Ein Ayah – Berachot 15

Table of Contents

• Opening of the lecture and technical framework
• The Talmud in Berakhot 9b on “and they let them borrow” and “against their will”
• Rabbi Kook in Ein Ayah, section 115: two tactics of influence and dependence on the moral level of the nations
• Maimonides in Eight Chapters, chapter 6: the virtuous person and the one who rules over his soul, and the distinction between rational commandments and revelational commandments
• The distinction between an ideal and educational effectiveness: returning to Rabbi Kook
• The story of the “turkey prince” from Rabbi Nachman: treatment by entering the patient’s world
• “They beat him until he says, ‘I want to’” and a psychological explanation of halakhic coercion
• The depth of evil versus its sharpness, and the implication for Rabbi Kook’s two modes of action
• Game theory, child education, and political rules as outcome-based correction rather than education
• Concluding discussion on force versus agreement in public disputes
• Questions from the audience: clarifying points from the lecture and additional topics

Summary

General overview

The lecture opens with the Talmud in Berakhot 9b on “and they let them borrow” as an act done “against their will,” and brings the Talmudic interpretations of whether the coercion was applied to the Egyptians or to Israel. Rabbi Kook, in Ein Ayah section 115, sets out two ways to elevate a people from the degradation of slavery and to influence other nations: the force of a “staff of destruction” versus the influence of “words of grace and good conduct,” and he says that the choice depends on the moral level of the people standing before you. The lecture then brings Maimonides’ distinction in Eight Chapters between “the virtuous person” and “the one who rules over his soul,” and the speaker explains that the apparent dispute between the philosophers and the Sages is resolved by distinguishing between rational commandments and revelational commandments. After that, the lecture presents Rabbi Nachman’s story of the “turkey prince,” principles of behavioral treatment, and the question of the depth of evil versus its severity. From there, it proposes a renewed understanding of Rabbi Kook: the question is not who is more ideal, but which method will actually work with whom. The discussion broadens to educational and political implications, and concludes with a cluster of questions on the material studied and on additional topics.

Opening of the lecture and technical framework

The lecturer mutes microphones so things can run in an orderly way, and announces that at the end of the lecture microphones will be opened for questions, both on the lecture and on other topics. He says that recordings of the lecture are uploaded to the website and to the WhatsApp group, and that today they are studying Ein Ayah, section 115.

The Talmud in Berakhot 9b on “and they let them borrow” and “against their will”

The Talmud cites Rabbi Ami’s statement that the borrowing was “against their will,” and presents two opinions: against the will of the Egyptians, or against the will of Israel. The explanation for “against the will of Israel” is because of the burden: Israel did not want to carry silver and gold vessels into the desert, and so they were compelled to take them. The speaker connects this to the reason “so that that righteous one should not say” that the promise “and afterward they shall go out with great wealth” had not been fulfilled. The speaker notes that it is difficult to say “against the will of the Egyptians” when the verse says, “And the Lord gave the people favor in the eyes of the Egyptians,” and suggests that an act that looks voluntary can still count as “against one’s will” if the will itself was produced through conditioning or hypnosis.

Rabbi Kook in Ein Ayah, section 115: two tactics of influence and dependence on the moral level of the nations

Rabbi Kook says that in order to raise up a people sunk in the degradation of slavery, one must teach it that it is fit to be “a light unto the nations” and to recognize its greatness, that it was created to be “a ruler among the nations,” in order to spread morality and knowledge of God among “wild men clinging to every abomination.” He says that Israel’s influence on the nations can come either “with a staff of destruction and the cry of a ruler” or “through words of grace and good conduct,” which will cause the nations to stream “in the light of God” and seek closeness to Israel. Rabbi Kook adds that both ways are needed, “everything according to the level of the nations and the level of their moral state,” and that nations behaving with evil abominations and corrupting political civilization and the splendor of the human soul need to see “strength of hand,” because “servants like them are not disciplined by words.” Rabbi Kook also describes nations that “have only slightly strayed” from corrupt ways as those in whom there is hope that they will recognize the truth and come “to seek the name of God,” and toward them one can act through paths of love.

Rabbi Kook explains the Talmud this way: corresponding to “the uplifting of the soul to the strength of a ruler,” what is needed is “against the will of the Egyptians”; and corresponding to “the expansion of understanding,” where nations seek closeness to Israel through ways of love, what is needed is “against the will of Israel.” He writes that the Egyptians sought closeness to Israel when they saw that they benefited by giving to them, and he defines this as a proper step toward the future fulfillment of “and unto him shall the obedience of the peoples be.” He cites, “Their silver and their gold with them, for the name of the Lord your God and for the Holy One of Israel, because He has glorified you.” The speaker says these remarks point to contact with Egypt in both modes, and that Israel needed to acquire tools for both forms of influence in order to use them later on.

Maimonides in Eight Chapters, chapter 6: the virtuous person and the one who rules over his soul, and the distinction between rational commandments and revelational commandments

Maimonides defines “the one who rules over his soul” as a person who performs virtuous acts but desires evil, struggles with his impulse, and suffers in doing good, as opposed to “the virtuous person,” who is naturally drawn to good things and desires them. He says that the philosophers hold that the virtuous person is better and more complete than the one who rules over himself, and he cites verses from Proverbs—“The soul of the wicked desires evil” and “It is joy for the righteous to do justice”—as fitting that view. Maimonides says that after investigating the words of the Sages, he found the opposite: that one who desires transgressions and longs for them but refrains from them is greater, citing “Whoever is greater than his fellow, his impulse is greater than his,” and “According to the pain is the reward.” Maimonides also cites Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel: “A person should not say, ‘I do not want to eat meat cooked in milk…’ Rather, ‘I do want to—yet what can I do, since my Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me.’”

Maimonides raises the difficulty that on the face of it there is a contradiction between the philosophers and the Sages, and he rules that both are true and there is no dispute, because they are speaking about different areas. He says that the philosophers are speaking about evils universally recognized as such—bloodshed, theft, robbery, deception, harming others, and dishonoring parents—and in those matters, a soul that desires evil is deficient, while the virtuous person who does not desire evil is more complete. He says that the Sages were speaking about “the revelational commandments,” meaning statutes, things which “if the Torah had not been given, would not have been evils at all.” In those matters, it is proper that the motivation be the command itself rather than natural inclination. He emphasizes that the Sages themselves illustrated this with revelational matters such as “the red heifer and the scapegoat.” The speaker adds an internal discussion about whether there is a contradiction between Eight Chapters and the Laws of Kings. He suggests that the Laws of Kings deals with the question of why one fulfills commandments, where the emphasis is on the command, while Eight Chapters deals with whether it is appropriate to develop inner identification with rational commandments, without turning that identification into the reason one fulfills them.

The distinction between an ideal and educational effectiveness: returning to Rabbi Kook

The speaker says that Rabbi Kook is not dealing with the question of which type is more ideal, but with the question of what will actually succeed in practice with different types of people. He explains that Rabbi Kook argues that there are situations in which gentle influence simply will not work, and so force becomes necessary—not because coercion is ideally superior, but because there is no practical alternative.

The story of the “turkey prince” from Rabbi Nachman: treatment by entering the patient’s world

The story describes a king’s son who went mad and believed he was a turkey, behaving accordingly, naked under the table, and all the doctors despaired of curing him. One wise man joins him, behaves like a turkey too, and gradually persuades him that a “turkey” can also wear a shirt, trousers, and other clothes, eat human food, and sit at the table—until he cures him. The speaker asks in what sense this was a cure if the prince remained in the consciousness of being a turkey but returned to normal behavior, and he connects this to a behaviorist approach of correcting through behavior. He also raises the opposite difficulty from the question at the beginning of the treatment: the prince asks the wise man, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” which seems to imply that he recognizes the wise man as a human being; and if so, it becomes puzzling how he himself can think he is a turkey.

The speaker suggests that there are two kinds of “patients”: one who has an inner healthy point and only distorted outer layers, as opposed to someone who is “broken to the core” and has no healthy point that can be worked with. He says that real treatment relies on an inner point of health, whereas someone who has no such point is not treatable but only subject to coercion or “re-education.” He explains that the turkey’s illness is built out of an impulse that leads to a bizarre theory meant to allow him to throw off restraint, and that the wise man works by entering the patient’s system, gradually correcting behavior in practice, and weakening the theory once it no longer serves any practical purpose.

“They beat him until he says, ‘I want to’” and a psychological explanation of halakhic coercion

The speaker compares the turkey dynamic to the rule “they beat him until he says, ‘I want to,’” in the laws of divorce, where Jewish law requires a bill of divorce. He explains that the coercion does not create a new will, but removes obstacles that allow the inner will to fulfill Jewish law to be revealed, because the theory justifying refusal is constructed in order to serve anger and impulse. He adds that in his view this rule does not apply to a person who has no fear of Heaven, because then there is no inner “I want to” that can be uncovered.

The depth of evil versus its sharpness, and the implication for Rabbi Kook’s two modes of action

The speaker explains that Rabbi Kook’s division between those who require force and those who can be influenced gently does not depend on how extreme their actions are, but on the psychological depth of the evil. He says a person can be thoroughly wicked and still retain a healthy point, while another person whose evil is less extreme may lack any inner point of hope. He presents force as, at times, a means of removing the incentive for a false theory, but says that the desired goal is to build a person who wants the good from within, and not merely behaves correctly under coercion.

Game theory, child education, and political rules as outcome-based correction rather than education

The speaker brings the game theory solution for dividing a cake equally: one person cuts and the other chooses first. He defines it as a perfect outcome-based solution, but educationally problematic, because it relies on maximal self-interest and encourages it. He says such a method is suitable only when there is no hope for inner education and all you want is quiet or a result, but it destroys education when there is a “point” that can be developed. He applies this to the political sphere and argues that changing rules—such as direct election of the prime minister—tried to “harness” interests toward a desired result but did not solve essential problems, because in complex systems there will always be workarounds. He says the deeper solution requires demanding human behavior, not just obedience to rules.

