Ein Ayah – Berakhot – Lesson 20

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The prohibition of murder really deals with the hyphen between the body and the soul, the way Burg used to say that the main thing in Religious Zionism is the hyphen between Zionism and religiosity. So too in the context of murder: the prohibition of murder is really about a dualistic conception; it is about severance, severance between the body and the spirit. Meaning, if the three cardinal sins are such that one is focused on the body, one on the spirit, and one on the hyphen between body and spirit—yes, that may be some expression of a dualistic view. In any case, let’s talk a bit more about the meaning of this dualism, and what after all can be said about the relation between soul and body, or between spirit and matter, at least in the human being. After that, maybe we can project from this also onto the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world.

I don’t remember whether I mentioned this too, but I once had a conversation with an interesting Jew who passed away a few years ago, Professor Yosef Neumann from Tel Aviv University. He called me after I published the book on evolution, and we talked about various things. He was a convinced neo-Darwinist materialist, even combative. You can search online and find a lot of articles, interviews—he was a very active person in these areas. We had a fascinating conversation because he was a very interesting and open person, unlike most of the people I know from that camp—maybe unlike most people I know in general.

We were talking, and he started speaking with me—he didn’t know that the next book I was cooking up was The Science of Freedom, on free choice—but somehow we got onto that topic, and he told me that he can’t understand his materialist colleagues, who basically deny the existence of a mental dimension in the human being. Meaning, their claim is that there is no such thing as desires, emotions, thoughts—it’s all molecules. In other words, there is nothing except that. Now, he himself was a materialist, but he said: I can’t explain to them the most basic thing there is. You simply can’t understand how an intelligent person can say otherwise. These things exist; that doesn’t mean they are entities. And here this connects to what I wanted to say earlier.

Neumann, for instance, argued that there is no spiritual substance. Meaning, there is only matter in the world. But you cannot deny the existence of a mental dimension in the human being. A person thinks, gets emotional, wants, loves—I don’t know, all kinds of things of that sort. How can you deny that? They tell him: no, no, there’s no such thing; it’s all molecules and electrical currents. That is simply confusion, lack of understanding—I don’t even know how to relate to such a thing, even though sometimes you hear genuinely intelligent people saying this nonsense. It’s hard to understand. He himself told me: listen, I talk to my neo-Darwinist materialist friends and I can’t explain to them why they’re talking nonsense. You can’t deny a reality that everyone experiences in the most intimate and immediate way possible.

Now, you can only begin discussing—and this is what he did claim, and here I disagreed with him—he claimed that the mental dimension in a person is not some additional kind of substance. Meaning, he does not believe in the existence of spiritual entities. That he does not accept; he’s a materialist. But that doesn’t mean you have to deny the existence of mental dimensions in the human being. His claim was that these are functions of our material totality. I’ll explain in a moment. He defined it a bit more precisely, but that was basically the claim. Meaning, we are not talking here about entities. You can’t deny the existence of phenomena, but phenomena are not entities, or not necessarily entities. Rather, they are things that characterize, or are some functions of, our material totality. That was basically the claim.

And I think that’s the point I want to focus on, because here there is a very fine line, and I’m not completely convinced that I know how to define it sharply. This idea that spirit, or mental dimensions, are functions of the material whole is called in recent years—or really for several decades now—emergence. To emerge means to come forth, right? The claim is that spiritual phenomena emerge out of the material whole. They are not entities. In the dualistic conception—what we saw earlier in the Talmud—there is an entity called the soul, and it is in some sense inside me, or I don’t know, together with me, or however we define it; I’ll talk about that too. And somehow we function in a kind of tango dance between body and—between matter and spirit, two kinds of entities.

By contrast, Neumann, or the emergentists, claim that there is no spiritual entity. There is no such thing. The only entities are matter. Spirit is a function of the material whole. Somehow, when you connect various molecules in a certain way and they form a human body, suddenly certain mental functions are created. He thinks, he wants, he feels, all kinds of things of this sort. But those are properties of the molecules. There is nothing that exists beyond the molecules. It’s like saying that I wouldn’t claim that the speed of a body is a thing that exists. What exists is the body. Speed is something that characterizes the body. The body is in a state in which it moves; it has speed. That doesn’t mean speed is another thing. In the same way, they want to say that mental phenomena are properties or characteristics of the material totality, but there is no ontic infrastructure, no metaphysical infrastructure—there is no entity that carries these phenomena, which is what we call soul, or spirit, or psyche, or something like that.

