The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 7

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The ancient parable—I’m not… Hebrew-English dictionary—the ancient parable means a short, obscure, and profound statement. The idea is not expressed there in its entirety and fullness, but is said in half a phrase that touches it, stirring the one who understands to hear it with his own knowledge and his own heart. And it is not presented through a connected chain of matters that belong to it, as a logical premise or consequence, but is said standing on its own, stripped of the dialectical back-and-forth that interweaves matters with one another. Let’s finish reading. And this is the form of Hebrew wisdom, which is not presented in the order of a method, in a deductive way—from the general to the particular—or in an inductive way, from the particular to the general, as a complete topic / passage in one place, but is stated as scattered chapter headings here and there. There is no earlier and later in the Torah, there is no order in the Mishnah, words of Torah are poor in one place and rich in another. Its matters too are concealed and hinted at in parables. And this is what seems strange to students of Western science, whose essence lies in order and system, and they see this way—this parabolic way—as an unscientific form fit for the ancient peoples at the beginning of their development, as the Greek philosopher already said in the book Metaphysics. What?

[Speaker B] Did he say that about the Torah?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no—about ancient things, that’s how I understand it at least. Meaning, what is fitting for ancient peoples is that they don’t speak in an orderly way. Aristotle was basically the founder of ordered discussion. Aristotle probably said this in the book Rhetoric, I don’t know. Indeed, that is how it appears to those of Greek speculative, observational logic. Someone once pointed out that “speculative” is related to “eye,” to seeing. But that is not how it is for the sages of old, who hear the word of moral instruction, of supreme wisdom. Hearing—the ones who hear—that’s the emphasis here. As distinct from Greek speculative, observational logic, the sages of old are hearers. Okay, so let’s see what’s going on here. First of all, there’s a claim here that there are two accepted ways of conveying intellectual messages. One is a systematic form, what Western science aspired to, and Western philosophy too at least; and there is another form—people often call it aphorisms—meaning short sayings that…

[Speaker C] Could the Rabbi just repeat quickly what Natan said before? What were the two forms?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hellenism is analogical and the parable is allegorical. So one form is a systematic form, the scientific one. Modern philosophy likes to work systematically; modern Torah study too, by the way—we already talked about this in previous evenings. And by contrast there is a method through short, concise sayings, aphorisms, fragments. In other words, there isn’t some full diagram of the intellectual move here, but rather some short and concise statement. The idea is not brought in full, but said in half a phrase, and that basically stirs the listener, the reader or the hearer, to hear it with his own mind and his own heart. That’s what he says. If you remember, when we talked about the difference between hearing and seeing, we said that one of the differences is that seeing is, in a certain sense, passive, while hearing is active. Meaning, when I want to try to reconstruct in my mind a situation that is described to me verbally—or a book, we said, is basically hearing and not seeing, to read a book, because it is seeing the thing through its representation, not seeing the thing itself—then in order to reconstruct the thing itself I need to be active; I can’t be passive. Meaning, from what I hear, from what I read, I have to try to understand the situation or what is being described there, the idea, whatever it may be, but to extract from the representation, to work with my head and try to extract the information from it. Seeing is simply given before me, meaning I’m basically passive. When I see a situation, I see it—that’s it, there’s nothing more to process here. Meaning, what I saw is the thing itself, supposedly. We talked about whether that really is the thing itself or not, but in terms of the event, it really is the thing itself: I see it and that’s it, I have nothing more to add. It’s very clear, it really is like that. We talked a bit about how this is also the difference between television and radio, say, or between television and a newspaper. A newspaper and radio always leave you more active. And television leaves you completely passive. On television you see; almost nobody—unless someone deliberately sits down and therefore… and that’s why they always teach critical viewing. Why do they always teach critical viewing and not critical listening? Because we listen critically by nature. Or at least much more so than viewing. Hearing doesn’t impose itself on you so much. You hear something, and in any case you have to think in order to reconstruct from it what was described in the thing you heard. So you’re already involved in the matter; you’re not passive. In viewing, you’re completely passive. You have to learn how to watch critically, how nevertheless to be a partner in the process and not accept everything as though they’re spoon-feeding you. So hearing is basically an active thing. Hearing is basically understanding the process—not grasping the information or the situation simply because they hand it to me, but the opposite. Meaning, the voice or the thing that is heard—or it can also be print—is only a catalyst for bringing the thing out from within me. Meaning, I draw it out from myself, or from it, no matter—maybe from both. But it is basically some catalyst that makes me work and thus create the understanding. It doesn’t give me understanding from the outside. That seems to me a very clear difference between seeing and hearing, even in the simplest sense.

