Types of Interpretation, Lecture 1
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The controversy in the Department of Jewish Thought and the debate over the role of academia
- “Refereed/judgeable” as a key distinction between academic writing and a position statement
- The example of poetry and literature: the clear difference between creation and the study of creation
- Jewish law, Talmud, and philosophy: intermediate zones where the distinction blurs
- The natural sciences, engineering, and the role of academia vis-à-vis industry
- “Talking about” versus “doing it”: examples from education, coaching, and creator–researcher relations
- Critique of postmodernism, agendas, and the deliberate blurring of boundaries
- The example of “scientific forecasting” and the claim that it lacks measurements and falsifiability
- Journalism, objectivity, and turning bias into an ideology
- The context of discovery and the context of justification: motivations are not a substitute for testing claims
- Historians, myths, and the dependence of facts on agenda
- “There is no Judaism without Jewish studies” and the attempt to blur the distinction between the object of research and the researcher
- Conversion and acceptance of commandments: illustrating two perspectives on a halakhic text
- Mixing hats in the case of a rabbi-academic and the need to declare what one is doing
Summary
General Overview
The speaker seeks to sharpen distinctions that are hard to pin down between different planes of interpretation and between different kinds of study and engagement—especially between traditional learning and academic learning, between analytical study and broad familiarity, and between halakhic ruling and theoretical study. He presents a principled position according to which the role of academia is “cold,” judgeable research that does not preach and does not promote an agenda, while alongside it there is a legitimate space for creation, normative expression, and decision-making that are not academic. He describes how the blurring of these distinctions intensifies in a postmodern world and in certain areas of the humanities and social sciences, and demonstrates that mixing up “talking about” with “doing it” causes distortions both in understanding texts and in making practical decisions such as halakhic rulings.
The controversy in the Department of Jewish Thought and the debate over the role of academia
The speaker begins with the dispute described around the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University between “the historical-philological group” and Avinoam Rosenak and his supporters. He describes the claim of the historical philologists, according to which an academic scholar should engage objectively with sources, clarifying their meaning, origin, and context, and not ask “what does this mean to me” or derive existential meaning for our own time. He notes that according to the newspaper’s account, Rosenak was transferred to education, and emphasizes that he does not know the details firsthand and is speaking on the principled level of the debate rather than about the precise facts. He says that in his article in Makor Rishon he specifically defended historical philology, even though the boundaries are not sharp in the humanities, and he sees this as an important clarification that is almost never carried out except in certain contexts of what is called “Jewish studies.”
“Refereed/judgeable” as a key distinction between academic writing and a position statement
The speaker recounts that after the publication of the book Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon, someone from Ariel College approached him and asked for an article for the first issue of a journal in Jewish studies, but emphasized that the articles had to be “refereed/judgeable,” and he refused because that is not how he writes. He explains that the request was justified because an academic article is supposed to present a thesis that can be tested against sources and facts, whereas normative preaching like “one should be pluralistic” cannot be decided objectively and therefore belongs in public commentary rather than research. He defines the claim “Maimonides was a pluralist” as a thesis that can be judged through quotations and source analysis, even if the researcher’s motivation is ideological, because the test lies in the quality of the justification and not in the motivation.
The example of poetry and literature: the clear difference between creation and the study of creation
The speaker states that in fields like poetry and literature, the distinction between creator and researcher is natural and clear, and therefore the dilemma hardly arises there. He says that a poet would not send a poem to a journal for the study of poetry, and a novelist would not send a story to a journal for the study of literature, because the platforms are distinct: one for creation and one for research. He adds that a literature scholar can also deal with the cultural and social context of a work, but this is still not normative or moral criticism, rather explanatory analysis; evaluations like “good/bad” or “moral/immoral” belong to another domain. He brings his own view regarding A. B. Yehoshua’s The Terrible Power of a Small Guilt, and argues that one can recognize a work as an aesthetic masterpiece even if its contents are morally objectionable, and that there is no need to mix aesthetic criticism with moral criticism.
Jewish law, Talmud, and philosophy: intermediate zones where the distinction blurs
The speaker explains that in the study of Talmud and Jewish law, the difference between a yeshiva learner or a halakhic decisor and a university scholar is harder to define, because both sides read similar texts and try to understand “what the passage is saying.” He says that everyone senses there is a difference but has trouble defining it, and in some cases articles can fit both worlds; still, he believes there should be a substantive distinction. He proposes an analogy to philosophy and distinguishes between a philosopher who expresses a position and draws his own conclusions, and a scholar of philosophy who analyzes positions, influences, and the history of ideas, even though here too the boundary is not sharp because philosophers also rely on comparisons and analyses of their predecessors.
The natural sciences, engineering, and the role of academia vis-à-vis industry
The speaker argues that in the natural sciences the distinction between research and “doing” also exists, but seems less confusing because the object of research is not human creation but nature itself, even though there is a public intuition about “being God” surrounding achievements like cloning and stem cells. He cites Professor Avraham Steinberg’s remarks that in many countries stem-cell research is prohibited because of a Christian tradition that sees it as murder, whereas in his view there is no similar barrier in Israel and therefore Israel is a “stem-cell superpower.” He emphasizes that there is no creation ex nihilo in science and technology, only use of nature’s components and laws, and therefore the discourse about “competing with the Holy One, blessed be He” is a confusion of concepts that reminds him of the confusion in the humanities. He compares the distinction also to engineering and argues that even a faculty of engineering should develop infrastructure and general tools, not solve product-specific problems for industry, and he criticizes the blurring of the line that has emerged because of financial pressures and industrial funding that steers research in a more applied direction at the expense of basic research.
“Talking about” versus “doing it”: examples from education, coaching, and creator–researcher relations
The speaker presents the general tension between theoretical-research work and practical performance through the example of lecturers in education versus teachers, and tells a story about complaints from the School of Education at Bar-Ilan regarding noisy students, and his father, a school principal, responding, “Let’s see them go into a classroom.” He argues that even if lecturers in education are not good teachers, that does not contradict their role, because their job is to equip others with theoretical tools, just as a poetry scholar need not be a poet and a basketball coach need not be a player. He argues that academia is supposed to “talk about” and not “do it,” and when academia does the thing itself instead of researching it, that becomes harmful and expresses itself in the promotion of agendas instead of knowledge.
Critique of postmodernism, agendas, and the deliberate blurring of boundaries
The speaker describes a postmodern tendency deliberately to blur the distinction between studying something and engaging in the thing itself, out of a desire on the part of academics to be considered participants in creation or decision-making rather than merely its investigators. He argues that postmodernism tends to see “plots” and interests everywhere and thereby denies the possibility of substantive discussion, and ironically creates departments that operate precisely on the basis of agendas. He gives examples of what he says are “nothing but agenda,” such as gender studies departments, and adds criticism of practices he describes as non-academic, such as “experiential tours” and “meditations” within departments. He mentions the story of Alan Sokal, who sent a nonsense article to the journal Social Text and had it accepted for publication, and presents this, in his view, as proof that part of the theoretical-critical discourse is a collection of quotations and tautologies that cannot be tested.
The example of “scientific forecasting” and the claim that it lacks measurements and falsifiability
The speaker describes criticism of the field of “forecasting” associated with David Passig, and says that he read things Passig wrote and found that they contained no measurable predictions or criteria for falsification, similar to oracular methods and astrology. He gives the example of a general claim like “our economic situation will improve greatly” and asks how such a claim can be put to the test, comparing the status of a professor and academic prestige to a “black hat” that grants authority without empirical oversight.
Journalism, objectivity, and turning bias into an ideology
The speaker says that there was once an illusion that a journalist could report objectively, whereas today many claim there is no objectivity because every person has a position. He distinguishes between the human recognition that there are biases and turning non-objectivity into an ideology that permits doing “whatever one wants” in the name of an agenda. He argues that there is an obligation to try to report fairly and to separate the presentation of facts from opinion, and he identifies the shift toward justifying an overt agenda as a postmodern characteristic.
The context of discovery and the context of justification: motivations are not a substitute for testing claims
The speaker formulates a distinction according to which the question of why a researcher arrived at a claim is not the main issue; rather, the issue is whether the claim withstands examination, and he illustrates this through Newton’s law of gravity. He says that dealing with “bribery” or interests is irrelevant so long as the claim itself is tested and found correct, and he parallels this to his criticism of postmodernism, which replaces substantive discussion with analysis of motives. He argues that the requirement of judgeability enables discussion of the issue itself and provides a mechanism of criticism, whereas denying the possibility of judgeability frees the promotion of agendas from restraint.
Historians, myths, and the dependence of facts on agenda
The speaker describes how during the period of the “new historians,” claims were raised along the lines of “everyone has his own narrative,” and he presents this as subordinating facts to agenda. He gives the example of a master’s thesis at the University of Haifa that accused the Palmach or the Alexandroni Brigade of murder, and claims that in court it was proven that the facts were not correct; he presents this as a danger when even academia is prepared to tolerate factual falsehood in the name of agenda. He mentions the controversy over “It is good to die for our country” in relation to Trumpeldor and argues that there is no ideological need to bend facts in order to disagree with a normative message, and he notes Shlomo Ramati’s claim that the doctor witness remained loyal to the truth even when it was inconvenient to different sides.
“There is no Judaism without Jewish studies” and the attempt to blur the distinction between the object of research and the researcher
The speaker quotes the title of a conference at Bar-Ilan, “There is no Judaism without Jewish studies,” and presents it as an expression of an attempt to blur the distinction between the object of research and the researcher. He says there are “gray areas” in which the blurring is more understandable, but it is still important to distinguish as much as possible between the functions of research and the life of tradition and religious practice, and he argues that there is Judaism even without Jewish studies, though they can certainly help.