One of the first to raise this option, I think, in a very clear way was an American philosopher named John Searle. His book, if I remember correctly, is called Mind, Brain, Science, something like that—the translation, anyway. It’s a series of lectures he gave on the BBC, I think, and it was published as a book in the Ofakim series of Am Oved. There he brings the following example to illustrate his idea. He says: think about a water molecule. Does a water molecule have the property of liquidity? The answer is obviously not. Right? Liquidity is a state of aggregation of a collection, of a cluster—that’s why it’s called a phase, a state of matter. It describes how a cluster of molecules behaves. It can be liquid, solid, or gas. And now, yesterday or the day before, another state of matter was reported—right? Liquid crystal was already known, and now some other kind of specific liquid crystals were discovered. So there are other states of matter too, at least in some respects. But the three familiar states are gas, liquid, and solid.

But those states are properties of a cluster of molecules. The individual molecule is not liquid, not solid, and not gas. It is none of those things. You can’t talk about it in those terms. Those terms belong only to the cluster, not to the individual element. So John Searle says: this is precisely an example of emergent properties. Meaning, there is a property that characterizes the whole—the collection of H2O water molecules—which does not exist in the individual molecule. It appears, or emerges, only when there is a collection of molecules. Then suddenly a new language is created, and you can talk about gas, liquid, and solid. In the individual molecule there isn’t the slightest hint; you can’t talk about it in those terms. It’s irrelevant to it.

So what does that mean? It means that sometimes, within a certain totality of things, properties appear that exist only on the level of the whole. They do not characterize the particulars that make up the whole. These are called emergent properties. And John Searle’s claim is that spirit, or our mental properties, is not an additional entity. He is not a dualist but a monist—yes, basically a materialist—and from this material totality, once it comes into existence—depending on what is needed for that, not important right now—properties suddenly emerge from this whole, and those are what we call mental phenomena. That is basically the claim.

And this is, I think, an illustration of the discussion with which I opened: when we speak about the soul, we can speak of it as a kind of entity—that is the banal, simple dualistic conception. And we can speak of it not as an entity at all, without denying its existence, like liquidity. Meaning, you need not deny its existence, but I do not see it as an entity, rather as a property of the material whole, or properties, phenomena, characteristics of the material whole. That is basically the claim.

I’ll just complete this discussion parenthetically and say that this claim of emergence seems to me very problematic. Because on the face of it, I see no reason in the world to assume that if the individual entity, the single molecule, lacks some property, then if I gather many molecules together, suddenly some property will arise that does not exist on the individual level but only on the collective level. Therefore it seems to me that to say that mental phenomena are an emergent result of the material whole is problematic; at the very least, the burden of proof lies on whoever claims this.

Now I’ll explain why liquidity is not a good example. But before that, think for example about seeing raspberry syrup in a cup. I have water with concentrate in it, and it’s red. Now I say: interesting—so if you collect water molecules into a cup, and enough quantity accumulates, it suddenly becomes colored red. But I deny the existence of any other element, any other entity, in that liquid. No, no, it’s only water molecules; only when I collect them do they suddenly become red, although each molecule individually is not red. Even though, apparently, this is more economical from the standpoint of Occam’s razor—the number of entities I assume exists—and ostensibly this is a preferable theory, I assume we would agree that this is not the more plausible theory. Rather, it is obvious that there is something else here that colors the water red.

Therefore it seems to me that the simpler explanation for mental phenomena is that they are indeed carried on a substrate that is spiritual, not material—that is, an entity of another kind, soul or spirit. It’s not just a connection of molecules with one another that suddenly creates desires and emotions and thoughts and all kinds of things like that. In my view that is a very problematic claim, or at least the burden of proof lies on whoever claims it.

