The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 9

Table of Contents

• Codification, the “disorder” in the Talmud, and deriving new ideas from contexts
• Literary form versus systematic form, and the significance of context
• Ulpan and a mother tongue, anthropology, and science as an outside perspective
• Matter and form, description through categories, and knowledge through sensation
• Analytical study, object/person categories, and the feeling of being “outside”
• Slabodka, Ponevezh, the Chazon Ish, and Rabbi Chaim as two forms of understanding
• The advance of science as giving up on understanding, and the analogy to Newton
• Order between the two methods, ulpan as a necessity, and completion through rules
• The symbolic-moral approach among the ancients, and allegory as onion layers
• Aggadah and Jewish law as two forms of the same transmission, and the view that “everything is a parable”
• Abraham our forefather and the attribute of kindness as a real force and not a symbol
• Figures in every generation, matter-form, Rashba, and the universal spiritual structure
• Harmony between the revealed and the hidden, the Ari and Maimonides, and disputes about deciding Jewish law
• Scientific errors among the Sages, the Ramchal, and the difficulty of hiding truth inside falsehood
• Greek mythology, narrative success as an indication, and the question of the authors’ intent

Summary

General Overview

The text presents the view that codification and the scientific-legal organization of Jewish law express, in a certain sense, a decline, whereas the original “disorder” of the Talmud is actually an intentional order whose purpose is to convey an inner understanding and not just information. It argues that from the contexts in the Talmud—from the juxtaposition of sayings and from the blending of aggadah into Jewish law—one can extract ideas that go beyond the halakhic content, even philosophical ideas that feel new. It distinguishes between knowledge “from the outside,” in a scientific style of classification and categorization by means of general categories, and knowledge “from the inside,” which is conveyed through literary form, images, and stories. It compares this to learning a language in an ulpan versus a mother tongue, and to the tension in anthropology between inner experience and external documentation. Later on, it brings a source about the symbolic and allegorical method among the ancients, and develops a view according to which every act has inner layers of morality and wisdom, and biblical figures are real forces and not “examples,” all while discussing the tension between conceptual truth and scientific errors among the Sages, and the question of how one moves from rules to understanding.

Codification, the “disorder” in the Talmud, and deriving new ideas from contexts

Codification and the scientific-legal organization of Jewish law express a decline, and the true original order is precisely the disorder. He says that from the links and juxtapositions in the Talmud—such as sayings placed next to one another, or aggadah in the middle of Jewish law—ideas emerge that go beyond the content of the law itself, because you ask, “What is this doing here?” and draw out a new statement. He says it’s even possible to derive genuinely new things, and stresses that he knows more novel insights that come out of a Talmudic passage than from studying the Hebrew Bible as it is usually studied, because the ideas that arise from Talmudic topics are more philosophical and abstract. He gives the example of the idea that when a person acts under coercion, it is not really an action, and that “it’s not he who is acting,” and he wonders whether to call that truly new, but presents it as a novel insight that emerges from the straightforward sense of the passage.

Literary form versus systematic form, and the significance of context

The modern scientific order is organized and systematic, while the “primitive” order of the Talmud is intentional and does not stem from an inability to organize things systematically. He describes an attempt to convey philosophical messages through literary form rather than philosophical form, and therefore there appears to be a lack of order, similar to the way a novel is not written systematically but chronologically and contextually. He illustrates this by saying that in the middle of a story, a description of landscape or mood does not advance the plot, yet it puts the reader into a state of consciousness that changes how the plot is perceived; so too in the Talmud, details that “don’t belong” contribute through context. He argues that if the goal were simply to convey a set of laws, this could have been done in a more efficient way. But if the goal is to convey an atmosphere and a worldview, and to bring the learner into that world, then precisely the mixture of stories with halakhic determinations gives the “atmosphere” of the commandment and of Jewish law.

