sense to describe negative commandments? If they use it in a borrowed sense, that’s a sign that intuitively they understand there is something common between the two. It’s just that the language doesn’t give them the tools to express it. So they use the word commandment to describe both, but they too understand there is something shared here. That’s what Maimonides wants to say here. Maimonides wants to say: know that although in language very often it doesn’t appear so, there is a difference between positive and negative commandments, and one might have said that they are really two things with no connection between them—but there is something very deep common to both, and even if often we have no common term to describe them, we create one by borrowing.

What is shared? What is the difference? The difference is between command and description. In language there are descriptive and prescriptive sentences. In analytic philosophy they distinguish between those two types of sentences. If I tell you: in the law book it says that murder is forbidden—that’s a description, right? I’m describing what is written in the law book. If I tell you: murder is forbidden—that doesn’t describe anything. It’s not a descriptive sentence; it’s a prescriptive sentence, a sentence that establishes prohibition or permission or obligation. Prohibition, permission, and obligation—those are basically the three concepts. So these are different kinds of sentences. A factual sentence, say, you compare to reality to see whether it’s true or false. If it fits reality it’s true; if it does not fit reality it’s false. A prescriptive sentence—there’s nothing to compare it to. How do you know if a prescriptive sentence is true? Murder is forbidden. One should help others. Stealing is forbidden. One should honor parents. Eating pork is forbidden. Sentences like that, prescriptive sentences. How do we know whether they’re true or not? What am I supposed to compare that to? Some reality? I should look at something and see whether it’s true or not? If I compare it to what’s written in the Torah, that doesn’t help, because at most it tells me that the Torah forbids it. But I’m asking why it’s forbidden, not whether the Torah forbids it. The Torah can forbid lots of things; other writings forbid other things. I’m asking whether it is forbidden for me, not whether it says in the Torah that it’s forbidden, or that the law forbids it, or something like that. Here there’s nothing to compare. These aren’t facts. These sentences are a normative determination of forbidden, permitted, and obligatory. By the way, there is deontic logic that deals with the relations among forbidden, permitted, and obligatory. It’s a different logic; it’s not the same thing as true and false. It’s a different kind of logic. For example, two obligations can conflict with one another, and that is not a logical contradiction. What Maimonides calls decree.

The point is that what is common to positive and negative commandments is a certain category—linguistic, of course, but language expresses a real idea, not just a linguistic one—a linguistic category and a category of thought, let’s call it, which is the normative category. This is the ought as opposed to the is. The is describes the facts—what exists and what doesn’t exist, what is true and what is not true. The ought says what should be done or what should not be done. It is a completely different conceptual world. Now I return to ought, yes—or rather O-U-G-H-T. The “ought” thinking you mentioned earlier is a nice example. Why? Because you brought it as an example of the difference between positive commandments and negative commandments. But I call that not even positive commandments. No, it’s not negative commandments, true. To say that a certain thing is good—that’s not a positive commandment. To say that you are obligated to do something—that’s a positive commandment. So those are two different things. Let me give you not just an example, but really let’s continue with Maimonides. That was the introduction, the first paragraph of Maimonides. Now look what comes immediately after. He says: “However, negation of obligation is another matter, namely that you negate a predicate of a subject. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with command, as in your saying: so-and-so did not eat yesterday, and so-and-so did not drink wine, and Reuven is not Shimon’s father, and the like. All of this is negation of obligation; there is no command in it.” It doesn’t belong to command; it is a negative description. Yes? This chair is not red. So I negate the property of redness from the chair. But there is no prohibition here, right? The ‘not’ here does not appear as a prohibition. Yes, the sages tell us that a negative commandment has to appear in the Torah by way of some key word, some forbidding term: “beware,” “lest,” “do not,” and “not.” Of course, they say this because it’s understood, but besides that there’s “beware,” “lest,” and “do not.” If it doesn’t appear in that form, then it’s not a negative commandment. Maimonides says: but sometimes even if it does appear in such a form, it still isn’t a negative commandment. Because sometimes the word “not” appears not as a prohibiting “not,” but as a descriptive “not,” saying that such-and-such is not the case. And that’s what he calls negation of obligation. Then he says as follows.