Concluding discussion on force versus agreement in public disputes

The speaker ties the tension between force and agreement to internal and external political arguments, and says the dispute revolves around the question whether the side standing opposite you has a point that can be worked with through explanation and personal example, or whether “there is no one to talk to” and only force will work. He emphasizes the danger of “forever living by the sword,” and suggests that the practical question is making a correct assessment of the type of person standing before you.

Questions from the audience: clarifying points from the lecture and additional topics

The audience asks whether a person who has an inner point of truth would not eventually stop “playing along” with a false theory, and the speaker replies that people can remain entrenched for a long time in theories that are convenient for the impulse, and that sometimes change does not happen on its own. A question is asked about Maimonides’ phrase “except from among their wise men” in the Laws of Kings, and about the fact that Maimonides includes forbidden sexual relations among the examples of revelational commandments. The speaker says the classifications are not always consistent, and that there are tensions in Maimonides on these distinctions. Another question is asked about the definition of the evil impulse and what distinguishes an intellectual error from a theory that serves impulse, and the speaker describes a reciprocal relationship in which impulses drag the intellect into constructing sophisticated justifications, while noting the difficulty of determining with certainty what is in another person’s heart.

A side question is asked about “negation by abstraction” versus “nullifying” and “opposing,” and the speaker says he did not retract anything, he simply omitted it because of the complexity. Another question is asked about Nefesh HaChaim and the claim that Torah study “upholds” the world, and the speaker tends to interpret this as a metaphor for the purpose of the world rather than a mystical claim that the world would immediately collapse. A question is asked about free choice in the context of homosexuality and conversion therapy, and the speaker says he is not qualified to determine therapeutic efficacy and that this is a scientific question. He adds that whether something is “natural” does not by itself determine whether it is “okay” or “not okay,” and that one must also consider the possible harms of treatments. The lecture concludes with an invitation to future lectures and the announcement that a message will be sent in the WhatsApp group.

Okay, once again, my apologies to everyone, I’m muting everybody, simply because otherwise it’ll be impossible to work. And also, okay. Well, as usual, at the end of the lesson we’ll open microphones and also allow questions about what came up in the lesson, and if people want, we can also talk about other things. Recordings of the lesson go up both on the website and in the WhatsApp group. In any case, today we’re in Ein Ayah, section 115. Maybe we’ll start with the Talmudic passage that we actually already saw. So I’m starting in Berakhot 9b. The Talmud says as follows: “And they let them borrow,” Rabbi Ami said: this teaches that they let them borrow against their will. This lending was done against their will. Against whose will? So the Talmud says: some say against the will of the Egyptians, and some say against the will of Israel. Meaning, there are opinions that this “against their will” refers to the Egyptians, that they made them do it against the Egyptians’ will, that they compelled them to give the silver and gold vessels to Israel. And there are those who say that they compelled Israel, not the Egyptians, to take them. The one who says it was against the will of the Egyptians, because it is written: “And she who dwells at home divides the spoil.” And the one who says it was against the will of Israel, because of the burden. Meaning, Israel didn’t want to take all the silver vessels and gold vessels with them into the wilderness, and therefore they had to be compelled to take these silver and gold vessels. And we talked about this one of the previous times, that this was so that that righteous man should not say—the previous Talmudic passage—“and they shall enslave them and afflict them” He fulfilled for them, but “afterward they shall go out with great wealth” He did not fulfill for them. So therefore the people of Israel had to be compelled, even if they didn’t want it, and maybe for that reason the Egyptians too were compelled.

At the beginning of last time I only mentioned this Talmudic passage as a completion to the previous time, and I said that this statement—that it was against the will of the Egyptians—seems a bit strange, because it says: “And the Lord gave the people favor in the eyes of the Egyptians.” That means that ostensibly the Egyptians did this willingly; they somehow became lovers of Israel and gave them these things of their own good will. And I said that ostensibly what the Talmud here is really saying is that even if someone does things apparently of his own free will, but really somebody programmed him, hypnotized him, so that he would want this thing, that’s not his genuine will; that is called against his will. And that tied into the first lesson I gave last Sunday.

In any case, here I want to get into what Rabbi Kook says about this Talmudic passage. So I’m leaving this sharing and moving to Rabbi Kook’s words. Okay, so here is Rabbi Kook’s passage: Berakhot 9b, “And they let them borrow,” Rabbi Ami said—this is the Talmudic quote—this teaches that they lent to them against their will. Some say against the will of the Egyptians, and some say against the will of Israel. So Rabbi Kook says as follows: To elevate the status of a people sunk in the lowliness of slavery requires two things. The first is to show it the path, that it is fit to be a light unto the nations; if so, it must recognize its own greatness, for it was formed to rule among nations, to subdue peoples beneath it in order to spread morality and knowledge of God among wild human beings clinging to every abomination.

So in order to instruct a people that is in a state of the degradation of slavery—apparently he means the people of Israel, at least that’s how it seems—to elevate its stature, meaning to bring it to a state where it can be a light unto the nations, two things are needed. One thing is to show it that in fact it is worthy of being a light unto the nations, to give it some self-confidence, in other words to value itself in a better way. Because a slave also usually suffers from low self-esteem. So “it must recognize its greatness, for it was formed to rule among nations, to subdue peoples beneath it in order to spread morality and divine religion among wild human beings clinging to every abomination.” That’s supposed to be the nations. The people of Israel were chosen, came out of Egypt, out of slavery, out of the degradation of slavery, in order to lead some kind of agenda in the world, to educate the world.

Rabbi Kook continues—there’s some structure here that still isn’t clear to me, I’ll come back to that in a moment—“But this can happen either with a staff of destruction and the cry of a ruler, or by gracious words and good conduct, so that nations will on their own stream to the light, to the light of God, when they see how splendid this great nation is, and they will seek its closeness.” Meaning, this can be done in one of two ways: either with a staff of destruction and the cry of a ruler, meaning by force, or by gracious words and good conduct, meaning by setting an example to imitate, right? “So that nations will on their own stream to the light, to the light of God, when they see how splendid this great nation is, and they will seek its closeness.” So here there are two tactics for influencing the surrounding nations: either by force or by personal example.

It’s not entirely clear to me how this continues the previous sentence. If I were researching this, I’d check manuscripts, because he says that “to elevate the status of a people sunk in the lowliness of slavery requires two things.” Now what does he mean by two things needed in order to raise the stature of Israel, who are in the degradation of slavery? The first thing is to show it the way, to give it self-confidence. What’s the second thing? It doesn’t appear. The second thing doesn’t appear. What does appear is that for it to be able to influence, this can be done in two ways: either by force or through personal example. So what are these two things needed in order to elevate Israel from the degradation of slavery? There’s one thing here: it needs to be given some elevated self-image, and afterward there are two techniques or two tactics for influencing the other nations. I don’t see here two things needed to raise this people from the degradation of slavery.

It could be that what he means to say is that after one elevates its stature and gives it a higher self-image, that itself gives it two things. One thing is that it allows it, or teaches it, to behave in a way that will serve as a personal example, meaning that it will provide a model for the nations to imitate; that’s one kind of influence. And also, slaves in general, since they have low self-esteem, won’t use force even when they have force. And therefore, yes, many commentators say this about the splitting of the sea and about Amalek: that the people of Israel were not ready to fight, even though they may have had the power to fight, because in the mentality of a slave you are not sufficiently self-confident to use even the powers you do have. And therefore, in order to use force too, you still need to acquire some elevated self-image. But again, in terms of the structure of the sentence: I can understand what the two things are that are needed for Israel to function. But the “first,” which appears here—“to show it the path,” etc.—is not one of the two. It is the infrastructure which itself then branches into two. Give it a high self-image, and out of that high self-image it will now be able to use force and also serve as a personal example. So something here in the sentence isn’t clear to me.

Still, the principle is clear, right? Basically, Israel needs to emerge from the degradation of slavery. It has two possible tactics in order to influence its surroundings: either by force or by personal example. And in fact both of these are required, everything according to the level of the nations and the level of their moral condition. Meaning, which of the two tactics should be used? That depends on who you are talking to. There are people with whom you need to use force. And there are people for whom, in order to educate them, it is enough—or even more appropriate than merely enough—to give a personal example. What’s the criterion? So Rabbi Kook says this: nations that behave with evil abominations—yes, the first type—nations that behave with evil abominations, which destroy political society and darken the splendor of the human soul through crooked paths, individuals or groups or nations that are on very, very low levels, they no longer even have the image of a human being, and they also corrupt the ways of their neighbors, because others learn from their ways—for them it is fitting to show strength of hand, for servants like them are not disciplined by words. Because one must show them strong force, since slaves—and here he is not speaking about Israel but about the surrounding nations—are slaves. Personal example won’t help. Here one has to use force.

However—that’s one type—however, nations that have strayed only a little from the most corrupt paths, meaning they’re not completely corrupted; they have some level, a somewhat higher level, although they are still far from the path of light—they are still corrupted, but not all the way—for them there is hope, because they will recognize the splendor of truth and on their own come to seek the name of God. And there you don’t have to use force; you can also act through explanation, through personal example, through more moderate means.

Therefore, says Rabbi Kook—that was the introduction—therefore, corresponding to the uplifting of the spirit toward the strength of a ruler, it was necessary to be against the will of the Egyptians. Now he goes back to explain the Talmud. He says that in order, for the uplifting of the spirit, to strengthen rulership—meaning acting through force—it was necessary to be against the will of the Egyptians. Yes, force had to be used against the Egyptians, because apparently the Egyptians were at a very low level and it was impossible really to speak with them in the language of personal example or explanations. And corresponding to the broadening of the mind, to see how other nations will seek their closeness—yes, the personal example—and seek them and seek their favor with gifts and ways of love, it was necessary that it be against the will of Israel. And the Egyptians sought their closeness by showing that they benefited by receiving from them. And this was a proper step toward the exalted future level of “and to him shall the gathering of peoples be,” that is destined to come, as it is written: “Their silver and their gold with them, for the name of the Lord your God and for the Holy One of Israel, because He has glorified you”—that verse in Isaiah.

In any case, it seems that these two paths were both present in the encounter with the Egyptians: both the educational path of personal example and the path of using force. But this was also necessary for the people of Israel, because Israel itself had to acquire both of these kinds of tools in order to use them later on and to bring the message, or to influence the whole world as well, through these two forms.

