Types of Interpretation, Lesson 2

[Speaker D] And that’s normo—normative. If it’s a norm, what difference does it make how you discover the norm?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What difference does the background make? No, but you’re already proposing solutions—we’ll get there, we’ll get to them. For now I’m just describing the problem. The problem of the scholar and the covenant-member is the problem whose two sides I described, and they lead to a different kind—maybe even the opposite kind—of problems, but still to some sort of disconnect from the accepted halakhic discourse. Okay? And what I want to argue now—I’m still at the stage of the problem, we’ll get to your argument, I agree—I just want first of all to make the problem clear. The classic covenant-members, yes, the traditional learners, completely agree with the dilemma, and therefore they reject scholarship. They say: no, there’s no such thing. They claim that the authors of Tosafot had nothing whatsoever to do with the Crusades; they simply learned the Talmud that way because that was their reasoning, and therefore they had such-and-such an initial assumption and such-and-such a conclusion and such-and-such a difficulty, and therefore they learned the Talmud that way. It has nothing to do with context. They were heavenly seraphs. They weren’t—you hear this every step of the way when you talk to people—it’s heresy even to say

[Speaker F] that reality influenced them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Reality didn’t influence them at all; they’re detached from reality. In the yeshiva world, it’s high praise if someone is detached from reality. No, it’s truly great praise, it’s praise: he’s detached from reality. Yes, he doesn’t even know what a coin looks like, exactly all those stories. My uncle once told me very enthusiastically that the Rebbe of Belz went to Dr. Ticho, the eye doctor, and he told him—he had some issue with his eye—so he said to him, “Do you see that bird? Try to follow it with your eyes, I want to see how your eyes are working.” And he said, “What’s a bird?” He didn’t know what a bird was, because he just learned all the time; he didn’t know what a bird was. And my uncle was so amazed by the greatness of the Rebbe of Belz, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But yes, that’s basically the statement here, that Rabbi Chaim took the frying pans out of the kitchen. So yes, that’s a very famous statement: that until Rabbi Chaim, the laws of prohibition and permission involved frying pans and heat and feeling things, seeing whether something absorbs or doesn’t absorb. Rabbi Chaim turned it into constructions. Meaning, a frying pan isn’t at all some round utensil with a handle like you think; a frying pan is something in which one fries with oil. He has no idea what it looks like. Exactly—the idea of the frying pan. Precisely. The idea of the frying pan—it doesn’t interest him at all what it looks like. There is something, and there is such a thing as oil, there is such a thing as a frying pan. A frying pan is something in which one uses that thing called oil, and with it one cooks, and that is called frying, not cooking. He doesn’t know what frying is, what a frying pan is, what oil is—it doesn’t matter. It became constructions. Rabbi Soloveitchik describes this in a very moving and beautiful way in Halakhic Man. And in the yeshiva world it’s well known that Rabbi Chaim took the frying pans out of the kitchen. You don’t need to know what a frying pan is—go into the kitchen—you can issue halakhic rulings in matters of prohibition and permission without knowing what a frying pan is. And then you say, if this is the frying pan, tell me, is this a frying pan? Ah, if it’s a frying pan then it’s forbidden. You don’t know what a frying pan is; you rely on the woman asking whether it’s a frying pan or not, like the bird of the Rebbe of Belz, right? It’s the same principle. He didn’t know what a coin looked like—all these stories, it’s all the same thing.