[Speaker B] And this has nothing to do with anything else, with any other kind of mode of perception. No, no, no—it’s something that carries over into other contents.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can convey the same contents. You can describe a situation on the radio and describe it on television. Even if you’re referring to the exact same situation, when you hear it on radio as opposed to seeing it on television, it’s a different world. On television it’s already much clearer, more unambiguous. But precisely because of that, you feel completely passive—finished, the work is over, you know everything. With hearing, you have to pause and try to imagine the situation, try to understand what exactly was there. Seeing imposes itself on you.

[Speaker B] The question is whether hearing is trying to achieve what you lack and what exists in seeing, in the picture—whether hearing is simply missing something that seeing has. It’s trying to complete something through seeing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So you see that hearing and seeing are senses. But we already said that hearing and seeing in his sense are not senses. Even sensory hearing is basically seeing according to these categories. So why does he use these metaphors of sensory hearing and seeing? Because even in the senses we can actually see an aspect of this difference.

[Speaker B] If it’s radio and television, it seems to me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As an example, in some sense.

[Speaker B] Can’t you present something beyond seeing? What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You—

[Speaker B] Can’t you present something beyond television? You can. Unless what you really see is that it gives you options.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Which is not true. Basically the medium itself, supposedly, really is just less good, because television gives it to you in full—but that’s not exactly right. Because when you see something on television, there’s also something real here, not just metaphor. Because when you see something, you will very little tend—you can, but you will very little tend—to try to understand what stands behind it. You feel the situation is totally clear to you. It’s not always like that. On television, for example—let’s take an example—you see someone killing someone else. Fine? You won’t think, wait, maybe just before that he was fighting with him, maybe he killed his father, I don’t know what he did, made him furious. You see such a thing and it forces you immediately to form a position. Meaning the device is much stronger. Stronger? Yes. Because it’s much less strong. I think that’s a very clear example. It’s much less strong. You don’t see it before your eyes and you’re already immersed in your opinion—only hear it—then you can still think more. It’s like that. And when you hear on the radio a description of some event, as brutal as it may be, then yes, it’s less touching, less unambiguous, all true. But on the other hand it leaves you some room to maneuver. You can pause and think, wait, I’m more level-headed now. I can think: okay, but there are situations where things happened beforehand. What happened before? What happened after? When you see the blood spilling, you don’t think—you can’t think. Again, obviously you can, but it’s simply a much more passive state.

[Speaker B] Don’t use that as an example, it’s not a good example.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why isn’t it a good example? It may be less of a good example. Giving a philosophy lecture on television wouldn’t count as seeing, you understand? And in fact they really don’t do that. Why don’t they do it?

