Types of Interpretation, Lecture 4

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s look at the things we discussed from another angle, from the hermeneutic angle. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation, and I want to try to place the approaches—I spoke about the academic approach versus traditional learning—in terms of hermeneutic conceptions. Actually, I already mentioned the critiques, let’s say of Menachem Kahana, the article by Menachem Kahana that we mentioned last time, and Sperber also writes about this. There are basically two kinds of criticism of traditional learning. They’re related to each other, but they need to be distinguished. One of them is the lack of research tools for checking the realia. That’s generally what Sperber deals with. To check what the meaning is of various tools in tractate Kelim, for example—various kinds of utensils are described there. I think I once mentioned that they tell a story about Rabbi Chaim, or say about Rabbi Chaim, that he took the frying pans out of the kitchen—that the laws of prohibition and permission, which used to be learned in realistic terms, there’s a frying pan and a pot and oil and frying or cooking and what happens with prohibitions and non-prohibitions, and basically Rabbi Chaim turned all that into these theoretical constructions. A frying pan is basically some sort of object into which you put oil and fry. He didn’t know what frying is, what oil is, or what a frying pan is, but he knows that there is some kind of structure like that and he knows what is done with it in Jewish law. I’m exaggerating, of course, but it reminds me of what my uncle—maybe I told this too—my uncle once told me very proudly about the Belzer Rebbe, who went to Dr. Ticho, the famous eye doctor in Jerusalem. He had some eye problem, and Dr. Ticho said to him, look out the window there, do you see the bird? Try to follow it with your eyes. He wanted to see what was happening with his eyes. So he asked him, what is a bird? Fine, it’s a half-joking story. He treated it seriously for some reason, but I’m saying it obviously takes to an extreme a phenomenon that does exist, some kind of ignoring of realia. When you study these passages, after all they have dimensions that require you to know life, to know the tools they used, to make use of archaeology, historical literature, literature from the period and from other places, to try to understand what we’re talking about. Not to mention language—Greek and Latin and all sorts of linguistic influences that can shed light on various things like that, such as Lieberman’s famous book Greeks and Greekness in the Land of Israel, which basically talks about these kinds of influences. And of course there’s much more. So that’s Sperber’s criticism, and here I think I completely agree. I just think that the question of dosage is a separate question that has to be discussed. Sperber devotes half his life to this, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. In terms of input versus output, I’m not sure it’s worth it. All in all, one should engage with the material itself, and yes, it’s worthwhile to use various means in order to clarify things when one encounters some term or object, to understand its meaning, a social concept, whatever, to try to understand what it means. Okay, but that’s on the margins. I don’t think this is a serious criticism saying that the learning itself needs to be changed. One should use the literature that develops, and today there are people who deal with this, and that seems very reasonable. The second criticism is Kahana’s criticism, which says that the criticism about context—which I already spoke about quite a bit—basically says that they don’t really use the tools of modern research, both context and of course philology. We talked about the historical-philological approach in that argument there with Noam Rosman; that’s how I started this series. Modern research tools in order to get at the meaning of the text through context, through all sorts of tools that have developed for deciphering texts. And it reminds me of an interesting meeting I had a few years ago. Some officer from the army called me, a young guy, a captain, a kid in his twenties. It turned out that one of my students from Yerucham who served under him in the unit directed him to me. Why? Because he was collecting tools of interpretation. Completely freely, from all kinds and all sorts—they were trying to formulate something very interesting, where they give a kid like that, who isn’t—he’s a smart guy, but he had no organized education in anything, at least not in these areas, maybe in computers or something, I don’t know, but not in these areas—and he was supposed to try and build some kind of theory, really out of nowhere—not out of nowhere, from something, but to gather a lot of interpretive tools of different kinds and see whether they can be used in interpreting journalistic sources, documents, all kinds of things that intelligence perhaps deals with, I don’t know exactly what. He said, I want to hear from you what you can give me in these areas without saying anything fixed—just throw things out there, and if he finds something interesting he’ll take it, and if not then not. It was actually a very interesting meeting. Anyway, so there is research in the area of interpretation. It’s not out of nowhere, as I said before, and people deal with it, research that uses all kinds of tools, and the criticism is that the traditional world, the world of traditional learning, does not use these tools. And basically because of that it somewhat misses the meaning of the text—that is, it could have used these things to decipher the meanings of the texts better. Now here, this is already a more principled criticism. There it was only an auxiliary tool, but here this is basically a recommendation to study differently. There it was just using more information that people aren’t using. It isn’t supposed to change anything in terms of the method of learning, except perhaps dedicating some time to clarifying realia. But even if not—there are people at the university who do this. Use what they produce; you don’t have to do it yourself. The first criticism is not an essential criticism, but there is certainly room to accept it. The second criticism is a principled criticism, and we’ve already dealt with it more than once, but today I want to look at it from a somewhat different angle. The claim is that there are various resolutions and difficulties and structures that we build on the basis of this or that difficulty, but their basis is really misunderstanding. Meaning, if we understood the context and so on, we would see that in fact the meaning is different, and it doesn’t contradict, and all sorts of things of that kind. By the way, there are critiques not from the academic direction, but similar critiques from Rabbi Rabinovitch of Ma’ale Adumim and Rabbi Kapach, may his memory be a blessing. Both basically claimed that all the elaborate constructions we build around Maimonides—or not all, but many of them—are unnecessary. Meaning, if we did orderly work with the text and didn’t impose all kinds of assumptions on Maimonides, there would be no contradiction and no need to build complicated structures to resolve it either. There are some not-bad examples of this. I mean, just look at Maimonides’ responsa and see what he says about the laws—sometimes that sheds light. One example I once gave: Maimonides writes in the laws of guardians somewhere, or maybe hiring, Maimonides says something that is really directly against the Talmud, as is his way. He says, if I remember correctly, that if I handed an animal over to a guardian to guard and the animal caused damage, then if the guardian is exempt, I’m liable; I can be sued. In the Talmud it says explicitly not that way. In the Talmud it says that if I handed it over to a guardian, I transferred the duty of guarding; the guardian has to guard it. If he was negligent, sue him. If he wasn’t negligent, then the animal was guarded, and there’s no one to sue. Meaning, the guardian takes the place of the owner. He basically now, you can say—

[Speaker D] that he handed it to a negligent guardian, and by that he was negligent.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but if the guardian was negligent, then sue the guardian, so there’s no need to sue him. So it could be that if the guardian fled abroad then maybe there is room to sue him if at least it was known that he was negligent—that’s the question, whether he was supposed to know that. But let’s say under the assumption that not: the guardian guarded properly. If the guardian guarded properly, then the animal was guarded. There’s no one to sue. It’s like when I guarded properly, then you can’t sue me. Now Maimonides writes that yes, you can come to the owner. If you can’t sue the guardian—the guardian guarded properly—sue the owner. That’s against the Talmud. The Maggid Mishneh offers some explanation somewhat forced into the Talmud, and he builds some structure. Afterwards Rabbi Chaim talks about it, and the later authorities, and so on. Except what? The Maggid Mishneh is here where Rashi is, and the Kesef Mishneh is where Tosafot is. The Kesef Mishneh brings a letter that Maimonides himself wrote, a letter to the sages of Lunel, saying: scribal error. It was simply a copyist’s mistake. This ruling was simply copied incorrectly. I didn’t write that; I wrote the opposite, what accords with the Talmud. Scribal error. Now the Kesef Mishneh already brings this letter, meaning everyone who read Maimonides also reads the Kesef Mishneh next to him. Rabbi Chaim read the Kesef Mishneh, okay? And that doesn’t stop him from building some structure that explains and reconciles Maimonides with the Talmud and so on. Yes, exactly. So he took the frying pan out of the kitchen and Maimonides out of Maimonides. Meaning yes, as I said, ask Kurzweil. Meaning Maimonides the man isn’t interesting; you made—

[Speaker E] the real Maimonides into the conceptual Maimonides. Yes, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or the man, the book, out of the man. Meaning the man clarifies what he intended, what the poetics are, but the book is the book. In the book, it’s what’s written. Maimonides is a book, not a person.

