Ein Ayah – Berakhot 112–113: Two Redemptions and Two Types of Freedom

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This is what I want them to see. Okay, good. So the passage we’re dealing with is section 112, which is on the lower left side of the screen, but I want to start by looking at the Talmud, because what Rabbi Kook says is really a comment on what appears in the Talmud above. So look here in the Talmud, up here, it says this. The context is basically a dispute about until when one eats the Passover offering, and the Talmud says that the Passover offering is eaten until the time of haste. The question is: what counts as the time of haste? “Haste” means the exodus from Egypt, that they left in haste. So when the Talmud gets into the question of exactly when that was, it says this. Watch my cursor, I’m pointing to where I’m reading. Rabbi Abba said: Everyone agrees that when the people of Israel were redeemed from Egypt, they were redeemed only in the evening, as it is said, “The Lord your God brought you out of Egypt at night”; and when they actually left, they left only by day. Meaning, they were redeemed in the evening and they left by day. In a moment we’ll see what that means. As it is said, “On the morrow after the Passover, the people of Israel went out with an uplifted hand.” What do they disagree about? About the time of haste. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah holds: what is “haste”? The haste of Egypt. And Rabbi Akiva holds: what is “haste”? The haste of Israel. So the dispute—Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah who says until midnight, and Rabbi Akiva who says until dawn—comes down to the question: what is that time of haste up to which the Passover may be eaten? Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah says it refers to the haste of the Egyptians, and Rabbi Akiva says it refers to the haste of Israel. What does that mean? It says, “It was also taught in a baraita,” and I’ll keep reading the Talmud here. “The Lord your God brought you out of Egypt at night.” But did they leave at night? Didn’t they leave only by day, as it says, “On the morrow after the Passover, the people of Israel went out with an uplifted hand”? “On the morrow after the Passover” means by day. Rather, this teaches that their redemption began in the evening. The Talmud there is basically saying that everyone agrees about what happened historically. Historically, the Egyptians stopped enslaving Israel in the evening—say, for the sake of discussion, by midnight. And Israel left Egypt in the morning. The whole question is a halakhic one: from when until when, sorry, are we supposed to eat the Passover offering? Is it determined by the haste of Egypt, meaning until midnight, or by the haste of Israel, meaning until morning? The halakhic context is less important for us here. Rabbi Kook is dealing here with the redemption—not with the dispute, sorry, but with the description of the redemption itself, this doubled redemption. So maybe let’s first read what he says. One second, okay, let’s first read what he says. I’m going to read two sections, 112 and then in a moment I’ll move to 113, so that we get some kind of overall picture, and then I’ll say a bit about it. He says—I’m reading here, watch the cursor—Rabbi Abba said: Everyone agrees that when Israel was redeemed from Egypt, they were redeemed only in the evening, and when they left, they left only by day. That’s a quote from the Talmud. Deliverance from slavery to freedom, says Rabbi Kook, generally brings about in an entire nation two things. One is the inner freedom, when a person feels in his soul an elevation, that he has left the lowliness of slavery and become a free person and master of himself. I’m reading from the upper right here. And the second is the visible action in the world, in that the nation is a free people, living and acting. And in Israel these two are even more pronounced. For the inner freedom is the beginning of their own perfection, in the holiness of character traits, in Torah and its commandments and wisdom. And the visible, external freedom stands in Israel so as to be a light unto the nations, as a great part of that has already happened even now, and it will reach its completion when the Lord has mercy on His people, for “from Zion shall go forth Torah,” and “for the Torah of Israel the islands shall wait.” Meaning, the whole world will wait for the Torah. Therefore the redemptions were divided into two parts. When Israel was redeemed from Egypt, the inner redemption was in the evening, because here the main thing is not the knowledge and publicity among others, but rather the good feeling of their inner freedom—their inner freedom. And when they left, they left only by day, with an uplifted hand, visible to all the inhabitants of the world, to show their open activity in the world, to act wisely and beneficently toward all creatures made in the divine image, to shine with the light of God, as it says: “Nations shall walk by your light, and kings by the brightness of your rising.” Basically what Rabbi Kook is saying is that there was an evening redemption and a morning redemption. The evening redemption is something internal, something the people around us aren’t really supposed to see; it’s something that happens inside us, and that’s why it’s at night, when others don’t see it, only what I myself experience. And there is the redemption of the morning. The redemption of the morning is what is visible also to the world outside me. The inner redemption is essentially the release from the external chains, when the Egyptians withdraw—that’s why it’s the haste of Egypt, at night. When the Egyptians withdraw, then I’m freed from the chains and become a free person. In the morning I already go out from Egypt, outward, and there I already have some action upon the world around me. Here the whole world is present to that freedom that I express outwardly, and that’s why it happens by day. The exodus from Egypt takes place by day because this is a freedom that is also revealed to my surroundings; it doesn’t happen only inside me. In a moment we’ll come back to these points, but first I want, just to complete the picture, to read section 113 as well. What do they disagree about? I’m reading here in 113. What do they disagree about? About the time of haste. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah holds: the haste of Egypt. Right, that’s from the Talmud. I’m now starting to read what Rabbi Kook writes about it. For the inner freedom depends on the nullification of slavery. And the nullification of slavery has to come from Egypt, because they are the cause of the slavery, insofar as they regarded themselves as Israel’s masters. Right—the Egyptians were masters over Israel, so the nullification of slavery is essentially the removal of the masters. And through their haste—the Egyptians’ haste—and their recognition that Israel ought not be slaves, the abolition of slavery began, and inner freedom began to glimmer. Meaning: it appeared; inner freedom began to appear. In other words, this is the removal of the external enslavers and the appearance of inner freedom. And that was the haste of the Egyptians, which happened at night, at midnight, because it is really only the removal of external limitations and the feeling of inner freedom that happens inside me—it still isn’t revealed outwardly. And Rabbi Akiva holds: the haste of Israel, which indicates the external freedom—meaning freedom directed outward, not freedom from external chains but freedom outward. To walk upright, to do great and mighty things in order to benefit the world. For that, what is needed is Israel’s own action and their recognition of their advantage and mission to act upon others in the world. And since the full completion of redemption is not merely the removal of slavery—right, redemption becomes complete, for redemption to be complete it is not enough just for the chains to be removed—but rather actual freedom and the expansion of life under the banner of Torah in the world. And in fact freedom is completed not only by removing the chains—that is the first stage, which happens at night—but by my now appearing and acting in the world as a result of those chains having been removed; they make that possible. Therefore, what is said, “The Lord your God brought you out of Egypt at night,” teaches that their redemption began while it was still evening, and only a beginning is called the redemption of evening compared to the exalted goal of the completion of redemption, “with an uplifted hand.” Yes, this is called a beginning relative to what will happen later, in the morning exodus: “so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the Lord is God, the God of Israel.” In the morning, by day, everyone also knows this freedom of ours. It is not just the removal of chains, but also our appearance outwardly, our influence outwardly. However, the redemptions were divided into two—I’m here with the cursor—the redemption of evening and the redemption of day. Because they were destined to be enslaved again. This is already a somewhat surprising passage. The redemptions are divided into two—we’ve already seen that—the redemption of evening and the redemption of day. Now Rabbi Kook says: historically, after we left Egypt, we were of course still destined for future servitudes; we would yet be enslaved again—Greece and Rome and Assyria and so on. This teaches that that later servitude would come upon them only to interrupt their action upon others. Meaning, what future exile and bondage would do to the people of Israel is stop their exodus from Egypt, so to speak; it would not allow them to appear outwardly. But the exaltation of their spirit and the inner superiority that they attained in the redemption of evening—this remains forever and will never depart from them. The freedom—the inner sense of freedom, not the outward influence—that can no longer be taken from us. From the moment we attained it on the night of the exodus from Egypt, it can no longer be taken from us. “For the people of Israel are My servants.” And of course he is alluding to the exposition: “For the people of Israel are My servants”—and not servants to servants. Meaning, this is freedom from the chains of every authority other than the Holy One, blessed be He. Therefore, the main obligation of telling the story of the exodus from Egypt is at night—I’ve moved here to the left column—to indicate the force and value of the redemption of evening, and Scripture is precise in saying, “The Lord your God brought you out of Egypt at night.” Why did I say that the ending is surprising? Because on the face of it it seems the opposite. At first he said that the redemption of evening is the removal of chains, and that this is an inner matter. The external chains that the Egyptians put on us deprived us of some inner freedom. Once those chains were removed, we had an inner sense of freedom. The redemption of morning is the continuation: we actually leave Egypt and begin to influence the world. That is our freedom to spread Torah, values, and so on. So I would have expected that in the future, when chains are put on us again—when other nations enslave us again, not the Egyptians—which of the two redemptions would be canceled? Seemingly the first one. The chains that had been removed from us in the first redemption have come back. But Rabbi Kook says no—the first redemption is eternal; that can never be taken from us at all. The chains that will be put on us in the future are chains that prevent the redemption of the morning, not the redemption of the evening. And the redemption of the morning is something that seemingly has nothing to do with chains—it happened after the chains were removed; it was the second stage. Yet it is specifically that stage that is taken from us when chains are put on us. That’s a somewhat surprising claim. Okay, so that’s the general picture. I want to broaden the discussion a bit. You know what? I’ll even do this—I’ll stop the sharing. Maybe I’ll begin with a more general introduction that this context calls for. There’s a well-known distinction, usually attributed to Sir Isaiah Berlin—the Jewish-British thinker and philosopher—between positive liberty and negative liberty. These are ideas that existed before him too, but he was the one who really formulated the concepts. Negative liberty is basically freedom from chains: nobody limits me, and I can do whatever I decide to do. No external factor dictates what I do. Positive liberty is