Ein Ayah – Berakhot 126

This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, first of all, one preliminary comment before I really get into the issue itself. There’s actually an interesting point here, and I think it’s an important lesson in many contexts: we have a tendency that when we see a trend, or a certain direction of development, it seems to us that this is now the direction. That’s it—it’ll keep going like this forever, or at least for a long time. But the opposite is true: not necessarily. Monotheism spreads, but at some stage it can retreat, or take some crooked turn or something like that, and then require renewed correction. Very often we have this tendency—yes, once upon a time when people thought about learning from history, that was the obvious thing to do. Let’s see what happened in history, and the assumption is that those directions we learned will probably continue onward. Slowly, we understand that you can’t really learn all that much from history. As Ben-Gurion said, historians are experts on what was, not on what will be. And therefore, basically, we’re more sober about drawing conclusions from intellectual trends about future developments. I know this about myself, for example: there were periods in the past when I thought to myself that postmodernism was starting to spread, run wild, and take over the world. My book Two Carts—I thought it was the last dam standing before the postmodern flood. The three and a half people who read it, that’s what was going to save the world. And somehow it turns out that this movement does indeed have a certain power, and it has effects far beyond its clearly defined borders, but it stopped. It was stopped from many different directions; today there are many forces opposing it. It looked like something that was about to wash over the entire world—at least in my eyes, and I think in the eyes of many, many people. And this was something that happened pretty quickly too; I’m talking about a few decades. But think, for example, about religiosity—what Rabbi Kook is talking about here regarding the spread of monotheism. Suddenly in modernity secularization begins, and then that secularization starts to spread, halting the spread of monotheism, reversing direction. Secularization starts to spread, and once again the feeling was that it was going to swallow everything. That’s it—there won’t be any religious people left, this whole story is already passé, right? That was the feeling of a great many people, I think including religious people, not only them, but certainly the secular modernist avant-garde here in Israel, and not only in Israel but in the world generally. The feeling was that this was a phenomenon on its way to its end. I think that over the last few decades it’s already become clear to everyone that it’s not going to end so fast. Both to those who are happy about that and to those who are sad about it—it’s not going to end so fast. Religiosity is coming back with force.

Just recently I read some article, a nice little column by Yair Sheleg in Makor Rishon, I think. I saw it online, but I think it was in Makor Rishon. He talks there about the ethos of Lag BaOmer. Really very topical. Until—I don’t know—twenty years ago, let’s say, and I think I’m even exaggerating a bit, it was obvious that Lag BaOmer meant Bar Kokhba, right? Heroism with the bow and arrow and the revolt against the Romans. Today Lag BaOmer is the mystical bonfires and all the “eighteen rotel” offerings of Lag BaOmer, and everyone joins in—secular, traditional, religious, Haredi, everyone. Today the whole militarism of Bar Kokhba is passé altogether—“vision, not fantasy,” as Yehoshafat Harkabi wrote about it. And in fact today the ethos of Lag BaOmer has become a kind of religious ethos. Once it was a symbol of secularity—Lag BaOmer. Meaning, it began as some kind of religious custom, but secularity latched onto it and turned it into a kind of Hanukkah, turned it into some secular ethos of heroism, rebellion, strength, army. And everyone very much identified with that, maybe Haredim less so, but also the religious groups that weren’t Haredi. And somehow today suddenly everyone is going back to Uman and mystical Lag BaOmer and all the nonsense surrounding that whole business. And that really symbolizes this interesting historical pendulum: anyone who lives through three, five, ten, twenty years—in the past it was a hundred years, but today of course the pace is totally different—so after a year or two you’re sure you understand the historical direction, you already know where things are headed. But just as it was built over a year or two, it can swing back in a year or two by a full hundred and eighty degrees.

And there’s a lesson here, I think, that’s very interesting—Rabbi Kook talks about it in the context of monotheism and morality, but it seems to me that it’s true of many things: one has to be very careful. Meaning, even if we see the direction and we see the derivative—yes, how the function is progressing—there’s also a second derivative and a third derivative and a fourth derivative, and these things can… So the excited modernist optimism is also not justified. Meaning, you don’t conquer a fortress until you’re really at the top. Directions—when you start climbing, everything is fine, but you can also go back down. Meaning, things don’t end so quickly, and directions don’t become clear, certainly not in real time and not even afterward. Meaning, these conclusions are very problematic conclusions. And I think this is just a lesson that isn’t necessarily connected to the core of Rabbi Kook’s words, but it appears here. He says: yes, it seems to us that the direction is toward monotheism—it changed, it can change back, nothing is certain. Learning from the past is something very, very speculative.