[Speaker C] They narrowed, they narrowed the world.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. And this detachment from reality became an ideology. It’s a counterreaction to scholarship, which looks specifically for context and specifically asks where the frying pans came from—Africa? Ah, the attitude toward frying pans is like the way Africans relate to cooking. I’m joking, of course. Doesn’t matter. But some contextual argument like that. And this counterreaction teaches that the covenant-members also agree with the scholars that there is a conflict; each side just chooses a different horn of the dilemma. I’ll read you a passage—I brought it here somewhere. Yes, so he says like this, Halakhic Man, yes, Rabbi Soloveitchik in Halakhic Man. “When halakhic man approaches reality, he comes with his Torah, which was given to him from Sinai in hand”—of course everything was given at Sinai; nothing was renewed later, that’s Rabbi Soloveitchik. Did I mention him once? Right? With the presumption that “it is better to dwell as two” descended from Sinai and cannot change. It’s hard to believe he really believed that. “When halakhic man approaches reality, he comes with his Torah, which was given to him from Sinai in hand. He engages the world with fixed laws and firm rules. A complete Torah of laws and judgments instructs him in the way that leads to being. Halakhic man approaches the world armed with his staff and his knapsack, with his statutes, his laws, his principles, and his judgments, in an a priori relation. His approach is one that begins with an ideal creation and ends with a real creation. To what may the matter be compared? To a mathematician who created an ideal world and uses it in order to establish a relation between it and the real world.” Okay, the mathematician doesn’t even do that; the physicist does. The mathematician only creates the ideal world; the physicist tries to apply it to the real world. We talked about that too. Or here’s another passage I’ll bring you: Rabbi Zevin writes in approval—there is a book by one Rabbi Aspis on Jewish law and economics, and he strongly champions this method. So Rabbi Zevin writes in his approbation to the book as follows: “Many and various critics, from different points of view, have risen against the Talmud. And the common denominator among them is directed toward removing the crown of holiness from Jewish law and clothing it in secular garments of natural, historical, economic, and similar development,” yes, that’s scholarship basically. “And as a result, heaven forbid, permission—and perhaps even obligation—is given in every generation, according to its taste and according to the conditions of its life, to add and develop”—that’s in quotation marks in the original—“and to change and to cut down the plantings,” and so on. Yes, heaven forbid, there is context to halakhic creativity. “Come and see this honored man,” yes, that important man, Rabbi Aspis, “who girded himself with courage and the pen of scribes, and did well to raise up in a separate composition the refutation of all the claims of the vain criticism of the criticizing scholars, and with clear and well-explained logical proofs demonstrated both the negative side of those who gore with horns the wall of the Oral Torah, and the positive side of the firm stability of Talmudic Jewish law, its holiness and its eternal existence from Sinai until now.” Nothing changed, there is no dependence on context, everything was given at Sinai and came down to us as is. Okay, that’s the claim. Or Rabbi Aspis himself writes there in the introduction, he says: “And in order to explain briefly to the reader and define the true perspective on the essence of Jewish law and its foundation, I say: it is not so, as the mistaken and misleading critics think, that Jewish law gradually came into being from time to time and in every generation in accordance with influences and conditions; rather, the fixing of Jewish law, its forging, its reasoning, and its polishing had already been done by Hillel and Shammai and by their students after them. They were the first to investigate Jewish law—not to make it and renew it, for Jewish law was already practiced, widespread, and fixed in Israel from ancient days.” It’s obvious—they only defined things that had existed forever, they changed nothing at all, and there was no influence of context whatsoever. Of course the assumption is that in the days of Hillel and Shammai there was no context; context was only born, I don’t know when, in the tenth century or I don’t know, when the Talmud was sealed, fifth-sixth century. There was context then too. What difference does it make if it was created by Hillel and Shammai? That says nothing. The question is how Hillel and Shammai created it. Fine, but this is what’s called: if you want to lie, keep your witness far away. About Hillel and Shammai you can say they were heavenly seraphs; Rabbi Elyashiv and Rabbi Ovadia we actually know, so you won’t be able to sell us stories. Not in a negative sense, but in the sense that they were human beings like you and me, influenced by whatever influenced them, and they determined their position the way they determined their position. Not in a fully self-aware way, not negatively. On the other hand, I’ll read you a passage from Rosenthal—he’s called A. S. Rosenthal, yes, Avraham Shemeshon Rosenthal, who was a professor at the Hebrew University. His two sons later also became professors there of Talmud, and he was also a rabbi of a kibbutz, Sa’ad I think, or Yavne—I think Sa’ad. He says—and there he’s discussing the question whether one may desecrate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a non-Jew. So he brings the Hatam Sofer, who permitted even desecrating the Sabbath by means of a Torah-level prohibition, and the Hatam Sofer said that this was because of appearances and the ways of peace—because of appearances and the ways of peace and things of that sort. He says: obviously he didn’t mean that. What he was really looking for was the moral way out, and therefore he anchored it in some basis that can somehow be inferred from among a variety of things, though that basis obviously doesn’t hold water on the halakhic level. But behind the words, what’s really sitting there is a moral motivation. Okay? And then he says: “And even if the decisor finds an overt and unequivocal contradiction, as it were, in the holy and sanctified sacred books, he will not be able to rest or be still until he knows how to uncover, in the hidden treasures of the rich and varied halakhic tradition, the authorized support that will make peace between his view and his Talmud, and he will even know how to set it in place with sovereign halakhic-interpretive talent”—yes, independent, autonomous, not bound to the text—“this is the way of the wisdom of Jewish law, and this is its praise; thus it always was and thus it always will be, the way of the sages in their Talmud.” Yes, meaning: you’re not bound to the text at all; it’s only a question of context. And if you want to permit saving the life of a non-Jew on the Sabbath, then you’ll produce one creative interpretation or another. That is the way of the sages of Jewish law—not just to interpret the text. Okay, that’s basically the move. And after that there was an article by Rabbi Benny Lau in Akdamot; he too speaks exactly about this point, how combining the hats of scholar and rabbi leads to beautiful innovations and so on, really praising those combinations. And I wrote a response to that and said that it was exactly this combination that led here to a terrible failure that has no justification at all in Rosenthal’s halakhic thinking. Precisely because he failed and combined those two hats. What he’s really saying is that once you understand that context did it, then okay—so you too should do what context does to you. You’re not bound to the text itself. You’re not asking yourself what his reasoning was, what his arguments were; that’s irrelevant. You ask what hidden motives lay behind the words, at most. And then you say: okay, I also have such motives. I too want to be a moral knight and save the life of a non-Jew on the Sabbath. And therefore I too will bend things and produce a creative sovereign interpretation—sovereign meaning autonomous, not committed to the nuances of the text and the proofs and the considerations—and I’ll find supports here and there. The game has to go on; I’ll bring supports from here and there, but really that’s just packaging for something I’m creating now. Something from nothing. We arrive at the decisor as creator, right? That’s this outlook. So on the one hand this presents the implication for someone trying to combine the two hats, and on the other hand I brought these quotations from Aspis and Rabbi Soloveitchik and all those people, which show that even those who oppose—even those who choose the horn of the covenant-member in the dilemma, not the horn of the scholar—also agree that this business can’t go together. And basically Kahana’s claim is that the first part of the article really talks about this issue of the scholar, about the dilemma, and the second part talks about Rosenthal. Meaning: how should one really do it—how can you remain both a scholar and a covenant-member? How do you remain that way? You do the second thought experiment I mentioned—the first one. What do I mean? Stay committed, but committed in a contextual way: committed not to the text itself, because the text isn’t detached from context; committed through contextual considerations. You too should do contextual maneuvers of that kind, because basically you’re not deriving Jewish law from the source, you’re creating it. Jewish law is created out of the context, and the sources are illustrations. The sources are only the form of the conversation, but not really the thing itself. And of course you understand that this is really—and of course this is taking one step beyond what I said earlier. Earlier I said the opposite: I only go with Maimonides and Tosafot and so on, I just look for whichever context fits my context. He now goes one step further and says: fine, if everything is only contextual creation and doesn’t really emerge from the proofs, okay, then I too will now make an artistic creation, a halakhic artistic creation, which need not stand tests of truth or falsehood because it is sovereign, and I too produce it, and later people will come and examine my context and discover that it came from moral considerations, not because the Talmud led me one way or the other. Okay? Therefore the arguments themselves become secondary—the arguments about whether this fits the Talmud or doesn’t fit the Talmud—because what matters is the motivation. If I really have a moral motivation, then I can do what needs to be done to realize it. Okay, and then what basically comes out is that someone who accepts this dilemma of scholar or covenant-member has to choose one of the two: either he is a scholar or he is a covenant-member. And even if he is both a scholar and a covenant-member, that’s Rosenthal—but that’s not exactly the kind of covenant-member we’re used to in traditional learning. And because traditional learners are afraid of that, and they too understand that it can’t be combined, they say: no, scholarship is nonsense, there’s no such thing, the sages were heavenly seraphs, there is no substance to the scholars’ claims. But if there were substance, then they too agree that the whole enterprise loses its meaning. That assumption is shared by both sides. That is why they find themselves compelled to reject the scholarly methodology altogether. If you saw the debate about “layers,” for example, some years ago—I don’t know, fifteen years ago, something like that—when it raged in full force, the debate was basically this. Nobody discussed the question of what was true and what wasn’t true; no one cared about that. The question was what is useful and what is not useful, what leads to fear of Heaven and what does not lead to fear of Heaven. That was the question. And instead of dealing with—incidentally, I remember Dror Pixler favorably, because yes, he was a student of mine, and today he lectures in engineering at Bar-Ilan, and he’s also a community rabbi in Savyon or Givat Shmuel, something—in Ganei Tikva actually, Ganei Tikva. So he writes—really a serious fellow—he wrote an article, a proper article trying to show what the problems are in the layers approach. It was a voice crying in the wilderness; I still remember that article to this day in Tzohar. Why? Because everything else around it was constantly: this isn’t right, it doesn’t lead to fear of Heaven, it’s heresy, this and that. Discuss the arguments. Say what they’re claiming. Is it true? Is it not true? What does it mean? Afterward talk about ideologies. First of all, examine it. And there’s a kind of refusal to engage substantively. Meaning, they say: no, this leads to heresy, therefore it can’t be true, end of story. Scholarship is invalid. Okay? So in that sense this joins the whole series of things I’ve spoken about several times in the past—these conflicts in which both sides share a common assumption, and I think that assumption is worth examining. Because both may be wrong. Okay. Now, this argument—the argument that since everything is context, therefore it loses its meaning, or therefore there’s no—both arguments. “It loses its meaning,” meaning it isn’t holy; or “it depends on context and not on reasoning.” And that one is committed to a Jewish law that is context-dependent—there is only one correct Jewish law and that’s it. This can be rejected through three types of objections. I’ll go back to what I said earlier. Three types of objections. The first objection is really an objection to the scholarly method. In a certain sense it joins those who say scholarship is wrong. But not because it contradicts halakhic commitment. Maybe it’s right—you need to examine it on its own merits. What do you do? You say—we’ve talked about this many times too, even this year actually; it was the first topic or one of the first topics, about the law of the excluded middle, supposedly the third possibility when a dichotomy is presented to us, how we create a third possibility. Many times there are spurious correlations. We talked about that there. When you see that, say, in the period of Tosafot a certain halakhic approach grew regarding sanctification of God’s name, okay? Then the scholar says: okay, this is basically a human creation. Or: okay, this basically depends on the context in which I find myself—the scholar’s two options. Okay? What will the covenant-member say? Scholarship is nonsense. Obviously, these are secrets from above, they weren’t influenced by their surroundings, and so on. Yes, those are the two options. Now in principle you can examine the scholarly approach and ask yourself whether the correlation between the circumstances and the Jewish law they produced is a real correlation or a spurious one. Meaning, it could be—and here your first argument comes up a bit, not what you said at the end. After all, in that very same setting there could just as well have emerged the opposite approach, a more lenient one: since the situation is so difficult and people have to give up their lives, then be as lenient as possible in the laws of self-sacrifice. That too could have emerged there. Okay? So basically your scholarly explanation is just incorrect. You can attack the explanation itself. Not attack the scholarly method in principle, but attack it locally. Meaning: you didn’t do proper scholarship, not as you should have. You messed up. Okay? Because it’s not correct. True, there were such circumstances, and true, such a Jewish law emerged—but who said that that Jewish law emerged because of those circumstances? We talked about the fact that many times there can be correlations between two things, but that doesn’t mean one is the cause of the other. Okay? There is a correlation for other reasons. Maybe there is some third thing that created both. We talked about Leibniz’s clocks, all those analogies. And then this basically means there is some spurious correlation here, and the halakhic product is not a result of the circumstances. Your scholarship is mistaken. That’s the point. That is a possible line of attack. Scholarship, especially in these fields, often makes mistakes. And this is basically one possible way when we are inside