He says “in negation,” and so on. “But negation in Hebrew is with the word lo, as in: ‘And there arose not a prophet again in Israel like Moses,’ ‘God is not a man that He should lie,’ ‘Affliction shall not rise up a second time,’ and the like. And now the difference between prohibition and negation has become clear to you”—I’m skipping a bit—“and that is that prohibition belongs to command, and it occurs only in the mode of command equally.” That is to say, just as command is always future-oriented, so too prohibition is always in the future. Command—whatever other linguistic phenomenon—not so. “And it is impossible in language for command to be in the past, and there is no way to insert command into narration.” Narration means describing things, and command is prescriptive, yes, as opposed to descriptive. “For narration requires subject and predicate, whereas command is a complete utterance.” When I say, “Reuven will go tomorrow morning to Jerusalem,” that is a complete sentence because it has subject and predicate and object and so on. When I say to you, “To Jerusalem!” there needn’t be a subject. That’s a command. A command doesn’t need a subject. A command is directed from the outset to someone and commands him something. It is a complete sentence even without subject and predicate. Okay? “And all of this is self-evident to anyone who exerts himself. And since this is so, it is not proper to count among the negative commandments those that are negation in the form of negative commandments under any circumstances. And this matter is demonstrative and needs no further proof after what we have mentioned concerning the understanding of the nature of the commandments, until one distinguishes between prohibition and negation.” Yes, everyone understands this if you understand the idea of the difference between prohibition and negation.

In our language, prohibition belongs to the normative plane: forbidden. And that’s the same plane that includes positive and negative commandments together. Now we understand what they have in common: they both belong to the world of the normative, unlike the descriptive—prescriptive as against descriptive. Okay? That is what is common to positive and negative commandments: they are not sentences that describe something, but sentences that require you to do or not do. That is what they share. Now whether it is to do or not to do—that is the difference, okay? But the common denominator is that they do not describe facts. And now he says: apparently this is a trivial matter, right? Fine, who would count “And there arose not a prophet in Israel like Moses” as a negative commandment? Maimonides didn’t write this root for that. It was much trickier. Now look at the example he brings. “And this escaped our predecessors, to the point that one counted ‘She shall not go out as the slaves go out,’ at the beginning of the portion of Mishpatim, and he did not know that this is negation and not prohibition.” Now this is less trivial, right? “And there arose not a prophet in Israel like Moses”—it’s obvious to all of us that the ‘not’ there is not a command but a description. But here, “She shall not go out as the slaves go out,” is less trivial. That is a verse that is Jewish law; it is not a description of a fact. And still Maimonides says: do not count this among the negative commandments. It is a description, a negation of obligation. Why? So he says:

“And the explanation of this is as I shall explain. For God has already judged concerning one who strikes his Canaanite slave or maidservant and in the blow deprives him of one of the extremities of the limbs, that he goes free. And it would have occurred to us that if this is so regarding a Canaanite slave, then all the more so with regard to a Hebrew maidservant, that when he deprives her of one of her extremities she should go free. Therefore this law is negated with respect to her by His saying, ‘She shall not go out as the slaves go out.’ As though He said: it is not required that she go free through the loss of one of her limbs. And this is negation of a law with respect to her, not a prohibition.” Afterward he brings some proofs.