[Speaker E] Like Buber said, the work is expropriated from the creator.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. And that’s exactly what I want to talk about—hermeneutics. So okay, that’s obviously extreme. I think at one point in the original article I even exaggerated about this, but in the meantime I’ve moderated a bit. In any case, that’s basically the essential criticism of ignoring context, of ignoring manuscripts, editions—look, maybe corruptions fell into the text. Once you remove the corruption, you see there is no contradiction and no need to do all the intellectual gymnastics to reconcile it. Check parallel works by the person, Maimonides’ responsa. He sometimes addresses the laws—people asked him about laws he wrote and he answered. You can’t look at those laws without looking at what Maimonides himself explained when he was asked those questions. What’s the logic of focusing while ignoring the whole context, when the context is not only historical real-world context, but also textual context? Meaning there are other texts or other works of Maimonides—look, compare against the Commentary on the Mishnah. People do that a little, but not much. See, sometimes it illuminates it, and so on. In short, there is some sort of ignoring of manuscripts, of textual versions, of the realia of the time, of the context of the time, of the influences on the historical Maimonides. I’m just expanding things we’ve already touched on a bit. Somehow the text is perceived as ahistorical, acontextual. Yes, it’s completely detached, out of context. Meaning the text stands by itself, I stand opposite it, and there is nothing at all around. Yes, or the person, or the text, or really the texts.

[Speaker E] We talked about this—that everyone is sitting around what? We said in the last few lectures that the whole traditional method of learning is built on detachment from—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right. So here I’m returning to the same thing, just from a somewhat different angle. Right, I’m just detailing things we already spoke about. Now Maimonides also omits various laws, for example ones dealing with the evil eye, demons, and things like that, which he didn’t believe in. Okay? Now every such omission—you can see masses of texts discussing it: after all, it’s against the Talmud, and they reconcile him and make distinctions and explain and all the rest. Now everybody understands that Maimonides omitted it because he didn’t believe in it. Meaning, that’s obvious. Anyone who reads Guide for the Perplexed and anyone who reads Maimonides’ other writings knows. Evil eye, yes—that one should not stand by his fellow’s field and stare at it, should not look at his fellow’s field when the grain is standing. Yes, the Talmud in Bava Batra there, page 2 I think, something like that, because of the evil eye. Maimonides omits that law. Washing hands because of an evil spirit, all sorts of things—consistently, he omits all those laws there. Maimonides writes somewhere that one may whisper over a scorpion bite on the Sabbath, even though it is forbidden to do medical things, one may whisper over a scorpion bite on the Sabbath because it is a case of calming someone’s anxiety. In any case, it does nothing. And the Vilna Gaon gets terribly upset there in his glosses on the Shulchan Arukh. The Shulchan Arukh copies this law from Maimonides, and the Vilna Gaon gets upset and says that the accursed philosophy led him astray. Here Maimonides said—

[Speaker E] At least on this point the Vilna Gaon—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, here Maimonides said it. There he simply omits things—he doesn’t say anything—so then you can discuss why he omitted them. Here Maimonides says: you may whisper over a scorpion bite on the Sabbath because in any case it doesn’t help at all, it’s just nonsense, so do nonsense; that’s permitted even on the Sabbath. Only medicine is forbidden on the Sabbath.

[Speaker E] And here he revealed his true opinion about—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] this whole area of these various mysticisms. That’s it, exactly. You can understand from this what his opinion was on all those various mysticisms. Yes, Maimonides consistently—Maimonides talks about all the prohibitions like “be wholehearted with the Lord your God,” “do not practice divination,” “do not practice soothsaying,” all those things—Maimonides systematically explains them as a prohibition against being foolish. Yes, Nachmanides, for example, or people closer to the esoteric side, explain: no, there are such things, they are real, they work, it’s just forbidden to make use of them because they belong to some other domain, the “other side,” yes, the other side. It is forbidden to use the powers of impurity. For Maimonides there is no such thing. Powers of impurity are simply nonsense. It is forbidden to be foolish, that’s all. Meaning, don’t do meaningless things. According to Maimonides, by the way, it comes out—I once ran into this—there was some discussion on the internet. Someone had an incurable disease, a serious disease, a terminal illness, a very tangible short life expectancy, and there was no conventional treatment for this disease. I don’t even remember what exactly it was. And he posted a question on some forum where I was: can he go to some Indian healer somewhere in South America, who apparently in quite a few cases had managed to cure this disease? The question was whether it is permitted, forbidden—on his side it’s connected to gods and all kinds of idolatry and things like that. Is it permitted or not? So I said that according to Maimonides it is certainly permitted, because if it works—no, if it works, then it is medicine. The fact that medicine has not yet recognized this treatment, okay, but apparently it is based on a real mechanism. And whatever is real is permitted. If it doesn’t work, then one simply has to check the data. If it doesn’t work, then it’s just nonsense, so there’s no dilemma. Then what difference does it make whether it is permitted or forbidden? Why are you going if it doesn’t work? So do a serious examination. If there really are indications that it works, then it’s permitted to go, why not? According to Maimonides. According to Nachmanides, it really could be forbidden. It’s an interesting issue between two worlds that there’s no point entering now. In any event, it’s pretty clear that all these omissions of Maimonides come from his worldview. Anyone who reads Guide for the Perplexed, anyone who reads the Maimonidean context, Maimonides’ whole intellectual world, will understand where this comes from. But there are commentators on Maimonides who look at every such thing and discuss it as though here there is some omission from the Talmud that has to be reconciled, and they make some distinction or try to explain that Maimonides ruled like such-and-such an amora and there is a dispute on the matter. All the regular methods for resolving problems in Maimonides, while somehow ignoring the intellectual context in which these things are written. Okay? So again this is a kind of ignoring of context—not specifically social context, but yes, intellectual context, the beit midrash, the intellectual world in which Maimonides operates. I’ll perhaps bring two examples where there are even halakhic rules that say you ignore context. So it’s not just some study habit in yeshivot; it actually enters as some kind of rule of learning. And it’s exactly the same thing, but it’s interesting. In the book Yad Malakhi, one of the books of rules, by Rabbi Malakhi HaKohen, he writes: an amora has the power to make a compromise between the tannaim, and he does not thereby do something that is neither like this master nor like that master. And thus we find in several places. What does that mean? There is a dispute among tannaim, let’s say they disagree, and that dispute leads to two points over which there is argument. You can rule on point A like this tanna and on point B like that tanna. Now, obviously this is one and the same dispute. We’re talking about two points that come out of the same issue over which the argument is being conducted. The rationale is one. But you can make a compromise between the tannaim, impose a compromise between the tannaim. And to impose a compromise between the tannaim means that you are actually disagreeing with both of them. Because you are not really adopting either his rationale or the opposite rationale. You are really creating your own position. But since there is a source you fit in each of the two rulings, you are not disagreeing with the two tannaim in terms of the bottom line. Ruling A matches tanna A, ruling B matches tanna B. Not for his reason, but it matches. So that’s okay. So it isn’t considered that you are disputing a tanna. And we split—yes, but we split between the rationales and the ruling, when the ruling is a product of the rationales. So it’s a somewhat similar phenomenon to what I said before about Maimonides. Maimonides has a reason why he omitted this. I know why he omitted it. I ignore that; I look at the omission as a halakhic position, and the reasons—I don’t know, I’m not interested in the reasons. So here too, same thing. A somewhat similar law, from another angle, appears in the Rema in Choshen Mishpat, section 25. The Rema writes: likewise, if there is one individual against the many, one follows the many in every place. And even if the many do not agree for one reason, but each has his own separate reason, since they agree regarding the legal ruling, they are called many and we follow them. It’s taken from Maharik. So basically what does that mean? Suppose in a court—maybe I mentioned this once—there are even paradoxes surrounding this matter. Three judges in a court, okay? And two litigants come concerning some contract. And there are two judges who say Reuven is right and one judge who says Shimon is right. So the law follows the majority, “incline after the majority,” so Reuven is right. But what happens if the two judges use different rationales in favor of Reuven? Now if I examine the matter at the level of rationales, at the level of rationales there is no majority. There are three rationales, each with a different rationale. Now in the end the decision is based on rationales; the decision is not just some bottom line floating in the air. The bottom line is a result of rationales. But here there is some sort of ignoring of the rationales. Meaning the question is what the bottom line is; I am bound by the bottom line. I’m not interested in where the rationales came from. You understand that this too is again some kind of ignoring of context? Because basically I’m saying: as far as I’m concerned, what is written in the book—I don’t know what the implications of the rationales are, the conceptual arguments behind it, I reconstruct those myself. I’m no longer interested in what led the writer of the book to write what he wrote.