[Speaker C] the field of scholarship.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. But then we are not challenging scholarship in principle; rather, we ask whether this specific scholarship before us is correct.

[Speaker C] A principled challenge to scholarship is a bit like saying, okay, I object to using judgment about what I read. Don’t use your mind at all. What is scholarship? Come examine it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, methodologies.

[Speaker C] But these are methodologies that you—at least some of them—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] At least some of them you can argue with. You can even argue about the principle of causality. That’s a methodological assumption in the natural sciences, not even just the humanities.

[Speaker C] No problem, I agree, but that only means: use your head if you think it’s

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] true. Right, but if it contradicts faith, then I’ll deny the principle of causality even though my head tells me it’s true. Because the principle of causality is nonsense since it contradicts the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He.

[Speaker C] I’m just saying.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but in the end you did exercise judgment here. Fine.

[Speaker C] Is that also scholarship?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not—fine. Judgment is not a synonym for scholarship. Scholarship is a collection of methodologies accepted in a certain group of people. Scholarship is—

[Speaker C] university, okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—by an essential definition, no. That’s only an indication; I’m not defining it that way. Gideon Ofrat says that’s the definition; I say no, that’s an indication.

[Speaker C] Scholarship is trying to understand what’s going on.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not right. In yeshivot too they try to understand what’s going on, just with different methodologies. Therefore when I speak about scholarship versus traditional learning, I’m not talking about trying to understand what’s going on—that’s a banal definition. They’re trying to define what’s going on within a very specific conceptual framework. Now, to me at least it usually sounds like quite a reasonable conceptual framework. Fine. Someone else can say: look, this conceptual framework doesn’t seem right to me because it leads to heresy, so I throw it out. It can’t be; it’s not correct.