Okay, but to the substance of what he says there. There are really several points here that I think all revolve around the question of morality, distortion of morality, the confrontation, the relation to God, whether there is morality without God or whether only faith can stabilize or ground morality. And here I want to make a few comments connected to what he says, but a bit broader.

First of all, Rabbi Kook speaks about the fact that the foundation of everything is knowledge of God, yes. Rabbi Kook says—right there in the second sentence—that “the foundation of everything is knowledge of God, which Israel implanted and by which it illuminated the whole world.” In other words, the basis of all the moral development of the world, the cultural development of the world, is faith. That’s the infrastructure. And now from that he starts building his move, saying: fine, but if that’s so, then when faith is not complete, automatically its moral consequences can also become distorted, deviate, and disappear. And even faith itself is not guaranteed to continue progressing—it may retreat, and then once again a revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He, must intervene here, because without faith the whole thing really cannot work. Therefore you can’t build on any moral rule, on any direction; a son can rebel against his father, a servant can rebel against his master. If there is no faith, then no natural rule implanted in us in a simple way can be relied upon. And I think that this threads through the entire passage, even though explicitly it’s not written in very specific places, but that is what basically lies behind this whole section.

And of course this recalls the well-known saying of the ethical teachers, when they speak about “If there is no God in this place, they will kill me.” That’s Abraham our forefather’s expression, and the ethical teachers use it to say that in a place where there is no faith in the Holy One, blessed be He, you can’t trust anything—they’ll kill you. And as is well known, there are all kinds of stories about this; the Haredi ethos is full of stories—about the Rogatchover and about the rabbi of Brisk. Once the Brisker Rav, Rabbi Chaim’s son, the Griz as he’s called in the non-Haredi yeshivot—it’s told that once he summoned Avraham Amseloy, yes, the wild man from Mea Shearim, and said to him: listen, you are the greatest of the Zionists, he said to him. If you go to demonstrate against them and you aren’t afraid that they’ll kill you, that’s a sign that you trust them. Meaning, he wanted to express this idea that there is no trust—they’ll kill you. Why? Because if they have no faith, then you can’t rely on anything. Let’s just say that meanwhile, it seems to me—I wrote this in my own column as well—that meanwhile, violence and fear of killings don’t seem especially likely to come from the secular side. But that’s this whole conception: “If there is no God in this place, they will kill me.” Somehow the feeling is that without God there is no morality—which is apparently what Rabbi Kook is writing in this passage.

Now here I think that if one looks soberly at reality—not with slogans and sayings and verses taken out of context and things like that—in reality I don’t think it works that way. Let’s say that I don’t agree with what Dawkins says. Dawkins has a chapter in his book The God Delusion—the… with the question mark—he has a chapter there dealing with religious violence. He says that every violent phenomenon ultimately came out of religion, which in my view is complete nonsense historically as well. But it is true that there are very violent phenomena founded on religious faith—that is certainly true. So I don’t agree with Dawkins’s sweeping generalization, but I also don’t agree with the sweeping denial. Meaning, there is a connection between religious faith and violence. And by the same token, I also don’t agree with the opposite sweeping generalizations—namely, that morality exists only in a believing world or a religious world. That’s not true. I think morality exists no less, in my view, in a secular society, among people who do not believe. I don’t think that—I don’t know—I haven’t done statistics, I don’t know how one would even do statistics like that, but based on general impression, I don’t think I would trust a religious person more than a secular person on the moral plane. Generally speaking, I don’t think so. And therefore “If there is no God in this place, they will kill me,” literally, I think is not true. Not the verse, but what the ethical teachers made of it. Right—what was it in Egypt? There was no morality there without God? It may be that in the ancient world it really was difficult to build morality without grounding it in God, and therefore that ethos emerged there, on which we are educated to this day—that faith is a necessary condition for morality. It may be that today that’s not true. It may be that once it was true. Faith in God and the seven Noahide commandments were basically the infrastructure for the emergence of morality, but after morality emerged, it already has an independent life or independent inertia. And today as well, nonbelieving or nonreligious populations behave morally. There’s variety there, just as in the religious world there’s variety.

