Ein Ayah – Berakhot 117

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I want to bring maybe one example or two to show this mode of thinking. For example, Maimonides says, following the Talmud, that disputes arose because the students of Hillel and Shammai did not fully serve their teachers as they should have. Meaning, because they did not fully apprentice themselves to their rabbis, they didn’t fully absorb the Torah their teachers taught them, and so things got missed. They didn’t understand properly, and disputes arose, and in the end somehow two such schools emerged with very sharp disagreements and all the well-known historical consequences. On the other hand, Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner points this out in several places, mainly in the book on Hanukkah, Pachad Yitzchak on Hanukkah. He says that dispute is seen in many places in the words of the Sages as something ideal. It’s not a malfunction that we regret, the emergence of disputes. Dispute is an ideal thing; it’s the ideal state. Because dispute ultimately helps us sharpen and uncover the many facets a topic has. And if there were no dispute and everyone said the same thing, then everything would be monolithic, and the world is not really grasped correctly if we look at it in such a simplistic way. The world has many facets; every topic, every human situation, has many facets. And therefore you need different opinions and disagreements and reasoning here and there to present the issue to us in its full complexity. So the emergence of dispute is a blessed thing, as Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner says there.

So what is this—how does that happen because the students of Hillel and Shammai did not serve sufficiently? So again, the same mechanism. Meaning, the students of Hillel and Shammai didn’t serve sufficiently, and that was bad, and as a result a problem happened and the Torah got distorted, and now they won’t be able to reconstruct the unified Torah that had existed until that point, and then they started… In the end, in the end, clearly there is something deeper going on here. And what Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner says is that even if something came about in a very crooked way, or as a reaction to some problem, it may be that in the end the resulting state is actually an ideal state. And maybe it was even planned מראש by the Holy One, blessed be He—I don’t know. Meaning, of course one can also see in this some kind of unfolding of divine providence.

The midrashim, for example, about the coming of the messiah are very well known: that the messiah comes through Ruth the Moabite, who did some somewhat problematic things with Boaz there on the threshing floor, and all kinds of things of that sort, and suddenly through that out emerges the son of David, the symbol of the Jewish utopia, right? It comes out of a somewhat problematic act, in its plain description. And you can even see this in the context of Passover. It is written—yes, Beit HaLevi is very well known on this, but it already appears in Nachmanides, and Rabbi Kook also speaks about it in several places—that the verse says: “Because of this the Lord acted for me when I came out of Egypt.” What does that mean? Seemingly this verse is backwards. We do this—the commandments of that night—because of what the Holy One, blessed be He, did for us in the Exodus from Egypt. But the verse doesn’t say that. The verse says: “Because of this”—that is, because of the commandments to which we point at the Passover Seder—the Holy One, blessed be He, brought about the Exodus from Egypt for us.

Now when we eat matzah, we eat matzah because our ancestors’ dough did not have time to rise. So clearly the matzah is a result of the Exodus from Egypt, not the other way around. But the verse says no—the Exodus came about so that we would eat matzah. So what’s right here? Apparently both are right. Historically, we eat matzah in remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. But why did the Holy One, blessed be He, bring about the Exodus and roll things along in such a way that the dough didn’t have time to rise and matzot came into being? Because in the end He wanted to bring us to a state in which we would eat matzah. It’s not just that something happened there by chance and in the end we eat matzah. That’s the claim of those later authorities (Acharonim).

The truth is that there are even hints to this in the Torah and in the midrashim of the Sages. In the midrashim of the Sages, it says that in Sodom Lot hosted the angels and said: “Bake unleavened cakes, for it was not leavened.” So Rashi says there below: it was Passover, and therefore they did not serve the angels leavened bread there but matzot. But what do you mean it was Passover? We’re talking about hundreds of years before the Exodus from Egypt. So what exactly were they doing there on this Passover? Why were they suddenly eating matzah? Our ancestors’ dough didn’t rise? The dough of their great-great-great-grandchildren hadn’t yet failed to rise. Those descendants weren’t even in the planning stages, and they were already eating matzah.

Now again, this is of course a midrash of the Sages; I’m not trying to claim that there really was Passover there and Lot ate matzah. But the midrash of the Sages is basically trying to tell us that apparently eating matzah is not something that happened by chance as a result of some malfunction; there is a directed process here. That is basically the claim. You can even see it—not only in the midrash of the Sages—but even in the Torah itself. In the Torah itself, when does the Holy One, blessed be He, command us to eat matzah? It happens on the first of Nisan. Right? “This month shall be for you the first of the months.” There the Holy One, blessed be He, commands: “And this is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your staff in your hand, and your shoes on your feet; you shall eat it in haste—it is the Passover offering to the Lord.” So all this haste is not haste that arose that night because Pharaoh chased us and we had to flee quickly and there was no time for the dough to rise, and so on and so forth. This whole story—already two weeks earlier the Holy One, blessed be He, tells us to eat the Passover offering in haste. Meaning, the concept of haste preceded the historical event that supposedly generated it.

And again, here this is already in the Torah itself; this is not a midrash of the Sages. In the Torah itself you see that there is some plan that in the end we will arrive at haste. How is that realized? How is that planted into historical unfolding? Fine—we’re there, Pharaoh chases us, we don’t have enough time, we run quickly, and the dough doesn’t have time to rise—but in the end that was the plan, to reach that result. That was the plan from the outset.

I’ll finish maybe with one more example on this point; it’s just a side remark. There is a very famous midrash; the Leshem deals with it in several places. The Leshem is Rabbi Elyashiv’s grandfather, one of the great Ashkenazic kabbalists. He brings this midrash that when the Holy One, blessed be He, decreed death upon Adam because of Adam’s sin, Adam says to the Holy One, blessed be He: “You come against me with a pretext.” For it is already written in the Torah—which, as the midrash says, was written 974 generations before the creation of the world—“When a man dies in a tent.” So you’re telling me that only now you suddenly decided to decree death upon me? In the Torah itself there is already a plan in advance that I will die. That’s what the midrash says.

It says—like a man, so says Adam to the Holy One, blessed be He. It needs to be explained to Him—the Holy One, blessed be He, apparently doesn’t understand—so Adam explains it with a parable. He says: I’ll explain it with a parable. There is a parable about a man whose wife spoiled his dish. So he puts his hand into his pocket, pulls out a bill of divorce signed by two witnesses, gives the woman the bill of divorce and says: you are divorced. So the woman says to him: “You come against me with a pretext.” You had a bill of divorce signed by two witnesses in your pocket before you even tasted the dish. So you’re telling me stories that you’re divorcing me because you didn’t like the food?