my inner freedom, which enables me—or not enables me, but rather I express it—in action according to values or ideologies or worldviews that I decide upon. So negative liberty is basically about what is not here: there are no chains on me. That still doesn’t say what I do with that. I can lie in bed all day even without chains, and then in a certain sense I have internal chains. No one is forcing me, but I’m not actually making use of the freedom I was given. Positive liberty is a state in which a person expresses values or worldviews he has within him, projects them outward, tries to influence, advance them, promote what he believes in. In that sense it is stage two. If there are chains on me, then maybe it will be hard for me to express positive liberty. So negative liberty is some kind of condition. But fulfilling the condition still doesn’t mean I will act in a way that reflects positive liberty. It’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. After that I also have to be a free person who acts autonomously, forms a worldview for himself, acts according to it, promotes it, and so on. I think that by these two redemptions Rabbi Kook means those two kinds of freedom. The removal of the chains—the freedom of night—is negative liberty. They remove my chains and now I have the potential, at least, to do what I believe in. And the freedom of morning is the decision to act in a certain way, according to a worldview I formulate, to promote it and act by it. I would even make an analogy to discussions that come up in relation to the freedom of the individual person. When people talk about a person acting as a free human being, it’s hard to avoid the connection to determinism. The question is whether we really are free as we feel we are. It seems to me that we do feel that way. A lot of people deny it. Some people think that a person doesn’t really have freedom to decide; his ideology and behavior are dictated to him. Dictated by external factors, by internal factors, genetics, education, environment—that’s more or less the accepted division. The confrontation with determinism—and now I’m not talking about a nation but about an individual—has become much sharper in recent years, or recent decades perhaps, as neuroscience reveals more and more about how we make decisions, form positions, and conduct ourselves. And the sense, at least among many brain researchers, is that freedom in the ordinary sense is some kind of illusion. We are not really free in the way we think. In reality, our environment and our inner environment dictate how we think, how we decide, maybe even our character—whether we are brave or cowardly, stingy, believers, unbelievers, atheists, whatever. Every other day there are reports about the gene responsible for fear and courage and faith and disbelief—reports that, I have to say, really don’t amount to much; that’s mostly in journalism, but it’s not really true. I don’t think that any mental phenomenon on earth—not even the simplest—has one clear gene that fully determines it. That’s my understanding, and I’m no expert in this field, but as far as I understand, that’s the situation. The papers always tell us they found what is responsible for what, but that doesn’t really happen. But to return to our topic: I think there are two mistakes in the confrontation with determinism, and they reflect these two types of redemption that Rabbi Kook is talking about. One mistake—in my view it’s a mistake, though a great many philosophers and scientists believe it—is the view called compatibilism. “Compatible,” meaning they fit together. What does that mean? The simple intuitive view sees a contradiction between determinism and free will. If there is determinism, then there is no free will, and vice versa. Meaning, if we have free will, that means nothing—internal or external—dictates what I think or what I do. That’s the simple view, and that’s the fundamental dilemma regarding determinism and free will. In order to deal with that, as I said, in recent years the view called compatibilism has flourished, and it basically says: that’s not true. There is no contradiction. They are compatible. Free will is compatible with determinism. What does that mean? Basically the claim is this—I’m putting it very simply here—there is a book by Eliezer Malkiel that I highly recommend. I think it is fundamentally mistaken, but it’s really a superb book. I wrote a review of it on the Mida website; you can read it there. He, in my opinion, is the best representative of this compatibilist view that I know. The basic claim is that as long as a person does what he wants, then he is free. Meaning, if there is no external limitation dictating what I do, but they leave it to me to decide what to do, then I’m free. Now, that doesn’t mean that the internal processes within me that determine what I will do are not deterministic processes. Meaning, maybe I have some kind of brain structure, genetic structure, whatever, education affects it too, doesn’t matter—all the things that affect us—but in the end there is some internal structure that dictates what I “want,” in quotation marks. I say “want” in quotation marks because this is not the traditional understanding of the concept of wanting. This is not free will in the sense that I can decide one way or another. The decision could be predicted in advance; it is predetermined. But it is predetermined not by an external factor but by who I am. And in that sense, says the compatibilist, you can’t say I’m not a free person. I am a free person, because what I want is what I do. There is nothing external interfering with my doing what I want. So basically the compatibilist says there is no contradiction between free will and determinism, as long as the determinism is internal determinism. That is, my internal structure—it may be innate if you like, doesn’t matter, but some internal structure that is me—dictates what I think and what I do. So you can’t say I’m not free. I am completely free. What I want, decide, think—that’s what I do. Nothing external interferes, so I am basically a free person. That is the compatibilist claim. Before I get to my objection to that, the second mistake—and I’m calling it a mistake, I’ll explain in a moment—is common mainly among brain researchers in this context. I found a formulation in a book called The Science of Freedom, citing Ciechanover, the Nobel Prize winner from the Technion. When he is asked in an interview about determinism, he says that today we can be relaxed about the question of determinism—this is a free paraphrase, I don’t remember the exact quote—because we know that our brain is plastic. Brain plasticity is a relatively new discovery: the brain is not some rigid structure where however we were born is how we die, but a dynamic structure influenced by many things and constantly changing. Therefore, says Ciechanover, there is no problem, there is no determinism. The brain is clearly not bound to the way it was when we were born. It changes. And because of that, he says, we see that the human being is dynamic, and therefore the deterministic picture is not correct. That’s more or less what he says. It sounds like nonsense, really, though I don’t think my summary does him any terrible injustice. Why is it nonsense? Because brain plasticity is accepted by all determinists. It’s a fact; I don’t think anyone denies it. The question is what causes that dynamism—those changes that happen in the brain. Are those changes the result of my decision—my deciding to do something different from what maybe my structure dictated to me? If so, I would indeed call that free will or indeterminism, meaning against determinism. But the brain plasticity as determinists talk about it is simply changes in the brain that result from environmental influences. Not internal influences this time, but still influences. Pressures, education, environment—it doesn’t matter, the whole collection of external influences acting upon us. So this has nothing to do with the question of determinism. You can be a total determinist and fully accept brain plasticity; you’ll simply say that brain plasticity, the changes in the brain, are the result of external deterministic influences. Now why am I bringing up these two claims? Because these two claims reflect exactly the sandwich within which the freedom we’re talking about is located. Because the freedom I at least want to talk about here is freedom both from external chains—that environmental influence that creates brain plasticity—and from internal chains, from the structures I was born with, my genetics or my brain structure. Freedom in the full sense has to be neutralized from both of these. If you surrender to either one, that is not freedom; it is one kind of determinism. Each of these views denies one kind of determinism and embraces another kind. When I speak about freedom, I mean something that is neither this nor that. Something else. That is admittedly a far-reaching claim, certainly from the perspective of neuroscience, but the claim is that we have some capacity to determine our steps, and that decision is not dictated even by our internal structure, and certainly not by our environment. Now my claim is not that the environment does not affect me, or that my internal structure does not affect what I think and what I do. Of course it does. There are such influences, and they are clearly documented in research. To deny that would be to deny facts. In fact, I think that often when people present the libertarian view—the view of free will against determinism—they present it as if the person were some detached creature who depends neither on environment nor on anything internal, some kind of action in a vacuum. That is obviously a straw man, and a very easy one to attack. And how do they attack it? They say: look, people born into one kind of education usually behave this way, and people born into another kind of education usually behave differently. So you see that education or environment affects human behavior, and therefore the world is deterministic. Right? The first part is true, but the “therefore” is not true. Because what the libertarian claims—I’m a libertarian—is that of course there are influences from the environment, and of course there are also influences from my genetic, psychological, neurological structure. Yes, I’m ignoring the psychological for now and speaking only in physiological terms, but I mean the psychological too in this context. Of course there are such influences. I only claim that these are influences, not determinations. That is, the claim is that the external environment and the internal environment do not determine what I think and what I do; they influence what I think and what I do. The difference is dramatic. Because it is obvious that there is influence. It is obvious that a person’s upbringing affects him. In fact, I think many people would see that as a good thing. It’s good because it is what makes education possible. Our ability to educate depends precisely on our having some capacity to influence what becomes of our student. If there were no such external influence, education would have no meaning. Either the person would choose good or choose evil, but education would have nothing to say about it. So this is not a negative phenomenon; it is a very positive one—as long as we are talking about education and not conditioning. Because the deterministic picture of brain plasticity speaks about conditioning, not education. It speaks about programming the student’s brain and thereby determining what he will think or do. That is not education; it is conditioning and programming. But the libertarian can absolutely accept the concept of education—not conditioning, but education. So environmental influences, and certainly internal genetic and psychological influences of my inner structure, are fully accepted by the libertarian no less than by the determinist. Now, if I return for a moment to the dispute with those two mistakes I mentioned, one can argue about definitions. A definition is just a definition; as long as we agree on terms, you can accept any definition you want. So if the compatibilist wants to define as “freedom” the state in which I do what my internal structure dictates, as long as there are no external chains on me—fine. That’s a word-definition. I’m willing to accept that definition. But it’s not interesting; it’s semantic. If we want to talk about freedom in the substantive sense—for example, in terms of how I view a person, to what extent I regard him as responsible