[Speaker B] There’s nothing to see.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, they don’t do it—it’s not just that it’s inconvenient. It’s something I once saw in an article by Postman. Postman? Yes. When I read Postman’s article I heard him say something right. He says there is, in a certain sense—we always have complaints about this medium called television, that it’s shallow. In a certain sense it’s built in. He says it doesn’t matter, it’s not because—or not only because—of the people who populate it or run it. It’s built in, because you can’t really give a lecture… On television, when it’s radio, I mean, there’s no added value to the device itself. Meaning, all its added value lies in its force, in its ability to present visual things—powerfully, Greek, in short. Its power is Greek power. So you can’t expect there to be un-Greek things there. It’s obvious, it’s built in. Maybe they’re to blame here and there, but that’s not the point—it’s built into the medium. It really is so. Whoever thinks about it—there’s a lot of truth here. On the radio many times—it may be lacking there too—but you can hear somewhat more serious things on the radio. It’s possible; the medium is built for it, that’s a fact. Now again, here I’m still speaking on the level of the metaphor. I’m only explaining why this is a justified metaphor. What he’s talking about, of course, when he says hearing, isn’t hearing with the ear. We said this too—even reading a book is hearing. Hearing means not grasping only what lies outside. Seeing—we already talked about this several times—seeing grasps what lies outside. What is seen is what is outside; the inside you can’t see. By contrast, hearing—that’s exactly what we said—you can’t hide it. Hearing is always, say, someone shouting from the next room. It’s very hard to block his voice; you always hear it. The thing that comes out from inside—the way to grasp it is hearing. It’s almost impossible to shut it out. Seeing is very easy—put up the smallest, simplest screen and you won’t see anything. But hearing is very hard to block, and therefore its uniqueness is that it transmits things from within. And seeing is seeing the thing from the outside; the inside you cannot see. Fine. If you try to reconstruct what’s happening inside through seeing, then you are basically hearing the sights. In other words, seeing the sounds. You’re trying—that really is hearing. It doesn’t matter that it’s through the eyes, but it’s not in the eyes, it’s in the mind. You’re trying to reconstruct from the sight what lies behind it. And that’s exactly what I said people often don’t do on television, because it’s so strong that there’s a feeling that there’s nothing left to do anymore—you understand everything. And therefore I think that hearing, in the sense he is talking about, is not hearing with the ear, but an inner perception. Meaning, it is a perception not of the thing as it appears to your eyes. You remember once, at one of the tish gatherings, we talked about literature. And we tried to define what exactly distinguishes literature from other kinds of writing. Broadly speaking, the claim there was that literature does not convey messages in a visual way—that is, not in the sense that you simply read it and through the content of what you read you know exactly what they wanted to convey. That’s philosophy, not literature. Philosophy tells you exactly what it means. Meaning, there’s an argument here; what you read, the words themselves, say exactly the message that is supposed to come across. Literature is a different medium. In literature, what is described may be plots, people’s feelings, all kinds of things. That is not what they mean to convey to you. It awakens something in you, and that something is what they wanted to awaken in you. That’s what he’s talking about here. Meaning, this statement about the ancient one—that the idea is not brought in full, but said in half a phrase that touches it, awakening the understanding person to hear it with his own knowledge and heart—that is exactly the difference between literature and philosophy. But philosophy should be philosophy; literature is not philosophy. His claim is that there are ways to convey philosophy in the form of literature. That’s the point.

[Speaker B] The advantage—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —is apparently that there are things that do not pass through in the form of philosophy.

[Speaker B] That you can’t, even if you philosophized from the start of your existence, you can’t convey them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s exactly it. Meaning, it’s a somewhat Greek idea—if you try to analyze it, to fit it into definitions, to put it into a context and present it in a complete form as philosophy does, you miss a whole piece there.

[Speaker B] And that happens many—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —times when you hear a good saying. It’s worth a thousand pages describing the idea behind it. There are things that don’t come across well through detailed description. There are things where every definition will miss it. And therefore precisely the literary way, the indirect way, does it better. It’s hard to do it otherwise. What?

[Speaker D] Does that mean they don’t succeed—that neither this way nor that way succeeds in conveying it? No, why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The idea—the idea you want to convey—is in principle present with you. You understand, consciously of course. It’s not that every writer is—these aren’t party-line writers, right? Meaning, it’s not that a writer has a set of ideas and now says let’s pump them through the text he writes. But somehow we feel that we pick up something from the inner world of the writer, even if it’s not some technology for transmitting a well-defined set of ideas. Usually it’s not like that, I think.

[Speaker B] If it’s something—if I have an idea—then I can also define it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not true. That’s a common Greek positivist mistake, which says that anything not defined doesn’t exist.

[Speaker B] No, it exists, but—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What idea do you want me to define for you right now, for example, an idea that cannot be defined? Meaning, there are things that do not pass through definitions, like in Torah. For example, the concept of speed. Leave philosophy aside. We talked about this once, right? We talked a little about… about giving a get and all that. Did we talk about that? A get? A get?