Conversion and acceptance of commandments: illustrating two perspectives on a halakhic text
The speaker brings up a controversy surrounding conversion and a response article to an article by Rabbi Brandes in Hakdamot, and refers to the position of Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar that “acceptance of commandments” in conversion is an invention of the nineteenth century. He argues that there is not a single halakhic decisor throughout the history of Jewish law who dispenses with acceptance of commandments, and he calls their claim unprofessional. He recounts that a professor of Hebrew law responded to him and brought proof from R. David Zvi Hoffmann in Melamed Leho’il, who appears willing to waive it, and the speaker says he knows the responsum but believes it is a halakhic mistake that is not legitimate and therefore is not, in his view, “an opinion within Jewish law.” He explains that the professor is correct as a researcher mapping the full range of views that appear in writing, while he himself wrote as a rabbi making a normative decision and applying categories such as “mistaken about an explicit Mishnah,” in which a ruling is void and is not counted as part of binding Jewish law; he presents this as an illustration that the two hats are different, and both can be consistent each within its own framework.
Mixing hats in the case of a rabbi-academic and the need to declare what one is doing
The speaker mentions a controversy with Beni Lau surrounding the figure of Rabbi Rosenthal, who was both a professor at the Hebrew University and a kibbutz rabbi, and argues that in this case mixing the hats led to a mistaken halakhic ruling because a research-oriented dimension was fed into halakhic decision-making. He concludes that the central dispute is not who is allowed to engage in what, because a person can be both a rabbi and an academic, but rather the recognition that these are two different kinds of activity and the obligation to distinguish between them and declare which hat one is speaking in within any given context.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I sent it by email. I want to spend a bit of time on this today—Yitzhak sent an email. So you didn’t see the email. Okay, yes, also in the morning. I want to deal with questions of interpretation, with different ways of relating to different planes of interpretation, to talk about traditional learning versus academic learning, about halakhic ruling versus analytical study, analysis and broad familiarity, all kinds of different approaches that everyone feels are distinct from one another, but people don’t always put their finger on exactly where the difference is, or what exactly the difference is. Sometimes it looks very similar. And what’s interesting is to discuss this a bit. I haven’t really done systematic work on this yet—maybe I still will as we go along—but I’ve accumulated various angles of view that I think can shed some light on the issue. We’ll see—maybe some more complete picture will emerge. I’ll actually start from the end, from an article I wrote not long ago in Makor Rishon. Some of you may have read it, in the weekend supplement, around this controversy in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University. There there was a fierce argument between what was called there the historical-philological group and Avinoam Rosenak and basically those who support him, mainly outside the department, I think, or among the department’s emeritus faculty, more than in the department itself. And they accused him of bringing existentialist elements into the learning—that is, he tells people what this passage in the Kuzari or in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed means to them, what its significance is for our time, and various discussions there touched more on the existential dimension, on the dimension of what this means to me, and less on the objective academic sense of dealing with things in some cold, external way, as required of academics according to the historical philologists. You’re supposed to engage in historical philology, to check what it means, where it came from, what it fits. What difference does it make what it means to me? What it doesn’t mean to me? Each person will decide that for himself; that isn’t the business of an academic. Everyone can decide for himself what it means to him. What it means to you is subjective; each person will say something different. And a university is supposed to deal with the objective, with research that is shared by everyone, that doesn’t depend on positions, points of view, ideologies, all kinds of things of that sort—supposedly. Okay? That was basically the claim of those who championed historical philology. And against that there was, of course, Rosenak himself—he isn’t here—so there was this whole attack, and in the end he had to leave the department somehow because of this issue.
[Speaker D] They transferred him to education.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, they transferred him to education. His father was a professor there in education, I think, so now he’s following in his father’s footsteps. And in Makor Rishon they described the matter. I don’t really know the details firsthand, only from what was described in the paper, so I’m speaking about what was described; I don’t know what actually happened. Also, later there were responses to my article, and about those responses I added that I spoke with Rosenak—he called me—and he felt that I hadn’t gotten the details exactly right. I told him that that may very well be true; I don’t know the details, and I’m relying only on what was in the newspaper. But I expressed a position that wasn’t related to him or to the details, but a position on the substance of the argument, so that didn’t really affect my main point. But I said that of course I apologize if there was any inaccuracy in the details; I don’t know. But for our purposes, what matters is really the principled level, and I think it opens up a great many interesting questions that are much broader than that little controversy. I actually tried to argue there—the articles in Makor Rishon, I think, were all from the camp that supported Rosenak.
[Speaker D] Because like everything in this country, it’s politics. The old clique are leftists, and Rosenak belongs to the right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. So I don’t know if it’s left and right. I don’t know if it’s left and right. Yes, maybe there’s also left and right there, that I don’t know. But there is a camp there: the old clique is historical-philological and the…
[Speaker D] No, no, but the clique that tells the leftist narrative—everything would’ve been fine. They would have forgiven him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, that I didn’t even know. I hadn’t heard that it was also connected to that issue.
[Speaker D] He tried to take Israel’s sacred texts and somehow connect them emotionally to the cultural world or the conceptual world of the contemporary Israeli, whereas the older people said: culture like the culture of the Indians—here the culture of…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but is that specifically left and right? I don’t know if it’s left and right. I think it’s a different academic conception.
[Speaker D] Under the surface there’s…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By the way, that itself is a somewhat academic discussion, and maybe it would be worth returning to after we have a few sessions on this matter. The discussion between us—I’m saying now—is an interesting one. Because the fact that something connects to political arguments doesn’t of course mean that it’s only politics. In other words, it could be that the political trigger generated a debate that also has something real and substantive in it. So fine, let’s leave that. Maybe if we remember, we’ll come back to it after a few sessions, because it seems to me actually to be an interesting example, what just happened here. In any case, I wrote that article there because I actually defended historical philology. Since I don’t belong to that field—I’m not at all expert in those areas, I don’t work in them—but I do think that in this debate over the role of academia, it seems to me at least that the historical-philological camp is more correct. And again, the boundaries are not sharp. There are gray areas, especially in the humanities. But I think that at the principled level this is an issue that is very important to clarify, and it seems to me that people haven’t done so. That’s the interesting thing. And today I’ll try a bit to explain why they haven’t done it. It’s connected to the issue, because in a large part of the humanities this doesn’t come up. It only comes up in very specific contexts in the humanities, mainly, by the way, in what is called Jewish studies—that is, the study of Jewish law, the Talmud, Jewish thought—as distinct from philosophy, literature, poetry, and all those things, where it doesn’t come up. Or philosophy—well, that needs discussion—but poetry and literature, there it certainly doesn’t come up. Fine, but I’ll get to that in a moment. In other words, there’s a good reason why they really hardly discussed it. And I think it’s worth discussing; it has bothered me for many years. I’ll maybe begin with a story that I also wrote there. After I published Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon, someone from Ariel College—today Ariel University—called me and said that they were now establishing a journal in Jewish studies, in Jewish thought, Jewish studies—I don’t remember exactly how he defined it. And he asked me to write an article for the first issue. And he said, look, but I ask that it not be like the book. So I said to him, in what sense? He said, look, the articles have to be refereed/judgeable. Well, so I said to him, fine, then you’ll need to find another writer; I don’t write things that are refereed. No, truly. I’m now coming to defend him, by the way. What I’m going to say now is in his defense—I’m not attacking him. I think he was right. I just think: what do you want from me? That’s not my field. Let someone who works in that kind of writing do it. And that is exactly what I also want to argue here. I’m not in that field, but I do think that this is academia’s role. So therefore the point now… I told this story to some people, and they were very surprised, because a lot of people who read, say, books or articles that I write say: what do you mean? You also relate to earlier sources, analyze them, compare them, use foreign terminology—heaven forbid—from time to time. What’s not academic about that? And it was completely clear to me what he meant. That is, he was right in the sense that he made the distinction. They can decide what kind of articles they want, but…
[Speaker D] A book on brain science isn’t refereed, for example?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t think so.
[Speaker D] What’s the difference between a philosopher and a scholar of philosophy? Right. Someone who creates and thinks for himself, versus someone who just comes to critique another thinker?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, exactly, that distinction.
[Speaker D] Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the point of refereedness is really a very important point. It’s a cornerstone of this discussion. So I’ll try to sharpen that a bit, and from there it will open up for us in various additional directions. I’ll start with the places where this dilemma doesn’t arise, where the distinction is very clear. If a poet writes a poem and sends it to a journal for the study of poetry, then it’s obvious to everyone that it won’t be accepted. Right? Why? Because we deal in the study of poetry; we don’t publish poems. We publish articles about poetry. Yes?