for his actions, to what extent he ought to bear the consequences of what he decides and does—here I think the compatibilist cannot really provide an answer. He will give an explanation for everything. He’ll explain punishment for offenses, he’ll explain education, he’ll explain everything. But what will his explanation be? That you punish a person in order to reshape his brain, his inner structure, so that next time he behaves differently. That is the picture of education and punishment in a compatibilist world. So one can continue behaving exactly as the libertarian behaves—outwardly the same—but the interpretation is completely different. Because in the compatibilist’s eyes, what is happening is really programming. That’s what was called “re-education” in the Soviet Union or in China. They send someone to re-education camps, where of course the point is not education but conditioning. So in the compatibilist’s eyes, education is conditioning. It is merely shaping your brain, or giving you a sanction that will create an association in you that prevents you from repeating the offense. In contrast, education in the libertarian sense is explaining to you the significance of your actions so that next time you exercise proper judgment. That doesn’t mean punishment should not hurt. There is a certain element of conditioning, but conditioning is not the whole story. It is part of the story. And the great tension in education is exactly how to move between conditioning and education as I defined it here. So if I return to our line of thought, Rabbi Kook’s redemption of the night is about removing chains. Removing chains means freeing oneself from external constraints—not from external influences, from external chains. And again, that’s an important point. I’m not talking about freeing ourselves from external influences. External influences are a blessing. I think we should pay attention to everything happening around us, from every distance and every angle; you can learn from anywhere. So external influences are very positive. But to let the external become chains on my hands—that is negative, of course. From that we need to be freed. That is negative liberty. Negative liberty means removing the chains, not removing the influences. In that sense, I think freedom from external chains—from Schopenhauer’s chains, if you will—is the redemption of the night. The redemption of the morning is in a certain sense also negative liberty. It has two components. It includes negative liberty in the sense of being freed from chains—but what chains? Internal chains, as opposed to external ones. Meaning, I do not allow my internal structure either—how I was born, or whatever my current structure is, not necessarily how I was born—to dictate what I do. That too is a kind of chain. And therefore I need to be freed from that too, and in that sense the redemption of the morning also includes negative liberty. So the distinction between the redemption of night and the redemption of morning is not simply a distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. The redemption of the night is negative liberty: the chains are removed. The redemption of the morning is first of all negative liberty too—removing the chains of my own structure, that is, my internal structure—not letting it dictate, yes letting it influence, but not letting it dictate what I do. But of course that is not enough. All that is only laying the groundwork for what? Once I have no chains on me, neither from within nor from without, now I can act, formulate a position autonomously—again taking all the influences, internal and external, into account, but deciding what I do with them—formulate a position autonomously and act by it. And that is already positive liberty. So after negative liberty has been completed and I have freed myself also from internal chains, now I am free. What do I do with this freedom? I could just be a nihilist. Though one could say a nihilist is in some sense still bound by his desires or impulses or inner lusts, perhaps. Philosophically one can debate that. But he can just go to sleep—be totally neutral, do nothing. Then nothing dictates what I do or think, not internally and not externally. So I have negative liberty. But positive liberty does not appear here, because in the end I have no position, I do not act for certain values, I do not appear in the world, I do not influence it. Therefore I think the redemption of the morning—again, where exactly I cast off the chains, you can debate how to align Isaiah Berlin with Rabbi Kook. Does negative liberty happen at night too—external chains—and in the morning too—internal chains—and then later in the morning positive liberty also appears? Or can one say that I remove both external and internal chains at night, and in the morning positive liberty appears? Those are questions of how exactly to map these things, I don’t know. You can interpret it this way or that way, but it’s quite clear that this is the axis Rabbi Kook is pointing to or hinting at. In this connection there are a few important remarks that I think are worth noticing. The description I’ve given so far leaves us with a very hard and unresolved problem. Because after I have cast off all the chains, internal and external alike, nothing dictates what I will do. So what does determine what I will do? In what sense is this autonomous formation of a position that I describe as positive liberty? If I cast off the external chains of Ciechanover, but also the internal chains, against the compatibilists, then what is left? The compatibilists claimed that positive liberty is simply acting according to one’s internal chains. I’m using my language now, but that’s basically what they mean. Nothing external interferes with my doing what my internal chains dictate that I do. So I understand their model. I don’t agree that this is what should be called freedom. I don’t think such a person is responsible for his actions in the ordinary sense. In the end it’s determinism like any other determinism; I don’t care whether what compels him is his genetics—that it’s internal rather than external—still, something is dictating to him what to do. But in that respect their picture is much clearer than mine. Because in their case it is clear what a decision means: strip away all the external chains, and then make decisions according to how you are built, according to what seems right or wrong to you. In contrast, what I am describing really does seem to leave us, like the straw man I mentioned, with nothing. No external chains, no internal structures, no anything. So what then? What does dictate what I do? That’s not a question I can get into fully here, but for now I’ll attach one word to it. This is an autonomous decision. Because usually, in debates around libertarianism and determinism, the objections to libertarianism are constructed exactly as I’ve just described. They basically say: look, if nothing external determines what you do, and nothing internal determines what you do, then what you do is just random. But randomness is not the action of a free person. Randomness is not something for which I bear responsibility, not something that reflects a position I formed, stand behind, and for which I should bear the consequences if I judged wrongly—or the consequences of my thoughts and actions. Randomness is randomness. It has no meaning. It’s like flipping a coin. That is not forming a position; it is not judgment. When I speak of judgment and forming a position, I mean a very elusive concept, very hard to define. Because on the one hand I mean something that is not randomness, and on the other hand something not dictated by any system, neither internal nor external. So if it is not dictated by any system, and it is not randomness, then what is it? What remains? There is a philosopher of Dutch origin, I think he worked mainly in the United States, van Inwagen. He made an argument against libertarianism. He said: there is no such thing as free choice. Why? Because if a person has a cause for what he does—and again I add in parentheses, internal or external—then it is determinism. If there is no cause for what he does, then it is randomness; then it is indeterminism. And that’s it—what else could there be? Either there is a cause or there isn’t. He sees no third option. He divides the possibilities into two exhaustive categories, and says: you have to decide, either you’re here or you’re there. But libertarianism claims something that is neither one nor the other. He says there is no such thing. Because either there is a cause or there isn’t—what else can there be? That is perhaps the main difficulty raised against libertarianism. And I think that in this context the conclusion is really built into the premise. The determinists assume there are only two possibilities, and then they say, well, we don’t see a third. The libertarian says no, there is a third possibility. The third possibility is that there are no causes that produce what I think or what I do—causes in the sense of sufficient conditions. That is, if the cause is present, the effect occurs. It doesn’t have to be necessary, but it has to be sufficient. And that means that if you gave me the cause, the effect occurs. Now if there is a cause for what I do, that is called determinism, right? A sufficient condition is deterministic; it doesn’t have to be necessary, only sufficient. Now if there is no cause for what I do, then van Inwagen says: fine, then it’s probably just random—you’re just doing things pointlessly. So what value do those things have? But I say: not true. Even where there is no cause, there can still be a kind of action that I call judgment, or decision, or forming a position—something oriented more toward the future than toward the past. I am really looking at the question of what I want to achieve, for what values I want to act, or which values I choose—not which values I happen to find within myself. The outlook of the determinist or compatibilist is: I act according to the values I find within myself. Very nice that you find them within yourself—but how did they get there? How did those values get there? They got there somehow, probably from genetics, or maybe from outside if you prefer. In other words, those are the same chains. The values you find within yourself were placed there by the chains, either external or internal. When I speak about action, or decision, or choosing values, I do not mean searching within myself to see what values I find there. That is deterministic calculation. The claim is that I choose which values are right in my eyes—which values I believe in and with which values I will go. And that choice is not a causal process. That is, it is not that the values cause me to do what I do; rather, I choose the values, and once I have chosen them, of course they guide me as to what I think ought to be done, and I will try to do that. But there is an initial process to which people don’t really pay attention, and that is the choosing of the values themselves. Choosing the values themselves is a kind of judgment that is not causal. Because if the values were embedded within me and simply dictated what is right and wrong, or what I would do, that would be a deterministic picture. It has no value. No value in the human sense. It may be that I act wonderfully, that I’m a truly good person, that I find within myself perfect values—someone who helps others, cares, harms no one, everything he does is marvelous. But in the end that is valueless in the human sense, because he is a sheep. A sheep is like that too. It is born that way, very nice, harms no one, all fine. A human being is meant to be something other than a sheep. He is meant to act rightly, but to act rightly out of the decision that these are the right things and that he is committed to them. If he acts rightly because he is programmed to act rightly, whether by his environment—conditioning as opposed to education—or from within, then that’s not it. So in the end it seems to me that if we take libertarianism as the model we aspire to, then after all the chains are removed we arrive at positive liberty. Positive liberty does not mean doing what my internal chains tell me to do. Determinists also accept Isaiah Berlin’s concept of positive liberty, by the way. They say that positive liberty is doing what my structure dictates. But by the definition I proposed, positive liberty is freedom that appears only after all chains have fallen away—all of them, external and internal alike. And still I do not act