[Speaker B] Maybe in the lesson with Shimon.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. I never remember what I said and what I didn’t say; it always seems to me that I already said everything. So somehow I said it. Last year we talked about this. So the concept of speed—you can’t grasp it in itself. Any concept of process, not just speed. Dynamic concepts—you can never define them. Every definition is only an approximation, and it always leads to paradoxes too. All of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion are all problems of trying to define speed in terms of states. Speed is a change of place. A process is a change of state. But if you try to define the process itself, you won’t succeed. You try to define what the state was before, what the state will be after, and what’s in between is the process. And we talked about giving a get last year, that giving a get, for example, has many attempts to define why it is a valid giving and why it is not a valid giving. The Talmud / Talmudic text itself brings dozens and dozens of examples in order to try to define what a valid giving is and what an invalid giving is. And when we try to extract from that a clear definition—we brought Pifer, who tries to do this—and it’s really enlightening to see how he tries one definition and another definition and the definition keeps twisting and twisting and twisting until you arrive at something that isn’t really a definition at all. And what he did wasn’t pointless. This isn’t criticism of him, on the contrary. He gives a classic example of what cannot be done. Because all we produced from that process is what we ruled out, not what we arrived at. Rather, what we arrived at is an a priori idea. We reached a point where it became sharpened for us automatically—these are negative attributes, yes? There are things where you can only negate the attributes. Meaning, you cannot define the thing itself, but you can try to sift out all kinds of definitional illusions. So for someone who wants a simple definition, none of this will help him; he’ll only get tangled up from the process. Exactly. Right. His definition won’t help at all—that’s exactly what we said then. Meaning, Pifer’s definition is very convoluted, and if you read only it, you’ll start laughing. You understand? But that is exactly the point. He shows you—I don’t know if consciously, but you can claim—that you cannot stop at anything defined. And why is that? Because all attempts to define giving—giving is, after all, a process, a dynamic thing. When you try to define it, you’ll always take the state that existed before and the state that will exist afterward. It always misses the point. Because speed is not being in this place now and in that place afterward; it is the very transition between the places itself—that is the speed. But we have no way to point at that directly. There are many examples of this. There it’s a relatively abstract example, but I think anyone who is impressed by some text and feels all kinds of experiences—I mean intellectual experiences, not emotional experiences—then he feels that things passed through him even though the text is literary, and he won’t always succeed in defining them. You really enjoy a book, you feel you learned a lot from it, and they ask you: tell me, what exactly was there? What exactly did you read there? There is some experience that I at least underwent here intellectually. I don’t know how to say what it is, what exactly it gave me, what exactly I extracted from this book—but I certainly extracted something. I feel it added something to me. There is a certain advantage in literature, not only as a means of leisure and entertainment; literature is some medium that succeeds in doing things philosophy will not succeed in doing. Yes.

[Speaker B] So in terms of form, let’s say, the ideas or the visual something—that’s the poetic something, that’s the text of the Written Torah itself. And all the definitions of the Oral Torah, whether it’s, say, halakhic midrashim or even more extremely, fixed Jewish law afterward—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You mean the Torah, the text we read in the Five Books of the Torah. Yes.

[Speaker B] And halakhic midrashim, or even more extremely fixed Jewish law, the whole—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —world of the Oral Torah. No, no. I think that even the verses themselves are to some extent only seeing. It’s not seeing—it’s the appearance. And if you listen to them, that’s everything. It doesn’t matter—if you listen to them, you’ll understand what the Torah really is. The Torah really is not the text written in the Five Books. Yes. The text written in the Five Books is some kind of description. You can listen to it and you can see it. Those are two ways of approaching it.

[Speaker B] So a book of rulings from later generations, where it’s already clear laws and there’s nothing there to listen to—what then?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. That is basically Torah on a lower level. Less to listen to. Right. Those are basically conclusions that are some result of those things I somehow managed to define, and obviously it’s only an approximation. All those definitions are in any case approximation. Exactly. Right.

[Speaker B] That then raises the question: who is responsible for making sure that you’re listening to the right things—the whole question of the Oral Torah?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, one of the reasons all positivism and modern approaches don’t like this is exactly because of the apparent subjectivity of this process. But on the other hand… that’s the Nazir’s central claim, that this is subjectivity—I don’t know if entirely apparent, but somewhat apparent. Meaning, in some place we do have a way of understanding what is right and what is not right, even though we don’t have formulas for verifying whether it’s right or not. It’s somewhat like what we often experience ourselves, when someone says a sevara, an argument, and you know it’s right—obviously. And there’s an opposite argument and it fits all the evidence; you don’t have… it’s not an error in an explicit Mishnah, but it is an error in judgment. There is a concept of error in judgment. That’s a remarkable innovation. There’s really no such thing in the world of scientific thought as “error in judgment.” There’s no such thing. Either you are wrong because it contradicts some empirical datum, or you are not wrong—you’re entitled to think that. What do you mean? The concept of “error in judgment” basically means exactly this: that judgment too has criteria for being right or wrong, even though again this is not a proof, because otherwise it wouldn’t be an error in judgment; it would be an error in an explicit Mishnah. So it’s not completely subjective either. True, there are still disagreements—we can’t be totally naive. There are disagreements, and we are even told that both these and those are the words of the living God. But there are also things that are certainly mistaken. What am I trying to say? And within the area that is not mistaken—right—there are seventy faces, there is one face from here and one from there. I strongly tend to think that these are all faces of one truth, because the Maharal and Rabbi Kook talk about this a lot. And then really these are not two conceptions, it’s not really a dispute; each one just managed to put his hand on one facet, but the facets are true.