All right, that is more or less what he says here. And apparently within the Egyptians themselves there may have been two populations: those who were completely corrupt, against whom force had to be used, and those who were not entirely corrupt, with whom one could speak in a more pleasant language. And that’s the difference between against the will of the Egyptians and against the will of Israel. What exactly is going on here—why does this correspond to against the will of the Egyptians and against the will of Israel? Meaning, why is the path of persuasion and personal example called against the will of Israel? That’s not completely clear to me. Let’s say it’s fairly clear to me that this is not what the Talmud meant in what he writes here. This is homiletics. But fine, let’s talk about his homily.

In order perhaps to move forward a bit, I want to bring in Maimonides here. Once again I’m sharing, but now from the responsa project. Yes. Okay. This is Maimonides in Eight Chapters. I want to read part of it, not all of it. Chapter six, on the distinction between the virtuous person and the one who rules over his soul. Yes, Maimonides’ Eight Chapters is basically an introduction to his commentary on the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot. And chapter six is in essence a bit of Maimonides’ psychological theory of the soul.

Chapter six says, Maimonides: On the distinction between the virtuous person and the one who rules over his soul. There are two kinds of personalities that Maimonides is comparing here. I begin reading: The philosophers have said that the one who rules over his soul, although he performs virtuous deeds—he does good things—but he desires evil deeds and longs for them, and he struggles with his inclination and opposes in his actions what his powers, desires, and character traits arouse in him; and he does good things, but he suffers in doing them. Meaning, the one who rules over his soul is what we might call someone who conquers his inclination. He has evil impulses; he would like to do something else, but he rules over them, overcomes them, restrains his inclination, and succeeds in doing the good. So in the end he does the good, but the good act is done in a way that conquers his evil inclination. He has an evil inclination inside him, but he overcomes it. That’s one figure.

But the virtuous person is drawn in his actions after whatever his desire and nature incline him toward, and he does good things and desires them and longs for them. Meaning, the virtuous person, as opposed to the one who conquers his evil inclination or rules over his soul, is someone who has no inclinations at all to do something bad. He does good because that is naturally what his temperament leads him to do, and he naturally identifies with the good. So these are the two types.

Up to here this is only a definition. Now come the evaluative issues. And the philosophers agree that the virtuous person is better and more complete than the one who rules over his soul. Meaning, someone who has a natural inclination to do good is better than someone who suppresses his inclination and forces himself to do good—someone who has an evil inclination but forces himself to do good. What Rabbi Kook calls, I think I mentioned this one of the previous times, the upright person versus the conqueror. The upright person is someone who has an inner moral straightness and flows with what he himself wants, and the conqueror is someone who forces what he wants aside in favor of what is truly proper to do. He restrains his inclinations. What does he really want? That’s a question; the terminology is confusing. But he restrains his inclinations. I think the good is really what he wants. But he has impulses that try to pull him in the direction of evil, and he suppresses them and nevertheless does the good.

So beyond the description—which was the first highlighted paragraph—here Maimonides is already taking a normative position: that the virtuous person is better and more complete than the one who rules over his soul. Thus said the philosophers. Why? Because he is basically a person who is good by nature. The second person does good, but he himself is not a good person. He has inclinations that pull him to do evil, but he overcomes them. He is not complete in goodness. He does good, but he also has an evil side. In contrast, the virtuous person is one who has no evil sides. He naturally does good, and therefore he is more complete. So say the philosophers.

But, they said, it is possible that the one who rules over his soul stands in many things in the same place that the virtuous person stands, but his level is necessarily lower because he desires the evil act even if he does not perform it. But his longing for it is an evil trait in the soul. Yes, that’s the explanation. He still has some bad inclination; he is not perfectly good. And therefore he is less good than the virtuous person, because the virtuous person’s soul too is complete, not only his deeds. And Solomon said something similar. He said this in Proverbs: “The soul of the wicked desires evil.” And regarding the joy of the virtuous person in good deeds, and the distress of one who is not virtuous in doing them, this is the verse: “It is joy to the righteous to do justice, but ruin to the workers of iniquity.” Yes, this too is in Proverbs, and there too King Solomon is speaking about the one who conquers himself: “The soul of the wicked desires evil.” Meaning, one whose soul desires evil is wicked. Even though the fact that your soul desires evil doesn’t mean you do evil. It may be that you suppress what your soul desires and in the end, in the end, you do good. But the very longing for evil has something problematic in it. And by contrast, “It is joy to the righteous to do justice” marks the virtuous person, because he is actually happy that he is doing the right thing. It is natural for him. That is what appears from the words of the Torah, matching what the philosophers mentioned. Yes, these verses in Proverbs fit what the philosophers say, that the virtuous person is better than the one who conquers his inclination.

But Maimonides says: until here are the words of the philosophers. And when we investigated the words of the Sages in this matter, we found that for them one who desires transgressions and longs for them is better and more complete than one who does not desire them and does not feel pain in refraining from them. Meaning, here we see the opposite. Specifically the one who conquers his inclination or rules over his soul is better than the virtuous person, contrary to the philosophers. To the point that they said: the better and more complete a person is, the stronger will be his desire for transgressions and his pain in refraining from them. Yes, in abandoning them. And they brought stories for this and said—they describe how this works in the world—“Whoever is greater than his fellow, his inclination is greater than his.” So we see that specifically one who has a greater inclination is greater than his fellow. True, the causal direction there is the opposite: one who is greater than his fellow also has a greater inclination. But Maimonides understands it in both directions. If you have a greater inclination and you overcome it, then you too are a greater person. And that is a bit opposite the original meaning of the statement, but one can understand that side of it as well.

And not only that, says Maimonides, but they said that the reward of one who rules over his soul is greater according to the measure of his suffering in ruling over his soul, and they said: “According to the suffering is the reward.” Yes, the greater the suffering, the greater the reward. The harder you work in order to do good, the greater your reward. And even more than that: they instructed that a person should rule over his soul, and warned against saying, “By my nature I do not desire this transgression, even if the Torah had not forbidden it.” And this is what they said. Yes, he says that the Sages basically instructed us to build in the soul precisely a conception or consciousness that says: I actually do not naturally desire to do the thing the Torah says—on the contrary, I would actually like to do the bad thing, but because of the Torah I overcome myself. And not to develop the consciousness of the virtuous person. What does that say? They warned against saying, “By my nature I do not desire this transgression, even if the Torah had not forbidden it.” I myself don’t want to do it, not because the Torah forbids it. So specifically the Sages warned against that. They think that the one who conquers himself or rules over his soul is better than the virtuous person.

Where do they say this? So Maimonides says: This is what they said: Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says, a person should not say, “I do not wish to eat meat with milk, I do not wish to wear sha’atnez, I do not wish to have relations with forbidden relatives.” Rather, “I do wish to, but what can I do? My Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me.” Meaning, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: don’t say, “I do not wish to eat meat with milk,” or “to wear sha’atnez,” or “to have relations with forbidden relatives.” On the contrary, say: I do want to, but what can I do—my Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me, and I force my inclination and nevertheless do what the Holy One, blessed be He, said. So up to this point we see that the philosophers hold that the virtuous person is the more ideal figure, and the Sages say no—specifically the one who rules over his soul is the more ideal figure.

Let’s pause here for a moment just for one comment, and I’ll draw your attention to a question. I always think that in situations where you see a question and an answer, it’s very worthwhile to focus on the question. What does the question itself assume? Because this contrast that Maimonides makes between the philosophers and the Sages is very interesting. Usually, if you were to ask a Torah scholar: the Torah says such-and-such, but the philosophers say something else—he would say to you, okay, so the philosophers are wrong, what can you do? Why is there any difficulty here? The Torah shows us that the philosophers are wrong, and that’s it, all is fine. For Maimonides it’s not like that. For Maimonides, if the philosophers reached some conclusion and it makes sense, then the fact that it comes not from the Torah but from non-Jews or other sages—so what? Accept the truth from whoever says it. Maimonides writes this in many places. Maimonides brings the Talmud in Pesachim about whether the sphere stands still and the constellations move, or the sphere moves and the constellations stand still—the dispute described there between the sages of Israel and the sages of the nations of the world—and the sages of Israel came to concede to the sages of the nations of the world on the basis of some argument, actually probably an incorrect argument, but that was the argument that persuaded the sages of Israel and they conceded to the sages of the nations of the world. From here Maimonides learns, and his son as well in the introduction to Ein Yaakov writes this—Rabbi Avraham ben Maimonides—that from here the Sages teach us to accept the truth from whoever says it. And if there is wisdom among the philosophers, then that is wisdom; it is not something one can belittle or throw away. And if there is something in the Sages that contradicts this, the first thing is first of all to try to reconcile it before you say they’re talking nonsense and don’t know what they’re talking about. So that’s what Maimonides says here too.

Now he says: And according to the plain understanding of these two statements, at first thought the two sayings contradict one another, right? What the philosophers say contradicts what the Sages say. Then Maimonides says: but that is only at first thought. The truth is that it is not so, but both are true and there is no dispute between them at all. Why? He says like this: the evils which for the philosophers are evils—what evils are the philosophers talking about? The philosophers are not talking about eating pork; philosophers are not talking about sha’atnez or meat and milk. They are talking about moral transgressions, about rational matters. Regarding these, says Maimonides, the virtuous person really is better than the one who rules over his soul. The philosophers are right, because that is what they are talking about, and only there is it really true that the virtuous person is better.

By contrast—and there is no doubt, he says, that the soul which desires one of these things and longs for it is a deficient soul, and that the virtuous soul will not desire any of these evils at all and will not be pained by refraining from them. Yes, in moral matters, a person who does not desire to do evil but only to do good is of course more complete than someone who desires to do evil and nevertheless overcomes it. But—that is up to here, the philosophers—but the matters about which the Sages said that the one who rules over his soul regarding them is better and his reward greater are the heard commandments, not the rational moral ones. And that is correct, because were it not for the Torah they would not be evils at all. And therefore they said that a person should set his soul upon loving them, and should have no deterrent from them except the Torah. Meaning, what the Sages say—that the one who rules over his soul is better than the virtuous person—is with regard to the commandments known as statutes, or the heard commandments, not the moral or rational commandments. Because there indeed it is only because the Holy One, blessed be He, said so; there is no reason to say that I don’t want to do it even without the command. That I do because of the command, and therefore there indeed the one who rules over his soul is greater than the virtuous person.