There are situations in which there is some kind of plan. The Leshem calls this “the governance of the awesome contriver.” Meaning, when the Holy One, blessed be He, basically—“You come against me with a pretext”—you actually planned this whole story in advance. So you put me into a situation in which I sin, and then you decree punishment on me for the sin, when this whole thing is basically a rigged game. You wanted to reach the final state in the end. So I think we see this in many places: this way of relating to the Holy One’s conduct with the world, that basically we proceed somehow in the historical order—meaning, something happened and because of that we act and tell the story of the Exodus and remember the Exodus—but this whole story is in fact planned, and the Exodus from Egypt itself came into being only so that we would do all these things in remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt.

Cause and effect are reversed here. The plan—yes, it’s like seal and imprint. There is a difference between the seal and the thing sealed; which becomes which? It gets reversed, the relation between seal and imprint. The cause becomes the effect. From the perspective of the Holy One, blessed be He, what is a cause, from our perspective is the effect, and vice versa.

Okay, but in any case this is the example we see in the context of Rabbi Kook’s explanation as against the explanation the Talmud gives. Because the Talmud presents some kind of mishap. Meaning, they didn’t want to depress the Jewish people—so fine, then don’t tell them about future enslavements, and okay, everything is fine. Rabbi Kook says, what are you talking about? This is a different form of Torah. The form of Torah that Moses ultimately gave them is only a Torah of “I will be,” not “I will be what I will be.” It is a completely different Torah. It is a Torah that speaks about an ideal state and does not deal with situations of enslavement, but contains within it guidance also for situations of enslavement.

What is this idea really? So before I go into that, I’ll just say: it’s the same structure as the examples I brought before. There is something here that happened as though in response to some accidental, arbitrary situation that arose there—they didn’t want to depress the Jewish people—but in fact, in fact, in fact, Rabbi Kook is telling us that in the end the plan was that the Torah would indeed be given this way. That is exactly the story, and the whole give-and-take between the Holy One, blessed be He, and Moses—“I will be what I will be,” and Moses says only “I will be”—the Holy One, blessed be He, had also thought of this in advance. It was only a didactic form of telling it to us. They tell us: no, there was a first thought to give the Torah in a complete and detailed way, with everything laid out and written; and in the final analysis it was given differently. But that is only a didactic form. It’s not that the Holy One, blessed be He, really intended one thing and then Moses convinced Him to do something else. That was the plan from the beginning.

Okay, so what are these two forms of Torah really? That is what I wanted to talk about a bit. What does it mean, these two forms? How do you write Torah in these two forms? What is the difference between the two Torahs, what they thought to give at first and what they thought to give in the end?

There are several ways to give people tools to deal with situations—like the situation of enslavement, which is what Rabbi Kook is talking about there. How can the Torah give us tools to deal with enslavement? You can spoon-feed it. Meaning, say: look, if you are in such-and-such a situation, then you must do this and this, or not do this and this. In other words, a recipe for how to behave in that situation, and then you’ll come out okay. And you can also not spoon-feed. You can say: listen, I’m teaching you things in general, but if you really internalize what I’m teaching you, even if it deals with the ideal state—in the end, if your mind is shaped correctly, you will know how to handle enslavement too. Two completely different ways of teaching people.

I once gave an example for this in one of the previous series in Petach Tikva. There’s a book by some German professor of philosophy named Eugen Herrigel, from the beginning of the twentieth century. He had a Japanese friend, a professor of law at the University of Tokyo, and he went to visit him in Tokyo and asked him to help him study Zen. So the Japanese friend arranged for him some master whom he could study under, some Zen teacher.

So he comes to the teacher—the book tells the story; the book is called Zen in the Art of Archery—and he tries there to describe what he went through, how he learned this whole matter. And he tells about the first meeting with this master, where the master asks him: tell me, what do you want to study—flower arranging, archery, or I don’t know what, fencing? I no longer remember exactly what all the options were. There were three or four options. So he says to him: no, no, none of those—I want to study Zen. But the master says: yes, yes, I understand, but do you want flower arranging, archery, fencing, what? And slowly he understood that these three fields were not really about learning flower arranging. He was going to learn Zen through the medium of flower arranging, or through the medium of fencing, or through the medium of archery. But it really doesn’t matter which medium you choose; you are learning exactly the same thing itself.

What is that thing you are learning? It is not connected to flower arranging or archery or anything. It is some sort of way of seeing, way of relating, insights, states of mind—I don’t know exactly. I’m no great expert in Zen. I’ve read quite a bit about it, but there apparently you really have to experience it in order to understand what this thing means. But apparently it is possible to learn the same thing through three different media, and you are practically doing completely different things, but learning exactly the same thing in all three or four of those different ways.

What does that mean? It basically means that flower arranging or archery—which is the track he chose—is only some way through which you receive tools to deal with an entirely different problem, or entirely different problems, in entirely different situations. It is only the medium I chose through which to give you these insights or that way of relating. But do not think you are learning archery here. I’m teaching you the technique of hitting the bullseye—but that is not the point at all. That is not what we are learning here.

And in that sense I think this is not a bad parable for many things, but among other things, in that earlier series I wanted to claim that it is also a parable for Torah. And now I’m saying it in this context too. There I expanded on it a lot, but here I’ll just say it briefly. The Torah that Moses ultimately gave us—the Torah in which things are not written explicitly, in which it doesn’t say: if you are in this situation, do this, and if you are in that situation, do that. Rather, you learn Jewish law or the Torah portions—I’ll speak later about the relation between those two—but after you engage with it, it is supposed somehow to organize your mind in a certain way, or give you some way of seeing, so that now you can apply it to situations that have nothing to do with what is written in the Torah, but are something else entirely, and still deal with them in the way the Holy One, blessed be He, really intended you to deal with them. Meaning, in the way that would have been written in that Torah of the initial thought, the Torah in which everything was supposed to be written explicitly.

And therefore there is here a different form of learning, and a different way of transmitting content, or lessons, or messages, or insights—not spoon-feeding, but some kind of giving of a perspective. I think we know this from other fields too, not only Torah. You can engage in completely different questions, but through that you learn how to look at problems, how to solve problems. Once you learn how to solve problems, you can also solve problems not of the same kind you already solved. On the contrary, usually that is the point. After you solve a few problems together with whoever is teaching you, the goal is in the end to deal with other problems that you haven’t encountered, otherwise you’re just a robot being programmed. Learning is almost always like this.