[Speaker B] But shouldn’t scholarship rely on objective matters, objective findings? For example, the example you gave with Tosafot and sanctification of God’s name—suppose in scholarship someone reaches the conclusion that sanctification of God’s name was because of such-and-such historical circumstances. Does he prove it? Otherwise it isn’t scholarship.

[Speaker E] He brings manuscripts—

[Speaker B] manuscripts, historical testimonies.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In many cases he doesn’t bring them.

[Speaker B] Then why call it scholarship?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it is scholarship.

[Speaker B] It’s just guesswork.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Scholarship in the humanities—a large part of it is just guesswork. I’m giving it some respect, not a lot. Yes, that’s true. But to a large extent there’s a lot of guesswork there, obviously. What do you mean? It seems self-evident to people that if you are in a place under persecution, then that probably means you will raise the walls higher. And the sages of Spain—factually, systematically—the sages of Spain are lenient and the sages of France are stringent. How do you explain that? Why doesn’t it vary within the sages of France or within the sages of Spain? That itself is scholarly proof. That’s scholarly proof that context has an influence. Believe me, very serious great scholars have written things like that in huge quantities. I didn’t say everything is like that, but many times definitely things like that. Proofs there are a very, very problematic thing—to bring proofs for matters of this kind.

[Speaker C] And the implication of scholarship also isn’t all that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter. I’m saying still—fine, I was wrong, so what. No, fine, still—but yes, you’re right, you don’t build on it, but still, okay.

[Speaker C] You also don’t issue Jewish law rulings. No, the decisor will sit over it—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I’m saying: if you are both scholar and covenant-member like Rosenthal, then yes—you also issue Jewish law rulings according to how you learn. That’s exactly the point.

[Speaker C] So then you’re already—that’s what I’m coming back to—then you’re a decisor who uses judgment with additional tools.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. And the standard decisors come out against it and say those tools are illegitimate,

[Speaker C] because they think that they lead to results that are somehow improper. Yes, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: there are times when you can attack things on their own merits, not on the ideological level, but say: listen, there’s some assumption here. Sometimes it’s simply implausible; sometimes it’s really nonsense, really nonsense. I’ve encountered things that are simply absurd. But many times, many times they’re not absurd, but they are very far from necessary. It seems to me that’s the overwhelming majority of material in the humanities—not absurd, but not necessary, not even fairly necessary. Fine, maybe that’s how it is, but if I have enough motivation to say I think otherwise, then I’ll think otherwise; it’s no big deal. Okay? And then you say: fine, if I have two options, and this one leads to heresy and that one leads to faith, then okay, I don’t accept this conceptual framework. Maybe if I were a blank slate I would accept it, but I’m not a blank slate. Okay? You hear that a lot. Fine, of course, as I say here, this is in essence an intra-scholarly argument, because you can say to a scholar: listen, your conclusion does not necessarily follow from the assumptions. That is an intra-scholarly claim. And the scholar will say: true, it doesn’t follow necessarily, but it still seems sufficiently reasonable to me to present it as a thesis. Okay? And many people will say that. Others will say: fine, but to me it isn’t sufficiently reasonable, and therefore I don’t accept it. Very well. It will remain as two schools within the scholarly world.

[Speaker B] If the scholarship isn’t serious and it’s only—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, what do you mean “isn’t serious”?

[Speaker B] No, if it’s the result of mythical conjectures and not of actual evidence in the field, then in my opinion you don’t need even to get into the question of contradiction between scholarship and faith, because I can simply say: sir, what you wrote here isn’t serious. No, no, it’s not all or nothing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are situations in which—look, as I said earlier—if I were a blank slate, what you’re saying would seem reasonable to me. Not necessary, but reasonable. I would adopt it. But I’m not a blank slate, and since overall it’s only reasonable, not more than that, then fine, I don’t accept it. What do you mean, certainty at all? Of course there’s a problem of conflict. In the humanities there is almost nothing beyond what is reasonable. In my opinion there is nothing there beyond what is reasonable—almost nothing. What do you mean, certainty now? What is certainty? That itself is a claim. In the university it’s reasonable. No, not true—that’s the methodology. Why do they call one the exact sciences and the other not the exact sciences?

[Speaker B] It’s

[Speaker F] reasonable.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why do they call one the exact sciences and the other the inexact sciences? Why is that what they’re called? Because there they talk about what is reasonable; they don’t talk about what is necessary. There are no proofs there. You don’t test it; you can’t subject it to empirical test. What are you going to do now, run an experiment? Repeat the Crusades and see what the decisors say? How will you run an experiment? You can try to find this indication or that indication. If you find a manuscript, then there was a certain decisor who did it. So what? But there were two hundred authors of Tosafot. Can you say something about the authors of Tosafot in general? How can you say that? Fine, so I found a manuscript. There is no more than that in the humanities. There is no more than that. Rarely—I mean, what do I mean by “there is no”? Even that statement is within the framework of the humanities. When I say there is no more than that, I mean usually there is no more than that. Fine? That’s it—that’s the humanities. And still one has to… A few years ago they made a big thing out of the fact that there were supposedly no camels in the biblical period. There were no camels in the biblical period, and therefore when Abraham is spoken of with camels, obviously the Torah was not composed then; it was composed later. Proof, and that was that. Obviously an anachronism. What was discovered? In the end it was discovered that there were camels. What can you do? Scholars discovered it, not me. I don’t deal with these things. The whole business collapsed. Now, articles were written on this business—that the Torah was composed late because there were no camels—and by the way, I don’t blame them. Those were the proofs before them; that’s fine. As long as they are honest enough, then when new things are discovered they say: okay, we were wrong. Or even before new things are discovered they say: friends, this is reasonable. We haven’t found camel bones, but that still doesn’t mean there weren’t any. We didn’t excavate all the ground in the Land of Israel or in the ancient Near East—in the East that was ancient. We didn’t dig up all the ground. Like people say: we didn’t find bayonets from the Israelites’ journey in the desert, therefore there was no Exodus from Egypt. A somewhat problematic claim. You didn’t find bayonets in the Sinai desert. Okay, so because of that there was no Exodus from Egypt? That’s a weak claim, pretty weak, let’s say. So once again, if I were a blank slate—still, 600,000 people is not a small number of people. I would maybe expect some remains, although it was several thousand years ago, so things disintegrate. What? Six hundred thousand only the male military-age adults. So there were several million people.