[Speaker E] Regarding Maimonides, on this specific point of the sweeping rejection of the whole world of segulot, it’s not only a matter of detachment from realia and context but also a theological problem of the authority of the text of the Talmud. Because apparently, just as the Talmud accepts the—once the Talmud was written and accepted by all Israel, then it was accepted, apparently. So now the question is, you take parts of the Talmud, and that—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a different question with Maimonides—

[Speaker E] Therefore this is a serious stumbling block, and therefore they try to do all this gymnastics to explain it in a point-by-point way, subject to accepting the authority of the Talmud.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but if the truth is not like that—what? But after all, the truth is not like that. Maimonides omitted it because of his worldview. Now I have a problem—I don’t know how to explain the authority of—

[Speaker E] the text, to accept all sorts of things like that that have no logic at all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I understand the difficulty, but practically speaking I know why Maimonides omitted it. So I have a difficulty: how does Maimonides undermine the authority of the Talmud, the authority of the Talmud?

[Speaker E] In short, there is this issue here. It’s not only the question of detachment from realia, but—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are also ideological motivations here.

[Speaker E] And what can explain it is factual error.

[Speaker G] In the facts.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I claim there is no problem. You say there is factual error, then there is no problem. The Talmud has no authority where there is a factual error. Where there is a halakhic error, there is room to discuss. A louse, yes, that it does not reproduce and therefore may be killed on the Sabbath—that of course is a shift to stringency, so it’s easier, but even that almost no halakhic decisor actually goes and does. But this kind of error, in my view, is no authority at all. It is just an expression of opinion that is simply mistaken. Today we know it’s mistaken, and that’s all. What’s the problem? Therefore this issue doesn’t trouble me at all. The question is, one can argue whether there really is an error here or not. Nachmanides thinks there is no error here because there are such things, and Maimonides thinks that this is an error. If the approach is that there is factual error, then there is no problem why he does not accept the authority of the text, because errors are errors. Fine. But the common view among halakhic decisors is that there are no errors, even factual ones, in the Talmud, and that is the accepted assumption in the traditional halakhic world.

[Speaker E] And there are lots of stories about interactions between amoraim and demons and all kinds of things like that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, it’s hard to understand how this whole business works. So here it is: Rabbi Avraham ben HaRambam wants to say that reality changed a bit. Demons existed once, but in the meantime they disappeared. And of course that doesn’t explain Maimonides, because Maimonides gives a halakhic ruling not only for his own time but for all times, unlike the Shulchan Arukh. So I would have expected him to give a ruling for a time when there are demons and for a time when there aren’t. Apparently he doesn’t. It’s like this idea of “nature has changed,” right? Neria Gutel’s book, The Changing of Nature. Maybe I mentioned it once in a class. Before the book came out he wrote some article on the subject, and I saw that article—I didn’t remember, but I saw it, read it—and it sparked some discussion in this forum too about the need for a decisor, and I remembered that I had seen this in Neria Gutel. So I said that Neria Gutel said this is a euphemistic way of saying that we disagree with the medieval authorities, with the Amoraim, Tannaim, medieval authorities, whatever. “Nature has changed”—you’re uncomfortable saying “I disagree with him,” so apparently reality in his time was different; back then there were demons, but today there aren’t anymore. It’s a kind of cleaned-up language so as not to put on the table that I disagree with the earlier generations. So he was very upset and said, “I didn’t write that. That was an initial assumption that I rejected altogether. No one says that. It can’t be. It’s just…” And then he moved on to say, no, nature really did change, and he has all kinds of explanations there in the book for what exactly “changing nature” means—but none of them is really the correct explanation, of course. The correct explanation is that nothing changed at all. It’s simply euphemistic language for disagreeing with him, or for saying there was a factual mistake. Not disagreeing—saying there was a factual mistake. I claim that saying there was a factual mistake is not disagreeing.

[Speaker E] And even those who make that claim don’t know that that’s actually what they’re claiming.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Their heart does not reveal it to their mouth—they don’t dare say it to themselves, they don’t dare say it to themselves. You see, there’s this approach that the Talmud is sacred, that there’s no such thing as mistakes in the Talmud. It’s like this fear that if you decide there are mistakes here, then maybe everything is mistakes; maybe there are mistakes in Jewish law there too. Even though there’s a difference between mistakes in law and mistakes in fact. Even if there are mistakes in Jewish law, you can still demand authority. There is authority—say, authority has meaning in halakhic contexts. Authority means that even if I’m wrong, you still have to accept what I say. In halakhic contexts you can hear that, like in the Knesset for example. The Knesset legislates a law. And I think it’s a mistake, it’s a bad law, it’s a wrong law, unjust, whatever. The Knesset enacted it—it’s binding. There’s no principled problem with that. Fine. Not an essential one.

[Speaker F] Here what matters, here what matters is not to turn it into something essential in life.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not to disagree—

[Speaker F] Because if there’s an essential mistake here, why do it? Why is there authority? What policeman is going to come grab me? The Holy One, blessed be He? There’s authority. But what—what policeman is going to come grab me?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Holy One, blessed be He. No, because you’re not listening to the truth. Because the truth is to obey the Talmud against the truth. And that too is truth, yes. That’s what Ran writes in his homilies about the rebellious elder—

[Speaker F] There it’s the Sanhedrin.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what? What difference does that make? The Talmud is like the Sanhedrin. All the medieval authorities write this: the Talmud is like the Sanhedrin. No one disputes that. It’s under “do not deviate.” Not all the medieval authorities—some of them. The authority of the Talmud is like the Sanhedrin. That’s accepted among all halakhic decisors. Even though they were not ordained as they were in the Talmudic period itself. So regarding the Talmud, the Jewish people as a whole accepted it, and once the Jewish people as a whole accept it, that’s like ordination. So it’s like the Sanhedrin.