And therefore this childish expectation, I would say, that the Torah should contain a set of concrete, explicit instructions for every situation we find ourselves in—what to do and what not to do—that is this linear, one-to-one kind of interpretation. Give me a situation, I’ll look in the Torah, search for an answer, locate where the information is written, and apply it. That is childish. There is no such thing in Torah, and the Torah was not given that way from the outset.

And not only that—there is a Talmud in Eruvin from which one might perhaps also understand this point, that says it couldn’t even have been written that way. How could you address all situations and give a recipe for each one? It’s simply not logical; it’s not practical. A text that is supposed to give me tools to handle all the problems of the universe—assuming that is what is happening here—cannot be given in the first form, because otherwise its length would be the length of the universe. You would have to cover all the cases and give explicit instructions for each and every one of them. That is simply impossible. What you need is to educate the person, or teach the person, or equip the person with some form of thinking and a way of solving problems, not with specific information.

Today people talk a lot about this, right, about education nowadays needing to move from an emphasis on acquiring knowledge to an emphasis on acquiring skills or forms of thought or problem-solving. I think knowledge still has importance even today, but it is true that I think the weight really should shift a bit more in the direction of skills and ways of thinking. So in this context I think that is really the meaning of what Rabbi Kook is talking about.

And indeed, one of the places where people very commonly think the information about all the future situations of the Jewish people is hidden, and also the recipes for what to do with them, is the Song of Ha’azinu. The Song of Ha’azinu, as appears also in the midrashim, and Nachmanides talks about it, and others—that basically the entire history of the Jewish people is there in some coded form or another, with recipes for what to do as well. That last part is an addition not everyone makes, but at least the history.

There is the well-known story of Abner of Burgos the apostate, a student of Nachmanides, who came—yes, it’s a famous story, I don’t know exactly what the source is, I didn’t look it up now, but you can surely find it online. He came to his former teacher after he had already converted, and he came to Nachmanides and said to him: you think everything is found in the Song of Ha’azinu, all of history? Where will you find me? Will you find me, my name, in the Song of Ha’azinu—Abner? So Nachmanides was not confused for a moment and immediately said: “I said I would scatter them; I would make their memory cease from mankind.” If you look at “I would scatter them, I would make their memory cease from mankind,” the third letter in each word spells A-B-N-R, Abner. Meaning, in “scatter them,” the third letter is A. In “make cease,” the third letter is B. In “mankind,” the third letter is N. In “their memory,” the third letter is R. So that’s Abner. Okay?

Now, forgive me, yes, I think Nachmanides himself didn’t mean this seriously, but it’s a childish example. Why? Because it assumes I need to find every single event and every instruction for a future event explicitly in the verses. Whether by letter skips, or by coding, or encryption—it doesn’t matter how sophisticated the coding is—that is still childish. It’s childish because even thinking you find it in code is not serious. Even in code you won’t find it. You need to find it in some completely different way, a way that says: I learned how to look correctly at things, I learned how to solve problems, I learned “an ox that gored a cow,” or whatever, all kinds of completely different things. And that is supposed to give me some tools to cope with life situations, even situations that involve neither oxen nor cows and are not even damages at all, but just a form of analysis.

And therefore I also don’t agree with the view that it is encoded there in some very sophisticated ciphers. That is still a childish conception. And I think what Rabbi Kook says here is exactly this point: that the Torah of “I will be,” not “I will be what I will be”—the Torah of “I will be”—is a Torah in which you will not find the information linearly. It’s not there. You have Torah—study it, what is in it. It does not contain all the information, certainly not in a linear way. It does not contain all the recipes for handling that information. But if you study the demonstrations or these passages, there is a good chance that you will know how to handle other problems well too.

By the way, this is a bit the source of the very problematic thesis of “Torah wisdom.” This notion that a great Torah scholar knows how to handle practical issues, real-life issues—I think it begins there. It begins there, and in that partial and minimal sense I tend to accept it. Although I usually object to such conceptions of “Torah wisdom,” in this minimal and very broad sense I do tend to accept it. I don’t think it is enough; you also need to learn reality well. In that sense I do not accept it. Meaning, there are those who want to claim that if you are steeped in Torah wisdom then you no longer need to learn anything else, you don’t need to know anything else, you can derive all the information either by letter skips or without letter skips—I don’t know exactly how—but you can give a solution to every question, through holy spirit, through your Torah wisdom, and so on. That I do not accept.

I do accept that someone who has learned Torah properly—if he studies reality and understands and consults and listens to what people who know what they are talking about say, and puts effort and thought into it—has a good chance of arriving at good solutions, correct solutions. I don’t know if the most correct. I say this deliberately in very moderate language. I don’t want to get carried away with this idea. But I do think it gives good analytical tools. I definitely think so. Or good tools of orientation, and I would even say perhaps in some sense, tools for aiming at what the Holy One, blessed be He, intends. Even that I am prepared to accept. Not only correct in some scientific sense, but correct in the sense that this is how the Holy One, blessed be He, expects us to relate to these situations. But not to slide into that mysticism which says: okay, then there is no need to know the situation or study anything at all, because I can extract everything from the four cubits of Jewish law in which I sit. I think that takes it too far. That’s how it seems to me anyway.

So if I return to the basic move itself, I want to clarify a bit more the meaning of the Torah of “I will be,” this Torah in which things are not given by spoon-feeding. They do not appear explicitly. By the way, one can perhaps compare this a bit to a parable I often use. I like it, and maybe sometimes it is not exact, but I think it does give some insight. Those who know computer science, for example: you can write programs linearly, the old way—a program that tells you if this, then do that, and if this, then do that. You give the computer spoon-fed instructions what it should do in each situation. And you can also do what is called today a neural network. A neural network is basically to give the computer some examples. It builds the network—which is really a network inside it in some form of links between points, not important right now—and once it is built correctly it knows how to handle all kinds of problems, at least of the kind on which it trained.

And therefore it is somewhat limited, because you need to train it for a certain type of problem. But within that domain, you can train it to solve a very broad range of problems that a linear program could not cope with. Meaning, a program that tells it what to do in every situation will not be able to handle it. And therefore I think this is not a bad parable for what I’m talking about here. Here too I’m talking about something that shapes our minds, not giving us the information, the algorithm of what to do in each situation. Rather, if our minds are shaped correctly, there is a fair chance that we will also handle correctly the situations that come our way.