And I’ll just finish up this discussion of Maimonides. Indeed, when you look at where the Sages said this and about what they said it, then see: “Consider their wisdom, peace be upon them, in what they illustrated it with.” What examples did the Sages bring for their principle? He did not say—what Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel said was not: a person should not say, “I do not wish to murder, I do not wish to steal, I do not wish to lie,” but rather, “I do wish to, but what can I do? My Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me.” That was not said. Rather, he brought only things that are all heard commandments. Which examples did Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel bring? Only examples of heard commandments: meat and milk, wearing sha’atnez, forbidden relatives. And these commandments and the like are those which Scripture calls “My statutes.” They said: statutes that I enacted for you, and you have no permission to question them. And the nations of the world challenge them, and Satan prosecutes them, such as the red heifer and the scapegoat, etc. As for those which the later authorities called rational, they are also called commandments, as the Sages explained. In short, I’ll stop here.

What Maimonides is basically saying is that the distinction between the virtuous person and the one who conquers his inclination depends on what kind of commandments we are talking about. In moral, rational commandments, it is preferable to be one who desires the good and is repelled by evil. In legal statutes, in decrees, it is preferable to be one who conquers his inclination.

A comment before I continue. In a number of places in Maimonides we see that Maimonides himself says that the ideal model of one who serves God is someone who does things because of the command and not because of natural inclination. For example, in Laws of Kings, at the end of chapter eight, Maimonides speaks there about the resident alien, but the commentators there say—and it seems quite clear to me logically as well—that this is also true for Jews. And he says that one who does things by intellectual compulsion—one who observes the seven Noahide commandments by intellectual compulsion, meaning because he thinks this is right or because this is his natural inclination—is not serving God in the full sense. He calls him not one of the pious of the nations of the world but one of their wise men. Meaning, he is wise but not pious; this has no value as a commandment, no religious value. It is simply a good act. So what is the ideal model? Someone who does things because of the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, at Sinai.

Does that not contradict what he wrote here in chapter six of Eight Chapters? Here he said that at least with regard to the moral commandments, there specifically one who naturally tends to do good and avoid evil is preferable in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He. Now one must remember that the seven Noahide commandments all belong to that sector. So it is strange—it’s an outright contradiction. Maimonides himself, by the way, writes this in Laws of Kings about the seven Noahide commandments after he enumerates them, and he says: “And these are matters toward which reason inclines.” Meaning, for Maimonides these are rational commandments, the seven Noahide commandments. Well then, in chapter six that we just read, Maimonides says that in rational commandments it is specifically better that this come from my identification with them and not from submission to command. The “I do not wish to eat pork”—“I do wish to eat pork, but what can I do? My Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me”—that speaks about pork, sha’atnez, red heifer, things of that kind. But regarding moral commandments, no. Is this a contradiction? I think it’s not a contradiction.

Maimonides in Laws of Kings is talking about the question why to do the commandments. And there this is true regarding all kinds of commandments, both the moral and rational commandments and the statutes. Why do the commandments? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them. What Maimonides is talking about in Eight Chapters is something entirely different, not the question why to do the commandments. I do it because God commanded it. The question is: is it fitting to also develop within myself an identification with the matter? Not that because of the identification I’ll do it. I do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it. That is true for both kinds of commandments. But, says Maimonides, in moral commandments there is also value in building within myself some natural identification with the good. Not that because of that I will do it, because if because of that I do it, then it is not a commandment. It is a good deed, but it is not a commandment. A commandment is when you respond to a command, when you submit or obey the command; only then is it a commandment. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile to build some natural identification with these acts. And that is a more complete person than someone who remains only on the level of obedience but has not repaired his soul in the moral sense.

By contrast, in legal statutes, in the heard commandments, there there is no value in that. Do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it, and you also don’t need to develop some natural identification. Therefore there is no contradiction between these two things in Maimonides.

Now, that is only an introduction. Now I return to what Rabbi Kook actually said in the passage we read. There he distinguished between two tactics for dealing with your student—in this case it’s Israel vis-à-vis the nations, but this is true in relation to educator and student or in relation to a person trying to influence another person, maybe parents and children too. We use carrot and stick, right? We use both the rod, the “staff of destruction,” as he called it, and also personal example, explanations, reasons, softer education, not punishment and force. When do we do this and when that?

Rabbi Kook said there that when evil is very deeply rooted, very basic, very deep, then one has to use force. When the person is bad, needs correction, but is not bad all the way down, then there is more room for personal example. What is the meaning of this? At first glance it seems that he is making a distinction here over what is better. Meaning, if I get him to do things because he has to, which is basically the example of the one who rules over his soul that we read in Maimonides, versus if I show him what is proper and then it will come from him—then apparently Rabbi Kook is basically dealing with the same issue we just read in Maimonides. The question is who comes out a more corrected student: one whose character you corrected and who does it out of identification because he sees in you a model to imitate, you explained it to him, he changed, he now wants the right thing himself; or one who wants the bad thing but you beat him and force him to do the good thing.

So then it seems that Rabbi Kook is dealing with the same question Maimonides deals with in chapter six. And he says it depends who your student is; in other words, the method you use depends on who your student is. But that already tells us, I think, that it’s not exactly the same question. Because Rabbi Kook is talking about the question—and if you read him, I won’t share him again, but if you read him afterward again, you’ll see—Rabbi Kook is not talking about which educational method will bring the person to a higher level; that’s not his discussion. His discussion is the question which educational method will succeed. Meaning, his claim is that there are types for whom it simply won’t succeed if you do not use force. Not because if you use force you’ll bring them to a higher level, or if you use personal example you’ll bring them to a higher level. The question is not how one gets to a higher level; the question is how one succeeds in changing them. And that’s an entirely different question from Maimonides. Maimonides is asking which is the more excellent type. Rabbi Kook is asking how you will succeed with each type. When do you need to use force, and when do you need to explain or offer personal example?

If so, then now we need to explain Rabbi Kook מחדש—from scratch. Because here the question really is: what is the criterion? Who is the type that needs to be treated in a forceful way, and who is the type that needs to be treated through personal example, explanations, and so on? So that no longer depends on Maimonides’ question of who is more excellent than the other, who is the more ideal type. Rabbi Kook’s claim is that there are types for whom bringing them to a positive state that comes from within simply won’t work for you. That is always better. He can agree with Maimonides that that figure is better, at least in the moral plane. He is only arguing that there are certain types for whom it won’t help; it simply won’t work. And therefore you need to use the staff of destruction.

On this matter I now want to bring a famous story, one that I’m very fond of, Rabbi Nachman’s story of the Turkey Prince. Here it is on your screen, now that I’ve shared it. Once again, we’ll do this quickly. Once there was a king’s son who went insane and imagined that he was a turkey, called a hindik. Yes, that’s what it’s called in Yiddish—a turkey. So some prince went mad and suddenly decided that he was a turkey. And he needed to sit naked under the table. Meaning, he decided he had to strip off his clothes, sit naked under the table, and drag bits of bread and bones like a turkey, eating crumbs under the table. And all the doctors despaired of helping him and healing him from this, and the king was in great distress over it. Until one wise man came and said: I take it upon myself to heal him. Of course, one can elaborate—he had looked for many wise men and so on, and nobody succeeded. In the end one wise man came and said: I’m willing to treat the boy’s illness.

He went and also stripped himself naked and sat under the table with the prince, and he too dragged crumbs and bones. Yes, he too behaved like a turkey, took off his clothes, ate crumbs under the table. And the prince asked him: Who are you, and what are you doing here? Yes, he asked him, what are you doing here? And he answered him: And what are you doing here? He said to him: I am a turkey. He said to him: I too am a turkey. And the two of them sat together like this for some time, until they became accustomed to one another. Then the wise man signaled to the members of the household to throw them shirts. And the wise man said to the turkey—to the prince-turkey, yes, both of them are turkeys—do you think a turkey cannot go about wearing a shirt? A turkey can wear a shirt and still be a turkey. Yes, why not? Is there some Torah commandment that a turkey has to go around without clothes? Be a turkey with clothes—what’s the problem? So they both put on shirts.

And after some time he signaled and they threw them trousers. And the wise man again said to him as before: do you think trousers can’t be worn by a turkey? And so on and so on; it continued until they put on the trousers. And likewise with the rest of the clothes. And afterward he signaled and they threw them human food from the table, and they began eating human food. And he said to him: do you think that if one eats good food, then one is no longer a turkey? That’s the Yiddish bit I’m less fluent in. And they ate. Then he said to him: do you think a turkey must specifically be under the table? A turkey can be at the table. And so he acted with him until he healed him completely.

This is a famous story; I assume all of you know it. In this story there’s a question—psychologists have made a whole production out of this, as with other stories of Rabbi Nachman too—but here I think it’s really on the table, no pun intended; you don’t have to dig very far. The first question that arises is: in what sense was the prince really healed at the end of the process? After all, at the end, after he went through the whole process, he still remained with the turkey consciousness. He just somehow, technically, returned to behaving like a human being. He sat on a chair, with clothes, ate human food. Everything like a human being, but deep down, the illness was a mental illness. Deep down he remained ill. He still thought he was a turkey; the other man simply explained to him that a turkey can also behave like a person, and that’s not terrible. So in fact he wasn’t healed. In what sense did this wise man heal the prince? He didn’t really heal his illness.

This of course gestures toward a controversial psychological approach called behaviorism. Behaviorism is healing through behavior—not doing psychoanalysis, not entering the depths of the patient’s soul, but trying to get him to behave properly, and also analyzing the soul through behavior rather than entering into psychoanalyses and parts of the psyche and all kinds of psychoanalytic speculations. So here the claim is basically that there was a behaviorist healing. He got him back to behave—yes, in English. He got him back to behaving correctly. But inwardly he remained ill. So that’s the first question: in what sense the prince was healed here.