And now I just want to explain why the liquidity example is misleading. Since then, a lot of water has flowed in the Jordan, and an ocean of articles has been written about this, so I’ll summarize briefly. The emergence of water, or the emergence of the property of liquidity on the collective level of water molecules, is what is called weak emergence. What does that mean? Today I already know how to explain, from the properties of the individual molecule—if you give me the temperature and pressure and so on—I can tell you how and why the liquid phase was formed. Meaning, why the property of liquidity is actually created. Molecules with different properties on the molecular level would not create liquid under the same conditions. They would be solid or gas or whatever, according to their phase diagram.

So that means that it’s true that you can’t speak of liquidity or solidity in a single molecule, but there is definitely a connection—and we know this connection—between the properties of the individual molecule, really the force field around the molecule, and what will happen when I gather many molecules together in one vessel: whether they will be gas, liquid, or solid. Therefore this is not really emergence. It’s like saying that when I gather ten people, then I have a quorum. So that means there is an emergent phenomenon here, meaning something new was created that doesn’t exist on the level of the particulars. No. I know that if you gather one plus one plus one, you have ten people. Ten people is not emergent relative to the property of one person. True, of one person you can’t say he is ten, you can’t say he is a quorum. Nonsense. You connect ten individuals, and you get a group of ten. That is not emergence.

Meaning, if I understand, or can map, the global property, the collective property, and translate it or ground it in the properties of the particulars that make up the collective—that is weak emergence; it’s not really emergence. What you are claiming regarding body and soul is something much more far-reaching and innovative. It is a claim that says that when I gather a collection of molecules—plain biological molecules, or cells if you prefer—and create some structure from them, suddenly properties are born there that no one has the faintest idea how to connect to the properties of a single molecule or even a single cell. There is no way to know this; there is not even a hint of which direction to look in; there is not even a language in which one can speak about it.

And this, incidentally, is what leads Yosef Neumann’s friends to their confusion, so they decide to deny the existence of this thing because they cannot map it onto the properties of molecules. But he, as a clear-headed person, says: what do you mean, such a thing exists. So apparently it is a product of the material whole. But then I tell him: listen, what do you mean, a product? You can’t tell me in any way how it was produced. You don’t know how to connect these collective properties, which according to your view supposedly emerge from the material whole—you don’t know how to connect them in any way to the properties of a single molecule or a single protein or a single cell. You can’t do it; you don’t even have the language in which it could be done. So on what basis are you proposing this absurd hypothesis?

So he says: because it’s more economical, since according to Occam’s razor, the fewer entities you assume, the more economical the theory. So I go back to the raspberry syrup example. I said: there are things that are not plausible. So I prefer to assume the existence of two entities rather than assume the existence of one entity plus an offspring that is completely implausible to derive from it. That does not sound like a simpler theory to me. Not at all.

So basically my claim is that in principle science will never be able to find strong emergence. Never. Therefore the fact that people use examples that are all weak emergence is not accidental, like the liquidity of water. Why? Because the moment science finds strong emergence, what has it found? It has found a property that appears at the collective level without there being another kind of entity; rather, everything emerges from the properties of the particulars. Now I ask the person who found this: how do you actually know there isn’t some additional entity here, and that it follows only from the properties of the particulars? How do you know that? Then he’ll say to me: here, look, make the calculation from the properties of the particulars, like liquidity from the field of the individual molecule, and then you’ll be able to see that it follows from the properties of the particulars. In other words, that necessarily makes it weak emergence. It is emergence in which one can show how it emerges from the level of the particulars to the level of the collective.

I ask: on what do you base the assumption that there is also strong emergence in the world? This is a hypothesis with no basis whatsoever, and more than that, I claim: it cannot possibly have a basis even in the future. This is not some technical problem, that science is not yet sufficiently developed or something like that. I already cannot understand how there could even theoretically be some future state in which science manages to find strong emergence. Because the moment it finds it, it has to show me that it really follows from the properties of the particulars. But the moment it shows that, it turns the emergence into weak emergence. Because then I already understand how it comes out from the particulars to the whole. So on that you cannot base the hypothesis that general properties—even if you cannot derive them or show their connection to the properties of the particulars—still really derive from them. That sounds to me like mere unreasonable stubbornness. But that closes the parenthesis.