But what I do think—and I wrote about this at length in the first volume of my Matzui series, the first in my trilogy—is that in moral theory it seems to me very difficult to ground morality, in my view impossible, without God. That is, faith in God is a necessary infrastructure at the philosophical level for grounding the validity of morality. Therefore I say that in practice I do not agree with this saying of “If there is no God in this place, they will kill me.” I do think that the atheist or materialist or someone who does not believe in God but behaves morally does not really hold a consistent morality. He is a good person, and it will be nice to live with him, and one can trust him, everything is fine—but in my opinion he is not a consistent person. He is not consistent if he claims to conduct himself morally. If he says, look, it feels good to me to behave this way and I think it’s good and everything is fine—okay, one hundred percent. But morality in the Kantian sense, right? Obligation to the moral command, subordination before it, requires some source that is external. I can’t go into the details of the argument here because it requires explanation; it’s not so simple. Many people object strongly to this claim of mine. I still think it’s correct, but for now I just want to put it on the table as a basis for discussion. I don’t want to prove it or argue for it, only to present it as a basis for discussion.

In other words, I basically want to claim that I agree with Rabbi Kook partially. I think there is moral behavior today—I don’t know what was in the past—there is moral behavior even without God, even without faith in God. More than that: I think that things Rabbi Kook and some of his students or others—religious thinkers or rabbis—see as immoral phenomena because they do not fit believing or halakhic conceptions, I do not agree with them. Meaning, homosexuality—to return to the example of homosexuality—I don’t think there is anything immoral about it. In this respect it is something that contradicts halakhic principles, but I do not necessarily identify halakhic principles with moral principles. Therefore I do not think it is a distortion of morality when people treat it as something moral. I think that this is, in my view, a healthy separation between morality and Jewish law. There is morality and there is Jewish law. Morally I have no problem at all with homosexuality; halakhically I do—it is forbidden. So therefore I partially agree with Rabbi Kook’s claim. I don’t agree in practice—there is moral conduct even without faith. I do agree in theory. In theory I think there is no well-grounded morality without God.

Except that one more point has to be added here: the question is how stable morality without God is. And now I am talking about behavior, not only theory. There is a connection between theory and—or there can be a connection between theory and behavior. Meaning, where behavior is floating—what in electricity they call ungrounded, right?—it is not grounded in the earth, it is not anchored in solid theoretical principles or in the Holy One, blessed be He, in some solid anchor, but rather it derives from… it could be that this thing is unstable. Meaning, the moral people are perfectly fine, but who knows—it can go wild, it can arrive somewhere else. Once there are no rules anchored in something hard to change, something before which you nullify yourself, right, where you are not the master of the matter—then who knows? Once people are the masters, and whatever they determine is moral, this can get to all sorts of places. People can derive all sorts of things from that. Fortunately, maybe it doesn’t happen that often. Meaning, in most places when people define something as moral it really is moral, even in my opinion. Not always, but in most places. But there’s no guarantee—who knows. In the believing-halakhic context there may be more basis for hope that this moral behavior will be stable. There may not be differences in moral behavior; there are differences in moral theory. But perhaps even on the behavioral plane there are differences in the question of stability. Meaning, how far one can rely on this moral behavior in the long term. And this claim of Rabbi Kook’s I may perhaps agree with. The claim that says that even if things seem to be going in a certain direction, it’s not clear that one can count on them continuing in that direction. Because who knows—today the fashion is one way, so there is secular morality; tomorrow the fashion will be different, so there won’t be secular morality, or there will be something else.

And therefore Rabbi Kook says that only divine power can keep these darknesses shut up in darkness forever. That’s a sentence we read. In other words, if it’s not anchored in faith—more than that, in complete faith in the eternity of Israel, and apparently excluding what he means by partial monotheisms like Islam and Christianity—then he says: this cannot survive. Now of course one can draft in support of the point, somewhat demagogically in my opinion, phenomena of violence, mainly Muslim but perhaps also somewhat Christian—the American wild men, the Ku Klux Klan and all kinds of people like that—which very often do indeed come on a religious infrastructure. Some say they merely latch onto it, but you can’t completely disconnect it from the religious infrastructure of these ugly phenomena. And all the more so with ISIS and Islamic violence. And apparently it really does seem that these imitation monotheisms—beware of imitations—these partial monotheisms, do not manage to hold things the way rooted Jewish faith, what Rabbi Kook here perhaps means, does hold them.

So first of all I want to qualify even that and say: first of all, among us too some of the greatest believers are not exactly nonviolent. True, they don’t go out on mass killing campaigns, thankfully—that hasn’t happened yet, though killings here and there have happened as well; see the case of Shira Banki—but violence and harassment of people who don’t think like you, whether secular people or religious people of another kind, certainly exists. And perhaps there is even more of it in religious groups than in nonreligious groups, it seems to me—at least ideological violence, that’s pretty clear. Non-ideological violence I don’t know; that’s already crime, that’s a bit different. So first, it exists.