[Speaker C] It could serve as a motto or illustration.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, fine, but not as an article. It can’t appear as an article in that journal. Why not? Because that journal studies poetry; it doesn’t create poetry. Right. The same thing in literature. When you write a story, you can’t send it to a literature journal and publish it there. It’s not relevant. A journal for the study of literature. There are literary magazines whose purpose is to publish stories, but a journal for the study of literature, an academic journal, that’s not relevant. No one would even think of doing that, except maybe very wild postmodernists. They do that too—they do everything. But in standard disciplinary terms, that’s not something one does. And basically that means there is some natural distinction between the role of the creator of poetry or literature and the role of the scholar of poetry or literature. Those are two entirely different roles. Two different hats, and there’s no competition between them, and no reason to mix up the platforms that publish works of this genre or that genre. They’re simply two different things. No one even thinks to question it. And therefore, by the way, this issue is not dealt with very much. Because traditionally, in most areas of the humanities, it really doesn’t come up. And where does it begin to come up? It begins to come up in places where the distinction is less sharp. For example, say, the study of Jewish law or the study of the Talmud. Doesn’t matter. Someone learning in yeshiva looks at the Talmud, studies it, looks at the commentators, whatever, and tries to understand what the passage is saying. The scholar does that too. The scholar also tries to understand what the passage is saying. He looks, sometimes he also uses commentators, though perhaps less than in yeshiva. Sometimes he studies the commentators themselves, but overall he too is simply trying to understand what the Talmud is saying. Or Jewish law, for example. There are people who study Jewish law, so they check halakhic sources. What is this one’s approach? What is that one’s approach? And they try to understand what conceptions there are regarding this law or that law. How is that different from what a halakhic decisor does? A decisor too—or someone learning Jewish law, doesn’t matter—studies the approach of this decisor and that decisor and ultimately tries to present a map of… maybe not a decisor; let’s say a yeshiva student. Let’s leave that aside.
[Speaker B] The decisor also, in the end, gives a ruling.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Depends what kind of decisor. But I’ll get to that later. But the student of Jewish law, all right? Let’s speak that way. A student of Jewish law in yeshiva, not a scholar of Jewish law at a university. So what’s the difference? Now, anyone who is involved in these fields knows both of them, and many times in yeshiva the students don’t know the scholarship very well, but the scholars are often former yeshiva students. So they know the issue somewhat. Everyone understands that there is a difference. That it’s not the same thing. But it’s very hard to put your finger on it. What exactly is the difference? And there really will be articles there that could definitely fit both here and there, and that would be fine—not because of confusion or something. But there is still some kind of difference. At least in my opinion there also ought to be a difference. And therefore specifically the places where it’s easy to distinguish this difference—maybe it’s worth starting with them in order to understand what happens in the places where it’s harder. The same thing in philosophy, like Ido mentioned earlier. We—not only we, but also the philosophers themselves, say, in philosophy departments in universities—scholars of philosophy usually regard themselves as philosophers, at least in my experience. In my opinion, very few of them are philosophers. Not that I’m disparaging them—they’re not philosophers because that’s not their field of activity. They know philosophy, they know philosophical approaches, they know the history of philosophy, who influenced whom, who is connected to whom, what is connected to what. That’s philosophical research. You want to know what approaches were stated on this issue, what the differences are between them, what the influences are, what is connected to what. Some kind of analysis of one sort or another. But a philosopher is someone who expresses a position. That is, he makes arguments whose end result is some conclusion. He doesn’t write what philosophers have said; he himself expresses his own position. He is a philosopher. Then afterward someone else will come and study what he, as a philosopher, said and how it connects to other philosophers and all sorts of other things. He is the object of research. But he himself is not doing research. He himself—you can call it research if you want, doesn’t matter—but he’s more of a thinker than a researcher, one might say. Okay? That is basically a philosopher. Now again, often it’s hard to put your finger on it. In philosophy too it’s hard to put your finger on when you are a philosopher and when you are a professor of philosophy, because philosophers too of course relate to positions stated by previous philosophers, compare them, analyze them. Philosophers do that too. All right? So there too it’s rather difficult to put your finger on what exactly the difference is.
[Speaker B] In all the fields you’ve mentioned up till now, these are fields where there is creation in the humanities. Only the humanities.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So far I’ve only spoken about the humanities. No, in the natural sciences the distinction also exists, it’s just emptier of content. Because if in the humanities, the humanities are about studying the human spirit—what man creates, what man does—the humanities basically study the products of spirit, philosophy, poetry, literature; that’s basically studying what the human spirit creates. And the natural sciences create what… how do you study what the Holy One, blessed be He, creates? It’s not connected to man. So the competition of the natural sciences is with the Holy One, blessed be He, not with some other human who is doing something similar. Because they don’t study what man does; they study what nature does, and the Holy One, blessed be He—however each person conceives it—but there is no confusion here because that competition is not between human beings. But even there there is some kind of competition. Very often when you hear talk—I just heard on the way here—about printing stem cells, it was on the radio just now, on the news. Three-dimensional printing of stem cells, yes. So it’s clear to me that many people relate to that as though it is some sort of creation—you’re interfering with the Holy One, blessed be He, in His business, meaning you’re becoming God yourself. Something like that. There’s always that feeling toward scientific achievements, or cloning, or things like that. The feeling is always somehow that you’re interfering with the Holy One, blessed be He, in His actions—it’s forbidden to do that, it’s mixing domains. This intuition—and by the way, people deal with it very seriously all over the world. I think I may have told this once, that I once heard Professor Steinberg, Avraham Steinberg, who deals with medical ethics. He is a physician and also a Torah scholar, and he deals with medical ethics. He is in interaction with many medical ethicists from around the world, from all religions and countries and so on. He participates a lot in conferences, and he is also very active in medical ethics here in Israel, on various medical ethics committees and so on, usually chairing them. And he said there that in so many countries, for example, stem-cell research is forbidden. Israel has been a stem-cell superpower for years. Why? Because in the Christian tradition, even though many countries are already secular, but it doesn’t matter, the Christian tradition is such that doing stem-cell research is a kind of murder. A kind of murder, because you’re basically taking a cell that could have become a sperm cell and then become a human being and so on, and you make it into something else and eventually throw it into the garbage. And then he said there—I still remember—he asks people: tell me, but is abortion allowed in your country? In your law, is abortion allowed? You take a person who already exists and kill him. So a cell that has the potential to become a person—you don’t do research on it because that’s murder? He says that he never heard from anyone a convincing answer as to how that can be. And it turns out that in quite a few countries that is the legal situation. And therefore Israel, for example—because in Israel there is no problem; in the Jewish tradition apparently nothing developed against it. Halakhic decisors don’t prohibit it, even conservative decisors—so he said; he is in touch with the decisors—don’t prohibit it; there’s no problem with it at all. This country also doesn’t seem to care very much about the decisors, I think, but unlike other countries, Christian countries even if secular, there are no such barriers here. On the contrary, it sounds like: all the more so, do the research. And therefore Israel is a stem-cell superpower, that’s what he claimed. I don’t know the field, so I don’t know. But around these discussions you always see that with cloning and all sorts of things like that—what are all these concerns? Sometimes they’re practical concerns, that they’ll make for us some collection of cloned soldiers out of those fictional horror movies or things like that.
[Speaker B] Those are different kinds of concerns.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so those are practical concerns, say, what it will do. But often it’s not that. Often the concern is as if it is forbidden to do such a thing, that it is becoming the Creator, becoming God in some sense. A human being is not allowed to do such a thing. Now we’re talking about people who can be entirely secular. They’re not speaking about interfering with God because He doesn’t like it, but because we are morally forbidden to do such a thing. That’s the conception. As if you… Now here again there’s some mixing, because with stem cells you really are doing something—say, you’re killing the cell. Doesn’t matter whether that’s murder or not murder, but you really are doing something. But when you study things and do things yourself—say, use technology that is the result of that research and so on—you are not competing with the Holy One, blessed be He, never. Everything you do takes the components that the Holy One, blessed be He, created and puts them together in one way or another, tries to imitate Him in some way, does some simulation of what He does, and uses those components to build something out of them. There is never such a thing as creation ex nihilo in the technological and scientific world, of course, right? The technological and scientific world uses the laws of nature and the components that exist in nature. And it tries to produce from them, to assemble from them, all kinds of things that can be useful in one way or another. That is not really competition with the Holy One, blessed be He, and in that sense this discourse about interfering in the deeds of the Holy One, blessed be He, somewhat reminds me of this confusion that exists in the humanities. Even though in the natural sciences it doesn’t naturally arise, again, because there is no second side—there are no men of Jewish law in the natural sciences. Yes, there are engineers, there are those who apply scientific research, but fine, there the scientific research is not encroaching on the engineers. Maybe one can compare it a bit if I speak, say, about a faculty of engineering versus engineers in industry. That’s perhaps a little similar, though unfortunately this distinction too has become blurred in recent years, mainly because of financial pressures, and therefore industry influences academia and channels funds there in order to steer academia in directions that industry needs. It wants somewhat more basic research, which is sometimes beyond its capacity or something like that, so it funds grants and research support for researchers to go in those directions. And in some sense the research, at least in engineering faculties and sometimes also in the scientific faculties not in engineering, basically becomes more practical. And then, in my opinion, it betrays its role at a basic level. But again, the financial pressures are probably stronger than the ideology. And there really a certain distinction arises, because I think that even a faculty of engineering—not only a faculty of physics—even a faculty of engineering is not supposed to do what industry does. It is supposed to develop general engineering techniques, not develop an engineering product. That too is not the same thing. And in that sense this mixing, even though it appears in engineering, somewhat resembles the mixing between one who studies poetry and one who creates the poem itself, the one who creates the poetry itself. Now, one who studies poetry, by the way, can provide tools for poets. That is, if he discovers some interesting technique used by some poet or a number of poets or suddenly finds something interesting, certainly a poet can then come afterward and make use of it. There is some feedback loop between the study of poetry and the creation of poetry. It doesn’t have to be. And the creator of poetry doesn’t have to know what poetry scholars say, just as Agnon says, ask Kurtzweil. And he doesn’t need to know what Kurtzweil says; he creates fine literature very well even without knowing it. Maybe he did know it, I don’t know, but he didn’t claim to know it. And that’s true. But it certainly could be that if you do know it, it will help you too. You’ll be able to create literature or poetry, and you’ll have additional tools you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. Certainly. But it’s still a different role. To discover those tools—that is the role of an academic. To use those tools—that is technology. You’re an engineer. So the person who creates a poem is an engineer of poems. Fine, that is, he creates poems, so he can use technologies developed in academia, but it is still a different hat and a different role.