And really the point with which I want to end this segment is that the discussion about the nature of the soul—and if you like, also about the Holy One, blessed be He, there is a parallel discussion there—is the question whether this is really some kind of entity, in which case we are dualists, or whether it is truly only something that emerges from the material whole. I am not denying the existence of mental phenomena or thought or will and so on, but I do not see in this another kind of entity. The Talmud here does describe it in a dualistic way. And again, I don’t know to what extent the Talmud is committed to or even aware of the philosophical conceptualizations or the metaphysics underlying the discussion. It is pretty clear to me that it is not. It is not committed to any particular metaphysics when it formulates one aggadic statement or another. But it seems to me that still, speaking innocently, you can certainly see here some kind of dualistic view, and of course you can see this in many places. It is fairly clear in the Talmud that this was the conception there.

The same is true regarding the Holy One, blessed be He. There too, incidentally, if you pay attention, many people define Him as some kind of idea, some kind of abstract concept, or if you want, Spinoza’s pantheism, which says that the whole totality is the Holy One, blessed be He. It is not another kind of entity; rather, the whole of existence is God. He is God. Meaning, there isn’t something else that is God. This is the parallel to the emergent conception of the soul. Basically, the totality of the world is God, not that there is another entity called God; and then we would be in a dualistic picture of world facing its God or its Creator. Rather, no—God is the material whole itself, nothing beyond that. This is really parallel to the discussion about the soul.

Now, maybe one more point related to this is a dispute—I think I spoke about it once too—in philosophy, even political philosophy if you like: the dispute about the existence of human collectives. A collection of people. Is this collection called a people, okay—is that some kind of entity, or is it a legal or cultural fiction of one sort or another? It is convenient for us to speak about some totality, give it a name, and talk about it, but in fact what exists is only the individual people. The whole is a cultural, legal, or other definition, but it’s not like a corporation in law, where the usual conception is that this is not a metaphysical statement. It’s not that the corporation really exists. It is convenient to define a legal entity called a corporation, or a limited company, or something like that, but I am not thereby committing myself to some metaphysical statement that such a thing really exists, that the company is something that really exists in some ontic, metaphysical sense, and not only the people and the equipment that make up that whole.

So in the context of collective versus particulars, there is the individualist conception, which says that what exists is only people, and society is basically a fictive definition—or if you like, it emerges from the totality of the particulars, again a kind of emergence. Again, I’m not talking about people who deny the existence of peoples—Shlomo Sand and his gang, who really go too far; that’s nonsense. But one can claim, and many do claim, that the collective is some characteristic of the totality of the particulars; it is not another entity. Okay? In contrast to this individualist conception stands a fascist conception. A fascist conception basically says—and I’m talking about metaphysical fascism, not a fascist system of values. You can be an individualist in the metaphysical sense, meaning believe that only individual people exist, but hold as a matter of values that what stands above all is the existence of the collective, or collective values. Fine? Without committing yourself to the idea that the collective really exists in the metaphysical sense.

I’m speaking about fascism as a metaphysical conception, not just a value-system, but as a conception that says: Nazism was fascist also in the metaphysical sense. There was a very strong mythology there at the foundation of the Aryan race. They viewed this race, or the Aryan or German collective, as some kind of entity. There really was a pantheon of gods there in certain contexts. They had an entire mythology there, this ancient Teutonic mythology, which spoke very deeply to many of the Nazis. And this is basically a conception that says—this is metaphysical fascism—that the collective not only exists, but basically it is the only thing that exists. That too is monism. Just as individualism is monistic, metaphysical fascism is also monistic. Meaning, the nation is basically the only entity that exists; the individuals are organs within this collective entity. They have no real independent existence.

Because if you ask the individualists, you can ask them some difficult questions. Why do you assume that a person exists and a people is a fiction? Why not assume that the person too is a fiction, and what exists is the cell? Or perhaps the cell is a fiction and what exists is the molecule or the protein? Or if you like, the quark exists and everything else is fiction; or go down as far as you can down the slope of elementary particles, get to strings, I don’t know where, and that is what exists and everything else is fiction. Where do you stop, or where do you begin your emergence, and up to where are you willing to accept the existence of collective entities? That is a very difficult question. Why does an individualist think that a person exists in some more real sense than a society, when the person too is only a collective of cells or molecules or particles? The person exists, it is an existing entity, while a people is fiction? Well, that is a very difficult question.