Second, there is the claim of the Kuzari, when the rabbi says to him that… I no longer remember the exact words—and anyway it’s a translation so it doesn’t matter—but he says to him: you take pride in the fact that you don’t abuse people and that you don’t act violently, but you never had such an option. Meaning, Judaism never had the power to use violence against its surroundings. So it’s no great wisdom for you to accuse the gentiles of being violent toward you while you were not violent toward them—you weren’t violent toward them because you lacked the power to be so; you were in exile. Then the king of the Khazars says to him, “You have shamed me,” right? Meaning, the rabbi responds to him: you’re right. Basically I can take great pride in being moral and nonviolent and all that, but for most of history we didn’t have the power to do otherwise. Now perhaps we have a bit more power, and maybe there’s room to discuss where we stand on this plane today, but certainly the religious groups themselves still don’t really have that power today. But the Jewish state does; the State of Israel does. So maybe that changes things a bit. But I think those comparisons are still problematic comparisons, because the option to be violent in the way Christians and Muslims were seems to me to exist a little less here. So I’m not sure even that comparison is so decisive.

In any case, Rabbi Kook’s claims here join, I think, the well-known Nietzschean prophecies. Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and the bursting forth of secularity, and that comes together with some kind of enormous savagery, and morality is a slave morality in his eyes. Again, there are all kinds of interpretive disputes, but I think the spirit blowing from Nietzsche is hard to miss. Meaning, one can quibble over this quotation or that quotation, but the spirit is a wild spirit. And the death of God, I think, is very much tied to that wildness. Because once you are the substitute god—man becomes the substitute god—then there is no limitation, no factor that puts any framework around things, and basically you cannot know what will come out of this. Right, all moral weakness in his eyes is slave weakness. All moral conduct is slave weakness. And it is no secret what influence he had on Nazi conduct. Of course there were many different kinds of influences—there was also a lot of paganism there, and that too partly comes from Nietzsche. There is something pagan in him. And also this whole idea of the death of God, even though it came with Christian religious trappings too—it’s all mixed, of course, everything is terribly mixed. One has to be very careful not to create sharp causal links here, but I think there are certain correlations.

And in a certain sense it seems to me that precisely because of the death of God, the bursting forth of secularization and enlightenment and liberation from the chains of religion created alternative chains—and that is the law. The sanctity the concept of law has received—the international law or also state law—in certain senses comes in precisely where the religious chains are no longer present. Something has to create a framework in place of faith and Jewish law, the religious constraints that created this framework Rabbi Kook describes in this passage. And I think the breakout of law and the power of law, its near elevation in recent years or in recent decades, is a result of that same secularization. We are basically trying to create a framework because everyone senses that the death of God is terribly dangerous. Meaning, once there is no infrastructure from which you can come to a person with claims—listen, but there is a God in the world; how can you allow yourself to behave this way?—then you can hope that this will restrain him, because there is some basis for discourse. But where a person says, God is dead, I exist in the world, what I want is morality, what I want are the rules—then the world may be destroyed. Again, this doesn’t happen very often, but that fear is always there.

Hobbes’s state of nature, right, which stands at the basis of the social contract that comes to restrain the state of nature—that is exactly this principle. It’s the foundation of the whole legal system, the judicial system, of international law of course but also state law, which receives such a strong status precisely because the natural right and wrong no longer exist. Because faith is some sort of thing that people… For two thousand years we existed almost without institutions with teeth, and still the ethos was a religious-halakhic ethos. You could come to a person with claims that he was not behaving according to the rules even though you had no police. Sometimes there was excommunication; they developed some social mechanisms, after all, to replace governmental institutions somewhat, but there weren’t really teeth to enforce religious norms. And still it held up as long as the faith was there, as long as the Holy One, blessed be He, was in the background. Once that no longer exists, they had to invent something else, and that something else is to a large extent the law. Law and certain formal moral rules that somehow replace faith in a certain sense. Until people allow themselves to cast off faith and say, what do you mean—the morality is humanistic morality. We also learned that from Kant, and on the contrary, morality is a secular category, as Leibowitz says together with secular people. I disagree with him entirely. But the golem has risen against its creator. Once morality came out of God, and now morality is a substitute for God. On the contrary: someone who follows God is not moral—the religious person. Morality means behaving in a secular humanistic way, not because of God’s command. To act because of God’s command is religious cowardice, in this secular modernist outlook. Morality has basically become the new God. But that may be something very unstable.