[Speaker B] So the reason, say, that those Tannaim and Amoraim who discerned… who expounded the Torah and discerned the things behind it—so the reason that specifically what they say is right is because it was accepted, because it seemed right to everyone? Or because… what do you mean what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “It seemed right to everyone” is an indication that they listened correctly. If it weren’t right, it would not have been accepted. Meaning, an indication? Right, exactly. It’s right because he knew how to listen. But how do I know that he knows how to listen and the other one doesn’t? And they were all accepted. No, but who heard him? Maybe I hear correctly. I say to him this way. Why is Hillel the Elder wiser than I am? I tell you that in the Torah it says that the rival wife of the daughter is forbidden, fine? That’s what I say. Why do you believe Hillel? So there are certain historical indications that Hillel knows how to listen better. Causally, in terms of justification, it’s because he knows how to listen better—but how do I know that? I know it as someone who doesn’t know how to listen like he does. It’s a bit reminiscent of identifying a prophet, yes? It says that a false prophet is flogged—not a false prophet, one who suppresses his prophecy. One who suppresses his prophecy is flogged, the Talmud / Talmudic text in tractate Sanhedrin says. So they ask there: how do we know that he suppressed his prophecy? Where was the warning? Where was this? How can you flog him? It says there lashes of discipline, never mind. But they say there that his fellow prophets warn him. So someone who knows how to hear like Hillel doesn’t need the indication that it is accepted by the surroundings; he understands that Hillel hears well. Someone who doesn’t know that has the historical indications. Meaning, since the matter was accepted, a truly rooted thing must be there; something untrue cannot be accepted. It’s only an indication. Meaning, public acceptance—that’s a completely different conception. Public acceptance is not what constitutes the truth, exactly; it is only an indication that there is truth here. Okay, again, there are confusions here between cause and effect in many areas, and this is one of them, I think, and it is very common. Right now I’m reading a book by… we’re digressing a bit, but that’s okay. I’m reading some book by Sagi, one among many books; he talks about autonomy and authority, yes. So there he really discusses several mechanisms that establish the authority of sages, and one of them is public acceptance. Meaning, the fact that the public accepts the sage is itself the basis for his authority. In that principled statement there may be buried all kinds of things—even if it’s true and even if it’s written in various places, one still has to understand what it means: is it a cause or an indication? And that’s a question that, by the way, should accompany all scholarly work. We once talked about this in relation to scholarship, right? Why scholarship is irrelevant and pointless? We haven’t talked about that yet. I haven’t talked about it somewhere, but I don’t remember where. Fine, let’s not talk about everything now; we’ll get to it.

[Speaker E] Our work of definitions, our work of definitions—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think that usually it comes to include. It comes to look for a language of Torah, right?

[Speaker E] The work of definitions—it comes to define Torah and to try to define it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. There are places where it is very clear. There are places where you have some feeling that you really have grasped the matter. I don’t know if what I’m saying is a general statement, but certainly there are such places. I tend to say that it is always true. A definition never… a definition never grasps the thing itself—never. It simply doesn’t… I feel that’s never true. Meaning, a definition almost never really grabs the bull by the horns and that’s it, now you know the thing itself. One of the reasons action is necessary is to improve learning, not only “study leads to action,” because if you don’t shake a lulav, then even if you study the lulav, fine, and know it academically in a marvelous way, you won’t understand what it means. You aren’t even on that plane at all, the plane of the definitions on that level. You don’t grasp the field fully unless you also live it.

[Speaker B] So then why won’t we dispense with all the—what are all the definitions for then?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We do understand this overall. All in all, there are examples where we can definitely understand it. Think about some Norwegian who comes here and starts learning the laws of the lulav, at the most basic level. I’m not talking about mysticism. I think it is quite clear that these definitions will mean nothing to him. Are the four species of the lulav a measurement or an artistic decoration? He’ll be able to argue, they’ll explain it to him, fine, he’ll be able to repeat the words, but it won’t mean anything to him. If you don’t live inside this world, then somehow… why, why doesn’t it say anything? A lulav, I don’t know, there’s something there, it says something, it does say something. I think something does come across. You somehow do feel at home with the thing, you do feel that this definition is not completely some kind of definition created in thin air—that altogether there is always a disconnection we’re constantly struggling with. Obviously there is such a disconnection, and this is something built in levels upon levels. The more you are involved in observance and in intentions, the more you will also understand the halakhic / of Jewish law definitions and the halakhic / of Jewish law concept. Yes?