Ulpan and a mother tongue, anthropology, and science as an outside perspective

Studying in an ulpan is an aid for someone who does not know the language, and someone who knows a language does not need rules, and speaks with the “inner rhythm” better than someone who graduated from an ulpan. Using rules is meant for someone who does not understand, and someone who understands does not need rules—and he presents this as a broad principle, not limited to language. He describes a dilemma in anthropology: whether to live inside the tribe in order to feel it from within, or to sit “on the hill with a notebook and pen” in order to document and compare. He notes that the move toward sitting on the hill took place when anthropology became scientific. He defines scientificity as separating subject from object, and as dealing in sorting, classifying, and using general categories “that I bring with me from home” in order to map observations into ready-made drawers, as opposed to wanting simply “to live the tribe, period,” without characteristics.

Matter and form, description through categories, and knowledge through sensation

He argues that matter cannot be classified, and all you can say about matter is that there is “something,” and that “it is not that other thing,” and every positive description is an attachment of a quality, which is form. He explains that descriptions like “red” or “triangular” are criteria that come from the one describing and not from the thing itself, and therefore systematic description is always an outside perspective. He says that grasping “the thing itself from within” is not done through comparison and classification, but through trying to understand “what it is,” and the only way to do that is through sensation, not through scientific tools. He argues that one can arouse indirect impressions that generate similar feelings in the reader, but one cannot convey this directly. He compares this to the distinction between hearing and sight: sight presents the thing from the outside, while hearing requires the listener to reconstruct the situation inwardly in order to understand.

Analytical study, object/person categories, and the feeling of being “outside”

Analytical study works by a method close to the scientific method, and therefore “you always feel outside,” because it uses templates and general classifications. He describes the use of concepts like object/person categories and general legal principles as a way of sorting Talmudic topics by broad categories, instead of “entering into the topic and understanding what it is saying.” He presents this in contrast to a conception of local understanding that does not rely on external conceptual frameworks from the world of learning, but on renewed listening to each individual passage.

Slabodka, Ponevezh, the Chazon Ish, and Rabbi Chaim as two forms of understanding

He presents the difference between Slabodka and Ponevezh as the difference between non-scientific knowledge and scientific-yeshivish analysis “in the spirit of Rabbi Chaim.” He describes the Chazon Ish as someone who does not use conceptual yeshivah terminology and does not compare passages broadly, but handles each law in its own local domain, and for that reason many in the yeshivah world have difficulty with him. He argues that Ponevezh produces more roshei yeshivah because the method of general concepts and templates allows even an average person to give a “general lecture,” whereas in an approach that does not use templates, every passage requires renewed listening, and someone who is not the Chazon Ish is left helpless. He explains that the ability to work with rules is compensation for the lack of direct inner understanding, and that precisely giving up on understanding makes theoretical and systematic progress possible.

The advance of science as giving up on understanding, and the analogy to Newton

Science advances meteoricly precisely because it describes and classifies instead of understanding “locally.” He presents understanding of the kind “what happened here” as particularistic and unable to generate scientific progress, whereas classification and placing phenomena under rules make testing and progress possible without understanding. He compares this to learning in an ulpan, where a person advances by means of rules because he is not a baby; from this he concludes that giving up on trying to understand makes it possible to advance by means of description.

Order between the two methods, ulpan as a necessity, and completion through rules

He says that for us there is an order, and not merely a parallelism, between the two forms of understanding, and emphasizes that one has to pass through an “ulpan” of rules in order to enter the language or enter the Talmud; otherwise, “it’ll just bounce off his face.” He argues that ulpan does not lock a person in, but brings him into a state from which he can continue and understand, and that someone who has gone through rules can be “more complete,” because the laws too are something. He gives the example of knowledge that includes both the laws of gravitation alongside understanding, and argues that analytical tools are a human capacity that develops historically. He suggests a historical picture in which, in the prophetic period, there was an immediate sense of halakhic truth, and therefore that kind of analyticity did not develop. Later, the decline forces the use of approximations and rules, and redemption is supposed to build on them and restore inner understanding in a more complete way. In that context he mentions “Torat Eretz Yisrael” as a return from the legal analysis of the Diaspora to the construction of inner understanding on its basis.