Not only may it be very unstable—it is very problematic. And I think we see that problematic nature these very days, which is why I couldn’t help commenting earlier. Look, I’ll allow myself to slide a bit into current affairs without expressing specific political positions—but yes, I’ll still offer some positions. This legal controversy about Bibi that there was recently, or the coalition and Bibi and so on. Without getting now into right and left and so forth, for me at least it isn’t connected at all. I actually lean more to the right politically, but I have very harsh criticism of right-wing politics. And I think this whole story around the Supreme Court and the public controversy around the Supreme Court—which of course played out as right versus left, as usual, and unfortunately that’s what ruins it, because it always gets tied to the political agenda—the question was whether the Supreme Court could disqualify Bibi from serving. After all, the law says he’s allowed to. Now it seems to me that every sane person understands that there’s simply no… it’s just intolerable that this man should serve as prime minister. Sorry for expressing an opinion here—morally intolerable, forget left and right for a moment. It’s unrelated. I want a right-wing prime minister. It is intolerable that this man, on the legal level—morally, or not morally, sorry, on the legal level—a minister against whom an indictment is filed must be removed according to the law, but he himself, with three indictments, remains there, and it is his job to remove that minister. That is simply inconceivable. It makes no sense.

Now true, let’s say there is no legal basis—I’m not even sure about that, by the way—but for the sake of argument, suppose there is no legal basis. What does that mean? Suddenly the whole right, of course, when it suits them, clings to the law. That’s what the law says, and we stick to the law, and if the law allows it then everything is fine. And the left clings to morality, of course. Morally it’s inconceivable, impossible, and so on. When the reverse direction suits them, they’ll say the opposite, of course. You can see what the left thinks of Supreme Court rulings after the Court rules in a way they don’t like. So it’s all agendas. But I’m talking now really without regard to agendas and without regard to left and right, to the issue itself. Here you see the weakness of rules. Once you cling to the law, the law becomes the new God. You can no longer come to a person with moral claims. Moral claims by now are passé, not interesting. Lip service is paid to them—yes, there’s this—but it doesn’t interest anybody, and everybody knows it doesn’t interest anybody. Not that it doesn’t interest them—not that; it simply isn’t important. It doesn’t play a role in the arena. It doesn’t play a role. People do what they want, promise and don’t fulfill, nothing matters, because there is no legal clause by which you can stop them. That’s all. The law doesn’t allow you to stop a prime minister, or stop a party that didn’t keep its promises, that betrays everything it told its voters, or a prime minister with three indictments—it doesn’t matter, because the law has some clause there that says such-and-such, and that’s it. And if we don’t like the law, by the way, then we’ll create a coalition of sixty-one people to replace it. And everything will be fine. Today even Basic Laws are changed with a flick of the finger. Basic Laws. So in what sense are they Basic Laws? Who cares about Basic Laws? The concept of law today is merely a recommendation. I’m speaking about constitutional law, not the law that addresses private individuals, civil law or criminal law. Constitutional law is merely a recommendation. Because after all, it gets changed the moment a coalition forms for which it doesn’t fit. People think they pass a draft law, and then a government with the Haredim or without the Haredim arises; a government with the Haredim arises, and it cancels the draft law. And that’s it. The laws are recommendations. Now it’s allowed, all legal; you can pass a law, you can repeal a law. There was a majority in the Knesset. Who should make laws if not the majority in the Knesset? I have no claim against that. I don’t have a better model. But there’s something very problematic here. The law loses all its meaning. And I think this is connected to the phenomenon Rabbi Kook is talking about. Because where the law becomes some system of rules that is an external facade, but not grounded in some shared ethos that underlies it, it won’t endure.