The point is that usually when we talk about those insights that the Torah conveys to us, and certainly when we talk about enslavements and what to do in situations of enslavement and so on, we are not talking about the halakhic part of the Torah. Usually the Song of Ha’azinu is not the halakhic part of the Torah. It is some narrative part, or in this case some sort of poem, but in any case it is not the halakhic part. And there I am a bit skeptical about all this. Those who know my position, some of the people here. Because somehow my feeling is that when we try to draw insights from engagement with the non-halakhic parts of Torah—and of the Talmud too, in this case I think it works quite similarly—we don’t really succeed in doing that. I am a pretty strong believer in insights acquired through engagement with Jewish law. I believe much less in insights acquired through engagement with aggadah, because usually, in my impression, engagement with aggadah may sharpen insights that already exist in me, but I don’t think it teaches me things I previously thought differently about. Meaning, that almost never happens, or maybe does not happen at all. And on that there are already various controversial columns on my website with very long debates, and I won’t open that here. I’m just making a remark that there is room here for hesitation.

Because on the face of it, when you look at Rabbi Kook certainly, and of course Nachmanides, and those who talk about the Song of Ha’azinu, they are not talking about the halakhic part. They are talking about the non-halakhic part of Torah, and also the aggadic passages of the Sages, in the Talmud as well, and so on. And personally—again—I am somewhat skeptical. Meaning, these kinds of engagements seem to me not essentially different from engagement with literature or poetry or whatever, things that can give me insights and enrich me and sharpen points for me, but I will never come from a place where I thought X and then learned there, wow, and changed. So I’m just noting that for those who know my position on the matter, so that it won’t seem to contradict what I said earlier.

Now I want to bring some example of a text that tries to do what I just described. It is a very well-known pamphlet by Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, called Ikveta DeMeshicha. Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman—yes, the head of the Baranovich yeshiva, a student of the Chafetz Chaim—was born in Boisk, the city where Rabbi Kook was rabbi. And in his youth, when he studied in Volozhin and in yeshivot for a period, when he came home between terms, he would sit and study in paired learning with Rabbi Kook. At a certain point he became very distant from him in worldview, from Rabbi Kook, and became extremely anti-Zionist, one of the great fighters against Zionism. He was murdered in the Holocaust in the Ninth Fort in Kovno. And there are all kinds of stories there whose historical reliability is disputed, about how he spoke there about the need to sanctify God’s name and not blemish the sacrifice—very famous stories. In any case, there is also a story that when Rabbi Kook—it was already in 1940… Rabbi Kook died, I think, in 1935, something like that. I even read this in Suraski, so maybe it is actually true, that Rabbi Elchanan organized mass prayers for Rabbi Kook’s recovery, despite the mountains that had opened between them. So there was really some complex and interesting relationship between them.

In any event, in the framework of his struggle against Zionism, his main work is this one called Ikveta DeMeshicha, a kind of booklet that in Bnei Brak people used to like very, very much; today I think it is less popular there. Netzach published several editions of it. In any case, let’s look for a moment at his introduction, so you’ll see what I mean. Here—no, that’s something else. Here, “At the outset”—this is already Rabbi Elchanan. Meaning, the previous pages are only the publishers.

“The period passing over us now is not an ordinary period, especially with regard to the Jewish people. We are eyewitnesses to phenomena we never imagined. The events are so rapid, wondrous, and surprising, that we stand astonished and lacking understanding of what is occurring. ‘And you shall be driven mad by the sight of your eyes.’ This is so as long as our approach is based on human reason. But if we delve into Torah, we will find that everything is clear and lucid. Everything that has happened in Jewish history, whether in the past or in the present, occurs exactly as the Written Torah and Oral Torah foresaw in advance. Every Torah matter is reality. Every word in the Torah is reality—actual reality, unlike anything else. Thousands of years ago it was told to us in prophecy, ‘And the Lord shall scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth even to the other end of the earth,’ and this prophecy became reality. If until now there were remote corners at the ends of the world where there were no Jewish settlements, now they are expelled even there. Scripture determines ‘among all peoples’; it must be fulfilled in us in its full meaning.”

It says “among all peoples,” so apparently it has to be literally in every place. “And the Lord shall scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth,” so if it says all peoples, then apparently it has to be everywhere. So now, today, we see the realization of that prophecy when Jews reach each and every place throughout the world. Fine, one can argue at what resolution. I think there are still places without Jews, but it seems to me there is no point in entering that resolution at all. It’s that same conception—I’ll call it childish, though that’s a bit disrespectful to Rabbi Elchanan—but it is a childish conception. Meaning, to read the Torah this way is exactly what I was talking about before. That every single event, everything that happened, every word in the Torah describes an event one-to-one. Meaning, everything is written there linearly. It’s not even encrypted, actually—it’s just written. His conception is so linear it isn’t even encrypted. Everything is written; just read, understand, one-to-one.

Now this whole pamphlet—this introduction is not incidental—the whole pamphlet is built on this. He shows us from the Torah everything that is happening, every event that happens. Now one of the problems with this kind of approach is that of course, whatever had happened, I could have shown you in the Torah that this is what had to happen. These are theses that are not falsifiable, as usual. It’s like the Oracle of Delphi. In that sense I think that at least a large part of what he says here—I don’t know if all of it, but a large part—you could say the exact opposite without any problem.

And one of the simplest proofs of this is simply to look at the contents. Look at the contents of the pamphlet. Here. The contents of the pamphlet: the Song of Ha’azinu—that starts on page 17, because that is where the whole matter is really hidden. After that, the slogan “Let us be like the nations”—you already understand that the punishment that comes is the Holocaust; this is the beginning of the matter. But all the persecutions are punishment for our saying we would be like all the nations, because that is what the Torah wrote. After that, “the shepherds”—yes, one must listen to the religious, rabbinic leadership. “The counsel of Torah.” “The exile policy of our forefathers.” “The national idea”—here of course he reaches Zionism and the Land of Israel and the attitude to the Land of Israel, and so on. Meaning, he is constructing the Haredi anti-Zionist worldview here on explicit verses in the Torah, simply one-to-one. Read the Torah and be anti-Zionist; you just need to read.