[Speaker C] “Your clothing did not wear out”—they didn’t have all that much wear and tear.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They walk and the clothes… No, but that, for example, is a scholarly assumption that says: ah, those are stories. Obviously their clothing wore out, because science says clothing wears out when you walk in the desert. So, for example, here is an assumption of a scholar who will say there is no such thing as clothing not wearing out. A believer will tell you: their clothing did not wear out, so you didn’t find remains of clothes in the desert. Nonsense. Clothes wear out; that’s the second law of thermodynamics—clothes wear out. Fine, the story there is one story or another. We don’t… Now that is an assumption. It is an assumption of scholarship that says there are no miracles, there are no things contrary to nature. And therefore, according to that assumption—and that’s fine; if I were a blank slate I would accept it. Maybe even now I accept it, doesn’t matter. But I’m saying this is an assumption over which a believing person can simply come and say: I don’t know, the Holy One, blessed be He, performed a miracle. He created the world; can’t He perform miracles? So their clothing did not wear out. In scholarship this argument was accepted—unequivocally accepted. What do you mean “accepted” or “not accepted”? It was accepted; that’s a fact. But the traditional person can say: what do you mean? This whole enterprise is based on the fact that they think there are no miracles, that the clothes did wear out, and then they ask themselves how the people of Israel could so quickly become 600,000 male military-age adults. Seventy souls went down to Egypt, 210 years passed—do you know how many came out? Three million. Wow, what increase. Fine, so the sages said six in one womb. What will scholars say? Isn’t that a solution? Fine, “six in one womb” is a midrash of the sages, it’s not—I also say that, by the way, but never mind.

[Speaker C] The question is whether that’s enough. Is there a calculation?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is a calculation, there is a calculation. Look, there’s an article by Eliyahu Beller. There is also a problem with the numbers of the firstborn, 22,000 and the tribe of Levi. Why do they assume there wasn’t? This kind of argument. Okay, because one friend pointed out to me, by the way, that there’s some shekel—

[Speaker D] Ah—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so it’s in Higayon, the journal Higayon. Eliyahu Beller, a mathematician from Bar-Ilan, once made a mathematical model. He even did parameter fitting. He examined this whole business and built a model showing how it could be. Also the number of the firstborn and the number of the Levites. He did research on all the tribal numbers—how it happened, how many people—and built some model and, I think, a differential equation or something like that, and fit parameters and tried to show what the natural increase would have to be in order to reach those numbers. People did calculations. But the numbers came out as six in one womb or something like that. The sages also did that calculation; they didn’t know differential equations, but they understood that one has to speak here of some miracle, because otherwise something doesn’t add up. And you can notice that problem easily; you don’t have to be a mathematician for that. Okay? Now scholars won’t accept such a thing. They’ll say: obviously it was a small group from Egypt, maybe if at all, they wandered in the desert, and a myth of three million was created, because after all it can’t be; seventy people after 210 years—even if I accept the Bible on its own terms, it contradicts itself. So the sages solve it with a miracle. You can accept it or not accept it, but understand: these are foundational assumptions, methodological foundational assumptions, and you can argue about them. When scholars say there are no miracles—what do you mean miracles? They gave birth, fine, and whatever came out came out. And through that they arrive at the question of how reliable it is. Then come other datings and whether it happened or not. The altar on Mount Ebal—the debate between, what was his name? He passed away not long ago, that archaeologist from Tel Aviv University, I forget—the one who discovered the altar on Mount Ebal and suddenly discovered that the whole Hebrew Bible, or much of the Hebrew Bible, had happened. And he had more finds there generally; he excavated the whole region. Ze’ev something? What? Adam Zertal. Ah, right, Adam Zertal. Exactly. Adam Zertal, exactly. The way they slandered him. He came under attacks; he was ostracized until the end of his life. Ostracized in the scientific community? Ostracized in the scientific community, yes. Is that not science? In academia, in the academic community. He was ostracized in the academic community. Science, science—he was a doctor.