But there is another interesting point here that caught my attention when I read this. Notice: when the wise man came under the table, the prince asked him, “The prince asked him: Who are you, and what are you doing here?” Now what is the subtext? Why did the prince ask him that? Because the prince is saying: well, this is a place for turkeys. You look to me like a human being. What are you, as a human being, doing here? Now that’s strange. How did he know that this wise man was a human being? From his point of view, he thinks about himself—he looks like the wise man. He too looks like this: two hands, two legs, exactly like a human being like him. Why is it obvious to him that the wise man is a human being, even though he himself thinks of himself as a turkey? What is the meaning of this question?

We spoke earlier about the importance of questions before getting to answers. Here too: what is the meaning of the question that the prince asks him? It seems that the prince basically, in the depths of his soul, understood that one who looks like that is a human being, not a turkey, and therefore he was astonished: what are you doing here? So how did he think of himself as a turkey? Doesn’t he understand that he himself looks like that too? Notice—that is a major difficulty, but it is the opposite of the previous difficulty. The previous difficulty was: how can one in the end relate to the prince as though he were a healthy person? What do you mean? He wasn’t healed. Inside he thinks he is a turkey. So what if externally he behaves like a human being? In the end, in his soul he still thinks he is a turkey. That was the first question. Now I am posing the opposite question. The question is not how was he healed, but who said he was ever sick. After all, if he understands that someone who looks like this wise man is actually a human being and not a turkey, then he is not sick. He’s playing games. He isn’t really sick. He understands that one like this is a human being and not a turkey. This sentence tells us that the prince was never sick at all. And the end of the story tells us that the prince was never healed. So there are here two opposite questions. You tell me that the prince was sick and afterward was healed. I don’t understand why he was sick, and if he was sick, I don’t understand how this counts as his being healed. Those are two opposite questions, but both arise here in the course of the story. And I think—I don’t know, I’m not a great literary analyst and certainly not of Rabbi Nachman, who usually doesn’t really speak to me—but I would not rule out the possibility that when he inserted this question of the prince to the wise man, he inserted it deliberately, as a hint, to give us some clue for deciphering the meaning of the story. Because this question isn’t essential to the story. On the contrary, it contradicts the flow of the story. It raises a difficulty. So why is it there? It adds nothing to the story. Why did he put this question in?

It seems to me that the meaning is that there are two kinds of people who can come to psychological treatment. Really only one of them—but there are two kinds of people who need psychological treatment. One kind is a person who inwardly is healthy, but in the more external layers of the soul there are distortions. Meaning, his inner part does not manage, or does not want, or whatever, there are some inhibitions, and it does not come to expression in his external behavior. And therefore he behaves like a madman, but deep down there is some point at which he understands that he is behaving like a madman. He understands how a healthy person, a sane person, should behave. That is one type of patient.

The second type of patient is one who has no such point. There is none. He is broken to the core. Meaning, there is no healthy point in him at all. It’s not something in the more external layers; it goes all the way down. Meaning, there is nothing. This person is sick; there is no inward healthy point in him, sick all the way through. Of course, someone who is sick all the way through will not come for psychological treatment, because he does not understand that he needs it. That’s why I said these are two people who perhaps need psychological treatment, but only one of them will probably come for treatment. But beyond that, only that one who comes for treatment is actually treatable. The second type is not treatable. Because a psychotherapist is basically supposed to use the points that exist in the patient’s soul, and take them and try to use them, to expand them more and more until they take over even the sick parts of the soul, and then perhaps the person will become healthy. Meaning, ultimately the therapist is supposed to help a person heal himself. And this can only be done if inside the person there is some point at which he himself is still healthy, because otherwise there is no one to help. What can you do with someone who is broken all the way through? Someone broken all the way through—all you can do is rebuild him, destroy him and rebuild him. That isn’t exactly psychological treatment; I would say it’s reeducation. That’s the Soviet gulags, or Chinese reeducation. There they do not help you become healthy again. Although they call it reeducation, it’s not education; it’s programming. I think we spoke about that in the first lesson last week.

So I think that what Rabbi Nachman is really saying here is that if the prince can be treated, it is only because deep inside him there is still some point that is healthy. And therefore the two questions I asked, which are seemingly opposite, actually resolve one another. On the one hand, the prince was sick. But he was not sick all the way through; inside him there was a healthy point, because if that were not so, it would have been impossible to heal him. One could only have used the whip—I’m returning now, hinting back to Rabbi Kook, we’ll come back to him in a moment—one could only have used the whip, to do it by force. To take him and help him understand what is right, and build within him healthy motivations for how to behave properly and the right values—that would be impossible. If someone is broken all the way through, you have nothing to work with. All you can do is try to rebuild him, to do it by force, from yourself, not with his help.

Who can you treat psychologically and not by force, or through personal example, through explanation, psychologically? Someone who has within him some healthy point, and the illness exists only in outer layers around that point. What happens in such a case? In order to understand psychological treatment in such a case, I think one needs to understand the nature of the illness. Illness of the second type, the type that can be treated, where there is a healthy point within him—that’s what I asked. If he understood that someone who looks like that is a human being, then why didn’t he understand that he himself is not a turkey but a human being? Why did the prince think of himself as a turkey? The answer is the evil inclination. He basically wanted not to behave according to human manners, according to the rules—he was fed up with the rules. In the parable, of course, this means the commandments or moral norms or whatever. So in order to behave not like a human being, you need to build for yourself some theory. You build yourself some crazy theory, it doesn’t matter what, but little by little you convince yourself of the theory and you begin to play the game. You enter into the shoes of the turkey, and now there is no problem—you are allowed to do whatever you want. The rules of human beings no longer obligate you. That is how this illness is built. But it is an illness built because of inclination, not a real illness, because inside yourself you actually know what is good. But your inclination causes you to adopt some theories and somehow manage to live by them.

The truly sick patient, the one for whom this is not inclination but who he really is—he understands that this is the right thing to do—in such a case no treatment will help, only force. What do you do with the one who does have something to treat? It seems to me that what the wise man did here is a marvelous example. The author of Sefer HaChinukh writes that hearts are drawn after actions. What does that mean? If you behave correctly—that’s the behaviorist treatment I mentioned earlier—if you behave correctly, in the end your heart too will become correct. At least the moral part, according to Maimonides, should be repaired so that it naturally desires to do the right thing. How does one do that? Hearts too are drawn after actions. If you behave properly, first you will be a conqueror, and afterward you will become upright. First you will be one who rules over his soul; afterward you will become virtuous, in the language of Maimonides, or in Rabbi Kook’s language, but it is the same principle. What does that mean?

After all, why did you develop the theory that you are a turkey? You developed the theory that you are a turkey in order to allow yourself to do what you want. People develop theories for themselves in order to allow themselves to do what they want, and in the end they also succeed in believing the theories they developed. Inside they understand that they are not okay, because otherwise they would be compelled, they would not be sinners. Or in the parable, they would not be treatable. There would be no claim against them. All one could do is act on them by force and make sure they do not do what they are doing. You have no way to come to them with claims, to judge them, to treat them—all that is irrelevant.

Whom is it relevant to treat or judge or blame? Someone who deep inside knows what the truth is, but he built himself a theory because of inclination, and he got himself into this business. In such a case, what can you do? Very simple. If you can manage to go along with his method—and many psychologists indeed speak in this context about Rabbi Nachman’s story, that the therapist has to enter into the soul of the patient and go with him—and this means reaching the healthy point of the patient and trying to work with it, to draw it outward, to let it also rule the more external layers. So what do you do? Fine, let’s go with you. We are turkeys, okay. A turkey can be clothed, and can also sit on a chair, and can also eat human food, right? It has no choice, the turkey, because what is he going to say, that he can’t? Of course he can. A turkey can do that, so why does it bother you to do that? So fine, he sits and does it. I caught him. I somehow succeeded in bending him by means of his own assumptions.

What happens now? The moment I corrected the behavior, he no longer has motivation to hold on to the theory. Because after all the whole theory was born in order to allow him to behave as he wants, to deviate from the rules. If I manage to go with him along with his theory and change only the actions—behavioristically—not to treat the psyche, but only to correct his actions, then in the end the theory too will dissipate. Because the whole purpose of this theory—after all he really knows that it is not correct, just as he asks the wise man when he comes under the table. He knows that someone like that is a human being, so he knows about himself too that he is a human being. Why then did he build for himself the theory that he is a turkey? To allow himself to do what he wants. Once I succeeded in ensuring that the practical consequences will not occur, the theory will dissipate on its own and he will return to being a human being.

And therefore these two questions resolve one another. From the outset he was sick, but not absolutely sick. Inside him there was a healthy point. He built himself a theory and became behaviorally ill—behavioristically—and of course this is also in the psyche, not only in behavior, but not all the way through. And the treatment is to try to dissolve the practical consequences, and then the theory itself too will simply blow away, meaning in the end nothing will remain of it.

Just parenthetically I’ll add that it seems to me this is also the general way to understand that strange principle that appears in the Talmud and in Maimonides, always cited in the laws of divorce: “We coerce him until he says, ‘I want to.’” This works in exactly the same way. Meaning, there is a husband refusing to give a divorce document, he doesn’t want to give his wife a get. And we are speaking only in a situation where Jewish law requires him to give a get. In principle a husband is not required to give his wife a get, but there are situations in which he is required to give the get. That’s what Jewish law says—he is obligated. He is violating a prohibition if he does not do it. In such situations, why is he not doing it—assuming he is God-fearing? Because if he is not God-fearing, then there is nothing to talk about; then he is sick all the way through in this parable. But someone who does have fear of Heaven does want to fulfill Jewish law. Why is he not doing it here? He is not doing it because of the anger he has toward his spouse, and he digs in his position. And I have no doubt—it is as clear to me as the sun—that if you ask him, he will explain to you with signs and wonders that he is the one who is right, and the Jewish law is on his side, and the Holy One, blessed be He, will seat him at the head of the highest Garden of Eden, because he is right and the judges understand nothing. Why? Because he built himself a theory to allow himself to do what his inclination tells him. The inclination drives the theory. The inclination builds the theory.