Now his rabbi, Rabbi Kook, whom I mentioned earlier, read that same Torah and reached the opposite conclusion. He explained that everything fits what is written in the Torah—but the other way around. I think Rabbi Kook is not quite as simplistic as Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, who explains to you in every verse what is happening. But it seems to me that Rabbi Kook too is not all that far from the view that you can see concrete things in the Torah. I’m not enough of an expert in his writings to bring examples right now, but it seems to me—you could look. In any case, one way or another, Rabbi Kook drew the opposite conclusions. Meaning, the conclusion that the Torah teaches us in a very clear way—just look and learn—brings Rabbi Elchanan to an anti-Zionist conclusion and Rabbi Kook to a Zionist conclusion.

And if you allow me to venture a guess that is not far from reality, I assume that for both of them it did not begin from the Torah. It began from the question of how they viewed reality and what they thought about it, of course together with a certain Torah-based conception, and then they went to the verses and found in the verses in great detail—or not in great detail; for Rabbi Elchanan it is in great detail—their worldview. And therefore I suspect, repeating the suspicion I expressed earlier, I am somewhat suspicious of those who find in Torah—certainly in the non-halakhic parts—very, very clear messages.

And I find it hard to see how a person holding a Zionist worldview reads Ikveta DeMeshicha and becomes convinced. By the way, there are some such people; I know some. One of the well-known ones is Elchanan something—I don’t remember the last name already—who wrote all kinds of pamphlets and so on, and was raised in Religious Zionist education and somehow converted his religion to really extreme and fanatical Haredism, and writes a lot of nonsense. But he is one of those who, it seems to me, really was persuaded by these arguments of Ikveta DeMeshicha and changed his skin. Usually that doesn’t happen. Usually you find in the Torah what you think you are supposed to find in the Torah.

And therefore I am somewhat skeptical, certainly regarding linear readings, and I’m not even sure about non-linear readings either—my neural network, so to speak. I place more trust in a neural network built through analytic study of halakhic passages than in study of the Song of Ha’azinu or aggadic passages of the Sages. And I think that precisely study of halakhic passages, which are totally detached from questions of life and worldview and history and all that, gives not-bad tools for saying intelligent things about history—of course not instead of studying history or learning the relevant data, but in addition. Meaning, it can add to you if you do what you have to do in order to know the material, and you’re not saying it directly out of the passage of “an ox that gored a cow.”

But here I want to return for a moment to the point with which I opened. True, it was only a remark in parentheses, but I want to use it to get to the point with which I want to finish. Despite everything, I think that perhaps—and I thought today before the lesson that maybe I should somewhat moderate the criticism I expressed earlier—I think that maybe even when people look at both Written Torah and Oral Torah and formulate an anti-Zionist worldview like Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, or a Zionist worldview like Rabbi Kook, the question then is: if so, what exactly is the value of Torah here, or to what extent is this interpretation really a correct interpretation of Torah? If both a thing and its opposite fit, then in what sense is there a correct and incorrect interpretation here? No one will find in the other some mistake that he can prove and say: you see, here you erred, and therefore obviously your interpretation is wrong, which proves I’m right. It doesn’t work that way. And not because people are stubborn, but because there really aren’t proofs at that level. In my opinion, you can’t bring such proofs.

So there is something subtler going on here. And perhaps—and here I want to suggest maybe some middle position—perhaps these interpretations are really not interpretations that try to propose truth-claims, but rather they are trying to propose a possible way of looking at things in light of the sources. And in that sense, the possible way of looking at things—both Rabbi Kook’s way is possible and Rabbi Elchanan’s way is possible. Independently of the linearity, which I don’t accept as a methodology, even in a non-linear reading one can reach Rabbi Elchanan’s conclusions and Rabbi Kook’s conclusions. And I think one can present a whole and coherent worldview that accords with the sources and yet is opposite—one Zionist and one anti-Zionist.

What does that actually mean? One could dismiss this and say—what I usually do, to confess my sins today—and say: okay, they’re all just making things up, and each one is really doing whatever he wants there. But I want now to present a slightly more moderate thesis and say that maybe the text really does tolerate both interpretations. It tolerates both because each contains some measure of truth. Each contains some measure of truth. You can look at this text in a way that pushes the Zionist idea, because there is something positive and true in it, something worth joining, and there is in it something that advances service of God, the spiritual dimension, the value dimension. But in the anti-Zionist interpretation too there is a correct way of looking; one must not dismiss it. There too there are aspects that are genuine. There is problematicity in the whole thing, and maybe it is also important to maintain some separation and not become completely merged with the Zionist movement, as was debated then. Never mind—the judgments in either direction can both be right.

At the bottom line, in the end, you need to make a decision: do you join or not join? But the ways of looking—and if Torah only gives me a way of looking, not some recipe for what to do—then in that sense I am indeed willing to accept that both ways of looking emerge out of the corpus called Torah, Written Torah and Oral Torah; and both are consistent, and both perhaps fit, or perhaps in some sense are even learned from there—although about that I am somewhat doubtful. But they constitute a possible interpretation of the sources; let’s call it that. Maybe tendentious, maybe I bring it from home, but it is a possible interpretation, and the other interpretation is also possible.

And what this really means is what I said before: part of my problem with linear interpretation is its simplification. Real-life issues, like Talmudic issues too, are usually complex; they have many facets. You can find 150 reasons to declare the creeping thing pure and 150 reasons to declare it impure, the Talmud says. A candidate for the Sanhedrin was tested by seeing whether he could give 150 reasons according to which the creeping thing is pure, even though the Torah says it is impure, and 150 reasons to justify the Torah saying it is impure. So Rabbenu Tam asks: what do we need these empty hairsplittings for? Why should you make pointless pilpul to say the creeping thing is pure? We know it is impure; the Torah says it is impure. So the Maharal says: no, that’s not true. There really are 150 reasons that purify the creeping thing. Those are real reasons. It’s just that there are also 150 reasons that make it impure. In the bottom line the Torah says that the latter 150 prevail over the former, weigh more, and therefore the creeping thing is impure. But it is not true that the picture is not complex. And a candidate for the Sanhedrin must understand that you have to look at realities in a complex way. If you see reality as all pointing in one direction, you are a bad judge. A judge must understand that reality has several sides, and in the end be able to decide—which is almost a contradiction in terms—but that is what is required of a good judge, and therefore that is how he is tested there.