[Speaker E] Yes, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And Velikovsky—I don’t care right now whether Velikovsky was right—but they refused to publish his books in the United States. I heard a talk from his son-in-law, some neurologist who lives in Givatayim. Do you know the Velikovsky story? Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian Jewish physician, secular, not connected to religion at all, who decided to do some independent research of his own, interesting, eccentric. He gathered all sorts of findings from the Inca, from here, from there, doesn’t matter, all kinds of data, and somehow built a theory that a meteor struck the earth and created all the miracles of Egypt and the Ten Plagues and the splitting of the sea and I don’t know exactly what—and the whole Bible fit perfectly into his theory. But one thing had to be done: move the dating by 600 years. So he argued that the accepted scholarly dating of the ancient Near East was off by 600 years. Now, he solved a whole series of problems that had remained open in the archaeology and history of the ancient Near East—problems that really are open, regarded in the academic world as open problems; they don’t know what to do with them, there are mismatches between the data. He built a theory that resolves many open problems, but the price is moving the dating by 600 years. Now in principle that is possible, because when they build the dating they also build it through various indications, so he built a different theory that produced a different dating, and maybe he was right. But there was no discussion. Why? Because no publishing house in the United States would allow itself to publish his books, because the professors at American universities told any publishing house that put out his book that they would boycott it. Like the rabbis in Bnei Brak, exactly the same thing. You can see the stories—Bnei Brak, exactly Bnei Brak. Just look at the film Footnote; you don’t have to go far. That’s how the humanities are conducted. A completely authentic description—the film Footnote is completely authentic. And especially in Talmud. Talmud is, in my opinion, the worst. It’s all interests and factions—though for the sake of Heaven, by the way. No, really, I mean it. There is something worthy of appreciation there: ideologies become severe personal resentments. I spoke with people who came to me crying. People who tried to do a master’s or doctorate in a Talmud department—they don’t let them, because they are a student of that one. A student of that one won’t be allowed to pass a master’s. They won’t let him pass a master’s. They don’t examine it. They don’t examine it, nonsense, they don’t recognize it, he won’t pass. Someone went—a student of mine—went to start a master’s in Talmud, and he was a student in a kollel who had studied with me in the kollel. He started a master’s in Talmud, and he went with Shamma Friedman, one of the greatest Talmud scholars today. Fine, but highly controversial vis-à-vis other scholars—probably the majority, if I understand correctly; I don’t know the balance of power there well enough, probably the majority. The secretary told him, “Look, I’m telling you privately: don’t go with him, because you won’t get a master’s.” Not that he did the work and they discovered it wasn’t good. She said: don’t go with him, because you won’t get a master’s if you go with him. He came to me and said: tell me, what am I supposed to do now? I don’t know what to do. You understand? I have a friend, Gabi Hazut, the one who did The Measure of Good with me—same thing. He also worked with Shamma Friedman. They didn’t let him get a doctorate; they dragged him out for seven years. I saw the correspondence. Seven years. And in the end they told him: look, they won’t approve your doctorate. It’s Shamma Friedman. You have no chance. It’s a waste of time. You’re fighting windmills. I say: the point is this. In physics there are also intrigues; everyone is human. But the point is that in physics there is still some bottom line that’s hard to argue with. And there you really can argue over things. The root issue is that here there really is room to argue over things. The methodology is a collection of assumptions. He accepts this, and he doesn’t accept that. One decides that there are anonymous redactors, and the other decides there aren’t anonymous redactors, and I don’t know exactly what. And that’s it—they build different theories about how the layers of the Talmud were constructed. And once the theories differ, factions arise, and his students are the continuation of the faction. It’s already the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel—not just Hillel and Shammai, now there are already the students. Yes, so it’s two factions, and they fight each other—for the sake of Heaven, all of it. Whether there were anonymous redactors or not, they can kill each other over the question whether there were anonymous redactors. You stand there astonished. It’s material for a comedy or a tragedy; I’m not sure which. But this happens mainly in the humanities. In the natural sciences it happens less, although there too of course there are intrigues and factions, but it happens less. And why does it happen less? Because there things are more rigid. Of course there too there are schools. In medicine—when you go get treatment—there are schools. How do you treat this kind of cancer? Do it this way or that way? Is this kind of surgery preferable or that kind? There are schools. There too it is not an exact science. There are schools. In a certain sense medicine too is not an exact science. It’s not the natural sciences. It is a natural science, but it is not an exact science—medicine. It’s not even clear to what extent it is science, I don’t know. It’s technology. In any case, fine. So that is the first objection. It is really to examine the correlation on its own merits. Another example, or another type of objection: an incorrect interpretation of a real correlation. Not a spurious correlation—a real correlation. I’ll give you an example. There is an article by Gilat—I think I also mentioned this once—Yitzhak Gilat, a Talmud scholar. I mentioned it. He wrote a book, Chapters in the Development of Jewish Law. I told you it came out when I was in my joyful Bnei Brak period, and then the entire Haredi press was full of this heresy. A fellow who had studied in Hebron, later became a professor of Talmud at Bar-Ilan, and in the joke-language of the yeshiva world “went off,” of course jokingly. He was an observant Jew, but at Bar-Ilan that didn’t count. And in the end you see where things lead: you start with Bar-Ilan and in the end you get to the idea that Jewish law develops, heaven forfend—meaning, Chapters in the Development of Jewish Law. And then articles came out frothing with rage: what heresy this is. Those were coarse words then; today people are already used to it.

[Speaker C] Nice that they read it at all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, there are people whose job is to read it—the censorship committee. Everyone else, of course, is forbidden; it’s heresy. But there are some people—the censorship committee—for whom it’s allowed. I think that usually they don’t read it either. They read the back cover, you know, the blurb on the back cover, and then they write a learned review of the back cover. In any case—and by the way, I’m speaking from personal experience—in any case, I saw quite a few reviews of things I wrote by people who didn’t read them. They didn’t read what I wrote; that’s obvious. Anyway, so the point is: what was his claim, basically? The development of Jewish law—as I read earlier—that Jewish law developed and was influenced by circumstances, and so on. So for example, one of the articles—these articles are the basis of, that is, the chapters in the book are based on articles he published, and they all deal with the development of Jewish law, because that’s what Talmudic scholarship does, and almost all the studies deal with that. So he describes the Sabbatical year in our time as rabbinic. We rule that the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. How did that idea come about? So he shows that this emerged more or less around the time of the destruction, a bit after the destruction. He identifies the sages who said it, looks at earlier sages where there’s no hint that the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. He says it came into being after the destruction. Why? Apparently there was economic distress and it was impossible to observe the Sabbatical year—like today with the sale permit. You can’t properly observe the Sabbatical year, you can’t just abandon the fields, not grow anything—you can’t, we won’t survive. After the destruction everything was a huge mess. So there was no choice; they had to be lenient. So the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic, and therefore they were lenient, and there’s prosbul, and in short all the leniencies follow from the fact that the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. Okay? That’s what he said. For that they came out strongly against him, among others. That’s one example; he has others. The whole concept of Torah-level and rabbinic law is, according to him, a concept that developed over the generations; it wasn’t there originally. This distinction between Torah-level laws and rabbinic laws is a later distinction—several scholars wrote that. Now when I read the book—of course I bought the book, because it’s a book you’re not allowed to read, so obviously you have to read it—so I bought the book, and to my amazement I discovered it was much ado about nothing. What the man actually writes is simply this: when you really read what he says—he was still from Hebron then, he hadn’t yet started saying his modern things—what he said was that the sages after the destruction saw there was economic distress, and therefore they sat down to seek a solution. Since they were looking for a solution, they looked for a midrash, or an argument, or a line of reasoning, or a verse—it doesn’t matter—maybe the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic; and they found some such midrash, or came to the conclusion that the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. And that solved the problem, or at least helped with the economic distress.