[Speaker C] They say about A. B. Yehoshua that in recent years he’s been writing books that a professor of literature writes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I know that he himself, for example, lectures in literature; he’s a professor of literature. Many writers, by the way, even though some of them never did a doctorate—they get some honorary title and become, for…
[Speaker B] To be a professor you don’t need a doctorate? What? To be a professor you don’t need a doctorate?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right—no, but sometimes they also get an honorary doctorate, not only professor.
[Speaker B] An honorary doctorate,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] an honorary professorship, adjunct track or something like that—they once offered me one too. In any case, since you mention A. B. Yehoshua, he really did write a book about this very issue, The Terrible Power of a Small Guilt. And there he talks about it—the only book of his I was able to read and also enjoyed, because I don’t like Israeli writers at all, and A. B. Yehoshua even less. But in that book he comes with a complaint against literary criticism, saying that literary criticism deals only with aesthetics and doesn’t enter into content. There can be a book that conveys very anti-moral messages and it will receive the critics’ praise because it is built in a good literary way—sophisticated, impressive, clever, whatever. And he says no, not at all, the content has to be brought into the criticism. Now this is exactly the same argument as here. And I disagree with him in that argument there. I disagree with him, because I definitely think you can critique Hitler’s book on race theory and say that it is a literary masterpiece. There is no problem with that. And still criticize it on the moral level and say that it is a moral catastrophe or moral disaster. Two different things, and I don’t think they should be mixed. And it’s the same argument in the field of literature; you can see it in many places.
[Speaker C] Can you critique a book without relating to its social-sociological significance—say, Père Goriot, you write…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When you write a review of the book, when you write a review of the book, then certainly you should write that. But when you write an academic paper about a book, or an artistic critique of a book, then no. What does that have to do with it? You critique it on the artistic level. Moral criticism is something else.
[Speaker C] You study what’s happening in politics, what’s happening in society. It’s another tool for learning about society.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what? Then a social scientist will use the book in order to learn things about society, but the artistic critic of the book doesn’t need to do that. Those are two different things.
[Speaker C] The department of French literature, or Chinese or Japanese literature, at the Hebrew University or at some other university, anywhere in the world, deals a great deal with culture and with non-literary things in the country where it was created.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that doesn't bother me. And they should do that. They should do that, because they need to understand the context in which this book or this poem was created, and understand what the relationship is between the context and what was created, compare it to other works, to a different context, to an author who changed context and suddenly his work is different. Absolutely, the connection between the work and the context is an essential part of the work of a literature scholar. But that doesn't mean criticism. It has nothing to do with criticism. Those are two different things. Criticism means: I don't like this because it's French wine and it's disgusting. That's not your job. You need to say: French wine is structured like this, and in France they produce this kind of wine. The question whether it's tasty or not tasty is none of your business. Okay? As a metaphor, yes? Meaning, you can tell me why this kind of literature is created against the background of contemporary French cultural conditions, I have no problem with that. But don't tell me what you think about that culture. That's unrelated. Say that in a newspaper article, not in academic research, research on art as an academic discipline.
[Speaker C] And the fact that most Israeli winemakers who won medals in recent years, by the way, studied microbiology in the Faculty of Agriculture and a few other places, that's not relevant?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, not relevant?
[Speaker C] Or is that like the literature scholar who studied the background of the author? No, I'm saying I don't know.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be that it helps them produce wine. I'm not an expert in the field.
[Speaker C] I don't even know if it's true or not.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And suppose it is true, then it helps them produce the wine. Fine. What's the problem? Most people who make machines also studied mechanical engineering. Meaning, okay, there are certain studies that help you produce something. But when I'm researching the wine, what do I care that you studied microbiology? Or even if I do care, I can study the fact that studying microbiology helps produce wine. But not criticize this wine because it was created by a microbiologist. Describe what wine produced by a microbiologist does, okay, and what wine not produced by a microbiologist does. And whether it's tasty or not tasty, leave that to tasters or to non-artistic critics, rather to practical critics, those who are supposed to tell you whether it's tasty or not, if there is such a thing, some claim there is. Okay? I'm talking about an academic discipline. An academic discipline is supposed to be very cold, not to express positions. I'm saying, that's the debate. I'm presenting my position at the moment. I'm expressing the position that an academic discipline should not express positions. I'm expressing that position because that position is not being said within an academic framework.
[Speaker B] It's very prominent in the social sciences, where it's really so much…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are places where certain departments or disciplines are nothing but agenda. Meaning there's only agenda there. Gender studies or all kinds of nonsense like that. Social sciences and all that rubbish, or all kinds of, I don't know what, at Bar-Ilan there are things like practical Kabbalah, all kinds of experiential tours and all kinds of places. An academic department? Yes yes, an academic department where they do all kinds of nonsense and babble, and experiences and meditations and things like that. Instead of dealing with the contents and the materials themselves, they talk nonsense, and they make money from it too while they're at it, but never mind. Same thing, there are…
[Speaker E] What kind of academic product do they…?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They write all kinds of articles that are worth nothing, just like their work is worth nothing. And okay.
[Speaker B] No, even if they're worth something, they're not academic articles.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes correct, they're also worth nothing and they're also worth nothing academically. And same thing, I know, now there's a new profession: forecasting, scientific forecasting, Pasig, David Pasig, yes, Pasig. He says he's on some committee… Oh really? Oy vey. The new Oracle of Delphi.
[Speaker B] The new Oracle of Delphi, meaning he writes forecasts for you…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As if in very scientific language and all that, and he gives predictions about what's going to happen, and he's simply the Oracle of Delphi. Nothing comes true, nothing obligates anything, there's no way to check whether these things come true or not. But what happens? They put a black professor's hat on him, he gets a salary, and he becomes an academic.
[Speaker B] He gives a forecast,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He gives a forecast, check it.
[Speaker B] And here, go check, he's also a lecturer, a very sought-after lecturer.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Check. I bought the things he wrote, I read some things he wrote, after that he surely wrote lots of things I didn't read, maybe he improved. But in the early things he wrote, people asked me what I thought, because these were people who sent them to me when he had just arrived. Really just when he arrived. He studied it abroad, in the United States I think, and he came to Bar-Ilan. And when he came he wrote a few things, about how important it is, because you have to create a discipline, you have to explain why it's terribly important. He gave forecasts and showed how scientific it was, and that was it. And then I showed people there, I took one of the articles he wrote, and showed people that nothing there is measurable. There isn't a single forecast there that is measurable, which is a trick that's worked since the days of the oracles. The Oracle of Delphi already did exactly the same thing. Or I don't know what, anyone who gives you information from heaven generally tells you something you won't be able to check whether it's true or not. Like all the astrologers and all that, you can hear them on radio programs or in all kinds of places.
[Speaker B] But you can check, he says what will be in twenty years, who'll remember in twenty years.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, you won't be able to check even in twenty years.
[Speaker E] There are scientific rules by which you build this.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There aren't, there aren't any rules.
[Speaker C] I gave him an example of someone who said that in twenty years the Earth's rotation speed would change by such and such. Which, by the way, is something you can check.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He says our economic situation will improve greatly in the next ten or twenty years. It was that kind of forecast. Now, what does it mean, improve greatly? Surely there'll be some increase at some point in the next ten or twenty years. There'll be an increase and there'll also be a decline and all kinds of things. Okay, so how do you refute that, or subject a statement like that to the test of falsification? More or less those were the statements.
[Speaker E] What's his name, futurist Dr. Yuval Noah Harari?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn't matter, but that's not what we're talking about, yes, that's not what we're talking about. So I'm saying again, these are things I read when he arrived, I don't know how long ago that was, fifteen years or something like that. A collection of nonsense and confusion, such mindless babble as I had never heard in my life. It could go straight into the gender studies department. In any case, the point is that today in the postmodern world, I say this because it's relevant to our subject, in the postmodern world there is some systematic tendency to blur this distinction. To blur this distinction. This debate is part of the matter. This debate is part of the matter, because people want to participate in the thing itself. They are not willing to preserve this distinction between studying the thing and engaging in the thing itself. They want to be considered philosophers, poets, writers, in every context, whatever you want. That's what they want. And therefore there is a deliberate tendency to blur the distinction.
[Speaker D] That's what happened with models, becoming advisers to the prime minister.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, maybe, yes. In any case, or the prime minister's wives. In any case, no, there was Yael Dayan, not a model, sorry.
[Speaker C] Forget it, heads of government around the world look like attractive people, camera-friendly people. Moses, some eighty-year-old man, slow of speech and slow of tongue, he would never in his life have made it onto television. And certainly not color television in particular.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? And certainly not color television in particular.