I think I mentioned in one of the previous classes the division of a cake between two children, about the attempt to solve substantive problems through formal rules—which doesn’t work. That attempt doesn’t work. And the more fractured and divided a society is, and the less shared ethos it has, the more detailed the law of course has to be. Because where there is agreement, everyone understands that we are acting according to accepted standards. One of the things that amazed me—today I’m occupied quite a bit with matters connected to politics, but really without expressing positions, just to talk about how things are run—during Obama’s term, one of the flags he raised was Obamacare, his health-care law. And Obamacare could not pass in the Senate even though he had a majority. Why? Because the norm was—the Senate is one hundred people—the norm was that you need sixty senators, because this is major legislation, foundational legislation; you don’t pass it with fifty-one. Now Obama had fifty-one for quite a while. He did not pass the law until he had sixty. When he had sixty, he passed the law. Now his whole political fate—this was one of the great banners he carried. I stood there astonished at this phenomenon. In Israel this wouldn’t last a second. Why? Because the law says that with fifty-one you can pass such a thing. In Israel, what determines things is the law. Norms and accepted practices don’t interest anybody. Israeli society is very untraditional in that sense, by the way. Very untraditional. In the sense that traditions and accepted practices don’t play a role. Only written law, enacted law. And that is a very problematic state of affairs. That is one of the reasons the Supreme Court comes in and intervenes in legislation in the name of values. Why? I’m not sure I justify it, but why does it happen? It happens because the legislators themselves, or the public itself, don’t care at all about those values, and only the written law is what counts. It’s very hard to function in such a society. A practical problem—forget the moral questions—it’s a practical problem, because the law doesn’t cover all the possibilities. The law doesn’t cover even half the possibilities, and we keep getting stuck over and over with situations that are inconceivable and yet fit the law. And until you change the law, you can’t deal with them. In a traditional society you don’t need that. In a traditional society they tell you: it’s just not done. That’s all. And it won’t happen. In Haredi society, if they tell you “it’s just not done,” it won’t happen, because it’s a traditional society, even though that “it’s just not done” is not grounded in the Shulchan Arukh. But there is something there—and again, I’m not now arguing in favor of the Haredim generally; as is well known, recently I’m not exactly among their great defenders. But yes, in this respect, there is something—again, with them I think the dosage is too high. But there is something here that beyond rules there must be some basis on which the rules sit. If you remain with the rules without the basis, it won’t hold up. It can function on the surface, but it can’t endure—it will break. In the end it will break. You can’t solve real problems with formal laws if there isn’t some infrastructure, some ethos from which the laws are hewn, from which the laws derive. Therefore it will sometimes override the law; sometimes it will be obvious that this law is out of bounds and should not be upheld. And if we had trust in the Supreme Court, that really would have been its role, to do that. Today, when there is no trust, I really do think perhaps it is very problematic for it to do so. But on the principled level there ought to be such an institution—perhaps like the House of Lords in Britain, or perhaps like the Senate in the United States. In Britain the upper house really is the constitutional supreme court, okay? Even though they are not jurists there, and that’s how it should be; there is no reason at all to hand this over to jurists. But the point is that there needs to be some sort of oversight in the name of society’s values.

And in Britain, apparently—I don’t know Britain well enough—but Britain is a very traditional society. You see all their nonsense with the queen and the royal guards and all the funny customs they have, which could exist only there. Here it would simply be—I don’t know—a joke. Again, not that I want to adopt it, because I too am Israeli after all. But the point is that something in a traditional society is more stable. It is more stable. The law cannot replace faith—what he calls here the source from which the laws emerge. If the laws remain detached from that source, they won’t succeed in functioning. They won’t work; they won’t do the job. And therefore it seems to me that in this sense, when Rabbi Kook speaks about some facade, some superficial faith, some sort of religious rules but not coming out of rooted, eternal faith—I’m not sure he means exactly this, but it seems to me to be a similar principle. This principle of laws replacing… even morality today is just another set of rules. But moral philosophy deals very little with the question of why morality obligates. It deals mainly with the question of what morality says. Utilitarian morality, non-utilitarian morality—fine, morality will be this or that—but why obey morality at all? You cannot answer such a question where there is no religious, divine basis, I don’t know, some sort of something standing outside and able to give an anchor to the system of laws, whatever that system may be—and of course it depends on interpretation, everything does. People don’t deal with it because it can’t be explained, and therefore they ignore it. And people think that everyone is educated and we drip this into trainees and students and young people and adults—morality, it’s important, contribute to society, all that—and they think this preaching replaces the very deep source from which this thing is supposed to emerge. Apparently it doesn’t. It doesn’t succeed in replacing it. And we think laws have some independent status.

By the way, not only in the moral context, but also in the context of the laws of nature. When we ask ourselves, “Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these,” yes, like Abraham our forefather—who turns the wheel? In the eyes of a religious person the obvious answer is God; there is someone who made this whole amazing thing, it didn’t just happen by itself. What does the secular person say? What do you mean? There are laws of nature that explain it—evolution, everything is fine. Once again the laws replace the essence, the essence that of course at bottom is God. It is always God. So there too, even apart from morality now—just generally. Meaning, laws are perceived as something that replaces the basis from which they originally came. But now we can supposedly give up the basis and remain with the laws. But it doesn’t work. It isn’t stable. In the end it breaks. So it can’t work.