In any case, the individualist’s claim is that the person exists and the things composing him are organs—this is what is called an organism. They are organs within the organic entity. The collective entity is organic. It is organic in the sense that the components that compose it cohere and create one body. It is not a fiction; this body is truly a body defined in the metaphysical sense as one body. So the fascists basically just take one more step beyond that. Suddenly it becomes much less mystical compared to individualism, which seems to us terribly rational. They are both mystical to almost the same degree. Fascism merely takes it one step further and claims that the collective is the thing that really exists—the collective of a group of people—and the people themselves are organs in that organic entity. Exactly as the individualist says about the organs of the body, or the cells of the body, or the molecules within it. Okay? So basically there is a very difficult philosophical question here: where do we draw the line between fictions or emergent properties and entities?

So in the context of the human being too there is basically the same question. But here notice there is an important point. The soul, in relation to the body—it is hard to disconnect this, or I think it is not right to disconnect it, from seeing the body as a whole. Meaning, after a person dies—fine—I separated his soul from his body. Now the body is no longer a whole. It is simply a collection of molecules that happen to be connected, but it is no longer an organism. Right? It is not an organic entity. Meaning there is something very deep here. The soul is not only—even if you are a dualist and think the soul is some kind of entity—once it is inside the body, it does something to the body itself. It is not just that it connects to the body and now there are two connected things here that create an organic entity. Rather, it turns the collection of molecules that forms the body into an organic entity.

Now one can also talk about biology. The biological body, even if you do not accept the existence of a soul, is an organic entity. It is an organic entity by virtue of the soul. Meaning, the soul performs two functions here. First, it connects to the body as a separate entity—but that connection, I’m saying within the dualistic conception, also does something to the body. The body itself becomes, from a collection of molecules, a collective entity. As it says about the king: “Has not one of the people almost lain with your wife?” The king is called “one of the people”; he turns the people into one. So the soul turns the body into one, into an organic entity. And the Holy One, blessed be He, turns the world into an organic entity. A lot of mystics deal with this; I won’t go into it, mysticism is not dear to me. It’s hard to define things there. But basically this is also the kind of discourse among mystics regarding the relation between God and the world. He turns the world into one organic entity by virtue of there being some kind of cosmic soul within it. Yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, basically constitutes a kind of soul of the universe that turns it into an organic body. And not for nothing does Kabbalah indeed describe the world in the form of a human body, within which there is light, just as the Holy One, blessed be He, is a soul in a body. You see that we are returning to the analogy the Talmud makes here between the relation of the Holy One, blessed be He, to the world and the relation of the soul to the body in which it is found.

Then what basically happens is something interesting. The connection of soul to body in the dualistic conception—and again I’m assuming dualism both because I believe in it and because I think that is what is written in the Talmud. So even if someone doesn’t believe in it right now, let’s learn the Talmud. The claim is that the connection of the soul to the body does two things. First, it creates the hyphen between soul and body, the thing the murderer severs—yes, cuts that hyphen or erases that hyphen. Second, the body connected to the soul also becomes something else. It becomes an organic entity. Biology exists in itself, independently of the soul, by the way. Incidentally, Kabbalists really divide things here among nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah, and yechidah. The nefesh is the thing that turns the body into an organic entity. The ruach and the neshamah are the mental functions. Those are different things. So this whole spiritual complex can also be divided according to its functions. One function is mental phenomena; the second function is biological phenomena—that is, to turn the body from a dead body into a biologically living body, even before spirit and thoughts and desires and emotions and things of that sort. So that is basically the relation between nefesh and ruach, or ruach and neshamah.

So the connection of the soul to the body is not only a causal connection, in which the soul in some sense is its cause—the cause of the body, by virtue of which it can even be considered a body, an organic entity—but it is also some kind of unification or inter-inclusion of soul and body that together create one whole. And it also turns the body into an organic entity, and now also the connection of the body to the soul turns them both into one entity. In the worlds of Kabbalah, they divide the worlds into the world of action, above it the world of formation, above it the world of creation, above it the world of emanation, and further on, there are more. What is the world of emanation? The Leshem, if I remember correctly, explains that the world of emanation means that the infinite light is with it. Therefore “emanation” is from the phrase “with Him.” It is with it like a soul in a body. Meaning, basically, one cannot separate the light from the vessels, from the body, the bodies, the matter that exists in the world of emanation. They are literally one entity.