The symbolic-moral approach among the ancients, and allegory as onion layers

He quotes that the symbolic and moral-practical method was common among the ancient peoples, and that their priests and sages taught by symbolic forms and short proverbs, and likewise the Seven Sages of Greece, the earliest philosophers, Don Yehudah Abravanel, and Pico della Mirandola. He brings a description according to which the ancient rhetoricians did not intend only one matter but many: first, the plain external meaning as a story; then, within that same story, a useful moral point; and beyond that, an allusion to true wisdom—natural, mathematical/astral, or divine—and at times all of them together, like the fruit within its peels. He notes that these inner intentions are called figurative and allegorical, and mentions the “Heptaplus” and the context of Pico della Mirandola as a Christian who dealt with Kabbalah, studied with Jews, and translated kabbalistic ideas into Latin. He sharpens the point that this method is both fragmented and unsystematic, and also moral-practical, in that it does not state the idea directly but by way of an act or proverb that requires the learner to understand on his own.

Aggadah and Jewish law as two forms of the same transmission, and the view that “everything is a parable”

He argues that there is no conceptual difference between aggadah and Jewish law on this plane, because both are forms of transmitting truth that is not mere information. He interprets the model of the three layers to mean that the connection between the action and the inner strata is not accidental, as in a mere “example,” but rooted within the thing itself; therefore a successful action is not an arbitrary combination, but carries inner layers within it. He formulates a conception according to which, if a true idea exists, it must have a practical expression—and vice versa—so that “everything is a parable,” and it does not take genius to create a parable, because every act includes an idea behind it.

Abraham our forefather and the attribute of kindness as a real force and not a symbol

He argues that Abraham our forefather does not “symbolize” kindness as a trait, but is the attribute of kindness itself—a force in creation and a mode of conduct that is revealed in the world of action in the figure of Abraham our forefather. He clarifies that kindness is not limited to “doing acts of kindness,” but is a beginning out of nothing and an act that flows from an inner power, and that Abraham is the “root” from which others draw as branches. He presents the human being as a “stature” that exists in action, formation, creation, emanation, and beyond, and places the figures as forces that appear throughout that whole stature, rather than as actions selected in order to illustrate an idea. He compares this to Platonic ideas, and argues that here “you bring horseness itself down below,” so that the force itself appears in this world, and not only particular objects.

Figures in every generation, matter-form, Rashba, and the universal spiritual structure

He cites “the Gaon” as saying that in every generation there is an Abraham our forefather, a Moses our teacher, and a Jacob our forefather, and argues that every generation is made up of those same forces and figures in a fixed spiritual structure. He mentions Rashba’s responsum with the ban against those who think that Abraham and Sarah are matter and form, and presents this as part of the conception that the figures are “the thing itself” of the forces and not merely examples. He connects this to the universality of the generation and to the idea that one cannot separate one person from another, because the connections stem from spiritual structure and not from physicality.

Harmony between the revealed and the hidden, the Ari and Maimonides, and disputes about deciding Jewish law

He argues that the Ari ruled like Maimonides against earlier kabbalists because if one grasps Jewish law correctly on the revealed plane, it automatically fits the hidden plane as well; the fit is not artificial but necessary, because the hidden lies within the revealed. He mentions the Magen Avraham in the laws of tefillin, who says that when there is a dispute between the hidden and the revealed, Jewish law follows the revealed. He then raises the question of how one decides when the hidden itself disputes that very rule. He explains that states of contradiction between the hidden and the revealed probably stem from incorrect use of one of them, and that proper use should have produced a complete fit, though he adds the idea of “seventy facets” as a possibility for multiple correct paths.