Once I wrote a certain piece—I wanted to write an entire column about the movie Joker. The film Joker was very powerful in my view. Some of the reviews and analyses I saw dealt with the question of how the treatment of the social margins can cause flames and upheavals and the breakdown of society. And my feeling was that the message there was a bit different. My sense was that this was merely a trigger. That boiling lava that erupted into the streets in the film was always there. It was always there, because it was inside. Around it there was some set of social rules that wrapped it up, and somehow we don’t feel that underneath the whole thing is boiling. Why? Because there are certain social forces that manage—the social contract that manages—to stop the state of nature, the bubbling underneath. And certainly the elites, of course, never feel what is happening down there below, and it takes some sort of trigger to bring it out. But in my opinion the lesson isn’t the trigger. The treatment of society’s margins was only the trigger that lit the fire. In the end what came out there was tremendous lava. Tremendous lava, which there is no doubt had already been bubbling there beforehand. And that is true here as well. Whoever thinks that some set of formal rules deriving from a gentleman’s agreement among people, a social contract, can hold back all the boiling lava among all kinds of people and groups and forms of wildness, is mistaken in my opinion. So far it’s holding up very nicely, surprisingly to me. But to say that it is stable and one can count on it over the long term—I don’t think so. Not at all sure.

And therefore, whenever—look, all over the world when some wild phenomenon arises, they try to deal with it within the framework of the law, but it doesn’t work. Legal treatment doesn’t work because the law cannot cope with such phenomena. And if necessary then we’ll change the law—and then there won’t be law. So what are you going to tell me now? There is a problem here: law is not a substitute. Only if the law emerges from a source that gives it solid validity—and again, in interpretations there are differences in Jewish law and everywhere else—but there has to be something there that gives validity to what we’re talking about. I can say to a person, “It’s just not done.” I can say to a person, listen, this isn’t reasonable; this doesn’t emerge this way, it doesn’t look like this in the passage. And then he’ll stop for a moment and think; maybe he’ll concede to me. That can happen. Or I’ll concede to him, it doesn’t matter. But where there is no binding passage, then it seems one way to me and another way to him, there is no shared basis for discourse, there is no way to handle the issue. For the time being we are really succeeding very nicely through this preaching in creating some kind of secular religion, a secular morality, that holds up nicely. As I said before, in practice it works. I’m just not sure how much trust one can place in it over the long term.

But I do want to end with the other side of the coin. Rabbi Kook basically proposes deep faith as the anchor. It gives an anchor to moral rules, or legal rules if you like, to the rules, yes—the way society conducts itself. But as I mentioned in the examples I gave, and somehow I ignored this but one can’t really ignore it, this kind of corruption can also come from the religious direction. As I said, Dawkins is right to a certain extent that the harshest and strongest forms of violence sometimes come precisely on a religious basis. Not all of them, but often. ISIS is a good example, but I would say even violence on much lower levels—Haredi violence here in Israel, for example—also comes on a religious basis. So it is not true that faith somehow sublimates, gives people a framework, and therefore you can relax: there will be moral conduct, everything will be fine. I’m not at all sure that religious societies—their religiosity doesn’t sometimes actually interfere with their moral conduct for various reasons. And therefore I think Rabbi Kook’s hope—let’s restore faith and then everything will be fine—solves one side of the problem. The side that without an anchor, rules alone don’t solve the problem. But on the other hand, faith can bring very deep corruption, no less deep. Therefore I do not share his optimistic view that faith will solve all the problems.

There is something here that requires adding to faith some kind of secularization, so that the matter can really be solved, so that this problem can really be solved. I’ll perhaps say—once I told this story—I was once at a school here, Ort Ramla, an Arab school. There was some initiative of the Ministry of the Interior and Education, I don’t remember exactly what, the department for religious communities, I think it was the Ministry of the Interior, I no longer remember, of rabbis, qadis, priests, all kinds, from every type—Druze and Muslims and Christians and Jews—coming to speak with the students there. They asked me too to speak there; there were other rabbis there. And I said to them that everyone there had spoken about the need for tolerance and about how we mustn’t take the law into our own hands, and there were indeed things there—also the Muslim religious leaders tried to moderate things and understood that there was some problem. By the way, Muslim violence often comes from the street; it doesn’t come from the religious leadership. And even when it appears in religious garb, these are religious leaders who are populists. It’s not the religious leadership. Someone once told me—an expert on Islam—that al-Azhar, the highest Sunni institution in Cairo, at al-Azhar University, where the leading Sunni sages sit, they are in the main fairly moderate people, and they deeply despise the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and ISIS and all those people—which is basically violent Islam in its different shades. They despise them. They are ignoramuses; even their religious leaders are ignoramuses. They are religious leaders like Amnon Yitzhak or I don’t know who, various other wild men. They are not really the avant-garde, the leading scholars there. Those people are in fact more moderate. And therefore the religious leaders who spoke there in Ort Ramla made the impression on me that they were speaking sincerely and genuinely trying to explain that if people would listen to them and not go after the street, things would look better.