And if I return to this issue of Zionism and anti-Zionism, it teaches a certain lesson in how to relate also to positions about which we are very decisive. Even religious positions that are binding, that become principles of faith in certain places. It says: first of all, even if these are principles of faith, with all due respect, the other side also has principles of faith. And the other side is not an idiot. And these two sides, in the end, each present a coherent picture that has some substance to it. You cannot ignore that. In the end, make your decision where you stand and what you do in practice, but there are two world-pictures here and you need to relate to both. If you see all the sources in your favor and all interpretation in your favor, and everything else is nonsense, then clearly you are not understanding the issue correctly. A judge in the Sanhedrin must understand that there are 150 reasons here and 150 reasons there.

And maybe I’ll finish—the Talmud in tractate Gittin, the Talmud in tractate Gittin says on page 6—wait, here—the Talmud in tractate Gittin says on page 6. The Talmud explains what “these and those are the words of the living God” means. It appears in two places in the Talmud: in Eruvin regarding the students of Hillel and Shammai, Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, and here in Gittin. There it is about halakhic disputes, and here in Gittin about aggadic disputes. And that’s nice, because this is exactly the point I’m talking about, and it is connected not specifically to halakhic issues in Torah and Oral Torah.

It says like this—I’ll read only the relevant part of the Talmud, what I marked. As it is written, “His concubine played the harlot against him”—this is about the concubine in Gibeah. Rabbi Evyatar said: he found a fly on her. Rabbi Yonatan said: he found a hair on her. Meaning, either he found a fly or he found a hair that annoyed him. What caused that great eruption and that terrible murder and all the disaster that followed? It started from a fly—the whole thing because of one small nail. The question is, what was that nail? Was it a fly or was it a hair?

And Rabbi Evyatar encountered Elijah—yes, Rabbi Evyatar, one of the disputants here, found Elijah the prophet and asked him. He said to him, what is the Holy One, blessed be He, doing now? So Elijah answered him: He is occupied with the concubine in Gibeah. He is learning the passage of the concubine in Gibeah right now. And what is He saying? That’s interesting—we were just arguing about that. So Elijah says to him: yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, says: Evyatar my son says thus, Yonatan my son says thus. Meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, studies the statement of Rabbi Evyatar and the statement of Rabbi Yonatan—fly, hair—and that’s it; He doesn’t state a clear-cut answer.

So Rabbi Evyatar says to Elijah the prophet: Heaven forbid—is there doubt before Heaven? What, the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t know what happened there? Is He uncertain about this matter? He knows. So what do you mean, what is this doubt? Elijah said to him: “These and those are the words of the living God. He found a fly and did not mind; he found a hair and did mind.” In the Talmud in tractate Eruvin the principle of “these and those” is not explained; here it is explained—that is the advantage. And what is the explanation? It says here: he found a fly and did not mind, he found a hair and did mind. So why is that “these and those”? So Rabbi Yonatan is right. Rabbi Yonatan, who said he found a hair on her, is right. Why is it “these and those”?

I think the answer here—there is a Tosafot HaRosh that talks about this somewhat; he doesn’t say exactly what I’m saying, but maybe it is quite similar—I think what is simply written here is that basically he didn’t get angry over the hair alone. It was a cumulative effect. He found a fly; that by itself was not yet enough to anger him. After he also found a hair, that already enraged him, blew his fuse. Meaning, what did it was not the hair by itself, but the accumulation of the fly and the hair together. And what this actually means is that it gives meaning to the concept “these and those are the words of the living God.” “These and those are the words of the living God” means that each one grasps one facet of the truth. The whole truth, the truth that is with the Holy One, blessed be He, who alone can perhaps really hold it in all its complexity—that is both facets together.

Each of us adheres to his own outlook—he is Zionist or anti-Zionist, hair or fly—and he goes with his own and fights for his own, and that is perfectly fine. A person should fight for what he believes in, within proper limits. But that is fine. You do not have to live out the truth of the Holy One, blessed be He, because then it really would be a boring world, a world without flavor, with nothing worth dying for, as the poet says. So each person should fight for what he believes in, formulate a position and fight for what he believes in. But in the end, behind the consciousness one must understand that no one here is an idiot. Meaning, there are sides here and there. And “these and those are the words of the living God” in the sense—not in the sense that I don’t know what to do, everybody is right—but in the sense that each grasps a genuine facet of the truth. In the end the truth is the totality of all the facets together. That is the truth of the Holy One, blessed be He.

And in the end there is also a bottom line of how it is right to act. And I can be a Zionist and decide that the Zionist side outweighs the anti-Zionist side. There are 150 reasons here and 150 reasons there, and these outweigh those. But not to say that there are only 150. There are 300. There are 300, of which one 150 outweighs the other 150. Then I can decide: yes, I am a Zionist; or I am anti-Zionist; it doesn’t matter, let each person decide what he decides. But you need to decide with an informed decision, understanding that there are both sides, and that each person who built such a worldview built a whole worldview that is not—usually it holds water. It isn’t nonsense. Sometimes there is nonsense too, but usually not. The basic assumption is that usually not. Intelligent people do not speak complete nonsense. There is something in what they say. Think. And in the end decide. You do not have to agree with them, but give some credit and say that there is something in what they say. And in that sense, it may be that even on the plane of aggadah—even though I am somewhat skeptical about our ability to infer conclusions from aggadah—this multiplicity of facets does not necessarily… I mean, there are two facets here. Maybe one cannot decide who is right, but one can decide who prevails. I think this is stronger than that, and therefore I choose this side, or I choose that side. And perhaps that too can be done in aggadot or in stories—I don’t know. That is already a subtler question. It seems to me we’ll stop here.

I’m releasing your control over the microphones, and I’m leaving everyone muted, but I’m giving control. So now anyone who wants to speak can open his own microphone. Let’s maybe start with questions related to the lesson, if there are any, and if afterward you want about other things, that’s also possible.

Can I ask? First of all, Rabbi, first of all the Rabbi is sending all of us to study Zen. That’s stage one. It won’t hurt. It won’t hurt. Now, I just wanted to ask: according to the way the Rabbi explained the Leshem, then where is human free choice? In practice, if everything is sealed, then basically we have no choice. The Leshem really takes it too far. He wants to claim that everything that happens in the world is this “awesome contrivance.” And he argues there is no contradiction because the Holy One, blessed be He, can direct things in advance even though it depends on our choice. On this point I really do not agree. I think there is a contradiction. Therefore, if we have free choice, there cannot be this “awesome contrivance,” but there can be certain specific points. Meaning, there are certain points that the Holy One, blessed be He, decided He dictates—He does not leave them to us—and then indeed He rolls things along as He decides. That can be. There’s no problem. He can always do something that He decides. I’m only claiming that this does not fit with free choice. There is no such thing as half-choice; either there is choice or there isn’t choice. What do you mean, certain points? What does that mean? Right, it can be that there are certain actions regarding which we have no choice. Certain events in which we have no choice—the Holy One, blessed be He, took away our choice because He takes the reins into His own hands. He wants to direct history to a certain place. In principle that is possible. Why not? Okay, fine. Okay.