[Speaker B] No, color television came after him, he was opposed to television altogether, that's the problem.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, this blurring, in my opinion, is deliberate blurring. This postmodernity fits in very well with these tendencies of there's no me and him, there are no differences between disciplines, everything can be done, anything. And then what happens is that, ironically, this postmodern criticism that sees conspiracies everywhere—after all, what does a postmodernist do? He says: he sees a position. Ah, that position comes because you want to achieve something, you have some kind of interest, this or that agenda, and by that he strips you naked because really you're just an opportunist. Now, that may be true and it may not be true, but discuss the issues themselves. He is not willing to discuss the issues themselves, because there is no such thing as discussing the issues themselves, because everyone is equally right. You can't discuss the issues themselves, you can only discuss the conspiracies around them. And now what happens as a result of this? What happens is that the departments in which the postmodern outlook takes over operate in exactly the way they criticize. So what happens there is only conspiracies. There is no academic creation at all. All there is there is agendas. Meaning, political science departments, for example, choose people according to whether he is post-Zionist or not post-Zionist, in Beersheba for example, yes? Meaning, there are departments like that where that's everything, that's what they do, their goal is not at all to produce something, it's only to advance an agenda. Gender studies departments are by definition like that all over the world, not just in one place. There is nothing there besides that, it's just agenda.
[Speaker C] I once saw on their website the reports they wrote about the state of the Bedouin in the country. They kept writing reports explaining how miserable and pathetic the Bedouin in the country are here and there and how guilty we are and things like that. And now when you read that report, without being a great academic, you understand for example that if cousin marriage is seventy percent—seventy percent of Bedouin women are married to their first cousin—you can't blame only the Jews for the fact that their infant mortality is five times higher than among Jews.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, I believe that's the result. Of lack of intelligence, a common phenomenon in those departments.
[Speaker C] So now they deleted them from the site and you can no longer find them there? Suddenly it disappeared about half a year ago.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, that's business. Sokal's article was a classic case, Alan Sokal's. Do you know that story, that he sent an article to Social Text, I think.
[Speaker B] Who is that guy?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A physicist. An American physicist. I think maybe even Jewish, if I remember correctly.
[Speaker B] How long ago was that?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fifteen years ago, ten years. It caused an enormous stir. He sent an article to a journal called Social Text. From the name you can already understand what we're dealing with. It's Theory and Criticism, same thing. Now, he sent a nonsense article. Nonsense. He's a physicist altogether. He sent them an article on social theories and mixed in quotations from every… no connection at all. Just complete nonsense.
[Speaker B] He did it on purpose?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, on purpose. He sent it there and it came back—they published it, it was accepted for publication. I can send it to you, I have a copy of the article. I can send it to you. Those people couldn't bury themselves from shame. Because afterwards the man came out and said: Friends, I wrote a collection of nonsense there, I meant nothing. Nothing at all. Just look, it's a collection of quotations that have no connection to one another. Now, all the articles there are like that. Most of the writers aren't physicists, so they aren't aware that they're like that. Meaning, the physicist did it deliberately, he was aware that that's how it was. That's all. Now look at critical theories, it's the same thing. Again, it's been a long time since I read them and maybe in the meantime it improved, though I doubt it. But it's the same thing, these are people who write a collection of nonsense and conspiracies here and there and connections here and say nothing. Just a collection of tautologies at best, if they preserve logical consistency it's a collection of tautologies. If they don't preserve logical consistency then it's just a collection of contradictions. There's nothing there. It really is an unbelievable phenomenon. These are whole fields that constitute themselves out of nothing. It's like forecasting. Forecasting too, in my opinion, is a field that constitutes—again, I'm talking about something I don't understand, I read Pasig's articles. Maybe there are people who do it better, I don't know. But my feeling is that this man sustains that field here in the country, at least in the country. My feeling is that it will arise exactly like the other political fields, that they arise through conspiracies by those who accuse everyone around them of engaging only in conspiracies and interests. And then they say: but there is nothing besides conspiracies and interests. There is no objective thing that is true or false. There is something that advances my agenda, then fine, and if it doesn't advance my agenda then let it go home. Openly.
[Speaker D] That's what happened in journalism. There used to be this illusion that a journalist could report objectively, and today they've already given that up.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, and today many people tell you, look, there is no such thing as objective. Every journalist—and this sounds right at first—look, every journalist is a human being, he has an agenda, he has a position. You can't expect a journalist not to have a position. But from there to the view that says that if so then he can do whatever he wants because of course you have a position and you have a position—fine, so try to overcome it, present the facts and in the end also write what you think. Okay. But present the facts at least as fairly as possible. Try. I'm saying, you can fail, we all fail, it's not… But the moment they turn it into an ideology, that's postmodernism. Meaning, postmodernism begins from a correct observation that people often act in an unobjective way. Fine, they have all kinds of agendas and so on, that's true. But afterward, when that itself becomes an ideology, then basically now that's the only way to act, because there is no objective way to act. And then basically, openly, we will act according to agenda. And that's all. Yes, Aharon Barak for example didn't want to accept Ruth Gavison because she has an agenda.
[Speaker B] He was interviewed—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] After all, just recently there was—
[Speaker B] A clarification that no, it was just something… they refuted what he said. It turned out that, gently speaking, he didn't quite tell the truth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. Well, in any case, that's the framework within which this whole thing operates. Lecturers in education versus teachers, for example. Lecturers in education are not teachers; they can also be bad lecturers, by the way. I assume many of them are. The field is boring, so surely it's hard to be a good lecturer there. Or it's a superfluous field, in my opinion. But there too, the lecturers… my father was always a school principal. So my father said, the technological school was located inside Bar-Ilan for a certain period, and there were complaints from the School of Education, which wasn't far away, that the children were disturbing the people there from contemplating their profound ideas because they were making noise outside. My father burst out laughing there. And then he said, let's see them walk into a classroom, their pants would fall down after two minutes, all those education lecturers. And then I told him that in truth it isn't their job to walk into a classroom. Exactly the same thing I'm saying here: it isn't their job to walk into a classroom. Their job is to train other people who will know how to walk into a classroom and equip them with various tools, and indeed in principle that can be done. It can even be done by a person who himself doesn't know how to do it, but he knows the theory and gives you the tools. And maybe he doesn't know how to implement them. Yes, maybe he doesn't know how to implement, but he knows the tools, so he teaches you the tools. That's entirely possible. It's not something absurd, and exactly the same as a scholar of poetry doesn't have to be a poet.
[Speaker B] Like a basketball coach who explains to them what to do.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, exactly. It's not… doesn't have to be. Meaning, in all these places you see exactly the same tension between talking about and doing. Okay? Now, academia, in my opinion at least, its role is to talk about and not to do. And all the places in academia that do, that's usually, in my view, a bad and harmful thing. In engineering too, in poetry too, in gender studies too, and everywhere. Every place where you don't study agendas but advance agendas, that's the same sin. And when you develop technological products instead of researching engineering theory.
[Speaker F] What do you mean? In physics there's an interest in researching…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? In engineering—I studied engineering—what? Control systems…
[Speaker F] It's to solve problems, the problems come from industry.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, what are you talking about? Solving problems—no, that's not right. In engineering, all the things I studied are things developed by engineering theoreticians. What do you mean? Control systems and communications and all the… again, the boundary is not sharp. Obviously in certain places you need to develop technology in order to solve a problem. Fine, but your goal is essentially to produce new technology.
[Speaker F] They were built by people who came from industry.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don't care that they came from industry. Again, I'm not talking about the people. There are also many professors of… Nyquist.
[Speaker F] Fine,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what?
[Speaker B] Go to the engineering faculty at the Technion, ninety percent of them have never set foot in… it's not…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, there are philosophy lecturers who are philosophers. No problem, that doesn't disqualify them from being philosophers. Not only cobblers are allowed to be philosophers, philosophy lecturers are also allowed. You just need to know that a philosophy lecturer and a philosopher are not the same thing. A person can engage in both fields. If he is talented in both fields and wants to engage in both fields, nothing prevents it. You just have to distinguish.
[Speaker F] He's not doing the work of an engineer, he's doing the work of a professor of engineering. Okay, so the boundary really isn't sharp.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I'm saying again, obviously the boundary is not sharp, there is a gray area. But broadly…
[Speaker F] Have you ever seen the papers they publish? It's not open, it's…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course, I see the papers they publish, and that's exactly what I'm lamenting.
[Speaker F] But why exactly are you lamenting that?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because I think it's industry's job to research that and not the university's job to research that. The university should establish the basic infrastructure for the field of engineering and not solve problems. Solving problems—let them solve them in the companies…
[Speaker F] Those problems, come on, they solve the problems by…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No problem. So I'm saying, many times problems are a trigger for developing new technology, and therefore I'm saying there is contact between the fields. The distinction is not completely sharp, but still these are two fields. Even if there is a gray part between them, there are still two fields, they are two different fields. And today the gray area has somehow been conquered in a certain sense. Meaning, somehow it has become more and more gray. Do you understand? It's part of the same process that appears everywhere in a different form, in different doses. Obviously, I'm comparing fields here that are completely different and each has its own characteristics, but it's the same phenomenon in all these contexts. In different doses, in different ways.
[Speaker D] Theoretical mathematicians have this view of applied mathematics, or maybe even theoretical physicists of experimentalists. Okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but an experimentalist, for example, is not an engineer. You're an experimentalist, right? No, you weren't an experimentalist, I didn't remember. Okay… I was in… to distinguish, basically, to distinguish… Ah, numerical experimentation. Yes. Ah, no, I'm saying, even an experimentalist is not an engineer. It's not the same thing. The experimentalist checks something in order to validate a theory, not in order to create a product.