[Speaker F] Rabbi, and what about the whole passage concerning one who is incited to issue a ruling? If it’s someone who ruled and he knows that the law is against the court, he’s forbidden to do what the court says.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so that’s “he erred regarding the commandment to obey the words of the sages,” a very complicated passage. It’s not so simple. There are all kinds of interpretations there. I’m also not in the details right now, but it’s a very complicated passage. In principle, of course there is authority. What is a rebellious elder? A rebellious elder is someone who sins against what he himself thinks? He certainly thinks he is right, and still there is a law of the rebellious elder in the Torah. So fine, it needs checking. “He erred regarding the commandment to obey the words of the sages”—there’s an article by Blidstein, it’s an interesting article. In any case, Rabbi Yehoshua…

[Speaker G] What?

[Speaker C] Rabbi Yehoshua who came with his staff…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, the story of Rabbi Yehoshua is not such a good example, because there the dispute was about sanctifying the month. And in sanctifying the month there is mandatory authority vested in the head of the Sanhedrin. The head of the Sanhedrin—it says, “you, even if you err; you, even if you act intentionally; you, even if under compulsion.” So what the head of the Sanhedrin says is by definition the truth; it doesn’t matter if he’s wrong. So that’s not a good example. There you had to accept what the head of the Sanhedrin said because he is the one who determines it, not because he is right. Okay, fine. Yes, sort of, yes, but there it’s only close—not the head of the Sanhedrin. Yes, obviously. In any case—ah, yes—so in Maimonides, the ignoring of context. With all the mystical laws, I brought these two examples of the Yad Malakhi and the Rema, in that they follow the majority of the bottom line and ignore the reasons. And I mentioned that there’s this paradox—I think I mentioned it once—where there are three judges discussing a certain contract. Reuven claims that Shimon breached the contract, and Shimon says no, he didn’t breach the contract. Now the judges have to decide on two questions. One question is whether the contract really obligates this—that’s a matter of interpreting the contract. That’s one question. And the second question is whether factually Shimon really acted otherwise. One is a factual question and one is a question of contract interpretation. Two questions. Now there could be a situation where the majority on the bottom line says that Shimon breached the contract, while on the level of the reasons there is a majority in favor of the side that exempts Shimon.

[Speaker E] Meaning, let’s say one judge—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —says that the contract really does require it, but Shimon did do it, so everything is fine. Okay? One judge says the contract doesn’t require it at all, so it doesn’t matter whether Shimon did it or not. And one judge says the contract requires it and Shimon didn’t do it. Okay? The first two judges say Shimon is exempt; only the third judge says he is liable. Now check the two questions separately, and you’ll see: on the question of whether the contract requires it, it’s two against one, so it does require it. On the question of whether Shimon did it, it’s two against one that he did do it. So that means that if you go on the level of the reasons, then the majority of the judges convict Shimon rather than acquit him. And if you go by the bottom line, then the majority of the judges acquit Shimon. Meaning, here it’s even more extreme than in the Rema’s example, because in the Rema’s example there are three reasons, each one with a different reason, so there’s no majority in any direction. So if there’s no majority in any direction, let’s go by the bottom line. But here no—if you go by the reasons, you reach the opposite conclusion! And still you go by the bottom line. At least that’s the accepted view: in Jewish law you follow the bottom line. Again, the Rema speaks about such a case; I don’t know whether to derive from that also the paradoxical example, but that’s the common way of thinking. So this means that even within Jewish law itself there is some concept of ignoring context, or of commitment to the text as such. That is, I am committed to the Talmud; I am committed to what is written there, not to the reasons for which what is in the Talmud was written. So if I go like the Talmud but disagree with the reasons, that’s fine. But if I go against the Talmud even though in some way I don’t disagree with the reasons, then no—that’s forbidden. Meaning, the authority belongs to the text itself and not to the intellectual or explanatory context in which the text was written. Okay? So in that sense it’s a phenomenon similar to what I described earlier. Okay, now I really want to try to fit this into a framework of hermeneutic discussions. In hermeneutics, in an interpretive act, there are basically three factors involved. One factor is the author—in interpreting a text; you can also interpret a work of art, you can interpret all kinds of things, I’m talking about text for simplicity. There is the author, there is the text, and there is the reader, the reader or interpreter. Right? Now. In the regular, naive conception, let’s say, of interpretation theory, we are looking for the author’s intention. We try to understand what the author meant. The problem with that is that it has various formulations. Some call it, for example, the hermeneutic circle. How can you know that the interpretation you give is correct? After all, what stands before you is only the text; the author died long ago. You can’t ask him what he meant. So basically what stands before you is only the text as the author’s representative. Okay? Now, how can you know your interpretation is correct? You say: because it fits the text. Fine—but the question is whether you are interpreting the text correctly. You need some independent indication that will give you feedback as to whether your interpretation of the text is right or not. But you have no access to the author except through the text. And therefore there is a kind of circle here—you are trapped inside the text, you can’t get out of it. And because of that, some argue that looking for the author’s intention is not right; it’s not possible. So then what? Then basically the more modern approach comes and says: I’m looking for the meaning of the text, not the author’s intention. The next factor in the interpretive act. Not the author, but the text. Its meaning. Interpretation is the meaning of the text, not the author’s intention. The text lies before me—that’s what I’m dealing with. But even in this context there are a few difficulties with this conception. First of all, what does it mean—the meaning of the text? The text is just a collection of ink molecules. What does it mean for a text to have meaning? If we’re not talking about a person who composed the text—meaning does not belong to inanimate things. Meanings belong to works of people or of beings with choice, doesn’t matter, the Holy One, blessed be He, but beings that have an intellectual dimension—you can discuss what the meaning is. What is the meaning of a stone? A stone has no meaning; a stone is a stone because it’s a stone. That’s it. The same with a text: when you look at the text in itself, what does “the meaning of the text” mean if not what the author intended? The text has no life of its own; it is a collection of ink molecules on paper molecules. That’s the text. What is “the meaning of the text”? So that’s a philosophical question. Beyond that there’s also a technical question. The fact that we have arguments about what a text says—interpretive disputes—means that the text probably is not interpreted in a one-to-one, univocal way. It can be read in several ways. And because of that, the nihilistic, postmodern, deconstructionist claim—call it what you want—is a claim that says there is no real interpretation of a text. The author, you can ask what he meant; if you can ask him, ask him, and he’ll tell you what he meant. But a text has no meaning. Either for the technical reason or for the essential philosophical reason. People don’t understand what it means to say that the interpretation of this thing is really the meaning of the text and not of the author. So basically they say no—the meaning belongs to the author, only that it isn’t accessible to us; we can’t get to it. So if that’s the case, we can’t reach the author’s intention. Gadamer tries to do what he calls a fusion of horizons—somehow he still claims it’s possible to connect with how the author thought and to try to reconstruct it. Anyway, that’s mostly words, all these things.

[Speaker C] So why is there no interpretation, basically? What? There are times when people offer interpretations the author never intended at all. Okay. There are interpretations.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so that’s why I’m saying: either the technical problem is that there are many interpretations, and that basically means there is no truly correct and incorrect interpretation of the text.