What is the way to treat someone like this? You say to him, very simply: look, I will beat you until your soul leaves you. You are going to give the get. You can scream until tomorrow that this get is worthless because you were forced, and a forced get is invalid, void, a get given under duress. And I, as judge, tell you: I don’t care. I myself will marry her off. You say she is still married, that the get is invalid—I myself will marry her off, by force. Nothing will help you. Now, the moment he understands that it won’t help him on the practical level, that he won’t succeed in achieving his practical goal, his theory too will dissipate. Then he really will want, in the end, to do what is right, because he understands that this is what is right. And therefore “we coerce him until he says, ‘I want to,’” what Maimonides writes there and everyone thinks is some kind of mysticism. It isn’t mysticism; it’s simple psychology. If you think that this person belongs to the group that inside really does want to do what the Holy One, blessed be He, says, wants to follow Jewish law, and only builds for himself some crazy theory that he himself inwardly understands is untrue, but on the conscious level that does not exist, because he has so thoroughly convinced himself of it in order to give himself backing to do what his inclination tells him to do—if that is the situation, says Maimonides, beat him until he says, “I want to.” What does that mean? It means that if you beat him and show him that he has no choice, then in the end, when he says “I want to,” he really does want to. He really wants to because his theory dissipates if, in the end, it does not allow him to do what he wanted it to allow him to do. If in the end the woman will go free, then he no longer has motivation to develop this theory that he himself knows is not true.

By the way, this has a very big implication, and there are halakhic authorities who write this. When I said this logically, I later saw that the Meiri, I think, writes it, and other authorities too: that if someone has no fear of Heaven, if someone is an atheist and believes in nothing, then the rule of “we coerce him until he says, ‘I want to’” truly does not apply. It won’t help to force him to give his wife a get. Since the whole principle of coercing him until he says “I want to” applies only when inside he really wants to. It isn’t that the coercion creates the desire. The coercion removes the obstacles, so that the desire which already exists inside him can function, can emerge, can take over the psyche and retake its place. Exactly as is written here. But that’s just a side note.

If I return to Rabbi Kook, basically what Rabbi Kook says, it seems to me, is that the method of treatment by force as opposed to the educational method or role model depends on the question who is the person or who is the group or who is the nation standing before you. And when he distinguishes between one who is bad all the way down and one who is not bad all the way down, in my opinion he is not speaking about the degree of wickedness of the two types or two groups. He is speaking about the depth of the wickedness. And that is not always the same thing.

Meaning, if the wickedness goes all the way down, that is, there is no healthy point at all, then only by force. There is nothing else to do; nothing else will help. If there is a healthy point, then there is a way, by means of explanation, by psychological means, by role model—and then of course it is much better and much more desirable to do it that way. So when you use these two techniques, it depends on who the type standing before you is, and it does not depend on how wicked he is. Meaning, there can be a person who is extremely wicked only because of his evil inclination. Inside himself he understands that he is behaving badly, but he is extremely wicked. And someone else may behave in a less extreme evil way, but inside he is simply broken to the core; there is nothing in him that one can work with, there is no healthy point. Therefore the intensity of the evil that Rabbi Kook is speaking about, I do not think it is the extremity of the acts, but the psychological depth of the evil. Meaning, if the psychological depth of the evil goes all the way down, then only force, there is nothing to do. You just have to stop him by force; otherwise he will kill, he will harm, he will do all kinds of things. There is no choice. Nothing will come of it, meaning you will only bring about a behaviorist correction and not really heal the person or the nation or the group. But there is nothing else to do; this business is broken. The group on which more moderate, more reasonable, more enlightened methods, let’s say, can be used is a group with whom there is something to work with, a group in which there remains a healthy point. And there it really is not right to use force; there, on the contrary, try to do it with explanations, and so on.

By the way, sometimes one does combine force, somewhat like what the wise man did with the turkey, or like “we coerce him until he says, ‘I want to.’” Meaning, you use force in order to prevent him from getting the consequences he wants to gain from the theory he adopts, but in the end you are trying to build in him another theory and not just force him to behave differently. Therefore even forceful means that one can sometimes use in education, the ultimate goal is to produce a virtuous person, not a person who merely rules over his soul—to produce a person who inside himself already wants to do the good. Sometimes you need to prevent him by force from obtaining the consequences for whose sake he adopts the wrong or crazy theory, but the basic direction is not punitive or forceful; it is educational. The punitive direction should turn only toward someone for whom there is no other hope, simply someone with whom there is no one to work, nothing to work with there.

Just a note, actually several notes, with which I’ll finish. These questions arise in many contexts, in one variation or another, but these are variations of the same tension or the same dilemma. Let’s give one example. In game theory it is well known that they ask: how can you divide a cake precisely between two of your children? You want them to split a piece of cake equally. How do you do it? In game theory the solution is well known. You let one of them divide the cake into two pieces, and the other gets to choose first which piece he wants. Why is that a perfect solution? Because the strategy of the first child, who divides the cake into two, must be to make the division exact, that the two pieces be exactly equal. Because if one is larger than the other, then the second one, who chooses first, will take the larger one. So the optimal method from the standpoint of the first one is to divide the two pieces completely equally, and then the second can choose one of them and the division will be exact. So that is a technique for achieving exact division.

Is this a recommended educational technique? I claim absolutely not. This educational technique will bring the behaviorist result. Meaning, in the end they will divide the cake equally, no one will take a piece larger than the other. But after all my goal is not that someone shouldn’t eat one extra millimeter of cake; that’s not the point. My goal is to educate him not to take the larger piece for himself, and not to want the division to be unequal—that he naturally want the division to be equal, that he understand that this is how a human being should behave. If you act according to this game-theory method, you build—not only do you fail to correct the people, you don’t educate them but merely achieve the result of equal division—you actually make things worse. Why? Because how do you get the equal division? Through maximum self-interest. And the more self-interested the two children are, the clearer it is that the division will come out more equal. That is the whole trick here. Therefore, you are actually only encouraging their self-interest instead of trying to educate them toward a little altruism.

So the path that leads to the good outcomes is very often a path that throws out the baby with the bathwater. Meaning, in the end you lose the real educational lesson for the sake of the practical result, when the practical result is not really important—it is only a symptom of the educational lesson that you want to convey. Therefore, very often focusing on the result is a very problematic thing. Not only does it fail to achieve the result; sometimes it destroys the possibility of achieving the result. But all this is only if there is in these children some point that you truly have hope of awakening, and of making them understand on their own that it is proper to split equally. Then don’t use this technique. If they have no such point and all you want is that they not scream and not feel deprived, but you have no chance of educating them—they are sociopathic children—then in such a case use game theory and punishment. Whoever does not do what I tell him gets punished, with exact instructions; that way you’ll achieve equal division, everyone will be satisfied, no one will be deprived. Education will not come of it.

And therefore, only with regard to a child who is lost, where you have no way of educating him—he’s a sociopath—then perhaps use the game-theory technique, and that is the parallel to punishment that Rabbi Kook speaks about. But with a child whom you want to educate, it’s a great mistake to do that.

And another note, one that could justify another whole lesson, but we’ll do it here: this is also true on the political plane. Also on the political plane—and in our day one could elaborate on this a lot, with implications at every step of what is happening literally these days—but in principle I first thought about this when they passed that law for direct election of the prime minister, which was of course repealed after one term. Why? Because people thought that if we create this kind of game-theory gimmick, if we reorganize the rules differently, we’ll fix our entire political system. The whole technique of the political system is actually built on this concept. Why? Because I basically take the most self-interested, most egoistic, most power-hungry people, and I tell them: listen, friends, let me make you a game-theory trick that will lead you, against your will, to behave the way I want. How? I simply say: you stand for election every four years; whoever behaves in the way I like—I, meaning the voters as a whole—we will choose him. So you have an interest in doing good, and the assumption is that you will do good. But you will do good because you have an egoistic interest in being elected, not because you are good people. This system does not educate you to be good people. This system makes you divide the cake equally even though you are bad people, or even because you are bad people. It harnesses your evil inclination in order to achieve the results that we want to achieve. And this too is a great mistake on the political plane.

Because on the political plane too one must understand that in the end we will not solve the deadlocks by changing the rules. Changing rules does not solve essential problems; at most it helps at the margins. One can use it, as I said before, one can use force as an aid alongside education, so the rules provide some kind of framework. But if in the end there are no demands made of our elected officials—and of us, they are our mirror—but of the elected officials and everyone, to behave like human beings, not to behave according to the rules, according to the law, but to behave like human beings—if there is no uncompromising demand like that, no rule will solve the problem. Why? Because with the cake this is a very simple problem. A game-theory trick like that will lead you to divide the cake into two exact pieces, because it’s a simple problem and you won’t miss anything there. But in politics it is so complicated that the rules will never succeed in taking the evil inclination of politicians and channeling it exactly in the direction I want. They will always manage to find some workaround. This is a complex system. A political system is complex; human beings are complex; society is complex; it is also fractured among different conceptions.

Therefore this strange conception, which perhaps many people have—that according to the law everything is settled, and the law will solve the problems, and if there is a problem we’ll change the law: direct election of the prime minister—after one term it was reverted. Why? Because after one term they understood that it solved nothing; it created more serious problems than the ones it solved. Since you think that through some trick of changing the rules you will manage to make people behave correctly—it doesn’t work like that. In complicated problems it doesn’t work that way. In simple problems it works that way, but there it works only in terms of results—you’ll achieve the result, and completely miss the education.

So I think that if I return to Rabbi Kook—and with this I’ll finish—ultimately it seems to me that what Rabbi Kook is saying is that the educational method and role model works for a person with whom there is something to work, a person who is not a sociopath, a person or a group. And then indeed it is proper to work that way, not in a forceful way, even if you have the power. Even if you have the power, don’t use it—or at least not in too high a dosage—because in the end this will work better. In the end he will be the virtuous person and not merely the one who rules over his soul. He will want on his own to do the good. That is much better than someone who suppresses himself, certainly if I force him to do the good. But if someone is broken to the core, then it is not because the one who rules over his soul is better than the virtuous person that I will beat him so that he overcomes his inclination in order to do the good; rather, simply because there is no other way out.