[Speaker D] Okay, and in applied mathematics?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Applied mathematics is a big question, I don't exactly know… in mathematics I'm not familiar enough with what exactly is called applied mathematics, but it seems to me, if I understand the field correctly, that applied mathematics is supposed to take the theorems of mathematics and produce from them techniques for solving mathematical problems. But producing techniques for solving mathematical problems is not solving problems; it's still not solving problems. Now, obviously, an applied mathematician will also know how to solve many problems very well, and therefore it's only natural that he will do that too. I still think there is also a disciplinary distinction there. Meaning, there is a distinction and there is a gray area in the middle. And it's true, not only is there a gray area in the middle, sometimes it's perfectly fine that a person who has that ability will also do it. Even though it's not in the gray area, it's in the white and black area. He just needs to know that he is doing that as a problem-solver and not as an academic. And that's fine, it's allowed, you don't have to be imprisoned in a disciplinary field. Exactly as, if I return now to Talmudic research or research of Jewish law, you can be a halakhic decisor or a traditional learner who also engages in research. That's perfectly fine, there's no prohibition, on the contrary. That's fine, you just need to know that these are two kinds of activity. Here you're wearing two hats, and the demarcation between those two hats, in my view, is important. It is important, this isn't just technical stubbornness. There's something essential here, and I'll try to illustrate that a bit later.
[Speaker C] Why is it so important where you do it? After all, specifically in literature, like the example given earlier, it's clear that the people involved have this awareness: when a professor of literature publishes a readable book, he does it through a literary press and not through the university press.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, exactly, that's why I said there it's clear.
[Speaker C] So what difference does it make where they do it? After all, research labs of big industrial companies engage in basic theoretical research.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is what the role of academia is, that's all I'm saying. The question of what the government invests money in, how much money to invest, should derive from trends. I think the role of academia really ought to focus on this. It's not some arbitrary set of rules, and if you have a lot of money and can support both infrastructural, basic research and also give help to academia, excellent. It's just that what happens, in my opinion, is a kind of prostitution. Meaning, they follow the money.
[Speaker C] They do that, there's a chief scientist who invests in practical research and there's…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the fact is that those who know these fields, it seems to me that's so, that's my impression, you can argue,
[Speaker B] The chief scientist isn't an academic chief scientist. Obviously, he invests in practical research.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I'm saying what happens is that academia stops doing that role. If it could do that role and at the same time also do other things, fine, let them do that in the university too. What happens is that money leads people to engage in these things at the expense of basic research. And therefore there is little basic research. There are more and more studies going in practical directions and fewer and fewer people engaging… and the role of academia is to sustain the things that don't bring in money. That's why you maintain academia. That's why the government funds them, and not from the money earned from products. Today, because of the pressure—and there is pressure, I'm not such a genius, I'm not giving them the money instead—so there is financial pressure and therefore it's no wonder they go to companies and try to set up companies that will produce products on the basis of ideas from the university, and okay, that's natural. By the way, in that respect it's perfectly fine; let them produce it, let the company sell those products. But the research should, in my opinion, focus on pure research. That's what I think, that's the role of academia.
[Speaker G] There was an engineering company in Spain that designed a water reservoir with this huge earthen embankment, and it burst and the whole reservoir flooded some village and a half, I don't know. And they brought in a professor to give his professional opinion on the design. So he wrote there, he explained why the water gradient at that rate changes the angle of the embankment, and at the end when he wrote the opinion he recommended that the judge not accept his opinion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] His own opinion?
[Speaker G] Yes. He said, look, this is completely academic research; these are engineers who designed it, they aren't supposed to know this. And it really is like that…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I got to… since we're already telling stories, I got to Tadiran in the fourth year of my engineering studies, so I did my project there—you have to do a project in engineering—so I did the project at Tadiran in the air communications department. I worked on a filter for the communications device of the Lavi in the IDF. And to my delight the project was canceled, and afterward the Lavi was canceled too, because it surely wouldn't have worked. Why wouldn't it have worked? Because it was a filter that couldn't be made by the regular techniques, so they saw that I liked theory and mathematics and all that, so they said: come sit and diagonalize orthogonal polynomials and produce for us some microwave filter, yes, a filter where you have to produce cylinders, metal cylinders, determine the gaps between them and their diameters. And that's a complicated electromagnetic calculation and fairly heavy mathematics. A longitudinal filter? For microwaves? A microwave filter. Yes. And in the end it wasn't produced, and I didn't have problems with the university either—in the end they approved the software as my project, because it wasn't manufactured, what could I do. In any case, and to my delight, because it wouldn't have worked, for sure it wouldn't have worked. How do I know that? Because why did I switch to physics afterward? This was in my fourth year in engineering. Why did I switch to physics? Because I realized that any technician there would do it a thousand times better than I would. He wouldn't diagonalize a single polynomial and he wouldn't do any mathematics at all; he'd just put in capacitors, if it didn't work he'd whack it like this, and if it still didn't work he'd rip it out and put in a transistor instead, until it worked.
[Speaker B] With feel and intuition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With lots of intuition, and I saw the people doing it, or he'd be Japanese, they'd bring some Japanese guy and he'd do it to the millimeter and it would work better than all my polynomials. Okay? And that was analog, by the way; in digital it's not like that. That's the advantage of digital, that mathematics really can work. But in analog mathematics doesn't work, that's a known thing. So therefore… so therefore… the chance that something will work times the amount of mathematics in it is constant. That's the technological uncertainty principle. Meaning, that, and that's exactly the point. But in order to develop this theory of polynomials and filtering and filters and so on, you need academia. That's fine; afterward the people of experimentation and application and so on will do it better than the academics. But they need someone to sit and develop these tools. In the air communications department at Tadiran no one is going to sit and develop a theory of how to make filters. That's the service academia gives society. That's why basic research is maintained. But not that they should solve the problems themselves; leave that to the engineers. And I'm talking about a faculty of engineering, not physics. Even a faculty of engineering isn't supposed to do that. Okay, let me return for a moment to the issue of justiciability and all that, I got carried away there for a while. What does justiciability actually mean? I'm returning to the idea of justiciability, that first story, yes, where he asked me to write a justiciable article. What is a justiciable article? I return to the field that actually interests me, that's Torah study, yes? If I want to write an article in which I preach pluralism—Judaism should be pluralistic and all kinds of things like that—that will never be an academic article. An academic article cannot preach anything and cannot express a position about anything. What should an academic article do? An academic article should present a thesis that can be examined, as much as possible—again, these are the humanities and of course this has to be taken with a grain of salt—but as much as possible you strive to present a thesis that is justiciable. What does it mean, a thesis that is justiciable? If I claim that one should be pluralistic because it's terribly important to be pluralistic, and someone else comes and says, look, in my opinion it's not important to be pluralistic and I don't want to be pluralistic—that's a debate; what I'm saying is not justiciable. You can't set it against facts and check whether I'm right or wrong. You have one line of reasoning and I have another, each person with his own reasoning. Write that in journalism, in a newspaper, or in an essay on Jewish thought or on Jewish law or whatever you want—express your opinion, say whatever you want. Academia isn't supposed to do that. In academia you would examine whether Maimonides was a pluralist. That you can examine. Why? Because if you claim that Maimonides was a pluralist, that's justiciable. Let's see, bring me passages from Maimonides, show me why those passages reflect a pluralistic position, and let someone else, with other passages, express a position that is not pluralistic. So you said something seemingly similar, but it's not the same thing, because you didn't express a position at all. You might even be against pluralism altogether, and yet determine that Maimonides was a pluralist. And to determine that Maimonides was a pluralist is a justiciable determination, because you can check it against the sources and see whether it's true or not. Now again, I'm saying, this isn't a mathematical check, and there too there is a gray area—this is the humanities—and still the aspiration is to present something that is testable: you uncovered new information, added something to the world of knowledge in the field you're engaged in. When I say that it's worthwhile to be pluralistic, I haven't added any information for anyone. I'm saying this, and someone else will say the opposite.