randomly, arbitrarily, by lottery; rather, I perform some act of decision, and that decision is the choosing of the values to which I choose to commit myself. I am not supposed to choose—and this is a discussion in itself, which I won’t go into in detail—I am not supposed to choose what is good and what is evil. What is good and what is evil is given. I am supposed to choose according to which values I will live: whether I choose to live by the good or by the evil. But what is good and what is evil is not up to me, because if each person decides for himself what is good and what is evil, then once again it becomes something hard to grant any value to. One person can decide that what is good in his eyes is murder. I will judge him negatively because what is good in my eyes is not murder. Fine, but in what sense is this anything more than a subjective judgment? It has no meaning. Just as he decided one way, I decided the opposite. A judgment has meaning only where good and evil are given. I do not decide what is good and what is evil. I decide whether to respond to the good or to the evil. In that sense I choose values, not in the sense of deciding what counts as good and what counts as evil. Therefore there is the well-known saying of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi—just one second, I can’t answer chats, all this is too much for me during the discussion, so there will be questions afterward—Rabbi Yehuda Halevi said: “The slaves of time are slaves to slaves; the servant of God alone is free.” Usually, I don’t know—for me, when I first heard this, it really irritated me. It irritated me because it reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984. Because Rabbi Yehuda Halevi is basically telling us: listen, friends, you are constrained from morning till night, including the night. Jewish law tells you what to do and what not to do at every step. And then you tell yourselves stories that the servant of God alone is free and everyone else is a slave to slaves. It sounded like the famous slogans—ignorance is wisdom, freedom is slavery, and so on; I don’t remember all the opposites Orwell used there. The point, of course, is communist conditioning, pumping into people’s heads that the life they live is the best possible life, even though their life is obviously miserable. And the hope is that if you repeat it enough, in the end they’ll internalize it and feel that way. That’s how I felt about Rabbi Yehuda Halevi—he explains to me that I’m a slave; after all, we all feel that. And then he tells me: no, not at all—“the servant of God alone is free,” that is the true freedom, all the rest are slaves to slaves. In the end I think he really is right. Because if what is good and what is evil is not given to you in a way that does not depend on your own decision, then your decision really has no meaning. I won’t repeat here the analogy of the elections in Switzerland and Syria, which I think many listeners here have already heard from me. I’ll explain it without that example. What I really want to say is that my actions have meaning, or can be judged, only where there is some standard in light of which I judge them. Aryeh Eldad—sorry, Ari Elon, master of wordplay—once contrasted the “rabbinic person” with the “sovereign person.” He said the rabbinic person is the person for whom rabbinic Judaism—not necessarily rabbis, but Jewish law—dictates what is right and wrong, what to think and what to do and what not to do. And the sovereign person is the one who decides for himself what to do and what not to do. But here there isn’t even really an argument; he is simply wrong. This isn’t even a matter of debate. You can be secular, you can be religious, but that contrast is just a mistake, because he assumes that sovereignty means deciding for yourself what is good and what is evil. And that is complete nonsense. A sovereign person in that sense would be someone who decides that being a contract killer is the ideal way of life. And according to Ari Elon’s definition—I don’t think he himself would stand behind this, but according to the definition he proposed there—that would actually be an ideal person. A wonderful person. He chose this as good in a completely autonomous way and lives by the values he chose. Why do I—and I assume many of you—feel otherwise? It is true that he is autonomous, perhaps, in the sense that he chose his values autonomously, but he chose bad values. Yet if the measure of good and evil is whatever you yourself choose, if you decide what is good and evil, then you cannot say such a thing. You can only say such a thing if what is good and what is evil is given and not chosen by you. Once those facts exist, now you can decide whether to answer to the good or to the evil. But if you decide what is good and evil, then you cannot be judged. There is no standard by which anyone can say whether you are a good person or a bad person. By definition, you are always doing what you decided. Okay, so what? Therefore I think there is a recurring mistake in how libertarianism is viewed. It is seen as action in a vacuum. Does libertarianism mean action in a vacuum? No. Libertarianism means autonomous decision under circumstances that are not all in your hands. There are chains from outside, chains from inside, values you find within yourself, external values. In the end you have to decide to what you respond and with what you go. That, I think, is positive liberty. And maybe I’ll end with the educational significance of these ideas. Or maybe first I should return to that puzzle at the end of Rabbi Kook’s words, and I’ll end with that. The significance of these ideas is this: how do we usually understand educational success? Educational success means that our student or child does what we think is good—I’m adding that in parentheses. Meaning, he does what I planned for him to do. I educate him to behave in a certain way, to live by certain values, and I succeeded: he does that. What is educational failure? Educational failure is when he does not do that, when he does not go in the path I laid out for him. And again, obviously we all understand there are boundaries here. If, say, you educate him in one particular religious path and he chooses a somewhat different religious path, most parents will probably accept that in one form or another, maybe even with encouragement and joy. But I mean even if he chooses a path completely opposite to the one in which I educated him—not a different shade, not a slightly different channel within the same stream or the same track. In my eyes, that too-simple picture misses something. According to the framework I described here, a person is required to do two things: both the redemption of the night and the redemption of the morning. A person is required, first, to be a chooser—not to let chains dictate what he does, yes to let them influence, but not dictate—and second, to choose the good. Obviously, if I freely choose to become a contract killer, that is not educational success. It is a certain kind of educational success in the sense that I created an autonomous person—assuming he did it autonomously, because that too can be done from impulse or self-interest—but let’s say he really thinks this is the ideal path. Then this is a partial educational success: I created a person who chooses autonomously, but he chooses evil. A whole person is a person who chooses the good autonomously. But on the other hand, a person who does good but not out of autonomous choice—that too is not educational success. In that sense, I’m not sure what is better. A person who follows the path I dictated out of inertia, because of the chains I put on his hands—or a person who does not follow that path, but not because of chains, internal or external, rather because he decided on another path, even though I may see it as a bad path, a path I oppose religiously, morally, whatever. Each of these is a partial success and a partial failure. And so I think we slide too quickly into the simple distinction between whoever follows the path—that’s success—and whoever doesn’t—that’s failure. Someone who follows the path out of choice: that’s success. Someone who follows the path not out of choice: that’s failure, though easier to contain. Someone who doesn’t follow the path not out of choice: that’s total failure. And someone who doesn’t follow the path out of his own choice—that’s a success that is harder to contain, if you like. Harder to contain, but I think it is still some kind of success. And in the context of religious education that is hard to accept, but I think it is true. It is true universally, and therefore also in the religious world. I’ll just finish with this riddle at the very end of Rabbi Kook’s words. I’m putting it back on the screen—one second—at the end of section 113, here below. Down here in the right-hand column. He says—I’m reading here, watch my cursor: “However, the redemptions were divided into two, the redemption of the evening and the redemption of the day, because they were destined to be enslaved again. This teaches that the future servitude would come upon them only to interrupt their action upon others. But the exaltation of their spirit and the inner superiority that they attained in the redemption of evening—this remains forever and will not depart from them, for the people of Israel are My servants,” and I said: “and not servants to servants.” So why, then, does he say that the main redemption is really the evening redemption rather than the morning one? He says the evening redemption is irreversible. Even if chains are put on us in the future, that cancels the redemption of the morning, not the redemption of the evening. Now that is very strange. If chains are put back on us, then seemingly we have been returned to the state before the evening redemption. So what was canceled is the evening redemption, not the morning one. In the end, the chains came back—the same chains that the Egyptians had removed from us. They returned. Other chains were placed on us. So what was undone here is the first redemption, not the second. But Rabbi Kook says no—the first redemption is eternal. Why? It seems to me that what he means is that once the chains were removed from us the first time, and we experienced this inner freedom, then positive liberty also eventually awakened. That positive liberty says that even with the chains around me—and I said positive liberty does not act in a vacuum, but within given circumstances—what determines whether I am truly free is whether I decide autonomously within the framework of the chains that are on me. I do not allow them to dictate my action, only at most to influence me. And that, I think, is what we acquired in the redemption of the night. That is where it first glimmered—he said that himself in the earlier passage—because that is where true freedom really appeared. Once the chains were removed from us, a person who has always been a slave may still in theory have some degree of freedom to conduct himself independently even within the chains, but in the end a slave develops a consciousness of slavery; he eventually loses even his positive liberty. Without negative liberty, as Isaiah Berlin says too, there is no positive liberty. Rabbi Kook here says: not true. That is not correct. You needed the removal of chains at the beginning in order to emerge from the mentality of a slave, to generate positive liberty in the sense of becoming aware that in fact I always, always have the possibility to decide. No matter how many chains are on me, I always have the possibility to decide what I do within the chains—or at the very least to decide how I relate to the chains. That too is a kind of freedom. And that can never again be taken from us. Even if later they put chains on us again, in the end I will always remain with my point of freedom. More and more chains, as many as there may be—in the end I remain the one who decides what I choose. Okay, I’ve really only started talking about this, but I think an hour is enough. And since everyone has been muted until now, I’m opening the microphones for everyone. What I suggest before I do that is this: first of all, the lecture is over. So whoever wants to leave could have left earlier too, but just so you know—the lecture is over. From here on we’ll start with whoever has comments on what we discussed, and then I suggest first opening the microphone for whoever wants to speak about the topics we discussed, and then, say after a few minutes of that, whoever wants a more open conversation—I’ll stay here.