In our world one can speak of two entities: there is soul and there is material body, and we understand these as two entities that connect and somehow interpenetrate. There, at least from our perspective, it looks like one thing. That is why it is called the world of emanation, because the soul is with it, inside the body like a soul in a body, basically becoming one entity. Therefore these are called worlds that, from our perspective, are considered almost literally the body of God. For the philosophers—I mean the Jewish philosophers—to say such a thing is outright heresy; that is anthropomorphism. But in the kabbalistic context that is the terminology. Meaning, the body of God: the world of emanation.

In any case, a few more remarks that still belong to the introduction. I see that this introduction is taking me a bit of time. We are used to saying that the soul is inside the body. The Talmud we read earlier says that it fills the entire body. What does that mean? Does that mean the soul has spatial coordinates? It is located at X equals two and Y equals three in the world? That’s a bit strange, because a soul is a spiritual entity. And I distinguish it from light. The location of light too, by the way, is a very problematic matter—those familiar with this know that a photon doesn’t really have a location. A photon fills the whole world too. It has a defined momentum, and therefore it has no location at all. But a real photon, not a theoretical photon, has no defined momentum, and therefore it also has a more defined place. In any case, a soul is a kind of theoretical photon—a sort of thing that is completely spiritual. And because of that, it is hard to speak about the location of the soul. Where is the soul located? Where? Here, where my body is located.

I think it is more correct to speak in terms of where the soul affects, not where it is. Where does the soul affect? And it has an affinity to this body. My soul has an affinity to this body. Not that it is inside me in some geographic or spatial sense. Rather, the soul—I don’t know in what sense it is in space, if at all; I don’t think so—but it has an affinity to my body. And therefore that is what the Talmud says here: just as the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the whole world, so too the soul fills the whole body. It not only fills the whole body; it fills the whole world. Because it is not really located anywhere in the body. Nor in all of it. Because it is not located in some sense in which it has a specific place you can point to and say: here the soul is. Soul is a spiritual concept.

It’s like asking where Plato’s idea is located, Plato’s idea of horse-ness. Where is it? Can you give it coordinates? According to Plato, who held that the ideas are existing entities—where do they exist? Where are they located? They don’t exist in any place. You cannot describe their existence in terms of spatial coordinates, because they are abstract entities, spiritual entities. Therefore, the expression “fills the whole world,” I don’t think means to say that He literally fills the whole world, the way they explain to children. The meaning is that He affects the whole world. He is not located in the spatial sense throughout the whole world, because He is not located in the same sense that other objects are located in space. But He has an affinity to every place in the world. The same is true of the soul and the body. The soul too is not in the body. It has an affinity to all the parts of the body to which it is connected.

Therefore I think that even if you read the Talmud here sensitively and insistently, you can continue this analogy to the Holy One, blessed be He, and to the soul, and understand that when we speak of spiritual entities, the expressions are usually borrowed expressions. “Fills the whole body” means: it has no place. It reminds me a little of the Kedushah prayer: “His attendants ask one another, ‘Where is the place of His glory, to revere Him?’ Opposite them they praise and say…” Meaning, the angels ask themselves where the Holy One, blessed be He, is located so that they may turn to Him and revere Him, serve Him. They do not find Him; there is no answer there. “Opposite them.” Opposite them they praise and say. So what do they do? Wherever they are, opposite where they are—there is no need to look for a specific place. Why not? The simple conception is because He is everywhere. The philosophically more correct answer, it seems to me, is that He is nowhere. He is nowhere; He exists, but not in a place. Because this attribution of place—and maybe time too, though time is a little different, I don’t know—but at least place, is not relevant to a spiritual entity.

Therefore, once the angels come to the conclusion that He is nowhere, “opposite them they praise and say.” So it doesn’t matter to which place you turn; you turn to a spiritual entity not through some specific place. Yes, even in prayer we pray from Jerusalem, but if one loses direction, it’s not terrible; you can do it facing another direction too.