[Speaker B] You added information that you…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so now an academic who researches my doctrine can say Miki Abraham is a pluralist. If he writes that in a justiciable way, and if anyone is interested in what Miki Abraham says, then that will be an article accepted in academia and it will be justiciable and that's fine. But when I wrote in favor of pluralism, that's not an academic article. It's a position. Positions are written in the newspaper, not in an academic article. And therefore now many methods have developed to bypass this difficulty, because after all we all have agendas, and academics do too—this is Nadav, my friend from Bar-Ilan, who once told me about a conference held at Bar-Ilan whose title was: "There is no Judaism without Jewish studies." That was the conference title. Okay? And that expresses very deeply the attempt to blur the difference between the object of study and the researcher, and indeed in that context it is blurred. I think that really isn't absurd, meaning there is blurring here, and it's true that there are gray areas, and still I do think it's important to make the distinctions where possible. True, it's not sharp, it's not mathematics, but it is still important to make the distinctions. There is Judaism without Jewish studies, in my opinion, although they can certainly help, but it's not true that it's completely disconnected. So in that context all kinds of techniques developed for bypassing the dry academic restrictions, because after all an academic is supposed to be dry, cold, not say anything of his own, not express a position but only deal with knowledge. Academic knowledge is supposed to accumulate. After you've written an article, at the principled level yes, after you've written an article, assuming no one found any mistake in it and so on, another piece of knowledge has been added to your field. Now everyone knows Maimonides was a pluralist. That's a fact. Now we can continue and see whether Maimonides was also something else, and whether that is consistent with his pluralism. That's the continuation of research. So research is built in such a way… in a way that it is supposed to be built over time. Meaning, another piece of information has been added to us, but then that means you need to deal with information and not with positions and not with opinions and not with expressing opinions. That doesn't build anything. Doesn't build in the sense of building knowledge; it may build discourse, never mind, but it doesn't—you need to build knowledge just as in physics you need to build knowledge. You uncovered a physical law, assuming it stands the test, the tests, now we know something more that we didn't know before. Now on that basis we can continue building further. In that sense, the humanities should definitely conduct themselves similarly to the natural sciences, with all the limitations and all that, since it's impossible to do it completely that way, but it should aspire in that direction: to be justiciable. And in that sense I completely accepted what he said. Because indeed in my book it's completely non-justiciable. I'm not claiming something about anyone else. All the medieval authorities (Rishonim) I use, yes, the philosophers I use, I use as illustration. I'm not making claims about what Kant said; as far as I'm concerned they can find that I was mistaken and that I don't understand Kant at all. I'm trying to use him as an illustration in order to say what I want to say. The book, all my books, my books don't deal with what other people say at all. I don't deal with that. Everyone chooses his own field. I—this isn't arrogance and it isn't contempt—I engage in one thing. An academic has to engage in something else. And if he wants to write books like mine, let him write them, but that won't come out through academia. And rightly so. My books cannot come out through an academic press. And it's good and right that that's the case, meaning that's really correct. And this point, so as I said earlier, this distinction leads people to circumvent it. So what do they do? In order to push pluralism, they prove with signs and wonders that Maimonides was a pluralist. And of course Maimonides is a source of authority; if Maimonides was a pluralist, the conclusion follows naturally. But that's fine, that's allowed. As long as your arguments about Maimonides are arguments that hold water. That they will stand the test—I will examine it in the sources and see whether he really was like that or not. I don't care now what the source is, what your motivation is for doing this research. It's exactly like the context of discovery and the context of justification in philosophy of science. I'm not interested in what caused Newton to think about the law of gravitation. He had some interest—say, according to the postmodernists—he wanted, I don't know, to get the chair at Cambridge. So he had an interest in researching the law of gravitation. Fine, what do I care? Check the law of gravitation, it works. It's justiciable. Put it to an experiment. If it works then that's perfectly fine; what do I care now what his motivations were? Not because it's illegal for him to have motivations. Motivations are outside the scope of the discussion. That's all. They exist, but academia isn't the one that should discuss them; rather the history of physics should, but not physics research. The history of physics, the culture of physics, the sociology of physics—they will study what the… or the psychology of physicists—they will study what Newton's motivation was. Fine. Or what in his psychological makeup enabled the achievements he reached. A very interesting question, but it has nothing to do with physicists.
[Speaker D] Someone who has motivation is very afraid of the verse, "for bribery blinds the eyes of the wise."
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but I’m saying, that’s exactly the point. The moment you see that his eyes are blind, why should I care whether it’s because of the bribe? Check whether he’s blind. Check whether his conclusions stand up to scrutiny. You understand? I don’t need to go looking for the bribe. If there was a bribe and he isn’t blind, I won’t invalidate his ruling even if he took a bribe, because the ruling is correct. Exactly. And if the ruling is not correct, I’ll invalidate it even if he didn’t take a bribe. Meaning, why should I care what was… that’s exactly my claim against this postmodernism that looks for conspiracies and interests everywhere. In many places there really are such things, mostly among them by the way. There are conspiracies and interests, but that’s not relevant. Judge things on their own merits. What happens is, they’re not willing to judge things on their own merits. They claim there is only a plane of discussion of interests and conspiracies, and they deny the existence of… the very possibility of substantive discussion. Okay? And that, that is the problem. And then what happens is that this confusion gets created. Because then they say, wait, so if everything is interests, and after all there is no unbiased researcher, everyone has an agenda—we hear this at every step. Except that some people say it apologetically; they say, okay, sometimes I make mistakes, sometimes I slip, fine, we’re all human beings. And there are others who say it as an ideology: there is no journalist without an agenda, no academic without an agenda. And therefore obviously, I have my agenda on the table and I promote it crudely, bluntly, and without embarrassment, because there is nothing else, because everyone does it. It is not true that everyone does it. There are people who do it honestly, and that advances things. If someone proves that Maimonides was a pluralist, and I know, he himself advocates pluralism and wants to promote pluralism, I have no problem with that. As long as his proofs that Maimonides was a pluralist are perfectly sound. That is exactly the difference between post… the postmodernist may be right that a person has an agenda, but that is not the relevant plane of discussion. Discuss what he says; examine it. For that, it has to be justiciable. The postmodernist, in order to promote his agenda, denies the very possibility of discussion. He doesn’t want the distinction I’m making here. Because he wants to reduce everything to agendas and interests, because then everything is legitimate. I can put my agendas on the table; if I’m on the left then I’ll promote the left and the narrative, and there is no true history and false history, and post-Zionism. And the post-Zionists and post-historians say this all the time. At a certain period they said it openly; today they’re a bit more embarrassed. But in the cheerful era of the new historians, yes, Benny Morris before he repented, and Pappe to this day, or all those guys—he’s a sociologist, doesn’t matter, but all the new ones, sociologists, new historians, all of them. These are people who say openly that there is nothing at all. They lie openly. They say, fine, everyone has his own narrative. I have one narrative and you have another. What are you lying for? These are incorrect facts. So what, fine, we all have agendas—you’re not scaring him. Doesn’t it stand up to criticism? Here, there was, I don’t know, maybe 15 years ago, also in that same period of the new historians, a little afterward, there was someone who did a master’s degree at the University of Haifa and it ended up in court, because he accused the Palmach of murdering some Palestinian villagers.
[Speaker C] How the Alexandroni Brigade
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] denied it.
[Speaker C] That they murdered villagers there in the area of Habonim Junction?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, something on the Carmel Coast there somewhere, exactly.
[Speaker C] You can go onto the Alexandroni Brigade website today—last time I checked a few years ago—they bring all his research and they bring testimony from the field.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The man got a master’s degree, it passed academic review, historians read it, and he got the master’s. Right? And then it got to court because I think Alexandroni, maybe, or some of the fighters there, or I don’t know exactly, someone sued him for libel over the master’s thesis he did. They sued him for libel, and it was proven in court that these were incorrect facts. He simply built it on incorrect facts. Now, I’m not getting into the fine details there, but it doesn’t seem far-fetched to me that some of his reviewers or advisors were not bothered by the fact that the facts were false, because that was okay. What?
[Speaker F] The Israeli court, or Jenin, Jenin?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, Jenin, Jenin—
[Speaker F] That’s a different question.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think that was Muhammad Bakri. There it’s a different question. You can criticize what the court said, but the court did not purport to determine what the correct and incorrect facts were. It only said that there is artistic freedom even if you build on incorrect facts. That’s a normative question; you can disagree with the court, but the court said what it said. Meaning, it’s not the same thing. A master’s thesis in history is supposed to present facts; that is, it’s not a normative question but a factual one. But these guys are not willing to recognize the difference between norms and facts. By the way, part of this is—we may have spoken about it once—the relation to myth. In the cheerful era of the new historians, many myths were shattered. Among them, “It is good to die for our country,” because supposedly Trumpeldor actually cursed in Russian; he didn’t say, “It is good to die for our country.” Now somehow, all those who were enthusiastic Zionists and loved Trumpeldor, of course, Betar and so on, they said, what are you talking about, it’s a blatant lie, and Trumpeldor said, “It is good to die for our country.” And those who said he cursed in Russian were generally people with a left-wing to post-Zionist worldview. Okay? Not only post-Zionist, some were simply from the Labor movement who didn’t like Betar, but also post-Zionists—that is, all the new historians and so on, all the myth-shattering. And I always wondered, and I even wrote an article about this in Tzohar, why this matters. Meaning, you can be a leftist even if Trumpeldor said, “It is good to die for our country”; then you just disagree with him. Why subordinate the facts to the agenda? After all, you really don’t need to. You can say Trumpeldor was an idiot because he thought it was good to die for our country, while really it’s not good to die for anything. No problem—express your position. But an academic cannot just express a position, because an academic has to be justiciable; it has to stand against facts. So what do they do? They find workarounds. Somehow they manage to cheat with the facts, or to say—I don’t know if it’s cheating, I have no idea what Trumpeldor really said, I have no position, I haven’t checked it.
[Speaker C] Shlomo Ramati researched this issue, and he says that the doctor—and in general this expression appears often in Trumpeldor’s letters—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] this one, “it is good to die”
[Speaker C] “for our country,” in Trumpeldor—that’s his expression, it sounds plausible. That famous doctor, I forgot his name, Dr. Grini I think, who said that this is more or less what Trumpeldor told him with his dying breath—he was also a member of a commission of inquiry the British established following the 1929 riots, and they pressured him to say that the Muslims abused the corpses, that the Arabs abused the corpses, and he wrote that it wasn’t true. Meaning, he was a doctor loyal to the truth. If the truth was a left-wing truth—namely, that the Arabs did not abuse the corpses—he wrote that; and if it was a right-wing truth—that Trumpeldor said, “It is good to die for our country”—he wrote that too. So Ramati argues that there are also such people. He’s neither right-wing nor left-wing; he’s loyal to his truth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that’s also an option; truth is also an option.
[Speaker C] And therefore he tends to believe him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that’s exactly the point, but in a postmodern world they don’t accept such a thing. No—either you’re on the right or you’re on the left, obviously. Immediately they label articles by the agenda. By the way, we all have some tendency toward this, to label articles by the identity of the author, or to label the author by the article. But truth is also an option—that sometimes a person writes something that is ideologically inconvenient for him because he is honest. That can happen.
[Speaker G] That’s also an option, and certainly from the standpoint of—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, it’s as though what’s problematic is that the facts aren’t exposed before you. He discovered it in some hidden scroll, I don’t know where. You can’t now travel to some archive and see what’s written there. So—well, he’s a leftist, he invented some scroll.