What is he saying? He says “She shall not go out as the slaves go out” is not a prohibition. So someone who releases his Hebrew maidservant when he deprived her of one of the extremities has not violated some prohibition of “she shall not go out as the slaves go out.” She simply does not go out. She does not have that law of release through loss of limbs. In a Canaanite slave or Canaanite maidservant, if you remove one of the twenty-four extremities, he goes free. That is the law, Torah law. Okay? We would have thought the same applies to a Hebrew maidservant. Canaanite slave—Hebrew maidservant too. The Torah therefore comes and says no; it negates the law of release through loss of limbs from the Hebrew maidservant. What does that mean? That there isn’t some prohibition here telling you not to do something. Rather, it means that law does not apply in this context. If so, this verse is negation of obligation, not prohibition. But it is still prescriptive. That’s why I said it’s trickier. We can discuss that now. It belongs to the halakhic world, that’s clear, not to the factual world. And the whole context there—what’s going on there? “And shall the children of Israel eat the sciatic nerve?” Rashba already asks that. That’s exceptional. “And he shall write her a bill of divorce.” No, no, that isn’t a negative commandment. “And he shall write her a bill of divorce and place it in her hand”—that’s a positive commandment. And that is a description of a story? No, it isn’t a story. If such-and-such happens, “and he shall write her a bill of divorce and place it in her hand.” The Torah is telling you what to do. It doesn’t say “and he wrote her,” no. And if someone does such-and-such, “and he shall write her”—the language is present tense. But regarding “therefore the children of Israel shall not eat the sciatic nerve,” that’s a question. Rashba already asks it. On the face of it, aside from everything Maimonides says here, there is no “beware,” “lest,” or “do not,” so how can you turn it into a prohibition? It tells you what Israel did with regard to the sciatic nerve. So Rashba says that there was some received tradition from the sages that despite the fact that there is no “beware,” “lest,” or “do not” here, it is nevertheless a negative commandment. But again, in any event it’s difficult, regardless of what we are saying here. What? Yes, but it’s not a story. Not a story. Yes, no—but “you shall not break a bone in it.” What? “You shall not break a bone in it.” Isn’t that a commandment? That’s not a commandment? He says that on this verse. No—negation of obligation is when there is a category and you’re not saying something is forbidden here, but rather that law doesn’t apply here. You are, as it were, describing the laws, not the facts. But still describing, not commanding. The ‘not’ that appears here is not descriptive and not prescriptive in the simple sense. Understand? Okay? It describes: that law does not apply here. Fine. Okay. But Maimonides can explain it.

In any case, how do we know which is which? What’s the diagnostic tool? Yes—how do we know when a “not” is this and when it’s that? Fine, that has to be understood. But it doesn’t matter for our purposes, because I only want to use what Maimonides says here for our issue. What Maimonides is really saying here—and that is why he gave this whole introduction—is that the distinction between negation of obligation and prohibition cannot be understood unless we understand what positive and negative commandments share. That’s why he gave this introduction here in this root. Why? Why does he need the introduction he gave about positive and negative commandments? We said: that belongs at the beginning of the Book of Commandments, where you explain what positive commandments are and what negative commandments are. Why does it belong here? In the eighth root, suddenly in the middle of the roots, he enters into the foundations of the distinction between positive and negative commandments. Because that is the whole difference. The difference between a “not” that describes and a “not” that commands cannot be understood if we don’t understand what command is. And in order to understand the category of command, what is special about it, in what sense it differs from something else, we have to understand what command and prohibition share. What command and prohibition share is that they both belong to the category of command. They are prescriptive and not descriptive. And now I can go into negative formulations and say: okay, so there is a “not” that is prescriptive—that will be a negative commandment—and there is a “not” that is descriptive—that is negation of obligation. Therefore Maimonides needs this introduction here. That’s Maimonides up to this point. It took me much longer than I thought. I want to get to us.

People think “good deeds,” as you said earlier. “Good deeds” are not positive commandments. Not only are they not negative commandments—they are not positive commandments. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. When I tell someone—in halakhic terminology at least—that this is a good deed, doing this act is a good deed, that doesn’t mean it is a commandment. Right? There’s no commandment here. Why not? What’s missing? Command. Right? Meaning, the role of command is not to explain to you which act is good and which act is bad, or not bad. To explain to you which act is good and which is bad can be done without command too; that is a descriptive matter. I can describe to you: this is good and this is bad. But command does something extra. Command says: this you are obligated to do, and this you are forbidden to do. That’s it.