But I got up there and argued the opposite. I told them: look, I usually tell people who come to consult me, ask me—you need to decide for yourselves. Don’t ask me and don’t receive instructions from me, certainly not in the halakhic realm and certainly not in the non-halakhic realm. I can give you the halakhic information; in the end the decision has to be yours. I place a great deal of trust precisely not in a centralist conception—I’m a capitalist in that sense too. I think that if every person understands that the responsibility is on him and that he is not receiving orders from anybody, not from these leaders and not from others, our situation will be better, not worse. The feeling is always that if that’s so, then there will be chaos. I think all in all the situation will actually be better. It will be better because in the end every person has to be responsible for what he does. Even if some leader or other, religious or otherwise, told you something and because of that you go out and do crazy things of one sort or another, the responsibility is on you and not only on him. And if you understand that and internalize it, I think there is more chance to moderate the violence and indeed to run a more decent society. And the secret of the matter is really decentralization rather than centralism. If there are many decisions by many people, then I think it is less likely that there will be a mass movement in favor of a murderous violent direction, because people pull in all sorts of directions, some one way, some another way. As long as you ensure decentralization and don’t try to educate people to accept authority but rather to be responsible themselves for what they do. You are responsible, yes—I trust you, the ignoramus in the street. You will be responsible. Know that you will have to give an accounting even before the Holy One, blessed be He, and it won’t help that the qadi or the rabbi or the priest told you to do it. In the end you will give the accounting. You are the highest critic of your own actions; every person is the highest critic of his own actions.

It seems to me that this, together with faith—I think both are important—will bring better results than simply restoring faith and obeying halakhic leadership and then everything will be wonderful. I’m not a great believer in those things. There is something here: faith is necessary for theory, and I am among those who very much believe that theory is important even in practice. Stability on the practical plane exists where there is theoretical grounding, even if people are not aware of it—it doesn’t matter. There is some theoretical grounding, and that gives stability also to the practical phenomena. Therefore I think one needs some combination of faith with decentralization, because faith very often comes as the antithesis to secular decentralization, where supposedly everyone does whatever he wants, even though that’s not really so. So I think we need a little secularity together with faith, and that is a better recipe for running a more sensible life. Yes, the invisible hand, capitalism here in this context is moral rather than economic, but it’s the same idea.

Now of course Rabbi Kook could argue that where the Holy One, blessed be He, reveals Himself explicitly and says clearly what He means—as perhaps once He said, though I’m not sure He said it even then; the Torah doesn’t seem to me like a statement that is all that explicit, just look how many interpretations there can be there—but if that happens, then perhaps he could neutralize all the influence of various people, and then maybe the word of God, which everyone obeys absolutely, would also be fine. I don’t know. But that wasn’t the case in the past, and I don’t know whether it will be in the future. Therefore that belongs to the messianic era. In the end, at least in our situation today, it seems to me that faith alone—no. It will not do the job. Faith alone can bring terrible things, no less terrible than the opposite thing, and in my opinion today, at least in our time, it is usually even worse. Therefore there needs to be some secular element or component within faith in order to create a world that is more sane, more moderate, more reasonably conducted.

Okay. I’ll stop here. The microphones are basically open—well, not open, they’re under your control—so anyone who wants to comment or ask is welcome.

[Speaker B] I have a question. The great atheist criminals—Stalin, Hitler.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That doesn’t sound good, Yossi. Doesn’t sound good? Yes. Is it better now? A little better. I’m saying that the great atheist criminals, Stalin and Hitler—

[Speaker B] were far worse than all the religious criminals put together—ISIS, the Inquisition, and the Crusades.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but I don’t fully accept that claim either. First of all, Hitler was not an openly declared secular person. There are major debates about this issue, around Dawkins, by the way. Dawkins himself argues at length to show that Stalin and Hitler are not counterexamples; he’s talking nonsense there. But with Hitler there’s a lot of debate—Hitler was all kinds of things, and there were many influences on him. Stalin—that’s certainly completely true. Pol Pot—I can add a few more for you. But still, it doesn’t matter. The quantitative issue is also a matter of technology, of possibilities. I assume that if ISIS could have set up concentration camps, they would have done that too. They just probably don’t have the means and the ability to do it. So I’m not comparing; it’s not that—I don’t think there’s really a “more” here. Also, I think that throughout history, when there was religious violence, it was simply because everyone was religious. So that’s no great proof. There couldn’t have been secular violence in the 12th century. Who exactly was secular there, for there to be secular violence? Right? So this discussion just isn’t relevant. I think there is violence from both sides. No one has a monopoly on violence, and no one has a monopoly on moderation either, it seems to me. I think these arguments are not especially productive. Anyone else? Okay, so we’ll stop here. Good night, goodbye.