[Speaker I] A text is made by a human being, meaning it’s a creation. Fine, it’s not a stone—it’s the person’s thinking.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Absolutely. You’re interpreting the person. What? So you’re interpreting the person—we’re back to the first approach. But in the first approach we said you can’t, because the person isn’t accessible to us. That’s exactly the tension here. Your wife—you want to interpret one of her paintings. Okay? If she’s still here among us, thank God, maybe you can ask her. She’ll say, “Ask the color reactions, I don’t know.” But an author who died eight hundred years ago—what will you do with him? You can’t ask him. So if a text has meaning, it’s only what the author intended, because that’s the person standing behind the work—but that’s no longer accessible to us, he’s not here. So what do we do? The text itself has no meaning; there’s no such thing as the meaning of a text in itself. Interpretation as the author’s intention is inaccessible to us. What remains? Only the reader or interpreter. That’s the third approach; this is what’s called deconstruction. Derrida, a Jewish Algerian-French philosopher, is considered the father of this view, which then flourished for many years, perhaps until today. It says that interpretation of a text is what it evokes in me. Meaning, the focus is not the author, not the work, not the text, but the reader, the interpreter. And again, this is basically a kind of coming to terms with the subjectivity of interpretation, because the objection that there is no meaning to the text—what, everyone interprets differently?—becomes the answer. Right, there are many interpretations, but that’s not a problem, because my interpretation is one of them, and interpretation is only my interpretation. There isn’t some true interpretation we are trying to hit upon. Interpretation is what is created in me when I encounter the work.

[Speaker G] And then there’s no point arguing about interpretation anymore. Right, right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s really no point arguing about that interpretation, and therefore—look—it’s not an ideological dispute about what is right to do. Do what you want—what, is someone going to tell you what to do? Interpret this way, interpret that way… The dispute is over what can be done, not what is right to do. What’s right? Do what you want, whatever entertains you. The question is what can be done. There there is a real dispute. Can you reach the author’s intention or not? Is there such a thing as the meaning of the text itself or not, and so on? Okay? So those are basically the three approaches. Regarding the meaning of the text, there are those who want to argue—if it’s not the author, then the second approach, what is called structuralism. Structuralism is basically an approach that comes to answer the difficulty, or an explanation that comes to answer the difficulty, with the second approach. The second approach speaks about the meaning of the text itself, so they say there are certain structures that pass through the author. The author is like some kind of almost hollow pipe. The spirit of the age, ideas circulating in that area, penetrate the text through the author. So even if the author is dead, we can still speak about meanings of the text—not as the author’s intention, and still the text itself can have meaning. That answers the philosophical question. It doesn’t answer the technical question, because the fact is that we still interpret it in different ways. And the question then is: what does “the meaning of a text” mean if each of us is basically doing something different? But the philosophical question—how can the inanimate have meaning?—yes, it can, because this is a creation of the spirit of the age and not of this specific creator. That’s what is called structuralism. Fine, we won’t stray from this context. Structuralism has all sorts of aspects. Piaget belonged within structuralism—psychology, various issues. The approach is much broader than just the interpretation of texts. Anyway, let’s try to see what these three approaches really say. What is expected of someone who holds each of these three approaches? Someone who holds the approach that I am looking for the author’s intention—the original intention, basically, what was meant when the text was composed—then I would expect him, yes, there are the difficulties, you don’t know, the author is no longer here and so on. But maybe there are tools I can use. For example, other texts by the same author. For example, some familiarity with the study hall in which he operated, who influenced him. You see that I’m getting to the academy, right? Basically, the academic search is a search for the author’s intention. That is its essence. I’m not talking about a literature department. I’m talking about a department for Talmud study or the study of Jewish law. Okay? In literature there are different approaches there, and certainly all the approaches exist there, but mainly the third. But when we talk about what is called Jewish studies—that is, study of the Talmud or Jewish law—then essentially it seems to me that the academic scholar is looking for the author’s intention. Now it doesn’t matter whether he believes that the author of the Torah is the Holy One, blessed be He, or not; even if human beings composed it, it doesn’t matter so much. He is looking for what the author who composed it intended. On the other hand, yes, it matters to him who the author was; he makes use of historical arguments, historical considerations, archaeology—it matters to him. To identify who the author was, in what period it was composed, and therefore biblical criticism is very occupied with layers and with the question of when it was composed and so on, because academic work strives toward the author’s intention in a basic way. Quite surprisingly, I would have expected—if I asked you a question—which side holds the more modern approach: scholarship or traditional learning? I would have tended to think scholarship, right? At first throw, without thinking. It turns out the situation flips. Scholarship holds the oldest approach in interpretation theory; it seeks interpretation in its most naive sense. What did the author intend? With a tremendous optimism that we really have the ability—not necessarily to reach it, but to get close to what the author intended. If we examine the context and the setting and the influences and manuscripts and other writings of Maimonides that illuminate what he wrote in the Mishneh Torah and vice versa, then we have the ability to get close to the author’s intention—that is the intention, that is the meaning, that is what should be done. And when the scholar criticizes the traditional learner, many times without noticing, he implicitly assumes the first hermeneutic conception: that we are looking for the author’s intention. Whereas the traditional learner, with the cap and payot and everything, is basically saying, leave it—I’m Derrida, I’m a deconstructionist. As far as I’m concerned, interpretation is what this does for me; I don’t care what Maimonides intended. That’s basically what he’s saying. Meaning that in practice there is here some kind of unexpected reversal. Traditional yeshiva learning or halakhic ruling is something anachronistic, out of context, not interesting—the only question is how I understand the text. And the scholar very often accuses the traditional interpreter of anachronism—that you take your own world and project it onto the text, and you ignore the fact that this text was composed in a completely different conceptual and intellectual world. That’s anachronism. You impose on the text all kinds of assumptions that simply were not there when it was composed. The traditional learner will answer: no, I’m not imposing anything on it; this is the interpretation. I’m not asking what the author intended, I’m asking what the text says to me. Okay? Now in some senses this goes back to what I said earlier—

[Speaker E] What the text says to me, or what the text says.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s a difference here between—

[Speaker E] How I experience—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —it, or what it says to me. Right now I presented it as the third versus the first. You’re right that it could also be the second versus the first.

[Speaker E] If it’s what it says to me—

[Speaker G] —then there are no disputes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. So that’s postmodernism—I’m getting there, right, that’s postmodernism, deconstruction—but that’s not Jewish law. Deconstruction is the interpretive conception of the postmodern picture; it’s part of postmodernity, one of the heralds of postmodernism, like Derrida, Foucault, Derrida, and all those Frenchmen who drove everyone crazy. So basically, seemingly—I said this and I’ll definitely qualify it in a moment—seemingly there is here a dispute between the first approach and the third, and if so, it maps onto a hermeneutic dispute of some sort. No, this is not a dispute over how it is right to interpret a text, but over what the interpretation of a text is. Of course, once you decide what interpretation is, that will determine how it is right to do it. If you’re looking for the author’s intention, everyone will agree that it’s worthwhile to see where he worked, how he thought, who influenced him, to check manuscripts, and so on. But if you’re looking for what it does to you, what relevance does any of that have? It’s of no interest at all. Okay? So in practice, behind these things sit different hermeneutic approaches. But as you rightly noted, I think that’s a somewhat superficial view. Because if the traditional conception really were deconstructionist, then there would be no point in arguments. There would be no place to bring proofs. Even if I’m not arguing with someone else—just with myself, when I try to build an interpretation of a Talmudic passage for myself—I try to build some coherent interpretation, I check it against the initial assumption, what the conclusion is, how Shmuel understood elsewhere, whether it fits his approach or not. I try to do some kind of work that tests and validates my interpretation. Now if this were only a matter of there being no chance at all of reaching an interpretation either of the text or of the author, then why am I doing this? I could just say what inspiration it gives me and that’s it.