[Speaker C] Wait, I have to say something for a second. I’m trying to get him to say some comment of mine and he refuses to say it, so I’ll say it. He spoke about the four sons the Torah speaks of, basically—the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one who does not know how to ask. Someone—here, this is the table for whoever wants to see—autonomous, automatic, good and bad. Someone who is both good and autonomous is the wise one. Someone who is both bad and autonomous is the wicked one. Someone who is bad and automatic is the simple one, because he mistakenly chose evil automatically. And someone who is good and automatic is the one who does not know how to ask. So you should have said that, but—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so there, you’ve discharged my obligation for me. Okay, well, nice interpretation, I think, although I could argue a little about the identifications of the simple one and the one who does not know how to ask.

[Speaker C] There was no choice, we had to squeeze them in.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But yes, they had to be squeezed in, it’s a homiletic reading. But it’s an interesting homily, I think. Good. That’s it, I’ve opened the microphones. I suggest that from now on, just one at a time—keep your microphones off on your own initiative. Only whoever wants to comment about the lecture should open a microphone and ask.

[Speaker E] Okay, I… can you hear me? Yes, Danny Mintz. I’d like to make one comment regarding the end of your remarks. Can you hear? Yes. Regarding this distinction that Rav Kook makes here, I think you can make a different distinction—maybe Rav Kook is hinting at it—between the individual and the collective. When he speaks about the freedom of the morning, he’s speaking about the collective, about the effort of the Jewish people as spreading the Torah to the nations of the world. That is specifically as a collective, only when it is sovereign. And therefore we lost sovereignty, but as an individual…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One second, I suggest that whoever isn’t speaking should turn off the microphone, otherwise there’s… I understood.

[Speaker E] How do I do that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Danny, speak.

[Speaker E] I’m saying that one can distinguish between the freedom of the individual person, which is at night, and the day, which is the freedom of the Jewish people, expressed as spreading the Torah to the nations—that’s what Rav Kook says. And therefore we lost that over the generations, this matter of… hello? Can you hear? Yes, I hear. And then it makes sense, because truly over the generations, throughout all the subjugation in the four exiles, we lost the identity as the Jewish people, but as individuals themselves, as individuals, we didn’t lose it. Meaning, we left Egypt within ourselves. That’s the liberty of each and every one, and that’s why what he says makes a lot of sense.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t agree with you at all. Rav Kook speaks from the beginning about states of a people. I transferred it to the individual because I made an analogy. But with Rav Kook, I think both redemptions exist on the plane of the people, and I argued—or illustrated—these two redemptions on the plane of the individual. I don’t think he’s contrasting the individual with the people here, absolutely not. Throughout, he’s talking about the people.

[Speaker E] Could be, fine, but you can see it as a distinction.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That distinction may be correct, but I don’t think that’s what Rav Kook is talking about.

[Speaker E] But then it fits with what he says, that we really lost the freedom as a people to spread the message he speaks about and to create shining generations perhaps in the world, but as individuals or as groups we certainly could express ourselves, as is written in the law. Okay. One more point regarding reaching a state of absolute freedom. So the ideal in Judaism is indeed that a person constantly rises in level, and then he becomes free from the… meaning, a person who, for example, prays in a quorum every day doesn’t have the dilemma of whether to pray at all or not pray. Meaning, a person doesn’t find himself every time in absolute libertarianism; he keeps rising in level.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s Rabbi Dessler’s “point of choice,” yes.