Scientific errors among the Sages, the Ramchal, and the difficulty of hiding truth inside falsehood

He brings the Ramchal in the introduction to Ein Yaakov, who says that scientific statements among the Sages were at times intended to express an idea, and were phrased in the scientific terms of their time, such as the theory of the four elements, rather than as scientific instruction for its own sake. He expresses reservation about reading this as merely an “apology” for not knowing modern science, and raises a principled difficulty: how can one convey a good idea within an incorrect scientific fact? He states that he does not believe it is possible to hide something true inside an untrue fact, and suggests the possibility that the scientific errors are real errors, and that if there is conceptual significance, it may be connected to the way the intellect operates and not to the fact itself—while admitting that this point is not settled for him.

Greek mythology, narrative success as an indication, and the question of the authors’ intent

He points out that the source applies the layered model to Greek mythology as well, and wonders whether its authors intended all those layers, but suggests that in a conception where the layers are built in, the matter no longer depends on the author’s intention. He argues that if a story works on the realistic level as successful literature, that signals that it also contains inner moral and conceptual truth, and that “public acceptance” is an indication of that. He raises the difficulty that some things catch on even though they are exaggerated or untrue, and answers that if something did not catch on, then apparently they did not represent it properly, or did not succeed in bringing the right story that would express the truth. He concludes by referring to the continuation on the next page, “in section 32 of the notes,” as a continuation of the discussion.