Can I ask a question? Yes, yes. Basically, the Rabbi distinguishes between aggadah and Jewish law in the way a person is influenced by some initial opinion he already has first of all about reality, and then he draws out of the things he reads—when it comes to aggadah, he simply reinforces his opinion as it was already formed. Wait. Okay. Yes, now you can. Go ahead, Daniel. Yes. And with regard to Jewish law, a person in the end will be obligated by what Jewish law says. But you see that even in Jewish law—the example that came to my mind is conversion. You see that on conversion, ostensibly a halakhic issue, people will say completely different things according to their worldview. I agree partially. Meaning, people always asked me this when I spoke about the relation between Jewish law and aggadah, and even on the website after the column in which I spoke about the Corona sermons, they asked me: and what about Jewish law? Does Jewish law also function this way? I think not, but I can’t get into it here because it really requires a lecture of its own. There is a fairly long discussion of this in the second book of the trilogy. If you want, look there, in the section on Torah study, the definition of Torah study. There I discuss the differences and why I think it is not the same thing. Although clearly there are disputes, and clearly conceptions that I bring with me enter there too, without question—I’m not denying that. But it is not to the same extent and in the same form as in the aggadic part. Okay.

Eli, I feel like you’re talking but there’s no sound. No sound and no answer. Rabbi? Oh, now yes. No, this is Barak. Ah, wait. Ah, Barak. Okay. I wanted to ask regarding—you spoke about the matzot on Passover, that it seems as though God created a narrative that determined that that’s how it would be, that there would be matzot, so He made everything appear as though there would be matzot. Now I wanted to ask: it seems there were some cases in the Torah where it looks as though it came from the people, for example the daughters of Tzelophehad, or the Second Passover, all those who couldn’t offer the Passover sacrifice. So it seems as though because of their intervention there really was a change in the Torah. Is that true, or… First of all, it could be. I’m not saying there always has to be this kind of rolling process. I don’t even know if there ever was. This is Rabbi Kook’s and Beit HaLevi’s claim. I’m not sure it’s actually true. I was only explaining what Rabbi Kook says. But even if you do accept this conception, it doesn’t have to be always. There can be things that do arise as a result of historical events. Therefore it could be that there it really did happen as a response to people’s initiative.

Although I’d say logically, if that really is the law, then why assume the Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t give it from the outset? He didn’t think of it? That doesn’t sound reasonable. If that really is the law, then what’s the problem? Why wait until the daughters of Tzelophehad or the people of the Second Passover raise it? Just say what the law is, and that’s it. It could be that He wanted the law to arise from below for His own reasons, but still that really was the law planned in advance. But maybe yes, maybe no—I don’t know. Yes.

Anyone else? Yes. Good evening, Rabbi. Sorry, I don’t have video here and… Okay. Yes, yes, I hear you. Go ahead. Now there’s no audio either. Good? Yes, my name is Akiva. Can you hear me? Yes, yes. Yes. Two things. First, regarding the last point: does the Rabbi agree, does he think and agree that there is a plain meaning of the text, or does the text allow seventy facets to the Torah and everything is correct? I don’t think there is always one plain meaning. It could be that sometimes there is a preferred plain meaning, and then I will incline in one direction. Certainly possible, even likely. But I don’t think it’s always like that, and it seems to me that if you try to formulate a general worldview, then it is almost never like that. Meaning, even if you find it in one verse, I’ll bring you another verse, or another aggadah, or another source, in which I can show you the opposite. Therefore extracting a conception from the whole of Written Torah and Oral Torah sounds to me almost impossible.

By the way, this is the dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides in the second root. Maimonides says there is only one interpretation to each verse, and therefore he claims that midrash is not interpretation of the verse but some sort of extension of the verse, like branches coming out of roots. Nachmanides, by contrast, argues that there are many—seventy facets to the Torah—and several interpretations, and all of them are interpretations of the verse. Nachmanides? I didn’t hear the… Yes, yes. Maimonides is pronounced one way and Nachmanides another. Yes. Well, I lean a bit toward the teaching of Rabbi Yitzchak Abarbanel, who says first of all it’s obvious, obvious to him that everything written was written in such a way that there is a first plain meaning. It is also clear to him that what is written allows several things. But it is clear there is also a difference between what concerns Jewish law and what concerns midrash and stories, and he too enters in a different explanatory way.

But let’s return to what the Rabbi said, which I heard in the lesson: that basically the Torah works more in the form of principle, and gradually descends and explains things, because it cannot descend to the level of cases. That is clear, I agree. That is clear, that makes sense. Therefore regarding, for example, the question of the daughters of Tzelophehad that Barak asked—yes, so clearly the Torah in principle did state it, it spoke about it, and maybe Moses simply did not descend to it or did not know it, and therefore he asked. Yes? I don’t know how that is obvious to you. As long as you don’t find where it is written, I don’t know where you derive the principle that it is written. But if that is obvious to you, fine; to me it is not obvious. No, I was going in the direction the Rabbi was saying. To say how it works on a principled level, you can see it. The Ten Commandments—again according to Rabbi Yitzchak Abarbanel’s method, and also Rabbi Saadia Gaon—each one saw them as roots from which all the commandments, the 613 commandments, emerge. That’s also how the kabbalah… But you understand that to derive all the commandments from the Ten Commandments you have to force them brutally. And that’s homiletics. Not necessarily. Okay, happy is the believer. That’s the work of Rabbi Yitzchak Abarbanel—you may not have seen it—and it works out very nicely. Okay, I don’t know it well enough, so I can’t give an informed opinion on that. Yes, by the way, this isn’t connected to this lesson, it’s connected to another lesson, if I may add… Sons? Yes. Here—so Rashi brings the midrash, right? Abarbanel simply explains, he asks why, why is it really “beautiful”? So he answers very simply: he answers that in order to see why it’s beautiful, you need to pay attention to how the Torah told it the first time and the second time and find the differences, and the differences really show how people behave. Okay. In Rashi what is attached to “beautiful is the conversation of the servants of the patriarchs” is not the differences but the length. There are differences, and he finds the differences. I didn’t say there are no differences, I didn’t say there are no differences, but I said that what they attach “beautiful is the speech of the servants of the patriarchs” to is the length devoted to the matter, not the differences—at least as far as I remember that midrash. He only explains why that length is needed. Fine, okay. Fine.