[Speaker E] In a certain sense, you definitely wouldn’t feel comfortable.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? That’s just psychology. “Wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

[Speaker E] You have integrity and honesty; you’re looking for a high degree of confidence for yourself. Not integrity—it’s also psychology.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s just psychology. That’s what makes me more—

[Speaker E] —comfortable, what gives me strength, what gives me inspiration.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then if it’s psychology, that somewhat empties it of content. Then I can’t accuse someone of what he said being an incorrect interpretation. His psychology is simply comfortable with that too; there’s no need to look for all the proofs, it works for him as is. If it’s not a real claim, if it’s psychology, that may explain why you do it, but it’s not—it’s not a substantive claim. So I’ll add different psychology, and then I’m exempt from doing that. Maybe I’ll add a third kind of study to complete the picture. Let’s sit in the new study halls. Those study halls—yes, Elul, the secular study halls, the secular-religious ones, the creative ones, I don’t know, all kinds of כאלה. They are a third type. It seems to me that the three types of study halls—that is, the academic, the traditional, and the new—are exactly the three hermeneutic approaches. The approach of the academy’s study hall is the first hermeneutic approach: looking for the author’s intention. The third approach, the new study hall, is basically the approach in which I seek what this does for me—what is subjective. There also aren’t so many arguments; there are suggestions. I have one suggestion, you see it differently. Usually we don’t argue.

[Speaker E] That’s the very reason it was established. It was established in order to create a kind of Jewish-Israeli culture that would allow us… not necessarily. Yes, so that we could live together, at least we’d have something in common.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that was… let’s say they relate to sources as a source of inspiration and not as a source of authority. Okay? A source of inspiration means that, for me, interpretation is the inspiration created within me.

[Speaker E] Every learner brings his own baggage. What? Every learner brings his own baggage.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Basically I think that fits the third approach better. And indeed, when you go in there, sometimes you see arguments, but it’s pretty clear that the purpose of the arguments is not to clarify the truth, but rather to defend my thesis. Meaning, I have a thesis, and your thesis is perfectly fine, no less good than mine, but this one is mine. And it’s also fine. And when I present it to others, I present it as a suggestion. Not as some statement of “this is true” and what you say is “not true” and I have proofs against you. Usually it doesn’t work like that.

[Speaker E] Is internal consistency required, at least?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So internal consistency is required there, but fine—I say that internal consistency really may be more on the psychological plane, as you said before. Because still, even for my own interpretation I require of myself some kind of… otherwise you could walk past an electric pole and produce a Shakespeare sonnet and say, “This is my interpretation of the electric pole.” There would be no limitation, no commitment, nothing at all. Nobody goes that far. Derrida, by the way, has fairly detailed and fairly committed logical analyses—and that’s Derrida. And many times people don’t understand: Derrida is not some creative type who just says whatever pops into his head. He deconstructs a text—meaning he interprets the text completely differently from what appears at first glance—but he validates it in a very rigorous way. Meaning, he tries to show that it really says this in some consistent form, and at the same time it is deconstruction. And his students try to explain this contradiction. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of what they mean; I’m not sure anyone there has gotten to the bottom of what they mean. Some of his students try to defend him against… there are Israelis too, by the way, who try to defend him against this criticism that basically he’s just anti-logocentric. “Do whatever you want.” What, that’s not an approach. “Do whatever you want.” No—Derrida is very rigorous. If he’s very rigorous, then he’s at least in the second method or the first, not the third. How that fits together, I don’t know. So that’s why I say that traditional learning—I completely agree with your comments—seems to me not to be the third but the second. But you have to pay close attention, because it’s also hard to identify it simply with the second. It doesn’t map neatly onto the second. The second is supposedly the meaning of the text itself. And that’s what I showed earlier, basically—that we are committed to the text, not even to the reasons for which it was written, as with the Rema and Yad Malakhi and Maimonides, all the examples I brought earlier. But why doesn’t it fit completely? Because when you want to… as I said before, what is the meaning of the text? A text is ink molecules on paper molecules. In what sense does the text have meaning? So I say: structuralism is basically the proposal that solves that problem. And it says that there is a spirit of the age, or some structures, that enter through the author into the text, and that is what you are looking for. But if that’s so, then I would expect the traditional learner to try to enter the spirit of the age in which the text was composed. But that’s exactly what the scholar accuses him of not doing. And that’s why, in the article I wrote—I wrote an article in Hakdamot; there was an issue of Hakdamot about the hermeneutics of canonical texts. I wrote that article, sent it for publication, and it wasn’t published in the next issue after I sent it, but in the one after that. Now in the immediate upcoming issue there appeared an article by Rabbi Chaim Navon. He argued in favor of… deconstruction. I didn’t even know it was about to come out, and he argues that the traditional approach is basically deconstruction. And therefore one shouldn’t accuse it of not working with context and not examining manuscripts and so on. And afterward I asked them for the article back—not back, but I told them I would send an updated version because I wanted to address his claims too, and there I added a few more remarks about why I think it’s not deconstruction. So I sharpened further why I think it can’t be that. And indeed, it doesn’t really describe what is done in the traditional study hall; it’s not faithful to what goes on there. Shall we say that ideologically you support this?

[Speaker E] What? Did you get a response from him? You can clearly see that from Heaven they wanted this to be read together. What? You can clearly see that from Heaven they arranged it that way in the issue. Everything is from Heaven.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Very nice. In any case, so I say: if there really are some structures embedded in the text, and that’s the traditional conception, then I would expect the traditional conception to do something very similar to what academic scholarship does. Try to understand what the spirit of the age was, the zeitgeist, what exactly the period put into the text—because that is the meaning; what other meaning is there? So there in that article I wanted to make the following claim: in fact the traditional approach is something between the second and the third, or you can call it the second but not exactly with standard structuralism. Meaning, I’m not checking what the environment put into the text, because why should I care what Maimonides’ environment put into the text? I ask what the Holy One, blessed be He, put into the text. Meaning, my claim then was—and I qualify it, because a lot of years have passed since then—that my claim was basically that this is another kind of structuralism. And this connects to things I discussed in earlier sessions, because when the authors of Tosafot decided to be stringent in laws of saving life and the sages of Spain decided to be lenient in laws of saving life, then my claim is that the circumstances drew out of them certain conceptions that are true conceptions. True, without the circumstances it would not have come out of them; the circumstances led them there, like what I discussed with Hila—that I may have motivation to turn over every stone, but in the end I come up with an argument that also has to hold water halakhically. So in the end some kind of truth emerged here. What is that truth? In what sense is it truth? It is not the author’s intention, because the authors of Tosafot really were products of their time. But on the other hand I claim that the period, through them, inserted some kind of truth. But in order to discover that truth I do not need to go down into what was going on in that period, because for me that isn’t important. I’m not interested in what people thought in the period of the authors of Tosafot. What interests me is what came out. After the period influenced the authors of Tosafot in a certain way, a certain interpretation emerged of these passages about sanctifying God’s name, and now that interpretation stands on its own for me.