Rabbi Kook, as I said earlier, is not dealing with Maimonides’ question of which is the more ideal figure, the more exalted utopia. Rabbi Kook is dealing with the question of which technique works, not who is the ideal figure. And he says: there are certain figures or certain societies in which only force will work. Meaning, the educational model will not work. And a great many of the arguments—also our political arguments, and also in our relations with our neighbors, and also in relations between left and right, and I could elaborate here on all of these—revolve around this question: whether to engage in arm-twisting, to act by force, or whether to act by way of some kind of agreement. And there is always the feeling that if you go for agreement and he doesn’t go with you, he will use force, and then you get hit from every direction. But in the end that leads us to both sides using force, and in the end we both get hit. Therefore very often the debate is over the question whether the one standing opposite you belongs to the type that has some point inside with whom one can work, and then I’m willing occasionally to lose and occasionally to give in and get the short end of the stick and come out looking like a sucker—but in the end I still have hope that we’ll solve the problem. Because force won’t solve the problem. Or whether the one standing opposite me is a real turkey, meaning someone with whom there is no talking—you can’t work with him; with him, only force, he understands only force.

And I think one can hear these statements from both political sides, without getting into it and without taking a position. I’m only saying that the political debate too, in the end, revolves around what we might call this educational question, even though it is a bit paternalistic to see myself as the educator of my neighbors or of the other groups or something like that. But never mind—the way to influence, not to educate. So this dilemma accompanies us, I think, also on the political plane. And it seems to me that it is very worthwhile to think whether I am correctly assessing the figure standing opposite me. Is it necessarily really what I think, and really true? Is he really hopeless, or perhaps not? It could be that maybe this is a very small point, but there is still such a point in him. And the question is how one grasps it, because force—as Moshe Dayan said—“for eternity we shall live by the sword,” yes? Meaning, to live by the sword forever—that can be read as an exclamation mark, not a question mark. So fine, one has to examine that. Or perhaps not. And if that’s not the case, then we need to face reality. Then one must understand that this is what is standing opposite me, and no role model and no explanations and all sorts of things like that will help, because only force is the solution. Again, I’m not taking a position here. I’m only saying that this is, I think, another look or another angle through which one can also look at our political rifts and political arguments, both internal and external.

That’s it, I’m finished. And now—I’m releasing the chat; I haven’t looked at it. I invite everyone, if there are questions there, they can now raise them vocally. But first I’ll unmute you, unmute. Wait. Now I suggest that everybody still turn off their microphones except for the person speaking. As usual, we’ll begin with questions that relate to the lesson, and afterward if you want to talk about additional topics, we can. No, no, it’s better if it’s vocal. Someone here asks whether it’s better in the chat. Let it be vocal—just only the person speaking should have a microphone on, and everyone else should turn theirs off so we won’t have all kinds of echoes and problems. Okay, so who opens? Yes, Rabbi, I see no one’s opening, so I’ll start. Regarding a person who in the end is not really sick, a person whom there really is a chance to treat, right? So at his root he is still a healthy person, we say. So I want to ask the question of truth, the question of time. After all, eventually he’ll get tired of pretending to be a turkey, because he knows the truth, he knows he isn’t, right? So how long can a person keep pretending to be a turkey when in the end he knows he isn’t a turkey? So ostensibly the problem should resolve itself, and one only needs to check what caused him, what drove him to behave that way, what external thing bothered him, or educate him regarding whatever was bothering him, show him that it isn’t the right thing. So I’m just asking if you could sharpen this, because ostensibly this doesn’t really solve the problem; it’s not what we need to be dealing with, to solve the symptoms and show him the truth, because he knows the truth.

In that sense I think you’re a little more optimistic than I am. Meaning, I think a person can entrench himself in crazy theories that he himself understands are crazy—deep down, he understands they are crazy—and after enough time he has lived in them so much and become so convinced that I’m not sure time always does its work. There are endless examples, I think. Again, it depends how you analyze reality. Even if we take the example of the Nazis—which, you know, Godwin’s Law, in the end we always get to the Nazis—even there, if they really, really believed in their theories, then ostensibly they were complete coercion cases. Meaning, if I have any claim against them, it is only because my assessment is that deep down they too understood that they were doing wicked deeds. And still, it is entirely possible that six years went by in extremely radical deeds, and I assume that if no one had fought them it could have gone on for fifty years too. I don’t know. Who says it ends after some amount of time? I’m not at all sure.

And here I am talking about very extreme deeds. And if there are less extreme deeds—there are people, you know, even in religious education. I talked about this in the first lesson last week. Now I’ll say the opposite side of the coin. There I said that sometimes success in religious education is actually when someone decides to leave, because at least you succeeded in that he formed his own position. On the other hand, many times it could be that someone leaves because he built himself some theory whose basis is that he basically wants to leave. And he built for himself the theory that in the end he really does think this is what he believes in, and it gives him some support for the things he wants to do. But the inclination led, and the theory came afterward. Now when it is like this and when like that, I don’t know; each person knows this about himself. But there are situations like this and situations like that. Now the question is: do you really think that everyone who reached this conclusion only because of inclination, after a year or two it just passes? I think that the moment he enters into a certain lifestyle—in this case, let’s say a secular lifestyle, though by the way it could also go in the opposite direction—then he’ll stay there because that’s what he got used to, and he’ll tell himself that’s what he believes, and ostensibly that is what he really believes, except for that small nagging point that usually doesn’t surface. And again, I’m saying this is true in both directions. Sometimes people make a change in the opposite direction for the same reason as well. So I’m not as optimistic as you are that every externally driven change must someday pass. You need to help him. That’s what I have to say.

Okay. Yes, Arik. Unmute yourself. Here, I unmuted you. Yes. Hello, Rabbi. Wait. Can you hear me? Yes. First of all, regarding what the Rabbi read, that he is not among the pious of the nations of the world and not among their wise men—there is a version in Maimonides that says “but among their wise men.” I read it with that version. “And not among their wise men”? No. I read “but among their wise men.” Yes. “But among their wise men”? Yes. I think that what the Rabbi showed us from the responsa database had “and not.” No, in the responsa database we didn’t see that ruling in Maimonides at all; I didn’t bring it up. The more authoritative version is “but among their wise men,” and that’s how I quoted it too. Understood.

Now, something I didn’t understand in Maimonides himself: he says that a person with no hold at all from inclination—the virtuous person—is in commandments like do not murder, the rational commandments. And the one who overcomes himself is preferable, basically, in the heard commandments. Then he gives examples like mixtures, meat and milk. But he also writes forbidden sexual relations. Why are forbidden relations considered a heard commandment? Interesting question. In this case I’m inclined to agree with him, that forbidden relations are not a moral issue. Yes. If the Torah hadn’t forbidden it, it wouldn’t have been forbidden? Another man’s wife wouldn’t have been forbidden? Relations with my sister wouldn’t have been forbidden? Another man’s wife—I’m not sure he means another man’s wife; he speaks about forbidden relations in general. My sister, then my sister. If the Torah hadn’t forbidden relations with my sister, it would have been permitted? Certainly. Our natural psyche recoils from it, but there is a very well-known psychologist named Jonathan Haidt. He once wrote a very interesting book—I wrote about it on my website several times—where he discusses all kinds of acts that we really feel are disgusting when we hear about them, but when you think about the matter a second time, you see that there is actually no problem there, it harms nobody. We just have some kind of internal taboo, some kind of—don’t know what exactly to call it—psychological structure that recoils from it. Like eating the neighbors’ dog after it died. You know, my neighbors’ dog dies, and I take it and eat it and cook it quietly at night, and they don’t notice. I think many people would react to that as something disgusting. But what is the difference between that and eating a chicken? Or I don’t know what—having sex with a frozen chicken from the supermarket; these are his examples, he brings them. You understand? It sounds to us like a disgusting, bizarre, inhuman act, I don’t know exactly what. But in the end, whom does it harm? One benefits and no one loses. What is the problem? There is really no moral problem here. Maybe I would call these aesthetic values as opposed to ethical values. Meaning, there is something in our humanity that recoils from this, but I don’t see a moral problem in it.

Maybe this is what Maimonides writes in Guide for the Perplexed about the conventional and the rational, that there are things that only became established as bad, but are not really bad. In that article there I deal exactly with that distinction between conventional and rational in Maimonides. But this still doesn’t quite fit, because the seven Noahide commandments—one of them is sexual immorality. And from what you’re setting up, sexual immorality sounds like a rational commandment. Right. In Maimonides there are quite a few contradictions in these classifications between conventional and rational. I’m not entirely sure what the answer is; I have various suggestions, but I don’t think there’s much point in getting into them here. Right, it doesn’t seem to fit. Fine, thank you very much.

Okay. Anyone else? There are chats here, lots of chats, but I invite people to say it vocally. Rabbi Michael? Yes, Hillel. Hi. Hi. You spoke there about the evil inclination of the certain type, the one who basically knows what is right but his evil inclination is what tells him to do this or that. Let’s say in the turkey case, the one who felt himself to be a turkey. I’d like to understand what, how you define this evil inclination, and why the evil inclination has some sort of—it sounded from what you were saying—like it has some… it’s just evil inclination, not something essential, not that this is really the person, the more sophisticated thing. How do you relate to this evil inclination? What is it?

No, I think that’s what I call evil inclination, nothing sophisticated. Meaning, if he really believes in what he’s doing, then it’s not evil inclination; he simply thinks differently. Even if he’s wrong. Fine, if he’s mistaken, he’s mistaken, but he thinks differently. In my view, the definition of evil inclination is only the mechanism I described here. It’s a state in which, basically, you yourself also understand what is good. After all, this is what we say: “Master of the Universe, our will is to do Your will, but what can we do? The yeast in the dough prevents us.” Meaning, the evil inclination doesn’t let us. What does that mean? We basically also understand that what we did was not okay, but the evil inclination led us to do it. But if I myself truly think that what I did is okay, then I’m simply coerced by my own mind. It’s not that I’m right, but even if I’m wrong it is not called evil inclination. I’m simply mistaken. Such a person is coerced.