In a certain sense, there’s more or less a decline here. The codification, the more and more scientific, legal organization of Jewish law actually expresses some kind of decline. Originally, the real order, the truly correct order, is precisely the lack of order. I don’t want to get into that discussion again, but you can draw new ideas from the Maharal’s connections—that’s the question we asked regarding linking things to verses in the Torah. Meaning, can you derive new ideas from verses in the Torah, in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)? After all, the ideas are more or less already there; the ideas exist. You can receive—we talked about studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)—you can draw existing ideas out of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), but the question is whether from this order that is clearly there, right? It’s obvious, yes, that this draws it out. What does “draws it out” mean? It means that statements were juxtaposed, or there’s aggadic literature in the middle of Jewish law, and from there they derive an idea? Of course, of course. It’s just that suddenly you ask, wait, what’s this doing here? Right? And then you say something new. Not just, okay, there’s a known idea and it fits here. In the sense of whether it’s new or not. But they draw something out that goes beyond the content of the law itself. Whether it’s new or not—I think you can draw out new things too, but I know more new things that come out of this than from studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). I already told you, I had a problem with that. And that’s an example there; I think that here clearly new things emerge. Tell me, to say that coercion isn’t an action of the person, or that he isn’t even guilty—is that called new or not? I don’t know. Maybe just some random person on the street might also think of that possibility, but I’m not sure. If something like that comes up for you from a Talmudic passage. It’s a little hard to say whether it’s new or not, because the ideas here, I think, are in a certain sense more philosophical, more abstract, than what you usually hear in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). Maybe you can also study the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) differently. I’m saying that what’s usually found there are ideas that are more—I don’t know what to call them—some good trait, or way of behaving, or a characteristic of a certain personality, or something like that. Here we’re dealing with philosophical ideas. It may be that you can also raise the philosophical possibilities earlier, but I still think there is a sense here of something new. If you have an obvious conclusion from a Talmudic passage that when a person acts under coercion, that isn’t an action—not that he isn’t guilty, but that he isn’t the one acting—then I think there’s something new here. It’s a little hard to decide what exactly “new” means here. Fine. Let’s come back to a few remarks anyway, because last time we were left a bit in the middle in certain respects, so I just want to finish. We saw that the modern, scientific order is an organized order, deductive—or I don’t know exactly what to call it—systematic. And the supposedly primitive order that exists in the Talmud is intentional, meaning it’s a different kind of order. It’s not that they simply don’t know that things can also be organized systematically. We also talked about what came later, but we said that basically there’s some attempt here to convey things in a literary way and not only in a philosophical way. Meaning, the messages can be philosophical, but their transmission is through a literary form and not through a philosophical form. That’s why there is disorder here. No one would ever think to write a novel systematically. It would be absurd, not relevant, not the same description. You can even imagine wanting to, but no one would ever think to do it. Just a chronological imagination of the life story of some hero in a certain situation. So we asked, why? There is significance to context. Meaning, for example, within the—this is an example I thought of exactly when I left here last time—in the middle of a story, suddenly you come across a landscape description, a description of the mood of the person being portrayed there. What does that have to do with the narrative, really? What’s it doing here? After all, it doesn’t add to the plot. It puts you into a certain mood; maybe now you perceive the plot a little differently, but it doesn’t add a plot detail. That’s what I mean by the contribution of things that seem unrelated but that the context is supposed to bring up. Okay, the literary form is obviously not systematic. It’s not that the writers are primitive and the philosophers are smart. What comes out of this in most of the Talmud—the framing we give the Talmud isn’t as some kind of narrative novel. It’s not just a story. It’s not that now the aggadic literature tells me something, and now I’ll understand the root of the next topic / passage; obviously it’s not like that. In the local sense, as a kind of introduction, maybe yes, but in the—okay, even there I don’t know if it’s in the local sense. You enter the head of the character and somehow understand the whole plot, and you understand that it contributes locally. You know the person better overall, so you read the whole book a bit differently once you know him. Which is simply not quite this kind of thing. It’s an example—again, I don’t want to push the analogy too far, but I think there is something to this example. Meaning, it captures a certain point that exists in literature and not in systematic description. There are possibilities of things where basically I could describe the character of the person in the introduction chapter and his adventures in chapter one. People don’t do that. They don’t do that because that’s not the right way to convey things. Things are not information. Information really can be conveyed much more efficiently, but no, the goal is not to convey information. In that sense, that’s how I understand this analogy. In the Talmud it’s the same