[Speaker E] Right, that’s basically what I wanted to say. Okay, thanks. Anyone?

[Speaker D] Yes. You spoke about two senses of freedom. There’s the sense of freedom against weakness of will, and I think there’s also freedom of thought. Maybe that’s freedom in the intellectual dimension. The question is how that enters into all the senses you discussed—whether in choosing values, in seeking values, or in understanding what the right value is.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t distinguish between those two things. Just as there are commandments regarding thought and commandments regarding action, anywhere there is a commandment there is also freedom, because without freedom there would be no point in commanding. And therefore, the same thing you’re applying to actions can be applied to thoughts and vice versa. In certain respects, the more fundamental choice is choice in values and thoughts, not in actions. True, afterward you also have the choice whether to do what you think, but first of all you have to decide what your path is, what seems right to you.

[Speaker D] But what’s hard about calling it that—why would a person choose something incorrect? Is it because he was simply born foolish, or he didn’t invest enough thought, or…?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean by correct? Do you mean something bad, or something that does not seem right in his own eyes? He always chooses what seems right in his own eyes, apparently. That’s the problem of weakness of will.

[Speaker D] But sometimes—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He chooses evil because he is an evil person.

[Speaker D] When people say freedom of thought, what does freedom of thought mean?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Freedom of thought is judgment. If you’re talking not about values but about facts, then I have a column about this on the website—it’s what’s called judgment. Judgment is a concept parallel to value decision, but a value decision deals in the realm of values, and judgment deals in the realm of facts or factual principles. A scientific theory and the like. There too there is room for judgment. A person has to weigh arguments for and arguments against and decide on a scientific theory, for example.

[Speaker D] And if I fail in that judgment, does that mean I chose incorrectly, or simply that I…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in factual judgment of that kind, it’s not so much called failure. You just made a mistake, what can you do. There there isn’t so much—there’s less evil inclination to choose incorrectly, so I don’t know to what extent one can talk there about failure in the moral sense.

[Speaker D] So in that sense, if a person reaches correct conclusions through proper judgment, he doesn’t deserve credit for that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, it’s the other side of the same coin. If there’s no failure in wrong decisions, then there’s no credit in correct ones. The fact that Einstein arrived at general relativity—many others didn’t, or relativity at all. Many others didn’t reach that theory, even though the facts were laid out before them. So what does it mean—that Einstein deserves some credit in the moral sense? He deserves credit in the sense that he was a smart person, fine. But I don’t know…

[Speaker D] Abraham our Patriarch discovered his Creator—does he deserve credit for that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He deserves credit for that only in the sense that he discovered his Creator as a binding source for values and norms. Not when he discovered the mere, say, physico-theological proof that God exists—for that no reward is due. You arrived at the philosophical conclusion that such a thing exists, okay. That’s a philosophical claim, a factual claim. But that God is binding—theism, not deism—that God is binding, that is a decision with value significance.

[Speaker D] So the fact that we invest so much effort in Torah study—that doesn’t… you don’t receive reward for that? I mean, after all, truly to clarify… why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Torah study is not study of facts.

[Speaker D] No, I mean in the aspect of toil in Torah. Meaning, to clarify the…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That itself is a value. Toil in Torah is itself a value—what do you mean? To decide to toil in Torah—is that not a value? Okay. Rafael? There are hands here. I myself don’t know how to do this, but I see that you raised your hand. You’re muted. Unmute yourself. Here, I’ll unmute you.

[Speaker F] Okay, hello. So I wanted to take you back to the beginning, about Isaiah Berlin, who in his famous essay—as I remember, of course he says many things—but one of them is that it seems to me he accepts negative liberty, and positive liberty, or at least different kinds of it, basically create paternalistic systems that come to explain to a person what the self really wants, without really—and by ignoring what the person thinks he wants. Can you connect that somehow, or do you just see that as relevant only to positive liberty?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll explain. Isaiah Berlin—his distinction between the two types of liberty was not made on the level of the private individual, the personal level. It was made on the level of political theory. And most of the debates there—Hobbes and so on—are all around political theory. Now, in political theory, when you speak about positive liberty, then that immediately comes across—and that’s the point of all the criticism of positive liberty, people get very alarmed by it—because positive liberty in the context of political theory means that the state will dictate also what is right, not merely remove your chains. And then it really does lead to totalitarianism. Some have connected this also to Hegel, if I remember correctly. But I think that’s why I quite intentionally moved to the plane of the private person, because with the private person it’s much easier to illustrate. Rav Kook, by the way, says the same thing on the public plane. His claim is that positive liberty is not the result of public coercion of the individual, but the result of the individual—or the collective, sorry—deciding for itself the proper path by which to act. He’s not speaking about political theory, about the relation between the regime and the private person and then how much they’ll coerce him. He’s speaking about the conduct of the public itself, meaning how the regime itself will behave, not how it dictates to the individual what to do. Therefore I preferred to make the analogy to the private person, because with the private person all this confusion disappears. With the private person, you immediately see what’s being discussed. Besides, I don’t like collectivism, but that’s already another discussion.

[Speaker F] Yes. Now, something you raised at the end—it basically reminds one of Nietzsche, right? Meaning, the person who creates values for himself. Right. But Nietzsche… but Nietzsche himself too, as I understand it, had reservations—he didn’t think it was necessarily a positive process that we lost the sources of values. He just thought that’s what happened. And therefore humanity is now required to do it alone. Isn’t there some positive side here to affirming the human being, elevating man in his ability, in his choice, in his ability to produce values, to choose among values?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t understand. What do you mean? I’m not an expert on Nietzsche, so I don’t know how to answer what Nietzsche intended, but this Nietzschean wildness, where man legislates his own values for himself—that’s exactly what you see with Ari Elon. In my eyes this is a negative process. It is a negative process because Nietzsche lost the objective distinction between good and evil. Once he killed God, he lost the standard, the external criterion that determines what is good and what is evil, and he essentially turned us into free people living in a vacuum. And freedom in a vacuum is exactly not what I’m talking about.

[Speaker F] Okay. Fine, thank you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s someone here—I can’t see. Yes, I don’t identify the name here. Yes, one of those who raised a hand—I don’t know how to identify the names, so just speak. Wait, I’m unmuting you; one of them I’ve unmuted.

[Speaker H] Yes, can the Rabbi hear me?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I don’t see the picture here.

[Speaker H] Is it me speaking?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, apparently. Yes.

[Speaker H] The Rabbi wrote there in The Science of Freedom—he tried to prove there that if there is free will, it contradicts the laws of nature. So he gave two possibilities: one from quantum theory, and the Rabbi rejected that because he said the phenomenon is smeared out; and afterward from chaos, and he said there is no chaos in free will. So it comes out that free will basically contradicts the physics we know. Right. Now maybe—my question is this: could a person still believe in free will and at the same time not believe that there is God? Would that be considered consistent on his part? Because if I understand correctly, if there is free will then it’s not something natural, so something non-natural produces it. Could there be a person who says there is free will and at the same time denies God?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think so. I think there is nothing inconsistent about that. Why? Because, for example, you could assume—first of all, there are claims that within physics there is some freedom; I don’t accept them.

[Speaker H] But you didn’t write that—no, I mean according to what the Rabbi wrote in the book, that you rejected the two options of quantum theory and chaos.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said that I think there are no relevant degrees of freedom within physics, and therefore it has to be something extra-physical. But not everything extra-physical is God; a soul is also extra-physical. Okay, so what remains?

[Speaker H] A soul. A soul—and who causes it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea. Maybe it always existed. How? Maybe it always existed, I don’t know.

[Speaker H] No, so that’s something outside matter. If the Rabbi says, defines a soul as outside matter, then the Rabbi has admitted there is God—you admit there is something here that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I admit there is something that is not matter. Someone who is a materialist does not accept the existence of God, but someone who does not accept the existence of God is not necessarily a materialist. Those are two different things.

[Speaker H] So he can accept the result of a soul that did not come from God? Is there such a thing?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not? Yes, if it is logically consistent, you can agree with it or not agree with it; there is nothing inconsistent here.