Let’s distinguish from that point. The assumption is that what God commands is a good deed. Fine. I’m not saying what He commands isn’t good. On the contrary—I’m saying that it’s not only a good deed, there is something more here. Besides the fact that it’s a good deed, there is also command. And that is a meaningful difference. Why am I saying this? Because the giving of the Torah—yes, the Torah was given—usually people understand what happened there at the giving of the Torah this way: what happened at the giving of the Torah was that the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed to us what is right to do and what is wrong to do, what is good and what is bad. And that is a big mistake. Absolutely not. Abraham our forefather observed even the laws of eruv tavshilin, the sages expound. Fine, that’s an aggadic midrash, but what are they trying to say? Abraham our forefather also knew what was good and what was bad. What is the difference between him and us? He was not commanded. The command was missing. At Mount Sinai they did not come to tell me what is good and what is bad. I could have known that even without it. At Mount Sinai they came to command me: do this and do not do this.

By way of analogy: say the Knesset had not legislated, for the sake of discussion, that crossing on a red light is forbidden. Okay? Even so, crossing on a red light is dangerous. Right? The rationale for not crossing on a red light exists even without that. But as long as the Knesset has not legislated it—or someone on its behalf hasn’t legislated it—there is no prohibition in it. And if I do it, it may be a calculated risk, but no one can put me on trial for it. The legislation of the Knesset does not turn that act into the right act. On the contrary—because it is right, therefore they legislated it. Okay? So why do you need the legislation? In jurisprudence they distinguish between natural law and more positivistic approaches. Natural law is basically positions that identify natural good and not-good with what is legally forbidden and permitted. Positivism says: what are you talking about? Without legislation there is no legal forbidden and permitted. The fact that something is good or bad is irrelevant. On the legal level, you need legislation. After that it becomes forbidden and permitted and obligatory. Before that it may be good or bad, “good deeds” as you said earlier, all true. But without command there is no obligation.

At Mount Sinai what was born was not our recognition of what is good and what is not good. At Mount Sinai what was born was the sphere of prescription. Meaning that at Mount Sinai this concept called command came into being. That means that from then on, things that perhaps had already been good and bad before became obligation or prohibition. Before that, were there no commandments? There were things—there were good deeds, whether good or not good. If it was good or not good, that’s what there was. And each person decided for himself whether it was good or bad. “Greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does.” Yes, certainly. I think we spoke about this once. I said that Tosafot HaRosh and Ritva ask why one who is commanded and does is greater, because all of our intuition says otherwise. So what does it mean? If you are commanded and you do, then besides having done a good deed, you also fulfilled the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. So there are two good things that you did. Therefore it is greater than someone who does that thing because it is good. He did the right thing, and in that sense it is a good thing, but he did not respond to a command. He did not fulfill the command, and therefore he is lesser than one who is commanded and does. But I think there is a deeper layer saying that in all that the Ritva said, and everything that existed before the Torah—there was punishment for things. It says “do not do,” and if you do it—ah, it doesn’t say it’s forbidden. Interesting, because I once saw in a book by Haim Cohen called The Law that he writes there the same thing about Israeli law. He says that Israeli law does not forbid theft. What it says is: one who steals, his punishment is such-and-such. That is what is written. Meaning, his claim—and this is a liberal interpretation of law—is that the law cannot tell me to do anything or not do anything. I am a sovereign citizen; whatever I decide is what I do. The law speaks to those who work for it—that is, the judges work for it, or the police. Okay? So it tells them what they must do in every situation. It does not tell me what I have to do. The judicial system, when a thief comes before it—his punishment is such-and-such. But I—I do what I want. So that conception basically says there is no prohibition on theft, there is only a prohibition on getting caught, as people say. There is only punishment.

And there is a very big question in Jewish law regarding one who causes damage: is there a prohibition to cause damage? The opening lecture on Bava Kamma in all the yeshivot. Yes, exactly. Yes, right. But everyone assumes there is. And the Levush and Hildesheimer both write something very interesting in this context. From the fact that the Torah imposes payment, it is obvious that it is forbidden. Meaning, they make the leap—the question with which they open the general lecture at the beginning of Bava Kamma in all the yeshivot is: who says it’s forbidden to cause damage? And the answer they give is that there is no question. If there is an obligation of compensation, that is a sign that it is forbidden. And that is an interesting question—why? Why should it be that way? “From where do we know the warning?” “From where do we know the warning?” You hear? The Talmud asks “From where do we know the warning?” If what they say is correct, then why do we need the warning? Correct. Correct. There is the author of Chinukh. It’s in commandment 65, interestingly—68 or 65—about cursing judges. There he talks about this, about punishment as against “from where do we know the warning.” And there what does he say? Exactly what I’m saying here. He says that if there had been no warning, only punishment, then we would have thought that this was only a kind of condition: do this—you’ll get punished; don’t do this—you won’t get punished, and all is well. The warning is needed in order to tell you that it is also forbidden to do it, not merely that there is a sanction attached to one who does this thing.