thing. If the goal were to convey a set of laws, obviously there’s a better way to do it. If the goal is also to convey an atmosphere, or how to understand these laws, or to place myself inside this world, then it’s worthwhile to tell a story once about someone who also waved his lulav and I don’t know what, and afterward say that a lulav is four handbreadths and all sorts of things like that. Meaning, it gives the atmosphere of what a lulav is. Fine, that’s an example—I don’t want to keep going with it too far. In any case, one more point that’s important to notice. We said—do you remember the ulpan example we talked about before Passover one evening, where we compared two ways of learning a language? You can learn it in an ulpan, and you can learn it as a mother tongue. A baby who’s born doesn’t learn in an ulpan; he learns it as a mother tongue. We said there that—and there it was in the context of transmission through the generations and all those matters, and I don’t want to go back into that now—but the example may also serve us here. We said there that learning in an ulpan is simply an aid for someone who doesn’t know the language. Someone who already knows the language won’t go to an ulpan. Someone who knows the language also speaks better than an ulpan graduate, usually. More precisely—not in terms of the rules, but in terms of the internal rhythm of the language. So we see—this example is simply meant to illustrate through it the fact that using rules is meant for someone who doesn’t understand. And that’s always true, not only in ulpans. Using rules is meant for someone who doesn’t understand. Someone who does understand doesn’t need rules. In that same context we mentioned the dilemma that existed at the beginning of anthropology’s transformation into a scientific field. There was some discussion there about what is more correct for the anthropological researcher to do. Is it better to enter the tribe and live as one of them in order to feel it from the inside, or is it better to sit on the hill with notebook and pen and document the facts I see and compare them to the neighboring tribe? Now of course there are advantages and disadvantages to each way. The interesting point is that the transition to the way of sitting on the hill came together with anthropology becoming scientific. Meaning, scientificity is always looking from the outside. It’s the analysis of the subject as object. That’s scientificity. And why is that so? Even in the example of anthropology. If I want to try to compare different populations in the world, different cultures in the world, then I need to go with some characteristics or invent a set of general concepts and place each culture somewhere in relation to them—how analytical it is, how much it engages in science, how its social life is conducted, what the family structure is, all kinds of things like that. Those are all always descriptions through general concepts. That is the scientific approach. A scientific approach is an approach of classification, of categorization, and basically the use of categories that I bring with me from home, and the attempt to map all my observations in light of those categories and organize them in drawers that I brought from home. In contrast, pre-scientific anthropology, that person who sat there—he didn’t examine the characteristics of this tribe as opposed to the other tribe in terms of how family-oriented it is, how moral it is, how intelligent it is. He wanted to live the tribe, period—not through characteristics. Through characteristics—and characteristics are what allow you to classify different objects. Matter cannot be classified. You can’t classify the matter of things. Because the whole content of the matter of things is that this thing is not that thing. Beyond that, you can’t say anything about matter. Anything you say will be statements about form. Do you understand what I mean? We talked earlier about how we got to the distinction between matter and form at all. We said that basically we try to abstract the object from all its properties, and that’s the matter, that’s what remains. It’s the same thing on which the properties are clothed. We said that basically all you can say about matter is that there is something there, and that it is not that other something. That’s all. Every positive description will always really be the attachment of a property. Meaning, classification through criteria that don’t emerge from the thing itself. Suppose I say that this object is red or triangular. Then the redness and the triangularity come from me, not from the thing. And I classify all the objects in the world according to the drawers I come with. In contrast, if I try to grasp the matter of the thing, to connect to the thing itself, that will never be in comparison to other things. Because that is the content of matter. Matter is the thing in itself. And that means connecting to the thing itself and not trying to classify it in my categories, but to understand what it is. Now here, what we didn’t quite understand in each other last time—I told you to say one word about this. Therefore scientific anthropology was dissatisfied with that, and it really did change. I think that makes perfect sense scientifically; it changed in anthropology. But again, if you really want to understand this tribe, think to yourself that you go somewhere and you really want to understand what’s going on there. Would you read a scientific study? Or would you read some literary piece by someone who lived inside? I would read the second. Because scientific study always misses the essence. You don’t understand it; you can’t say anything. Essentially again, you can’t say anything. Anything you say will come out of his conceptual world. What do I mean? You want the atmosphere of what’s happening there. Yes, so maybe the word “atmosphere” isn’t strong enough, but I’m using parables to try to bring the thing closer. I don’t know how to speak about matter itself. But you can’t, you can’t—that’s the problem. Right. But you can feel it. Right. And that’s what I’m saying. The attempt to grasp the thing itself from within is something