In any case, the claim is that between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world, or between the soul and the body, there is some double relation: a relation of cause and effect, but also a relation of organic entity, of soul vis-à-vis… yes, the soul animates the body and is also connected with it, as I said before. Apparently the same exists also between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world. And in the previous sections of Rabbi Kook we spoke about how the soul of the world—that is, the Holy One, blessed be He—and our soul, the soul of the individual human being, are themselves connected to each other. The Holy One, blessed be He, is basically the inner light, the filling one—as opposed to the surrounding one—that is actually inside me, yes, my soul. And therefore there is also a connection between the two… that is, there is an analogy of the Holy One, blessed be He, versus the world, and the soul versus the body, but the Holy One, blessed be He, and the soul are also connected in some sense, because the soul basically comes from Him. There is some relation of emanation between Him and the soul. It’s not only that He created it; in some sense it is really part of Him. And it is not easy to make a sharp separation between it and Him.

One more remark. I already see that I’m not really going to manage to get to Rabbi Kook himself, so at least let’s try to finish the introduction now. I once wrote—also in the trilogy, at the end of the first book—I spoke a bit about religious obligation. Why do we have to serve the Holy One, blessed be He? I said there that many people speak of grounding this obligation in terms of gratitude. One must show Him gratitude for creating you, and so on. And I already said that Rabbi Amital wrote this sharply, in his usual way, that it is very hard to ground our obligation to the Holy One, blessed be He, in gratitude, for many reasons. He spoke mainly in the wake of the Holocaust and evil and so on, but there are many reasons. It is very difficult. He did not make an effort to create us; it costs Him nothing to produce all of us. It’s not as if we need to appreciate what He did for us, and so on. In short, for many reasons it is hard to speak here of gratitude in the same sense in which we speak of gratitude between human beings.

So I wanted to argue there that there is what may be called metaphysical gratitude, or philosophical gratitude, or ontic gratitude. Yes, gratitude directed not toward someone who did me a favor—which is what we usually mean; someone who did me a favor, I owe him gratitude. Gratitude is an obligation toward someone who did me a favor. But there I spoke of gratitude toward one who created me, regardless of the question whether he did me a favor or not. Yes, that is what the verse says: “Is this how you repay the Lord, O base and unwise people?… Is He not your Father, your Master? He made you and established you.” Meaning, it’s not only that He establishes you, but He also made you. Not only that He sustains you all the time or helps you exist, but He made you. Meaning there are two reasons for which we owe gratitude. One is to someone who benefits us, sustains us, helps us continue to exist. And the second is to someone who created us. By the mere fact that we came from Him, we owe Him some gratitude. We are supposed to fulfill the commandments He imposes on us.

Now, in light of the description I gave here, I think this takes on even greater force or becomes sharper, because the claim is that it is even more than that He created us. Rather, He is basically what underlies our existence; He emanated us. We are basically something that in a certain sense is part of Him. Just as the Holy One, blessed be He, is the entity that turns the world into a collective, He is the soul of the world, so in some sense that is of course what underlies the fact that the soul turns the body into an organic entity. Okay, so basically the Holy One, blessed be He, is what is present, He unifies the world, yes, turns the world into an organic entity and each person into an organic entity, and without that we would not be here at all. So this is much stronger than saying He created us and therefore we owe gratitude. Rather, we exist only because something of Him is present in us and turns us into an organic entity.

Okay, so… you know what? Maybe just so as to discharge our duty to Rabbi Kook, so that we won’t remain completely without him, I’ll read just the first short passage. Rabbi Kook has three passages on this Talmudic statement, so we’ll read only the short one. Okay, he says like this: “The whole world in its entirety conducts itself according to long rational orders, through His supreme wisdom, may He be blessed. And the wise laws governing the whole system of the body are all in the power of the soul and its faculties, which guide the body in a rational order. And there is not to be found a small part of the bodily system that does not enter into the calculation of the rational order, for if such a part were found, it would interfere with the governance of the rational soul.”