[Speaker G] Fine, that can happen, but it can also happen with facts. I once read that an archaeologist found a pomegranate by the Western Wall, and they built some thesis on that about the High Priest passing through the market of the… They found a pomegranate.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, fine, those are speculations when you don’t have the facts. But when someone cites facts and they’re not correct, then that’s subordinating facts to an agenda. And there, many times, because the facts aren’t accessible to me and he quoted them and said, “I saw a letter,” or I don’t know, some document, you say: okay, he’s a leftist, he invented it, or he twisted it, or he distorted it. And that also isn’t right to do; meaning, you have to check. Maybe he is distorting it, but we automatically go in that direction because it can’t be otherwise. Gideon Levy describes some heartbreaking case of a Palestinian, and immediately we think—it’s obvious this is nonsense, there isn’t a word of truth in it; that’s also how I tend to think about him, by the way, usually. But who says? It may be a real case. Meaning, sometimes even when you’re paranoid they really are after you, as they say.
[Speaker C] So to your question, where in your academies do Rosenak’s collections on meta-Jewish law fit in?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know them.
[Speaker C] I don’t know. Books he’s putting out now, also a series of several books of articles on the subject of meta-Jewish law.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I know of them, I don’t know them. Maybe it would be worth looking. Yes. In any case, this point of justiciability is a characteristic that also exists, but it seems to me it should mainly be part of an academic conception. And that’s the point from which I want to continue discussing the question of how an academic looks at a text and how a traditional learner looks at a text. That is, the question is what are you looking for. And this distinction will serve me in the next stage in order to see also this distinction. Maybe I’ll finish with one more example that also illustrates this point. I once wrote an article on conversion in Hakdamot; it seems that a lot is being said today from my adventures, because this subject I’m saying from my own heart. For many years, I’ve carried around the inability to make these distinctions and to try to think about it in an orderly way. So I wrote an article on conversion, and among other things I wrote there—it was a response, a response to an article by Rabbi Brandes in Hakdamot. And among other things I referred there to things that Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar say in a book on conversion, and also in articles and so on, where they say that acceptance of the commandments is an invention of the nineteenth century; nobody ever thought that acceptance of the commandments was needed in the conversion process. They say this in huge headlines, everybody loves quoting it too because they’re experts, they researched the field of conversion, they’re academics. These are academics who give academia a bad name. And Avi Sagi is a very talented man, by the way, but sometimes the agenda apparently drives him out of his mind. And here I’m saying this not out of suspicion but because I see it. I wrote—but I don’t deal with this, I just want to say—I wrote that there is not a single halakhic decisor in all the history of Jewish law who dispenses with acceptance of the commandments in conversion. And I didn’t go through all of them, but there isn’t one, there can’t be. Like Rabbi Chaim says: there is no such Tosafot—that famous story. So in short, they are ignoramuses, I’m saying it, a bunch of ignoramuses, it’s unbelievable—they don’t know what they’re talking about. Then a professor of Hebrew law wrote a response to my article, a soldier of mine once in the reserves. And he wrote a response and said, what are you talking about, there’s Radatz Hoffmann. Radatz Hoffmann—I showed several examples where what appears at first glance to indicate otherwise is not correct; they all require acceptance of the commandments. Radatz Hoffmann—and this is a responsum I knew—and indeed in one or two responsa it really seems that he is willing to give this up. Really. Not only to give up the declaration, the act of accepting the commandments. That’s another discussion; maybe one can give that up. Rather, to give up there being an actual assessment that the convert really accepts the commandments. That’s what I’m talking about, not the declaration. And in Radatz Hoffmann it really does appear. So then they no longer let me respond, because they told me, that’s already been exhausted and so on—they didn’t let me respond to his response. But basically what I wanted to say was that yes, I knew that Radatz Hoffmann, and still there is no such opinion in Jewish law. Because Radatz Hoffmann made a mistake. A mistake. Someone who writes that wrote nonsense. So what if it’s bound in gold letters, in some Rashi-style font, with gilded print on the cover?
[Speaker B] No, that doesn’t mean there isn’t such an opinion in Jewish law.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, because it does mean that. That’s exactly the point, it does mean that. I’ll tell you why. And I’m bringing this not in order to convince you that he was mistaken, but to show the two points of view. The professor was right. He was right. Why was he right? Because as an academic, from his standpoint, he doesn’t critique halakhic opinions at that level. He constructs the tree, or the whole range of halakhic opinions that appear. Now Radatz Hoffmann is a halakhic decisor, wrote well-known responsa of course, Melamed Leho’il—what do you mean, there is such an opinion in Jewish law. From the viewpoint of a researcher he is right, one hundred percent right. But I didn’t write a research article; I wrote an article expressing a position. I’m writing this as a rabbi, not as a researcher of Jewish law. Okay? Now from my standpoint, the fact that someone wrote something means he simply made a mistake on an explicit Mishnah, not a mistake because I think his reasoning was wrong—there’s of course a difference between those two things. He made a mistake on an explicit Mishnah; it’s nonsense. Meaning, it’s against Talmudic texts, it’s against—there’s no such thing, it’s just a mistake. The fact that someone got confused once and wrote something, and he was also a rabbi, does not mean, from my standpoint, that there is such a halakhic opinion.
[Speaker B] Your article was a critical article on an article that didn’t say—that article, as I understood, as you described it, didn’t say what the Jewish law would be, what the Jewish law ought to be.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no—
[Speaker B] It said that there were halakhic decisors before the eighteenth century—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] who didn’t—yes, I said there is no such thing. The purpose of the article was how conversion should be conducted. So yes, it was an article expressing a position. They just—I said there are workarounds—so in order to explain how conversion is conducted, they bring what Maimonides thought about how conversion is conducted, right? So they discuss what opinions exist and what opinions don’t exist. My article was not academic. I claimed there is no such opinion. What do you mean there is no such opinion? If tomorrow morning I were to write a book saying that there are only ten categories of labor prohibited on the Sabbath, okay? Let’s say I wrote it in Rashi script and published it through some Bnei Brak publisher that didn’t notice what was inside and was willing to publish it, and that’s it. So now a researcher of Hebrew law comes and says: wow, here’s some strange rabbi, there is such an opinion in Jewish law. As someone who is not a researcher—and this really is a question of from what point of view you come—as someone who is not a researcher, there is no such opinion. There is no such opinion. He simply got confused; he woke up on the wrong side that morning. There is no such opinion. Yes, he got confused. With all due respect, he was a Torah scholar—I’m not, again, I’m not trying to disparage Melamed Leho’il—but it’s not legitimate, it’s not within the legitimate range. Just as I do not treat Reform opinions as opinions in Jewish law, even though perhaps they have their own internal logic, everything is fine. It’s not an opinion in Jewish law. Now obviously there is a big difference here between someone who comes wearing the hat of a halakhic decisor or a rabbi or someone expressing a halakhic position, and someone who comes wearing the hat of a researcher. And that is absolutely correct, and both of us were right. He was right as a researcher, and I think I was right when speaking within the framework of an article that was not a research article but an article saying what the Jewish law is. Okay? In that sense, just as the Talmud itself makes a distinction between one who errs in an explicit Mishnah and one who errs in judgment. One who errs in an explicit Mishnah—that’s not a halakhic ruling at all. It’s not that it’s a halakhic ruling that went wrong; it’s not a halakhic ruling, the ruling is void. Okay? It’s not a halakhic ruling at all. What do you mean—there is a religious court, amoraim, the Talmud speaks about this—so who were the judges? Amoraim. Amoraim wrote a legal ruling. Take that ruling, make a kite out of it, throw it into the sea. It’s not an opinion in Jewish law. That’s one who errs in an explicit Mishnah. Now if a Talmudic researcher comes and says there were amoraim who said such-and-such—what do you mean, certainly there is such an opinion, and he is right, there is such an opinion in the Talmud, he is right. So this is a difference in ways of looking; that is exactly the point. And therefore this is already an initial demonstration of why this disciplinary distinction is important. It’s not a technical matter of what academia deals with and what rabbis deal with, just a division of labor. Make a different division of labor—so what? I don’t care where each thing gets done. What matters is only to understand that there are two different things here. Now I think academia really should deal with this, and the study hall with something else. Now someone can tell me, fine, I think academia should also deal with that. I have no problem; I’ll argue with him, but that’s not an error in an explicit Mishnah, right? It’s not. But what would be an error in an explicit Mishnah is if he says that it’s the same thing, that these are not two disciplines. That is not correct. Who will deal with each thing is another matter. Certainly an academic can also be a rabbi, or a rabbi can be an academic, that is obvious. We’ll also bring examples and see where this leads. There were such cases, and about that too I had polemics in Hakdamot with Beni Lau, and he wrote an article about Professor Rosenthal, who was a professor at the Hebrew University and also rabbi of a kibbutz—Kibbutz Sa’ad or Yavne, I don’t remember exactly which of those kibbutzim. And there I show how the two hats get mixed together for him, because—and Beni Lau wrote in praise of the mixing of the two hats, because he himself also somewhat mixes the two hats. And I said no, one has to distinguish between the two hats. The same person is allowed to engage in both, but… he did something there that was a mistake, because he mixed the pursuits and he mixed his research dimension into his halakhic ruling. And that, in my view, led him to an erroneous ruling, in my opinion. So that is a good example of why this distinction is necessary. It is not just some technical insistence about what to budget where, or what to do in academia and what to do in the yeshiva. Rather, first of all to understand that these are two different kinds of activity. Who does what—I don’t care about that. Let everyone do what he wants. As long as he declares what he is doing, and says: I’m doing this, I’m doing that.