[Speaker H] No, why? If it really does depend on the period, then in fact the truth here is not what they said, but rather the truth is that in such circumstances—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no—that’s what I said—

[Speaker H] —in other circumstances they would have said something else. I want to defend the traditional conception. In fact there’s no disagreement between us.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That was the scholarly approach, and I claim that the traditional conception is not like that, because we do confront the authors of Tosafot with Maimonides and bring proofs; we do see this as some kind of round table. And why? So apparently that would be either the first or the third, not the second. I say no—it’s the second, only the structures are not products of the age. The circumstances in which the authors of Tosafot operated caused them to seek a certain interpretation, but the interpretation they found is timeless, timeless. It is an interpretation that does not depend on time. Time was the enzyme that helped them hit upon this kind of interpretation, but now, in order to understand the interpretation, it has nothing to do with time at all. It was only the historical pretext that caused it to be revealed, but it is not really a product of the age. The age—I know, they were being persecuted and had to be stringent about sanctifying God’s name; I don’t need major research for that. The point is, I want to know whether this stringency holds water, whether it passes the interpretive tests of the Talmud, its sources, verses, expositions, whatever it may be. That is a timeless question. I don’t need for that to go back to history and manuscripts and so on. For me, what they created stands on its own. And now I seek the meaning of what they created. So in that sense it is structuralism, but of another kind—not a product of the age, but some sort of timeless thing. You can say that the Holy One, blessed be He, planted it there. I say today I’m no longer sure I stand behind that—there, I’m saying it. Something true emerged, regardless of whether it was the Holy One, blessed be He. What caused them to discover it were the circumstances in which they operated. But it’s not that the circumstances embedded the meaning into it—that’s not the point. That’s exactly the difference I pointed to in the two interpretations of what Gilat did. There are those who interpret it as if he says: yes, they wanted to be lenient in the laws of the Sabbatical year, so they said that the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. And then he says there are disputes, with all the meaning I described in the extreme academic interpretation. And I say no—in the traditional interpretation it doesn’t work like that. And Gilat didn’t say that either. What Gilat said was that because of the distress they sought valid halakhic, Torah-based reasons to say that the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. Once they found those reasons, I can test that using the tools of exposition, interpretive tools, and see whether it is a good interpretation. I would never have thought of it without the pressure, but after the pressure I did think of it, and now it stands on its own.

[Speaker J] But then you completely prevent yourself from changing, innovating, adapting to circumstances that have changed entirely.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m not preventing myself.

[Speaker J] If you’re saying it reflects truth with no connection at all to circumstances.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But Maimonides and Tosafot are both true, and they disagree with each other.

[Speaker J] Fine, but in any case now you come, let’s say, to completely different circumstances.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So now these circumstances—as the authors of Tosafot did to the Amoraim, I will do to the authors of Tosafot. After all, I too am not exempt from the punishment of circumstances, or from the burden of circumstances. I too am a product of an age. A person is the mold of the landscape of his birthplace, right? That’s a saying.

[Speaker J] The question is whether you’re allowed to—if this is objective truth.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It can’t be that I’m not allowed, because I cannot avoid doing it. I’m also a human being, just as the authors of Tosafot were human—

[Speaker E] —beings.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We are not ministering angels.

[Speaker E] But add here too that they said things suited to their time.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I—when I read Tosafot—no, I’m saying: when I read Tosafot and Maimonides and the Talmud, I will do to them what the authors of Tosafot did to the Talmud. I will do the same thing to them. And what will produce that, of course, is the order in the study hall and the voice within which I operate, the influences acting on me. That is what will produce it in me. But in me too a new method will emerge—maybe it’s a synthesis of them, maybe a third method, maybe whatever, all kinds of things. Then a scholar will come and ask why he did it, and he’ll answer: because of the circumstances. When a learner comes in two hundred years and asks why he did it, he’ll look at my reasons. Even though he will be able to accept that I did it because of the influence of circumstances. But after the circumstances influenced me, he will examine my reasons. And it will continue onward; it’s an endless process. And therefore it doesn’t prevent change. I’m not claiming that I am committed to Tosafot or committed to Maimonides in an as-is, literally binding sense. Whatever the authors of Tosafot said—that’s what binds. I too do to the authors of Tosafot what they did to the Talmud. Just as from the Talmud there can emerge interpretations of Maimonides and interpretations of Tosafot. Why? Because the circumstances caused them to discover other true interpretive reasons. There are reasons this way and reasons that way, and everything is correct. Meaning, there are reasons this way; now you have to weigh them and decide which seems more convincing to you. To the authors of Tosafot one side seemed more convincing; to Maimonides the other side seemed more convincing. But the environment drew out from you additional interpretive reasons that without it you would not have drawn out. And those reasons are not products of the environment; those reasons stand on their own. Now test and see that there is logic to interpreting the verse or the Talmud in such a way even apart from the circumstances. Now I can throw away the ladder with which I climbed the tree and got out of the pit. I can throw away the ladder; now I’m already on the tree. So I do the same thing too. The process goes on. Before me now stands not only the Talmud, but also Tosafot and Maimonides. They too stand before me. And now when I do this, I too now uncover interpretations of Tosafot, of Maimonides, and of the Talmud. I’m now building my own structure. And it may be a different structure from Tosafot’s. And about me too they will ask the same question they now ask about Tosafot. Scholars two hundred years from now will ask it about me. They’ll ask why he did it; then the academic scholars will say because of the period, while the traditional learners will say: look, he has reasons—leave the period alone, don’t get busy with the period.

[Speaker J] I’m not asking what they’ll say after you, but what you’ll say to yourself when you want to.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can’t tell myself that, because I can’t step outside the framework within which I operate. “A person is the landscape of his birthplace” — that’s a very powerful statement. You can’t detach me from my environment. I’m part of my environment; it’s part of me. I can’t stop and ask, “Wait, how much does the environment influence me?” and then detach from it. I can do that a little, but it’ll never be complete. Every halakhic decisor — Tosafot and Maimonides too, I think — worked that way.

[Speaker K] Did you learn a little from all sorts of rabbis and so on? Yes, I’m influenced by things.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It seems reasonable to me, it doesn’t seem reasonable to me. It’s a certain kind of study hall. I once went to learn in the Chazon Ish kollel. And they warned me there, over and over, before I transferred. I come from the Ponevezh school, and the Chazon Ish kollel is Slabodka style. And they kept warning me: listen, you won’t manage there. It’s a different world. You simply won’t fit in there. It’s a shame, don’t go there. And I’m looking at two frogs croaking on the campfire lawn, the Pacific Ocean. I mean, how big could the difference really be between Ponevezh and Slabodka? Two Lithuanian Bnei Brak yeshivot, okay, a bit different, but every person is different. What — how different could it be? I got there: a completely different world. Really a completely different world. There’s no—

[Speaker L] Example.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I actually made a very organized whole Torah presentation about these differences. Afterward, at the beginning of every year, I used to give my students an opening lecture on the difference between Ponevezh and Slabodka. I think there’s a very important lesson in it. I’ll tell you briefly. The claim, basically, is that Ponevezh learning is very routine, very logical, and very rigid. There’s right and wrong, everything is very structured, very analytical. Once you hear that for enough years — by the end of my time in Bnei Brak, I used to go, I always loved hearing lectures by yeshiva heads who would come around on holidays, on the intermediate days of festivals, to give talks in synagogues, study halls, during breaks, open lectures like that. I really loved going to hear those lectures; it was like a holiday pleasure for me. But at a certain point I saw that once the lecture began, I could tell you the entire progression all the way to the end. In almost every lecture. Really — I’m not exaggerating. He starts the lecture, formulates the question, brings the first point — I’ll tell you what difficulty he’s going to raise, how he’ll distinguish, what proof he’ll bring for it, who disagrees with it, and what his conclusion will be. Now, maybe sometimes I didn’t get all the way to the end, maybe I missed something here and there, but basically I could tell you what he was going to say. Why? Because it was all Ponevezh-style. Almost all of it was Ponevezh-style. Most yeshiva heads come from Ponevezh, and it’s extremely structured. Meaning, after enough time learning it, you know exactly how it goes. You know how it goes. Give me the beginning, I’ll tell you the rest. In broad outline. If I don’t know the sources maybe I’ll miss a little, but if I do know them, I’ll tell you how the lecture is going to go. I remember — I never told this story, I’ll tell it now. My maggid shiur was a student of Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky, who was the founder of the Ponevezh method. Some hybrid of Rabbi Chaim and Rabbi Shimon Shkop. He was a student of Rabbi Shimon Shkop, and he created a hybrid of those two methods, and that’s basically what today is called the yeshiva method — that’s Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky, broadly speaking. At least in Bnei Brak. In Jerusalem there’s Baruch Ber, Praczovitz, and a few others like that. But when people say “the yeshiva method,” that’s Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky. Now, my rabbi, my maggid shiur in Bnei Brak, studied with him. And we learned tractate Sukkah with him. I learned tractate Sukkah with him, and at some point—

[Speaker E] There weren’t any writings of Rabbi Shmuel.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nothing had been published.