What does that mean? I think what he means to say is what I said earlier: this is not governance in the sense of a king who governs the world; it is governance in the sense of operation from within. I return to the “surrounding” and the “filling” from the previous passages we saw. Basically what turns us into what we are, what plants in us the regularity according to which our physiology works, or the laws of nature according to which the whole world is conducted, is basically the Holy One, blessed be He. Therefore, those “long rational orders in His supreme wisdom” are basically what is meant by “Forever, Lord, Your word stands firm in the heavens.” The Greek logos, yes—the divine reason is basically inside the world. It’s not that He designed it according to what was in His head; rather, His head is inside the world. That is basically what causes the world to behave according to the regularity by which it behaves.

Therefore every detail in the world ostensibly ought to correspond to something in the wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He, even the tiny details. Therefore he says: “And there is not to be found a small part of the bodily system that does not enter into the calculation of the rational order,” because this corresponds to that. There is no isolated thing here; they are turned into one entity. Every little thing like that—if it had no counterpart, or if there were no filling inner light within it that is something of the Holy One, blessed be He—it would not be here. Meaning there has to be a full analogy between the spiritual dimension and the material dimension, because in the end they are connected and become one. He says that the same as the relation between soul and body is also the relation between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world.

I’ll just finish with a little story that happened to me personally; maybe I told it once too, I no longer remember what I told where. Once I was hospitalized in HaSharon Hospital with appendicitis. This was shortly after my book God Plays Dice, on evolution, had come out. I was lying there, and there was a doctors’ round, and the head of the department came in. He sees some religious guy lying on the bed, so he says to me: you know that the appendix has no role in the body. As if as a jab at religious people who think the Holy One, blessed be He, created everything wisely and every detail has a role, like Rabbi Kook writes here.

But he didn’t know who he had fallen on. I had just finished writing—just after that book God Plays Dice had come out—and I asked him: I assume that according to your view, evolution did all this. The question is how you explain the existence of an organ that has no function at all—how does evolution allow such a thing to survive? It seems to me that you owe an explanation for this no less than I do. And indeed, we know there are arguments today. Some claim the appendix has a function; others say it doesn’t. As far as I know, that is still under debate among different researchers.

Well, that’s an amusing anecdote, because this fit that is supposed to exist between every detail and divine wisdom can also receive a parallel neo-Darwinian explanation. There too, as Dawkins keeps repeating with great devotion every time, he says: there is nothing superfluous in evolution. Meaning, anything superfluous will be eliminated firmly and unequivocally. No trace of it will remain. Evolution is very aggressive and imposes its “wisdom,” in quotation marks, on reality. So you can call that evolution by various names—maybe it’s the Holy One, blessed be He; maybe it’s evolution—but something of His wisdom apparently has to be found in every detail. That is what Rabbi Kook is claiming, and this is really a first expression of the introduction I gave earlier about the very intimate connection between soul and body, or between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world. Okay, so we have discharged our duty to Rabbi Kook, at least with the first passage. We’ll continue with the next two passages.

[Speaker C] My question is whether, when we’re talking here about an entity, are we really talking on the ontological level or on the epistemic level?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What’s the difference? Epistemology is cognition of something that exists in the world. You can say that my epistemology is misleading me, but if it’s epistemology, it’s a perception of something, so there is something that I’m perceiving. So what difference does it make whether it’s epistemic or metaphysical?

[Speaker C] No, it makes a huge difference, because it’s like if someone comes and tells me that there are demons, that the Sages believed in demons. But there’s a very big difference between whether they really believed in entities that are demons, or whether they thought this was part of our cognition, that these are cognitive processes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, then that isn’t epistemic either, it’s just a hallucination. Epistemology is our cognition of the world. So if I cognize it epistemically, then there is something that I’m cognizing. The claim that demons don’t exist in the world and the Sages, I don’t know, imagined them, invented them, thought them up—that’s not epistemology. On the contrary, those are experiences or, I don’t know, hallucinations—call them subjective.

[Speaker C] Wait, so you’re basically saying there’s no difference between an ontological dualist and an epistemic dualist? Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That sounds strange. Epistemology simply enables me to know what is happening in the world. Unless you say that my epistemology is misleading me, but then that’s not epistemology, that’s just a hallucination. Epistemology, literally translated, is the theory of cognition. So if I know something, then there is something that I know. Anyone else? Okay, so we’ll stop here. Goodbye. Next week we’ll continue. Tuesday next week, God willing. Goodbye.