And therefore the claim is that what was revealed at Mount Sinai was not a collection of facts. Mount Sinai was not a descriptive event; it was a prescriptive event. There, basically—if the world was created with ten utterances, then “with ten utterances” means basically the creation of the factual, descriptive sphere, the sphere of facts. Reality was created with ten utterances. And with the Ten Commandments the prescriptive sphere was created. It is not connected to the descriptive sphere. Now, in the descriptive sphere, this is David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy, which says that you cannot derive obligation or prohibition, the ought, from the is. You cannot derive prescription from description. When you describe something—say, if you hit someone, it hurts him—that’s a fact. Okay? Does that mean it is forbidden to hit? Absolutely not. You need another assumption that says that what causes someone pain is forbidden to do. Right? Meaning, a fact by itself does not generate the norm. This is a gap that cannot be bridged. Why? Because these are indeed two different categories. This is descriptive—facts, I describe what exists and what does not exist. What exists and what does not exist is neutral. When I color it with normative colors, when I say this is forbidden and this is permitted and this is obligatory, I have basically created a new world. This is the Ten Commandments as against the ten utterances. In the Ten Commandments reality is colored with the colors of permitted and forbidden, with commands. And that is what is really taught in the Ten Commandments.

I’ll just say—let me, because I want at least to complete the minimum, since I haven’t gotten to what I wanted. “I am the Lord”—is “I am” descriptive and not prescriptive? And therefore there is indeed a big question why this is a positive commandment; everyone asks that about Maimonides. It is more than merely descriptive—it is the infrastructure for all the prescriptions. Meaning, without this there is no prescription. So how can that itself be a commandment?

Look at Maimonides in chapter 3 of the laws of idolatry. We once saw it, but in this context it’s interesting to look at it. Maimonides says as follows: “One who worships idols out of love, such as one who is drawn to this image because of its craftsmanship, because it was very beautiful; or one who worships out of fear of it, lest it harm him, as its worshipers imagine that it can do good or evil—if he accepted it upon himself as a god, he is liable to stoning. But if he worshiped it in its usual mode, or by one of the four forms of worship, out of love or fear, he is exempt.” This is a dispute between Abaye and Rava in tractate Sanhedrin. One who worships idolatry out of love or fear—Abaye says liable, Rava says exempt. What does “one who worships idolatry out of love or fear” mean? On the simple level, you love or fear the idol, right? But all the medieval authorities—Rashi and Raavad here in his glosses on Maimonides, and Rivash and many others—write that clearly this cannot be the simple meaning. If you worship idolatry out of love or fear of the idol, that is idolatry in the fullest sense. Why are you exempt? Rather, what does it mean? It probably means love and fear of a person. You worship idolatry because you want to please someone whom you love or fear, and therefore you worship the idol. That’s called one who worships idolatry out of love or fear, and therefore he is exempt.