Okay. Viki? Yes. Following what you said—that this is a bit innovative on your part—that Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman and Rabbi Kook rely justifiably on Torah because if you look you find, right? It’s true it’s not only their side, but it definitely can, so to speak, support their position. So maybe you are also open to the idea that Israeli law should indeed lean on Hebrew law, and should bring in more Hebrew law and search more for sources and find sources. I don’t see why that should happen. You can force anything, but it doesn’t sound reasonable to me to do such a thing because the assumptions and starting points are different. Wait—and what did Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Elchanan do? Both of them worked with religious-Torah starting points, so there is a dispute within the framework. But someone—you can draw… I gave an example in my article on the matter. Suppose you want to adopt the most prosaic, banal thing possible: the laws of bailees. Why not adopt from Hebrew law that a paid bailee is liable for theft, loss, and negligence, and an unpaid bailee… No, because they are looking for the moral principles behind the matter, not necessarily the law itself, but to draw and receive some kind of inspiration from the moral principles of our Torah. Unless there are moral principles at the base of it—I’m a bit doubtful about that. But I’m saying again: then Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman also did not have to do that. They formulated a view. Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Wasserman are not talking about morality. They’re talking about interpretation of historical events and ideology. History and religion are not necessarily the same thing. I didn’t say they’re the same thing. Why, I didn’t understand—why can Zionism draw on Torah sources, at least get some inspiration from there even if not everything supports that direction? So I’m saying: in the moral context too, the same thing happens. I can say the same thing in the moral context too. There too you can find different opinions and both will be based on Torah, so I am somewhat doubtful how much it really comes out of Torah, and I am even more doubtful whether someone who holds one of the opinions will, as a result of studying Torah, change his position. Therefore everything I said here can definitely also be said in the moral context. I accept that.

No, but you were pretty forgiving just now toward Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Wasserman. I said I’m moderating my usual approach. Therefore I’m asking whether in the other fields too you are moderating. The same thing, though the skepticism remains both here and there—how much it really comes out of the Torah. I am willing to give it a bit more credit, although at first glance in most cases I don’t see that it really comes from there. But I presented a certain direction of how one can nevertheless give it some credit. Okay, good. By the way, I suddenly understood why sometimes I ask you to wash dishes so that you can understand other insights from Zen, for example why dirt remains on the dishes or… Exactly. Okay, good. But you can also learn those same insights by lying in bed; remember, there are various ways. Those same insights. Okay.

Anyone else? If I may ask one more question: if I take the Rabbi’s parable from earlier about the difference between linear learning and neural-network learning, then in machine learning like that, the programmer himself in the end does not know where the machine will go, because he feeds in some sort of… So in that way, can one say that free choice is so free that even the Holy One, blessed be He, gives us some ability to choose things that He Himself in some sense does not know, meaning does not foresee? I think He does not know anything that we choose, but that’s… But I don’t see why that is connected to free choice. There is something here where the Holy One, blessed be He, does not put the data explicitly into us, but gives us some form of perspective, trains us on examples as is done with neural networks, and once our network is built properly, the assumption is that we will make decisions correctly. Whether we choose freely or do not choose freely—I think that is a somewhat different plane. Understood.

Can I? Yes. I think you can give an example for this in Maimonides in two places. In the introduction to the chapter “Helek,” Maimonides lists five schools regarding the concept of the world to come, how they understand the concept of reward. And he comments there that it is according to the differences in their intellects. He says each one has sources in the Sages and in Scripture to rely on, but he says it is according to the differences in their intellects. That implies that each sage, according to his own understanding… Now another point: in the Guide of the Perplexed, part 1, chapter 31, he says there that in matters of science we can notice there are fewer disputes, but in something for which there is no mathematical or scientific proof, then because of human beings’ passion to arrive at truth, each thinks he holds the most correct view, and from here comes the multiplicity of disputes. So perhaps that is exactly the matter regarding Jewish law or aggadah—why specifically in the Torah realm? We see it that way also in literature and in the world of law, where there can be different disputes. Though perhaps in Jewish law it is narrower because there are some foundations everyone agrees on, and therefore the dispute is narrowed. In Jewish law there are some empirical facts that make it more similar to science than aggadah is. Okay. Yes, so according to the… fine.

Anyone else? Viki? Yes. Regarding what you said about “and He will scatter you among all peoples” and so on, what you said regarding Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman. What you said about “and He will scatter you among all peoples”—I think that if we reverse it, not go to the text and try to derive from there, but go, so to speak… If we look at history empirically, how many peoples in history have been scattered throughout the world and afterward returned to their land, and in addition were persecuted to such a degree that it got the name antisemitism—let’s call it by that word—we identify here a line that really is exceptional. And then in addition we see here some prophecy which, if we give the simplest possible interpretation to the text, does indeed speak about scattering, it does indeed speak about hatred and persecution. Right. I said there are certain things that perhaps really can be seen as appearing in the Torah. But his pretension to derive every detail, and if it says “all peoples” then it must be all peoples—that sounds a bit… I won’t say again. It’s obviously not—that presumably seems not to be it.

And another thing, by the way, regarding aggadot: Maimonides’ view that aggadot are not to be taken literally and are actually a parable for the Account of the Chariot or something in that style—what is your opinion on that? I have no idea. I don’t know why the aggadot should be parable. Anyone who proposes a parable will find a parable for what the aggadot say. We have no feedback that tells us whether it’s yes or no. So I don’t know what to say. Great, thanks. You’re welcome. Maimonides does not always say it is connected to the Account of the Chariot, because in his introduction to the chapter Helek he says that he intends to compose some explanation—though he did not explain it—but he says I will tell you what was in the dream, what was in the parable. Meaning, he accepts that it does not necessarily reflect the Account of the Chariot. It depends on… You can understand that Eli is a serious expert on Maimonides, so you can ask him whatever you want; I am not in that league. No, I’m not. That was just an incidental remark. Okay.

Anyone else? Okay, so we’ll finish. Thank you, and may it be… this is the last time before Passover. As far as I’m concerned we can continue on Sunday during the intermediate days of the festival; apparently we’ll still be in lockdown. So I think I’ll continue on Sunday; whoever wants is of course welcome. We’ll send messages through WhatsApp. So thank you very much and goodbye.