[Speaker G] The motivation was for the analysis, not for the conclusion.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. The correlation is a correct one. If we go back to the Crusades and stringency—it’s true: because of the Crusades, the Tosafot examined to the very end whether there were lines of reasoning that would allow them to be stringent in the laws of saving life, and they reached such arguments, or such interpretations of the Talmudic passages, or something of that sort, that made stringency in saving life possible. The motivation for looking was the circumstances. But the circumstances are not an argument. After that you still have to look. It’s like permitting an agunah. When I want to permit an agunah, obviously the distress is there. The sages put that on the table explicitly. But the fact that I want to permit an agunah doesn’t permit her. Does the fact that she’s miserable permit her? The fact that she’s miserable only means that I will search very carefully through all the possible arguments and considerations that might truly allow her to be permitted. If I find considerations that hold water, I’ll permit her; if not, then not. There are agunot who are not permitted. Ron Arad’s wife, to this day, was not permitted. She ignored them—never mind—but to this day they never permitted her. Why? Did they not understand her distress? Of course they did. But distress is not a permitting factor. Distress is only motivation to sit down and investigate more thoroughly, to look harder for grounds to permit. But the grounds I find have to hold water on the principled level. So it’s true that before the destruction the sages had no motivation to investigate these midrashim and these interpretive directions, because they didn’t have the distress that would make them say: let’s look, maybe in fact the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. Who says not? They didn’t think of it. Why look at all? If you don’t look, you won’t find, right? But after the destruction, once the motivation arose, they looked. And once they looked, they also found. Now, assuming that what they found holds water—and I very much hope that’s the case—then what exactly is the problem with the fact that the motivation for looking was distress? In the end it holds water. And now I return to Rosenthal—look at

[Speaker C] how much trust you have in the person who did that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. Again, I can also examine and see whether that exposition is one that holds water or not, independently of my trust. I can examine it.

[Speaker C] It’s a matter of your ability.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, not important. On the principled level one can also try to examine; that’s not everything. I’m saying, sometimes yes.

[Speaker C] That’s also part of the basic assumption of the halakhic decisors—that I can’t.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Agreed. But sometimes yes and sometimes no; sometimes you can. And I’m saying: look exactly at the connection to Rosenthal. What did Rosenthal actually do? Rosenthal basically said: since I want to be a moral person, therefore it is permitted to save the non-Jew. And therefore it is permitted to save the non-Jew on the Sabbath. In contrast, I say that even if he were right about the Chatam Sofer—and of course he is not right, the Chatam Sofer was as far from that as east is from west—but even if he were right about the Chatam Sofer, at most I would be willing to accept the following thesis: since the Chatam Sofer was deeply pained by this moral problem—that one does not violate the Sabbath to save the life of a non-Jew—he turned over every stone for the sake of peaceful relations. He turned over every stone to see whether a halakhic argument could be found, one that truly holds water, that permits saving the non-Jew. And then he found one. Someone who wasn’t bothered by that moral problem didn’t look. Didn’t look, didn’t find. So he just took the Talmud as is. In the Talmud it says it’s forbidden. Okay? Now, for example, I look at myself: I too found an argument that permits this. I wrote it; I wrote an article about it. Not permits—obligates. To violate the Sabbath in order to save a non-Jew. All right? And I’m also telling you unequivocally that my motivation was moral—unlike the Chatam Sofer, where I don’t believe that was the motivation. In his case it really was concern for Jewish lives and for peaceful relations, or something like that. But it doesn’t matter. Check my argument and see whether it holds water or not. If it holds water, why do you care what my motivation was? So here the correlation is a correct one. If some scholar now comes and says: look, he grew up in an environment where it was morally intolerable to leave a non-Jew to die because of Sabbath violation. And therefore he developed the approach that it is permitted to violate the Sabbath to save a non-Jew—he is entirely correct. Entirely correct. But this is not a false correlation; it’s a real correlation. There is no problem with his research; his research is correct. Therefore this is not the same argument as before. His research is correct. But this correct research can be interpreted in two ways. One can do it in an irresponsible way on the part of the decisor—I mean not on the part of the scholar. The decisor was irresponsible: he said, since I want to permit the agunah, therefore she is permitted. The arguments don’t hold water. That’s basically what Rosenthal said earlier, yes? What I read before—creativity, sovereignty, this whole thing—you find yourself some creative support-text and so on, and in the end you do what you think. And I say no: I have motivation, absolutely, I openly have motivation, but I still want to meet the halakhic tests. The arguments have to hold water. I have motivation to look; someone without motivation to look won’t find anything—that’s no surprise. We can’t know everything. We don’t expound all the verses in every kind of exposition. We do it according to circumstances. A question comes to us, so we look for an answer. Someone to whom no question comes does not look for the answer. So what is surprising about the fact that he permitted it and someone else did not? The question came to him. Did someone else come and ask: maybe the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic? No. Because nobody was troubled by the need to be lenient in the laws of the Sabbatical year. But when people wanted to be lenient in the laws of the Sabbatical year, they asked him: tell me, maybe the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic? They came to him with a question, so I look for an answer. I look for an answer, I found arguments. I found arguments, so I say the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. So yes, it really came after the destruction, where it should have come; the historical correlation is correct. But that does not mean the halakhic argument is not based on a halakhic argument that holds water. Those are two completely different things. And now this dispute is no longer