science doesn’t do and can’t do. Because science doesn’t progress that way. Science always progresses through the attempt to place everything on some general platform or coordinate system. A coordinate system that doesn’t emerge from the thing. So essentially this is always using concepts that don’t emerge from the thing in order to classify the thing. Understanding of the second kind is understanding the thing itself from within, and then it is detached from all kinds of comparisons. Broadly speaking, in principle, it’s detached. This division is somewhat artificial sometimes. But that’s the pole. Meaning, that’s the side in its pure form. It never appears in pure form. Every researcher is somewhat subjective and every researcher somewhat tries to understand the mindset, but these are basically the two poles between which we move. Now you understand that a mode of description—what is a systematic description of something? Types, species, what it resembles, what it doesn’t resemble, characteristics. That is exactly scientific work. And that is something, it is an outside perspective. A systematic description is always an outside perspective. Because the method itself—what does “systematic” mean? It means a description using a method, but the method is me, not the object. When I try to feel the object, I have no way to describe it systematically. I can evoke impressions that indirectly convey to you the feeling of what is inside. If I have literary talent, maybe I’ll do that better. But it can’t be conveyed directly. It’s something that cannot be conveyed directly. Only somehow through indirect descriptions, an attempt to awaken in me those same sensations that existed in the person who lived there. That is really what has to be done here—not to convey messages to me. That’s what we said: hearing as opposed to seeing. Hearing is something that awakens the thing within me and that’s how I grasp it; it doesn’t transfer information to me from the outside the way sight does. Sight presents the thing before me. Hearing doesn’t present the thing before me. I have to do work in order to reconstruct within myself what I heard, and that’s how I understand what the situation there was. That’s exactly what I’m talking about here. The systematic scientific form is observation from the outside. The pre-scientific form is grasping from the inside. Not for nothing does it say “the man knew Eve his wife,” right? Knowledge is connection; people talk about that a lot. And that is exactly the point. In order to know something, you have to dive into it. You simply have to enter into it. But that is not scientific knowledge; it is the opposite of scientific knowledge. Science cannot work that way. Scientific knowledge is exactly the opposite of that. It tries to look from the outside and not from the inside. If you’re inside, get out quickly, because that’s not good. You’re subjective, you’re not—A scientist has to get out quickly, detach from the thing he is studying, and try to classify it in some general categories. Okay? So there’s a book exactly about this by Michael Polanyi called Personal Knowledge, where he… what does he do within life with criteria. In short, life is one thing, and that’s what is always so complicated. It’s not even possible; it makes things complicated. I’m not hanging this on complexity, okay? Life is the thing itself, and description is an abstraction from the thing. The problem isn’t that it’s too complex. People think it’s because it’s too complex. It’s not because it’s too complex; it’s simply something else. It’s not the thing. Description always deals with itself. You’re trying to understand what the thing itself is, not how it’s told, not how it looks. What is the thing itself? And that can only be done through feeling; you can’t describe it with scientific tools. So in the end we’re talking about two forms of understanding, which are expressed in two forms of description. The form of short expressions, these parables, this parabolic pattern, is meant to show you—or try to convey to you—things that are not mere information, that are not just data for comparison, and that is very, very clear. For example, in analytical study we work with a method very close to the scientific method, and that is exactly why we always feel outside. Because you don’t experience the thing itself. You try to place on it some templates, these kinds of abstract formulations that in fact can also be used elsewhere. This is not the local side here: object-focused, person-focused, law in this case, law in that case, all kinds of such concepts that are general concepts, trying to classify the Talmudic topics according to general concepts. That is a scientific approach. The approach to the thing itself is simply to enter into it, not to try to ask about it through all sorts of external concepts. By the way, we talked at the beginning of the year in the opening talk, if you remember, about the difference between Slabodka and Ponevezh. Do you remember? That’s exactly the difference. Someone who knows the Chazon Ish, for example—Slabodka goes in the direction of the great Chazon Ish. Someone who knows the Chazon Ish: the Chazon Ish is the archetype of knowledge of the non-scientific kind. True, he gathers all the—a Jewish precisionist who goes through all the relevant topics / passages and compares and draws conclusions—but he never uses the analytic yeshiva concepts. The Chazon Ish isn’t like that. He doesn’t use those tools, and therefore many people in the yeshiva world find the Chazon Ish difficult. Because in this sense the Chazon Ish seems to me, in certain places, not to grasp the whole Torah as one single matter, as it were—meaning, not everything through broad concepts by which you can basically classify all the topics. You need to enter into the topic / passage and understand what it says, not look at it from the outside and say, wait, here this is object-focused, there we see person-focused, and try to classify and compare here and there. He doesn’t compare topics at all. Anything that touches the law of lavud, even if it’s found in mixtures, he’ll deal with—but only what touches the law