[Speaker H] I understand. One more question? Something about idealism?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We can try.

[Speaker H] The Rabbi once said about Leibniz that Leibniz says every substance—that two substances that have the same sets of characteristics are the same substance.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what Leibniz says. I don’t agree.

[Speaker H] Leibniz, yes. Now my question is this: all that people say today, what they keep saying in the news all the time—gender, that a man is a woman and a woman can decide she is a man and so on—they are basically assuming idealism, that there is no such concept of substance called man, and basically it’s only sets of characteristics, and if I change the sets of characteristics then I have changed the gender. They assume idealism without knowing it, or—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That it—

[Speaker H] or is it also unrelated?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure, because first of all, we’re not talking about objects but about ideas. Meaning, the claim is not whether a certain entity, a certain object, is a man or a woman, but the concept man and the concept woman—the question is whether there is some definition there in the world of ideas, of the idea man and woman.

[Speaker H] But the Rabbi also took it to substances, the Rabbi made an implication also for substances and definitions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] נכון, but the dispute you described does not deal with substances but with ideas. There is the same implication for substances and ideas, but the dispute you described concerns ideas, not substances. The question is whether the concept man and the concept woman are defined; the objects are already an implication. And that’s the first point. The second point: even with regard to ideas, it doesn’t necessarily mean there is no definition. Rather, the claim is that the definition is not something you know how to point to through external characteristics. There can be a person who believes in this kind of queerness, in the theory of multiple genders, but still thinks there are essentialist genders.

[Speaker H] So if he thinks in his essence he is male, then how can he call himself by other names?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He doesn’t call himself by other names; he thinks he is male, so he calls himself male. It’s just that he appears to you to be female.

[Speaker H] If there is no essence of male, if there is no essence of male, then he really can call himself whatever he wants. But if there is an essence of male, how can he say he is female? If there is something essential, a substance, something unchanging.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I answered you, listen. I said again: people in queer theory can believe in essentialism. They can—I’m saying this is logically consistent. There are those who believe, there are those who do not believe, I don’t know, but you asked whether it is logically inconsistent. The answer is that it is logically consistent. Why? There can be an essentialist definition of man and woman, only the defining characteristics—what are the characteristics that define, essentially, a man or a woman—are not necessarily the external characteristics we are accustomed to, but other characteristics that the person senses within himself. And therefore, although he appears to you as a woman, he defines himself as a man and demands that you relate to him as a man. And that does not contradict queerness. It can of course—and again, as I told you before, there is a one-way dependence. If there is no essentialism, then clearly there is queerness. If there is queerness, it is not yet clear that there is no essentialism.

[Speaker H] Understood, thank you very much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re welcome. Anyone else? David Roth, yes. Wait, I’m turning you on. You know how to turn yourselves on? Can you turn yourselves on? You can’t turn yourselves on—I forgot, because I disabled it for you. Okay, I turned you on.

[Speaker B] First of all, thank you very much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all I’ll release you all. Sorry one second, I simply didn’t allow people to unmute themselves, so now I’m allowing it. Yes, okay. Now anyone can unmute himself or mute himself. Sorry for the tyranny—there’s just no way with numbers like this of listeners. Yes.

[Speaker B] Yes, so first of all, thank you very much. You’re welcome. I have a question not related to the lecture but about reward and punishment. A general question: if you accept Leibowitz’s view, after all he argues that a notion of reward and punishment basically turns God into a means, in the sense that we use Him as a means for our own ends.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That sentence is not logically correct. What do I mean? You can hold—the Rambam himself says there is reward in chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance. Maimonides says there is reward and punishment, but still one does not serve for the sake of reward and punishment. That is what is required, right? He says that is service—pardon me, from the people here—that is the service of women and children, Maimonides writes there, that they serve God in that way for reward and punishment. But the service of wise people is service not for reward and punishment. But that does not mean there isn’t any. There is reward and punishment, but that is not the purpose for which one serves. Like, if you know the introduction to the Eglei Tal, he writes there that we need to study Torah—there are those who think that to study Torah for pleasure is study not for its own sake, or that one must not enjoy Torah study because then it is not for its own sake. And then he says: you are greatly mistaken. Every morning we bless, “Please make the words of Your Torah pleasant in our mouths.” We want to enjoy it. But then in the next sentence he says: but if we study for the sake of the pleasure, then it is indeed study not for its own sake. Meaning, one has to distinguish—that’s the difference between correlation and causation. The fact that something exists doesn’t yet mean—two things come together doesn’t yet mean one is the cause of the other.

[Speaker B] I understand. Good, thank you very much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re welcome. Yes, Shmuel.

[Speaker I] Hi, Rabbi. When the Rabbi spoke about autonomous choice made according to some criterion of truth, I couldn’t understand that criterion. According to what is it done? If it’s not according to an inner motive or an external motive, then what is the criterion?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I elaborated on this in the book The Science of Freedom because it’s a somewhat subtle point. I haven’t read it. Yes, I know. But I’ll tell you briefly. When you ask “according to what,” you’re already assuming something. Right? What do I mean? You assume there is something that causes me to do this. So you ask: what is that thing?

[Speaker I] Otherwise it would be relativism, what we said—just a lottery or something. There has to be something.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not relativism but indeterminism. But no, I claim not. I claim that although there is no cause according to which I did it—that is, that causally caused me to do it—that still does not mean the act is accidental or random. There are purposes, not causes. I don’t act because of causes; I act for the sake of purposes.

[Speaker I] What are these purposes? Where do they come from, how do you get to them?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They are givens. I don’t choose them at all. I only choose—I don’t choose whether they are good or bad; I choose whether to respond to the good and act for the sake of the good, or to act for the sake of the bad.

[Speaker I] But I choose to act—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] for the sake of the good, but it’s hard for me—sorry, just a second—it’s hard for me to answer chats while speaking, so there are all kinds of chats being sent here, I suggest maybe you raise it orally afterward. Yes, sorry.

[Speaker I] I’m saying, these purposes that I choose to act by—what… how do I… I understood that a person chooses the good and then acts autonomously, but what does it mean when you say “the good”? What is included in that word?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is good—what do you mean? He chooses to do good to his fellow and not to harm his fellow, so he chose the good. Another person also knows that this is good, only he doesn’t always choose to do it.

[Speaker I] That’s simplistic, but there are value clashes and things that you can’t know so simply.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, you’re asking another question. You’re asking whether the good is defined univocally for all of us, in the same way and unambiguously. The answer is no. Meaning—or not always. I’m not a pluralist in the essential sense. I don’t think there is no such thing as good and evil, or that everyone defines his own good and evil. But I’m also not an extreme monist. I don’t think that for every question and every situation there is one correct answer. There are situations in which it may be that there are two correct answers. You know, there is a positive commandment against a positive commandment—so what? A positive commandment overrides a prohibition, right? What happens when there is a positive commandment against a positive commandment, or a prohibition against a prohibition? In such a situation, it is judgment—you can do a lottery. Shuda de-dayyanei. Yes, shuda de-dayyanei is one of the methods of decision in the Talmud. Okay? What do you do in shuda de-dayyanei? A situation where the two sides are balanced, there is no right and wrong answer, so you make a lottery. Meaning, the monism by which I oppose pluralism—I am opposing essential pluralism. The pluralism that says there is no such thing as moral truth, but in every question whatever anyone decides, that’s what he decided and it is as correct as its opposite. I don’t think that for every question there is only one correct answer. That doesn’t seem right to me.

[Speaker I] And regarding what you said, that someone can fail to follow a certain path and nevertheless act according to those same values—after all, if you assume the values you arrived at are correct, for example the values of religion, and he doesn’t follow them, then he is not acting according to the values that from your perspective are objectively correct. So how do you see that as a positive side?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I see a positive side in it because he chose. Unfortunately, he chose a path that in my eyes is incorrect.