[Speaker E] And at some point… There weren’t any writings of Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky? I remember in Ponevezh I saw in the library those stenciled booklets…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, there was a manuscript of Rabbi—

[Speaker E] Yosef Rozovsky, there were stenciled pages, red, red-colored like that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, that red one—

[Speaker E] They typed those things on a typewriter. On a typewriter. Yes, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And it was also published later. It’s not… There are notebooks of Rabbi Yosef Rozovsky, his brother. That’s the yeshiva-style flow, Rabbi Yosef Rozovsky, that’s the “rayda,” as they say in yeshivot. That’s before Rabbi Shmuel. But it’s the same basic idea. Still, it came out later — Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky’s lectures, the novellae and lectures, the novellae and the general lectures, and the lectures, the daily lectures. Now when it was published, it came out on tractate Sukkah. That was the first volume, and then we were learning tractate Sukkah. I open the book, and it was embarrassing. I literally saw the lectures we were getting, one for one. Embarrassing. He never said he was saying it in the name of Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky; he presented it as his own insights. It was awkward. What, are you going to say something to him? And this was… by then I was already a veteran with him, I’d been in his class for years. In the end I couldn’t let it go; I had to clarify the matter. I said to him, Rabbi, look, a book by Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky on Sukkah has just been published. Oh really? Is that so? Interesting. So what does he say there? I told him, look, the lectures are one for one. And… are you taking it from his notebooks? He didn’t write anything. My maggid shiur… he has no notebooks. He doesn’t write down what he teaches. He didn’t write when he learned. Everything was by heart. And he knew everything by heart. So he says to me, look, honestly, I didn’t know it had come out. I didn’t study tractate Sukkah with Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky at all. Not at all. And it came out one for one.

[Speaker B] And it came out one for one.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It was embarrassing. It seemed obvious that he had copied the lecture from Rabbi Shmuel Rozovsky. But no. He had simply reconstructed it himself, and it came out as the exact same lecture. Really, it was amazing. Suddenly it hit me just how structured this Ponevezh way of thinking is. In the end I experienced it myself. After some time I also got to the point where people would begin and I’d know how it would continue. I would have given the same lecture. And that’s why, by the way — when I got to Slabodka, they drove me crazy. In the Chazon Ish kollel. One guy feels it this way and another guy feels it that way, this new study-hall atmosphere, like, this one thinks this and that one thinks that, and there isn’t all the… where’s the school? Where’s… of Fischer? No, Fischer is more Ponevezh-style, more Ponevezh-style, though not entirely; there’s a little creativity in him, a little personality, yes. He’s from Jerusalem. I said, my classifications are natural types. In any case, in Slabodka, it’s like everyone says whatever he thinks, it seems to him this way, maybe you could say it that way. I went crazy in those study-partner sessions in the Chazon Ish kollel, I couldn’t handle it. I’m used to structured things — method, ideas, set things up, formulas, Shkop, yes, really. And there it was, maybe this way and maybe that way and maybe otherwise. To this day I don’t… And that’s the Chazon Ish method. The Chazon Ish was very non-Ponevezh. He was very unstructured, not rigid, not logical — I mean, his logic is very difficult.

[Speaker G] Rabbi Chaim, yes, right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The notes on Rabbi Chaim, yes, right — his book… the Chazon Ish’s notes at the end, that’s exactly the focal point. It’s a classic text of Ponevezh versus Slabodka, really: the Chazon Ish’s notes on Rabbi Chaim — Slabodka versus Ponevezh. Well, it’s not Slabodka and not Ponevezh, it’s the founding fathers of those two streams. And it’s exactly a reflection of the issue. By the way, another parameter that distinguishes Ponevezh from Slabodka: as I said earlier, most yeshiva heads are from Ponevezh, not from Slabodka. And of course the correlation isn’t accidental. Because if it’s structured, then that means any average person who works properly can become a yeshiva head. You can give general lectures on any topic / passage you want, it really makes no difference whether you learned it or not learned it; there’s an orderly technique, you know exactly what to say. I know this. It becomes so easy to give lectures afterward, because it builds you in a very, very rigid, very straightforward way.

[Speaker B] And is there also a turn to certain medieval authorities (Rishonim), later authorities (Acharonim) every time, or not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Usually the central ones. They don’t deal with esoterica.

[Speaker L] And then do new insights come out of that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No — yes, new insights do come out.

[Speaker L] You build—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The logic, the analysis, produces new insights. But someone who’s inside the system can predict those insights. You need to ask the right questions; once you ask the right questions, we know what the answer is. There’s a book about the controversy over pilpul by Dov Rappel, a little pamphlet, a booklet, and there he describes how in the period of pilpul, the 15th–16th centuries, there was a toolbox for the pilpulists. For every kind of difficulty, it was already known what answer you gave to it — I mean, it even had a name. This is a Regensburger, because in Regensburg, in the yeshiva of the city of Regensburg, that’s how they answered such difficulties.

[Speaker E] Like openings in chess.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, like openings in chess, exactly the same thing. This one’s that, Queen’s Gambit — everything has names. Now you can see in the Shelah, in Maharam Schiff, people from that period and from Poland, from that pilpul-heavy area, that they bring an answer and then say, “That’s a Regensburger, fine, let’s move on to the next question.” They don’t even state the answer, because there are these very orderly structures: certain types of difficulties and certain types of… By the way, it’s a very beautiful thing, because it means a methodology is developing; you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time. On the other hand, it’s very limiting, because if you want to open up something new, they’re incapable of hearing it — a Ponevezh person, something else. When you say something that doesn’t fit the standard fixed mold, they don’t hear you at all, it doesn’t go in. “That’s nonsense, you’re talking nonsense, you don’t know…” They’re not willing to hear anything. Totally square, really. That’s why my opening talk to students was always: start in Ponevezh and finish in Slabodka. Someone who starts in Slabodka — that’s a mistake. And someone who finishes in Ponevezh — that’s also a mistake. You need to do it this way: at the beginning, start by being a student. Learn what people who know have said. Learn formulas, yes, learn how to do it right. Learn what has been done until now — after all, people weren’t idiots. Learn what we’ve learned until now, and afterward try to open up and create something of your own. Later. If you did that right from the start, you’d just be talking nonsense. You yourself didn’t apply that—

[Speaker E] That, because you say you didn’t like it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t like Slabodka because they do it at the initial stage. I like it when you say something of your own after there’s a structure and you know how to ground it. That’s exactly the difference between someone who does it from the beginning and someone who does it after he’s already gone through the Ponevezh crucible. It’s a completely different world. That’s why I say: in Slabodka they assume they’re all the Chazon Ish, but they’re not. The Chazon Ish knew how to do it from the beginning; he didn’t go through the Ponevezh part — he was the Chazon Ish. But someone else who does it that way — no. You need a certain training, and in training you have to work. No free ideas; it’s not… After you work, now add your own layer.