[Speaker G] a dispute with the scholar, but with the decisor.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. The scholar is right; he did good work; everything is fine; I agree with him completely. The question is: what I say to him is that since, in your case, you wear both hats—you want to be both a scholar and a decisor—then what I demand of you is that you always be aware of which hat you are wearing. You need to know, in the work you’re doing, which hat you’re wearing. It’s not the same hat; it’s two hats. A person is allowed to wear both hats, just as I spoke about in the previous class. Here you can see how it connects. In the previous class too I said: you can be both a scholar and a philosopher. No problem. But you need to know that these are two different hats. And if you mix them, then you’re not doing good philosophy. Okay? And maybe not good scholarship either; never mind—both of those are true. Fine, scholarship has to be objective. And if you are a philosopher, then you are not a scholar—you’re not doing good scholarship if you are acting as a philosopher. Because a philosopher determines what is true and what is false. It may be that that philosopher was mistaken—so what if what he said is not true? I want to know whether that’s what he said. That is the scholar’s job. The philosopher asks whether that philosopher was right or wrong. If he was wrong, then he didn’t say it. The scholar says: what are you talking about? Maybe he was wrong—so what? If he was wrong, does that mean he didn’t say it? Let’s see whether that’s really what he said. Let’s check the context, let’s check manuscripts, let’s investigate and see what this person says. Okay, so here this dispute is no longer within the world of scholarship. Here this dispute is already about what you do with the results of the research. Do the results of the research mean that there is nothing beyond the context? Or do you say no—the second assumption of Kahana—and here I return to Kahana’s article. Kahana says: fine, if I am a scholar, then I understand that everything depends on context. Since everything depends on context, that means there’s really no holiness in these things, so it’s all a human creation. Not true. The context caused them to discover something that was actually there all along. It was always there; there just wasn’t motivation to look for it, so they didn’t find it.

[Speaker C] That’s all. And that’s the motivation, because the context created the motivation, so Jewish law developed because of the contexts. But when I now get to the present stage, they tell me: this is forbidden and that is forbidden. Yes, maybe it’s forbidden only because no one checked it? Fine, then check it. Okay, but not as a decisor?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s what I’m saying. So in my view—because of how I look at this, and we’ll get to this later—precisely because of this, later on I’ll talk about first-order halakhic ruling. First-order ruling means that the Tosafot and Maimonides disagree, and I now discuss the evidence for who is right between them; and it could be that the evidence will lead me to conclude that neither of them is right. And why do I reach that conclusion? Maybe because I happen to be in a third situation that leads me to discover other lines of reasoning or other arguments, and suddenly I see that a third possibility exists. And then I say: okay, so I’ll go against both Maimonides and Tosafot.

[Speaker D] And that’s how they went in all generations; that’s how it was.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. And therefore I say: that really is the implication. In a certain sense, precisely defending traditional thinking can lead you to be much more innovative than someone who criticizes traditional thinking. Because many—and by the way, this is something I experience every day—scholars who criticize, for example, things—I gave an example last time from the legal scholar, but I’ve encountered many such people already. Scholars cling to sources. Scholars who are committed to Jewish law—you will never see first-order ruling among them. Never. It is always second-order ruling. Because since they are aware of context, they are terribly afraid; they suspect themselves too—after all, they are also context-dependent and all that—so I cling to whether there is a source. If in the responsa Tzinzenet HaMan it says such-and-such, then I can rely on it. Fine. It doesn’t matter whether it is right or wrong; that’s not the question he asks himself. The question is: what do the halakhic decisors say? Is there such an opinion? Is this rabbinic or Torah-level? Meaning, you are making a technical second-order calculation because you are a scholar. Here the scholar suddenly becomes a much more conservative decisor, because he clings to what was said. Now I say: as a scholar, that is perfectly fine; you need to study what people said. But as a member of the covenant, when you want to know what the Jewish law should be—when you put on the decisor’s hat—leave the scholar’s hat aside now. Why do you care what they said? They said what they said; now check whether what they said is true, and perhaps you will say something else, different from both Maimonides and Tosafot. And then you need to rule in a third way. Many scholars—most scholars I know—do not do this. And when I do it, they tell me: you’re Reform, because you’re not sticking to sources. No. Because for them the definition is a justiciable definition. Meaning, if you can say: I say this is how it is, this is how one should act, because it is true—“true” is not justiciable. You think it’s true; others… Let’s see whether there is a responsum that says this, or whether there is a medieval authority who says it—then it is justiciable. In a certain sense, halakhic ruling too has to be justiciable. Do you understand? When academia enters the world of halakhic ruling, it often produces second-order ruling, not first-order ruling.

[Speaker G] I think Rabbi Moshe Feinstein did not operate that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein really was—but that’s because, you know, he didn’t operate that way because he was exceptional. Yes, that’s true.

[Speaker D] But he did accept—I think he did accept… no, no, certainly, they viewed him as part of the primary texts, as a canonical text, if not in Jewish law… maybe I’m not…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is how far you go with first-order. Exactly. Do you disagree with the greatest later authorities, do you disagree with the medieval authorities? I’m radical on this point, but Rabbi Moshe Feinstein still… yes, he says so explicitly, but he goes straight to… and with a Torah-level doubt one is stringent, with a rabbinic doubt lenient, and then they apply rules. No, he enters into the passages, he checks who has evidence. Meaning, he does enter in, even within the framework of the medieval authorities; maybe he won’t reject all the medieval authorities, but he will decide disputes among medieval authorities. And in that sense he is very close to first-order. Look, even I, for example, though I advocate first-order, I do not go against the Talmud. Everyone stops somewhere; the whole question is what is considered the canon where you stop. So maybe he stopped later. It doesn’t matter. But on the principled level he strives to know what is true, not what was said. “What was said” is a question scholars need to ask, not decisors. The decisor needs to know what is true. Now you can see how this whole business connects to modes of halakhic ruling, which we’ll get to later. This question of academia versus traditional study immediately leads to the halakhic question.

[Speaker G] The decisor also needs to know what they said, because there are all kinds of arguments there that if you don’t read them, you won’t think of them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously. But you don’t need that in order to rule; you need it as a means so that you yourself can know what is true.

[Speaker C] But the assumption about what is true is that what they said carries much greater weight than what I think.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that’s the dispute. That’s what I’m saying. So I say that this question, which is only a question of methodology in learning—whether you study traditionally or whether you study academically—also projects onto forms of halakhic ruling within the world of decisors. Today most decisors are second-order decisors. Even though they oppose academic study, still, in a certain sense they have somewhat adopted this scholarly outlook, because they rule in a second-order way.

[Speaker D] Without being aware of it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. We’ll talk about that more.