[Speaker I] But he chose not according to values but according to either an inner motive or an external motive.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he chose. He may have chosen completely freely a path that seems to me incorrect. I don’t think this is contrary to Rav Kook, by the way. For Rav Kook, Rav Kook is a kind of determinist in the sense that it is clear to him that if a person listens very, very carefully to his soul, it is obvious he will choose the good—the religious good, not only the moral good; basically for Rav Kook it’s the same thing. I don’t think that necessarily so. A person can genuinely arrive at a different decision from mine. I think he is mistaken. Not because there are multiple truths—I think he is mistaken—but I don’t attribute it to the fact that he’s following his urges instead of being exalted like me, who is elevated above all those influences.

[Speaker I] Because of the essential difficulty of arriving at truth, in certain respects? Something technical, sort of? Okay. Yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Thank you. Okay. Any more? Various questions came up here in the chats, for example how to get updates and so on, so I suggest not here but to me on WhatsApp or on the group’s WhatsApp, and then you can get answers to various technical questions. How to receive messages and all kinds of things like that. In principle it’s on the group’s WhatsApp. I’ll also add there links to Zoom, to other Zoom lectures maybe later on, everything will be updated there. But you can also contact me on WhatsApp if you want to ask one thing or another. Okay.

[Speaker J] Hello Rabbi, I wanted to ask a question. You wrote a little about this in The Science of Freedom but you didn’t elaborate much, regarding the theories of… the Copenhagen school. That’s what I asked in the chat—about the influence of the human being on the world from the perspective of quantum theory. There are philosophers and various people who talk about it; how valid do you think that is? If I remember correctly, you wrote some brief remark that you rejected it on the basis of some article published in Cambridge by several researchers. We’d be glad if you’d expand a bit on why you object to those theories.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’ll preface first of all. First of all, I haven’t been in the field for quite a while, and I’m not updated on the state of the art, yes, on the current situation. As far as I know—and really with limited confidence—this was true back when I was more involved. There was such a thesis among various physicists and philosophers, very important ones, but there are several experiments that show fairly clearly that it is not correct. For example, the two-slit experiment: you place a detector by one of the slits, and the assumption is that the detector, the moment it gives me the information, the wave function collapses—it becomes a particle instead of a wave. But when you transfer the information from that detector to a computer and then burn the disk, even then there is a collapse of the wave function. In that article I referred to. Now, no human being saw that information, and nevertheless the collapse of the wave function occurred. Now that is a great puzzle, because what is the difference between a detector and any other physical system? If no one sees it, then what is a detector? A detector is just a physical system, so what difference does it make? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone knows; I’m really not sufficiently updated. But as I understand it, that is an open question, though it seems to me that it is no longer so simple as people once thought. Who was it there—what’s his name? The one with group theory, I forgot his name, never mind. He… there were several important philosophers, and von Neumann too, I think, at some stage thought that people collapse the wave function. I think today it does not seem to me—not certainly, but also not accepted—to think that way.

[Speaker J] Did you mean David Mermin, maybe?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. I forgot his name, the name escaped me. Anyone else? That’s it? Shall we close the meeting? Uriel, yes.

[Speaker G] Yes, following up on Shmuel—it’s kind of a continuation—my two questions touch exactly on his two questions. The first is really about the issue of the arbitrariness of the will, in a certain sense, in what you said about choice. I didn’t fully understand where you locate human choice, and I’ll explain. I understood that what you emphasize is a forward-looking perspective, as though good and evil are facts, and I basically come and look and determine myself where I’m going. But what makes that not something that is supposedly arbitrary—my choice of good and evil? What makes it not arbitrary?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does it mean, what makes it non-arbitrary? The fact that I exercise judgment. What do you mean, what…

[Speaker G] I just don’t understand what the meaning of—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again I return—I also said this in the book—when you try to understand the concept of judgment,

[Speaker C] you are basically trying to look for causality.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you try to understand judgment, what you are basically trying to do is reduce judgment to a causal explanation… There’s someone speaking in parallel here. Please try to mute everyone and then activate… okay. I muted… When you ask me to explain the concept of judgment, you are basically asking me to reduce it to a causal explanation. Because what is it to explain? To explain is to show what it is based on or how it operates. But that is the whole point—that it is not a causal mechanism. And trying to reduce it to a causal mechanism is basically to force me into a frame that I’m not willing to enter.

[Speaker G] Right, that I understood, but when you don’t do that, then you have no root, so to speak.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean I have no root? I know exactly what judgment is. I experience within myself what judgment is and I understand what it is. That’s all. Why do I need to reduce it to something else in order to understand it? And as I said in the third booklet, among the three mechanisms—determinism, indeterminism meaning arbitrariness, and judgment or choice—the only one really known to us directly is judgment alone. Since causality—as David Hume already said—we have no empirical way of verifying, and randomness too we have never seen on its own, independent randomness. Even where quantum theory speaks about randomness, everyone tears out their hair because they don’t understand what is being discussed. So those things we don’t understand—and then suddenly… suddenly when judgment comes along, which each of us experiences in the simplest and most direct way, people try to reduce it to one of the other two mechanisms. To me that is absurd. It’s not even a mechanism, but rather a mode of conduct so familiar to us from immediate experience that there is no reason in the world to try to reduce it to two other mechanisms that are not familiar to us at all. On the contrary. About them I would ask: who said they exist, and what exactly is their meaning?

[Speaker G] Understood. And regarding the second thing, you had a comment—you kind of indicated, from the way you related to the thing itself, that it was obvious to me—that freedom is a value, and therefore from your point of view, of course, and therefore you said there is something in the fact that a person chose even if he chose evil. Didn’t choose good, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that he didn’t choose good.

[Speaker G] No, fine, right, that’s one side. And then the second side I heard you say is maybe he is even less than him. As though the side of free choice—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is someone who chooses not-good and someone who does not choose good.

[Speaker G] Yes. Ah, okay, that’s what you meant. Yes, yes. Absolutely. So I think it may be that these things—in thought—stem from the fact that basically, I don’t know, at least from how it seems, if now we were in, I don’t know, a period when everyone was murderers and robbers and who knows what, I mean total chaos, but everyone was acting by choice—would you still see that consideration standing like that? I mean that it stands opposite that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It may be that I would be in some nuclear shelter so no one would kill me, but that shouldn’t change my judgment of the people. And if it did change, then that would be a psychological influence that ought to be avoided.

[Speaker G] No, clearly that’s connected to it. That’s what I think, that maybe it’s located there and not in—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Psychological influences, in my view, are not relevant to value judgment.

[Speaker G] Right. No, because supposedly you have one value, the value of freedom—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And you put it—no, that’s not a value. On the contrary. Freedom is not a value but a meta-value. Without freedom there is no meaning to any other value, since values have meaning only when you choose them. Therefore choice does not stand on the same platform as all the other values. Choice is the condition for values to have meaning at all. Freedom is not a value. Freedom is the infrastructure of values.

[Speaker G] And you establish that because of its fundamental status, so to speak?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, simply on the conceptual level. Without freedom, all your values are worth nothing.

[Speaker G] That’s true, but who says that then turns it into… ah, okay, understood. Fine. Fine.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well? Anyone else? Yes, Nadav Dotan was already—there isn’t anyone else here. Good, so speak. Me?

[Speaker B] Yes, yes. Yes, I’d just be happy to sharpen my earlier question a little. I meant more the question of when we turn in prayer or request to God that He provide us with certain needs. About that Leibowitz says that this turns God into a means. Now you say, as though asking is simply not helpful. But he says there is something wrong in the very request, because it turns God into a means and God is an end. So, do you accept that? No.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Why yes? What’s the problem? Why shouldn’t I ask God? The question is whether the whole purpose of God is only to give me bonuses or benefits—then indeed He becomes a means. But if as part of my conduct in the world I also ask Him for things, why not? It’s a resource I can use, isn’t it?

[Speaker B] Right, now that you use Him—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I do not worship Him for the sake of benefit. I worship Him, and along with that, once in a while when I need healing I ask Him for healing—what’s wrong with that?

[Speaker B] Understood. Good. Fine.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s it? Okay, then thank you all, and the chats—I’ll now go into the chats; we’ve stopped talking, I’ll try perhaps to answer what I can there, and then I’ll close this. So whoever is no longer in the chat, thank you and good night. Updates on WhatsApp. Goodbye.

[Speaker B] Thank you, good night.