But in Maimonides—and therefore Raavad attacks him here—in Maimonides it says nothing of the sort. In Maimonides it says: one who worships idolatry out of love or fear is exempt. Love and fear of the idol, not of a person. Therefore Raavad objects and says no, that’s not the correct interpretation, it can’t be true. Why? Because then, when do you ever actually worship idolatry? Everything that you direct toward the Holy One, blessed be He—love and fear—you are now directing toward the idol, so that is idolatry in the fullest sense, isn’t it? No. So the alternative, what Maimonides says here, is that no—when you worship idolatry out of love or fear, that is not idolatry. It is worship for the sake of some benefit. It doesn’t matter—an abstract benefit, maybe even a positive benefit—but still there is some benefit, some external reason because of which you worship. When you truly worship idolatry, you do it because you accepted the idol upon yourself as a god. By the way, the same applies with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He: what you direct toward Him—if you direct that toward an idol, that is idolatry. The same distinction. When you turn toward the Holy One, blessed be He, if you worship Him because you love Him or fear Him, then you are not worshiping Him. To worship the Holy One, blessed be He—what is “god”? “God” means someone whose word I do. That is the definition. And therefore in Scripture judges are called “gods.” Why? Because what they say must be done and must be obeyed. “God”—the definition is a factor such that what it says, I do. Not because I love him, not because I fear him, not because I am afraid he’ll shoot me or hit me on the head—yes, not for any other reason. Rather: just because. We’ve arrived at just because. “Leibowitz.” Correct.

And the claim is really that one who worships either idolatry or the worship of God for some reason, that is not religious worship. Neither idolatry nor worship of the Holy One, blessed be He. What is needed is to worship Him because He is God, period. If you do something because someone said so, but you have some self-interested calculation of one sort or another, that is not religious worship. I’m driving on the road, I see a police officer, I slow down so that he won’t catch me and give me a ticket. Did I perform idolatry? Look—here is a factor whose word I do out of fear, because I’m afraid of him, so I served him out of fear. Why is this not idolatry? Everybody laughs, but defining why this is not idolatry isn’t simple. What’s the difference between this and serving a statue so that it will make it rain tomorrow or so that it won’t refrain from making it rain tomorrow? Is the mistake simply that the statue can’t do it? That’s not the point, certainly not according to Maimonides, who says idolatry is nonsense. But certainly not according to other medieval authorities either, who say there is something real in it. It isn’t true that it’s a mistake. Meaning, there is something real in certain aspects of idolatry, and it is still forbidden to do it. So why is it forbidden? Or when is it forbidden, and with the police officer why is it permitted? Because with the police officer you are not worshiping him; he is not a god. You are not doing it because he said so. You are doing it because of some calculation. You have some calculation according to which this is right or this is not right, and that explains the reason why you obey the police officer. Therefore it is not religious worship.

Idolatry is when you have no other calculation. When someone asks you why you do it, the answer is: just because. It’s like in the moral context. Someone says: look, I understand that stealing is bad. Fine, explain to me why not to steal. I can’t understand why not to steal. Stealing is bad. There is no answer to such a thing. The only answer that can be is that apparently you don’t understand that stealing is bad. If you understand that stealing is bad, that means you don’t do it. That is what “bad” means. “Stealing is bad” is not description; it’s not a description. “Stealing is bad” is prescription. Any sentence that describes a fact says nothing by itself about what to do, except within a naturalistic framework. A prescriptive sentence is a sentence such that when you understand it, you also know that you are obligated or forbidden to do something. There is no room to ask another question: “Wait, I understand that, but why do it?” Then you don’t understand. And why don’t you understand? Because very often people don’t understand the difference between description and prescription. There are people who can definitely be troubled by the question: I understand that this act is immoral, but I don’t understand why not to do it. Whoever asks such a question does not understand what it means for an act to be immoral. To understand that an act is immoral means that it is forbidden to do it. That is prescription. It is not a sentence that describes and remains neutral. It is a sentence that tells you what you must or must not do.

Now this same thing applies to Jewish law. Before Mount Sinai, the patriarchs could observe eruv tavshilin and everything else because that was what was right. But it was descriptive. It was like saying theft is forbidden because the law book says theft is forbidden. After Mount Sinai it becomes prescriptive. Meaning, there is command: forbidden and permitted. Someone in whose world the concept of command does not exist—and by the way there are many such people—people in whose world the concept of command does not exist. Secular people, for example, very often—not all, but very often—when they ask themselves why obey the law, they have all kinds of self-interested explanations one way or another. There is nothing in their world called obedience to a command. There isn’t. They don’t know such a thing. No such creature exists. It’s like what Maimonides describes here in Arabic: those who don’t understand what positive and negative commandments have in common, because in their world the prescriptive category doesn’t exist. Therefore they also hesitate with respect to morality, many people. They don’t really understand what it means to be bound by morality. Maybe tell me it’s useful, useful in this way, explanatory—but if not, then what? That’s exactly the idea of mercy killing, that I kill a person but I’m doing him a favor, and so on. Fine, but that’s already a more distant implication. Even without it, there are people who still aren’t there. Why is idolatry one of the things for which one must be killed rather than transgress? If it means accepting upon yourself as god someone who is not the Holy One, blessed be He. But he isn’t accepting him as god. Then it isn’t idolatry. It’s not certain there’s a “be killed rather than transgress” here. It depends on the reasoning. According to this Maimonides, it is very difficult to understand in what situation there is “be killed rather than transgress” for idolatry. Very difficult. But that’s another issue; I’ll just finish.