[Speaker B] There are concepts here—vow, prohibition.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right. Many things that if you describe them from the outside—object-based and person-based, for example—they already sound fairly clear to someone. I’m sure that many people, no less intelligent than any of us, would at first have difficulty grasping what exactly the business is. What difference does it make whether the loaf is forbidden to me or whether I forbid myself with respect to the loaf? Bottom line, it’s forbidden to eat it—why are you confusing me with all this? And it’s not stupidity. He doesn’t live inside these concepts, so it doesn’t quite mean to him what it means to me, and that’s all. He’s no less intelligent and no more stupid. I think this is something that can also be felt on deeper levels—not in the sense of intuitive feelings, that yes, this means something to me and speaks to me and I feel at home here, but also in the sense of interpretation itself, of what the interpretation says to me. In that sense too there is an effect, I think. That’s what he means here. And therefore many times we have to note that when people write in a way that looks primitive, as he says here, in the eyes of students of modern Arabic science, it is because they are trying to convey messages in ways that Arabic science does not convey them. And it doesn’t convey them because it really deals with a different kind of message. That kind of message cannot be conveyed in a modern way. It’s not an inferiority of those who lived in the past; they dealt with a different kind of message, and therefore those messages have to be conveyed in this way.

[Speaker B] Fine, that answers part of the problems, as it were, with the way Arabic science looks at this. But it doesn’t answer, for example, why it appears more or less in different places and not on one page under the same topic.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think that’s part of it. Until now we talked only about the aphoristic form, right? But he himself—look—ties several things together. First, it is short, obscure, and isolated. The idea is not brought in full but said in half a phrase. It is not presented in connection with the matters belonging to it, so it is as though scattered, yes, as a preface to its consequences; it is said on its own and stripped of dialectic. Fine, that’s something else, yes. And this is the form of Hebrew wisdom: it is not presented in the order of a method and methodology and so on. What is that—three broad lines.

[Speaker B] I think—in one place, earlier and later—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —in the Torah, there is no order in the Mishnah. How is all this connected to what he said earlier? Earlier he only talked about the aphoristic form, right? How is all this connected? Obviously it is connected. I think it’s also fairly… when you try to formulate a Shulchan Arukh—if the Torah had been given like a Shulchan Arukh, our situation would be terrible, in my opinion. Because we don’t really grasp the whole Torah as separate topics. Meaning, today we grasp it as: there are laws of the Sabbath, laws of a Jewish holiday, laws of prayer, blessings, impurity and purity, sacred offerings, subcategories of laws. And you would not understand that there is a connection between concepts. You could divide the whole world of laws in a completely different way: object-based laws, person-based laws, laws of time, laws of space, laws of sectoral combination, laws of neighborhood combination. All those things are also from Temple matters and from the Sabbath and from blessings—everything. That division is a completely technical division for halakhic / of Jewish law purposes only; it has no educational value. It has no educational value; it is only for halakhic / of Jewish law purposes. Therefore this division by subjects started in the period of Maimonides. There is a bit of it in the Mishnah and the Talmud / Talmudic text too, but we see how quickly it gets dispersed. Maimonides did it because the main value of classification by topics, by commandments, is a simple halakhic / of Jewish law value. I want to know what to do on the Sabbath, so the index—

[Speaker E] —is very convenient.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Mishnah—it’s not Maimonides. Maimonides did not think the matters were like that; Maimonides didn’t think like that at all. I’ve said this several times already. Maimonides did not think there was a philosophical structure behind the Talmud / Talmudic text—only behind the aggadah. The Nazir claims that this is not true: the Talmud / Talmudic text itself is laws that express a higher philosophical-conceptual layer. It’s not that philosophy deals only with thought in aggadah, while Jewish law is only so you know what to do, to refine yourself, all kinds of pathways—that’s not the main point. We’ve talked about this countless times.

[Speaker D] Maimonides wrote Guide for the Perplexed, obviously, he wrote it in such a—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —way. He writes this in many places. It’s completely clear that this is how he understood it. He almost never extracted a line of thought from a legal rule, almost never.