The important point here—and this is for another lesson, somewhat connected to free will, which I discuss on Thursdays—is that there is some kind of affinity or reciprocal relationship between our instinctive dimension and our intellectual dimension. What? You said that twice. Wait, there’s something here… They manage to drag the intellect after them, and the intellect builds some theory that serves the instincts. And that theory can be super sophisticated; we’re not talking about stupid people. People can generate theories—I think, I don’t remember now, Oscar Wilde said it, or maybe not Oscar Wilde, some other Brit, I forgot his name—that there are things so stupid that only intellectuals can say them. Meaning, there are things so stupid that in order to build a theory within which one can say such things, you need to be a genius. Not a real genius—this is a real phenomenon. It’s not just a joke. It’s a real phenomenon, because a person with common sense says: this is true, that is not true. He doesn’t know how to build for himself sophisticated theories out of nowhere that justify something untrue. He isn’t sophisticated enough for that. In order to justify something untrue, you need to be very sophisticated. And then again, I’m saying, not everything is done maliciously—this is a complex psychological process—but it still requires intellectual sophistication. And the inclination uses that sophistication and builds a theory, and after it builds the theory I identify with it and think I really am a turkey, and now I behave like a turkey, and what do you want from me? That’s what I think. We disagree? Fine, we disagree, but that’s what I think. The claim is: no, deep down you don’t think that—unless he really does think that. And then there’s nothing to do, right?

But how do you know whether he really thinks that or doesn’t really think that? I don’t know. I can try to assess, but clearly I can also be wrong. And there’s no way. A psychologist too, of course, can’t always know this, and someone who isn’t a psychologist maybe even less so, though my confidence in psychologists is somewhat limited. But let’s say, clearly no one can know with certainty. Still, a judge has only what his eyes can see. You can try to assess where the person standing before you is, just as every court, every judicial body that judges a person, ultimately also has to judge his criminal intent. Now intentions—who can know? God tests hearts and kidneys. Yet both the legal system and Jewish law give judges the authority to decide what is in a person’s heart by way of all kinds of indications. They can be wrong, but what can we do? We have to make decisions on that plane too. So sometimes we’ll be mistaken.

Was there a question? Yes, yes. There is some assumption here: we presented Maimonides, and it seems the Rabbi agrees with him, with the approach that the virtuous person, the naturally upright person, is more excellent than the one who conquers his inclination. I’m not sure. There’s something here—I want to connect this to previous lessons where we said that a person’s level is his point of free choice. Because if he was born with a good character, that’s not—it’s deterministic. So what if it’s inner determinism, it’s still deterministic.

No, so here I partly agree with the beginning but not with the end. Meaning, first of all, it could be in light of what Maimonides says that only on the moral plane is this so, and your point of free choice may not be on the moral plane but on the religious plane of meat and milk, sha’atnez, and so on. So it could be a distinction. But beyond that, I think first of all I don’t necessarily agree with Maimonides that someone whose inclination is toward the good is in fact a better person—unless it is the work of his own hands. Meaning, unless he himself built himself in such a way that he also identifies with the good. That perhaps does seem to me a virtue. But if he is someone who, say, cannot get there, I don’t think he is necessarily worse than someone else who did get there.

But I’ll say more. That is why I said I nevertheless don’t agree with the end of what you said, because even if in the end I build myself in a positive way and that is what causes me to do the good, after all don’t forget: I built that. So in the end, when I do the good, it is still the result of my own internal work. I don’t have to make a fresh decision every moment, every step, every time. I’m allowed to build myself correctly in a way that makes daily conduct easier for me, and therefore that still counts to my credit. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that.

One final point in this context—and I think it was even in response to one of your questions in one of the previous lessons—I brought the introduction of the Eglei Tal on Torah study, about enjoying Torah study. He says there that it is not only permitted but desirable to enjoy Torah study, but it is not right that the study be because of the enjoyment. Likewise, a person who repaired his soul and now wants naturally to do good—that still doesn’t mean the reason he does good is because he wants to. It may be that he does it because he truly obeys the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, and understands that this is the right thing to do. It’s just easier for him because he built himself well. But even if he had been built differently, he still would have done it. He still would have done it. In that case, although he has a desire to do good and does good, it still doesn’t mean that he does good because of the desire to do good. That’s not a necessary conclusion.

Okay. Okay, anyone else? The chats are still running here, so I invite you to speak. Can you change the mute? This is Shmuel. No, no, wait, sorry, now I understand, my mistake, sorry. I didn’t restore to you the ability to control your own fate. Wait. There, now. Now anyone who wants can unmute. Sorry, technology is still beyond me. Yes. Now anyone can unmute if they want.

Regarding another lesson—you said, in a relatively old lesson, about negative attributes, you spoke there about privative negation. And I saw that in the trilogy you didn’t write privative negation, only nullifying negation and opposing negation. Does that mean you changed your mind about privative negation? No, no, but it was too complicated. I debated whether to include it or not. Fine, that’s all I wanted to know. Thanks.

Okay. Anyone else? Are people now bringing questions not related to the lesson? Can’t hear? Is it okay now to ask questions not related to the lesson? Yes, yes. Yes, so also a question: in the Rabbi’s book Human as Grass, at the end of the second stage he brings Nefesh HaChaim, which speaks about how Torah upholds heaven and earth. And it reminded me a bit—I don’t know—of things one sometimes hears, arguments that are supposedly more practical, that some Haredim say, I don’t know, I also contribute directly to the security of the state, because without Torah study things would really collapse, or some custom in yeshivot that there should always be Torah study. The world-saving shift. The world-saving shift on Shavuot. The world-saving shift after Yom Kippur. So my question was, I’m kind of not sure what to do with that. On the one hand it’s hard for me to believe that if no one were studying Torah, suddenly the world would collapse. On the other hand, from Nefesh HaChaim it sounds very serious, that Torah really upholds heaven and… I don’t know, I wanted to hear the Rabbi’s view.

I think—you know—at least in recent years I’ve gone through changes on this matter too. But in recent years I’m not inclined toward those mystical directions. I interpret these things more metaphorically. Meaning, if the world was created so that we would observe commandments, then that is the justification for its existence. Not that if for one moment people stop studying Torah or observing commandments, the world will collapse. Rather, that this is the reason it was created, and therefore it is fitting to occupy ourselves with this. On the mystical level—that if for one moment it stops, the world will immediately collapse—that doesn’t sound right to me.

Let’s say, I don’t even rule out that it would be interesting someday to do a statistical calculation of the probability that there was ever some second from the giving of the Torah—not from the creation of the world, from the giving of the Torah—until today in which no one in the world was studying Torah. Of course, for this one would also have to define what counts as studying Torah, which I do in the second book. But even if, let’s say, someone who holds the worldview you described earlier also has a very defined conception of what it means to study Torah, even then perhaps some sort of calculation could be made. Understood. Fine, okay. Thank you very much.

Rabbi? Yes. A question regarding your previous lesson about free choice—it was about knowledge and prediction of the future. You had an analogy about a ball. A ball that is located in a certain topography, we can know where it will end up, because the terrain dictates where it will go. Whereas with a human being, it’s not certain he’ll go according to the path; it only influences his decisions. Where it’s hard, he’ll try not to go; where it’s easy, he’ll go more—but it won’t dictate to him, it will only influence him. Can you hear me? Yes, yes. So my question is about homosexuality: how much of it is chosen and how much is forced? And conversion therapy on the other side—is that something that can have an effect, or that’s it, that’s how one is created?

Look, I don’t feel qualified to answer that. I can only say that in my impression there are many people who aren’t qualified who answer it. Meaning, on both sides, by the way. People express very definitive positions on this issue when apparently there still are not fully definitive answers. But for me, I don’t think it has theological significance. It has important significance in relation to people, but in theology I don’t think it has significance. Even if it turns out that the person has absolutely no ability to overcome it, fine, that still doesn’t mean the thing is a state that should be regarded as positive. At most, in discussions of punishment we’ll say he is compelled, and therefore there is no point in punishing him; he’s unfortunate, he’s compelled. That’s not…

And the reverse too: meaning, if you think it’s fine, then it doesn’t matter—whether you think it’s fine or not fine, it has nothing to do with whether it is natural or unnatural. The insertion of the question of how natural or unnatural it is is simply an intellectual joke. By the way, on both sides. Those who defend the phenomenon explain that it’s natural, and those who attack the phenomenon explain that it’s unnatural, and both are talking nonsense. No, they are talking nonsense not because it is natural or not natural, but because the question whether it is natural or not has nothing to do with the question whether it is okay or not okay. There are natural things that are okay and natural things that are not okay. There are unnatural things that are okay and unnatural things that are not okay. And when someone thinks it’s natural, then it’s harder for him to cope. Fine, then maybe he is compelled—what can you do? So the question is not whether it’s natural; it’s whether it’s moral.

A young man comes to a psychologist and he has these tendencies. Is there something to help him with, or that’s it? Let him ask a psychologist. I don’t know. That’s a question of scientific knowledge. I think there are some who claim that it is possible to do something in this area. They are silenced very strongly; there is a very strong consensus from the side that says there is no way to do anything in any case. I don’t know who is right on this matter. I only know that there is very strong silencing, and therefore I’m somewhat suspicious of the professional consensus that often gets expressed in one direction. But I have no knowledge in either direction. Again, I don’t think anyone has complete knowledge. Clearly there is knowledge—there are people who work on this and research it. I don’t think anyone has a clear answer whether it is impossible in every case or possible in every case. It is probably neither fully true nor fully false. The question is when it is possible, and whether it is possible, and under what circumstances, and exactly how, and how to do it without damages. Because conversion therapy too has a lot of terrible harms. And that’s already an ethical question: how far to put a person into conversion therapy when you are imposing all kinds of terrible harms on him. Those are ethical questions; one must think about them. But the scientific factual questions—what helps and what doesn’t help and how—those are questions for scientific research and not for rabbis or thinkers or me or whoever. And second, even the researchers currently still apparently do not know how to give a full answer to that.

Okay, thank you. That’s it? Okay, so it seems to me we’re finishing here. So we… Fine, there is supposed to be another lesson on Tuesday. We’ll send a message in the WhatsApp group, a continuation lesson. All right, then.