Look, Maimonides talks here about idolatry. But in the earlier Maimonides, in the laws of kings—and I think I mentioned this once too—he says there the following: “Anyone who accepts the seven commandments and is careful to perform them is among the pious of the nations of the world and has a share in the world to come,” that is the resident alien. “And this is provided that he accepts them and performs them because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Torah and informed us through Moses our teacher that the descendants of Noah had previously been commanded in them. But if he performs them because reason compels it, he is not a resident alien and is not among the pious of the nations of the world, but among their wise men.” It’s not “but” but “and not.” There are two versions; the more correct version is “and not.” There are two textual versions. So what does this mean in spoken Hebrew—my translation, at least? Maimonides says as follows: if there is a resident alien who observes his seven commandments because they seem moral, reasonable, nice, acceptable to reason, then he is a wise man. Meaning, he behaves properly, he is a moral person. But that has no religious value. Religious value exists only if you do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it at Sinai. And we are talking about the seven Noahide commandments, which in Noah’s time they were essentially commanded. So what is Sinai doing here? The answer is that even if Noah was commanded in them, the obligation to do them is from Sinai. Why? Because to Noah they only said that this is how it is right to do and this is how it is not right to do. At Mount Sinai command, normativity, was born. Exactly. As long as one was not commanded, what he does is not a commandment. So why in Shechem did they say they would be liable? Wait, wait, I just want to finish. As long as one was not commanded, what he does is not a commandment. Therefore Maimonides says: if you do something—you can observe all of Jewish law—but if you do not do it because of command, you have done nothing. You have not performed commandments. You have done acts that are right, but you have not performed commandments. A commandment is performed only when you are commanded and do, which is what I spoke about earlier.

Just look at the final Maimonides. The Mishnah in Chullin brings a tannaitic dispute there regarding the sciatic nerve in a non-kosher animal. Rabbi Yehuda says that it applies even to a non-kosher animal, the prohibition of the sciatic nerve. And the sages say it applies only to a kosher animal. So Rabbi Yehuda said to them: “But was not the sciatic nerve prohibited from the days of the sons of Jacob? And at that time a non-kosher animal was still permitted.” After all, the sciatic nerve was prohibited already in the days of the sons of Jacob, and for the sons of Jacob there was no difference between a kosher animal and a non-kosher animal. So clearly the sciatic nerve is forbidden even in a non-kosher animal—that is Rabbi Yehuda’s argument against the sages. So the sages said to him: “It was stated at Sinai, but written in its place.” And on the simple level the meaning is historical, that the sages answer Rabbi Yehuda: no, you’re mistaken, it was said at Sinai but written in the story of Jacob our forefather. Maimonides says no. This is not a historical statement; it is a normative statement. Look in his commentary to the Mishnah; it’s the same with circumcision. “Take note of this great principle brought in this Mishnah, namely their statement, ‘It was stated at Sinai,’ and it means that you should know that everything from which we refrain or which we do today, we do only because of God’s command through Moses, not because God commanded it to the prophets who preceded him.” Not because the preceding prophets lied—not because what they said wasn’t true. What they said is completely true. But it is not command. The earlier prophets told us what is right and wrong in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He. That is still not a commandment. He is basically distinguishing between command to the general public and command to individuals? No—more than that—between command and no command at all. More than that—between command and description. What the earlier prophets did was describe to us what is right or not right in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He. That is still not a commandment. A commandment is when the Holy One, blessed be He, tells you: do not do this, or do this. Only there. And that was born at Sinai, and that is what he writes here.

“For example, we do not eat a limb taken from a living animal not because God prohibited it to the descendants of Noah, but because Moses prohibited a limb taken from a living animal to us through what was commanded at Sinai. Likewise we do not circumcise because Abraham circumcised himself and his household, but because God commanded us through Moses to circumcise. Likewise with the sciatic nerve—we are not following the prohibition of Jacob our forefather but the command of Moses our teacher.” Meaning, once again the same principle. And here he says it not only about the resident alien but about all the commandments. He is basically saying that we perform the commandments because of the command at Sinai. One who does not do it because of the command at Sinai has not performed a commandment. Why? He did a right thing, and he did what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants, and he does it because the Holy One, blessed be He, wants it—everything is present. What’s missing? What’s missing is that he responded to a command. In that consists the meaning of Mount Sinai. Only that is Mount Sinai. Things that existed before Mount Sinai also existed before—there was circumcision, there was the sciatic nerve, there was the prohibition of a limb from a living animal, there were many things before Mount Sinai. What was missing? What was missing was the prescriptive dimension, command. We knew what was right and what was not right, but we had not yet been commanded. That is the meaning of Mount Sinai. Therefore the concept of commandment was born at Mount Sinai. That very concept that Maimonides tries to describe in the eighth root—that which is common to command, basically, was born at Mount Sinai.

And if someone asks me why one has to observe commandments—someone who asks me that doesn’t understand what a commandment is. A commandment means something that must be observed. It’s like morality. “It’s moral, but why do it?” If you ask that, you don’t understand what moral means. Meaning, the acceptance of God that Maimonides describes in the laws of idolatry is basically this commitment, or recognition of the prescriptive category, of this category that there are commands and prohibitions and they obligate us by their very existence because the Holy One, blessed be He, said so. Yes, like that mountain climber—I forgot, that British one—when they asked him why he climbs Everest, he said: because it’s there. Edmund Hillary. What? Edmund Hillary. Mallory or Hillary? Hillary, Hillary. I don’t remember; maybe. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What does that mean? He says there are things—there are things I don’t need to explain to you. Meaning, by the very fact that they exist, they obligate. That is the concept of commandment.

Now, a person in whose world there is no acceptance of God—someone who doesn’t know this concept of God and commands and obligations—he doesn’t understand, he looks at you as if you’re crazy. He says: what? Why do you do this? Suppose there was a revelation at Sinai. Fine, so what? Why do you do it? Why does he ask that? Because he doesn’t understand the meaning of the concept of command. It doesn’t exist in his world. It’s like in the Arabic language as Maimonides describes here. Suppose there were a person who didn’t have in his mind—yes, the amygdala was defective—had no conception in his mind of what moral is and what not moral is. He would ask us exactly the same thing about moral principles. Why do you do that? No, I understand that in your eyes this seems good and this seems bad—but he understands in an intellectual sense. He doesn’t grasp that this understanding is not like understanding a law of physics. A law of physics exists because it exists, it is what it is. Here, to understand means to understand that it also obligates, or that it forbids something. Someone who doesn’t understand that cannot be made to understand. Therefore the answer to the question why do you observe commandments, or why do you act according to moral rules—the only possible answer is: just because. Simply just because. But this is not an arbitrary “just because”; that was my opening point. It is not arbitrary. It is “just because” because it is self-evident. Anyone who understands it understands that one must also do it. It may be that you don’t understand it, fine, then I can’t explain it to you. But one who understands it has no question why it must be observed. That is acceptance of God. If God commands, that is the meaning of God—that one must do what He said because He said it. Because the mountain is there. Therefore I do it. Not because of any explanation. The moment I do it because of explanations, then it is like love and fear and interest and a police officer and speed limits and so on. Then it is not religious worship. Religious worship is only when it comes by virtue of this “just because.” Meaning, there is here acceptance, because the Holy One, blessed be He, said so. That’s it, that is the explanation. Thank you very much, happy holiday.