of lavud. He won’t take ideas from tractate Kiddushin for problems in I don’t know where. For him, understanding is always local; it’s an ideology with him, it’s very clear. In contrast, the Ponevezh method, say—that’s what I know, and there are other yeshivot of all kinds, but these are two very prominent examples—the Ponevezh method is exactly the opposite. It takes some general concepts and analyzes, in the spirit of Rabbi Chaim really, and tries to analyze the topics scientifically. These are exactly the same two forms of understanding. The Chazon Ish simply wants to understand what the topic / passage is saying to him, not to come through some concepts you brought with you in advance and used to classify. He wouldn’t classify; he simply tried to understand what it means, and these are always local, non-yeshivish analyses. Anyone who reads Chazon Ish sees that there is no lomdus there in the sense that you can make broad analogies. So then you can’t make analogies? If you know how to listen properly, you don’t miss it; if you don’t know how to listen properly, then that really is a problem, and that’s why we don’t do it. And you can see that well in Slabodka. There are people there no less talented than in any other yeshiva, a magnificent yeshiva with scholarly yeshiva people and everything is good, but hardly any roshei yeshiva come out of there, and almost all roshei yeshiva, at least in the Bnei Brak area—in Jerusalem I know less—come out of Ponevezh. And the reason for that is that we are small, not because we are great. Because people like us can’t work with a non-scientific method. If you take the concepts, the power of Rabbi Chaim, and after him Rabbi Shimon, and after him Rabbi Shmuel—there was a formulation there of these scientific-type models with which you can go from topic to topic and give a general lecture about it. You don’t have to be a phenomenon for that. It’s obvious that the more of a phenomenon someone is, the better—again, descriptions are always extreme; the truth is always in the middle—but I’m trying to illustrate in an extreme way what I mean. Meaning, even an average person will be able to give a general lecture because he already knows the templates. But the Chazon Ish doesn’t work with templates, so that doesn’t help. Every topic / passage you have to listen to afresh to hear what it says. So if you’re the Chazon Ish, you’re fine. But anyone who isn’t the Chazon Ish remains at a loss in Slabodka—not that that’s bad, but. Thinking about these terms. I was a bit of a scientist when I was there in that region; I was detached, so I could think about these things and where they come from. The same thing, by the way, in science. In a certain sense there has been meteoric progress in the modern age. Meteoritic progress in science. And on the other hand we said that science basically doesn’t understand, it only describes. It’s outside, classifying, observing. So I would have expected that someone who understands would progress more, right? Like all the—you shouldn’t know of them—“the Sages didn’t build an airplane,” or something like that, right? Maybe they didn’t know, or something—I don’t know, there are all kinds of very subtle arguments there about that question. About the airplane. But the truth is really, why? I think the answer is very simple. Someone who tries to understand—understanding is always particular. To understand in the second sense, in the sense of attachment, right? I connect with this thing. I don’t know rules, not laws; I only know what it means to me. When an apple falls on Newton’s head, I want to know why that happened. Not what the phenomenon is that exists here as in a hundred other cases, how to classify it. But what happened here? Locally. From that you cannot progress scientifically. Obviously not. Precisely—precisely the willingness to give up the attempt to understand, and to be willing to focus only on explanation, even though I acknowledge that I’m missing a significant layer—well, some people acknowledge that they’re missing a significant layer—and precisely giving up the attempt to understand is what enables progress. Because I only describe. And in descriptive ability, I have it; I know how to classify, I know everything, I advance in everything without understanding. I don’t understand. But the descriptions give me a tool for progressing, because I classify, I check, I check whether the classification is right or wrong, without understanding at all. Exactly like in an ulpan. Someone comes to an ulpan; I didn’t learn the language from birth, I don’t know how to speak it. So what do we do now? I’m already not a child; I can’t start like a child. Right? What do we do? I follow the supposedly scientific rules they teach me in the ulpan; only that way can I progress. If I tried to come some other way, I wouldn’t progress, because after all I’m not an infant, what can you do. So basically in a certain… in that very place where I’m stuck precisely because I’m trying to understand, if I give up the attempt to understand I will progress. Because I can make do with description, and in description I’m good. Description I know; I have intelligence; I’m already formed as a person; I know how to describe. And if they tell me rules, I know how to work with them. So very often, precisely the relinquishing of the attempt to understand is what advances things. So we have to remember that this is not the ultimate goal of understanding. It’s an attempt to progress when there is no understanding. When I don’t understand, then I progress in another way, through descriptions. Yes. Now, these two questions, these two methods, or this approach, or whatever else—is it two parallel types? Or is there some order between them? Meaning, is the second type built better on the basis of the—if we bring the scientific example… For us, I think—and not only for us, but for us certainly yes. Certainly yes. It’s not that one comes and struggles… two parallel types, and there’s some contradiction, whether classical science only confuses the quanta? Rather there is a first stage, and on that basis… You can return again to the ulpan example. In the ulpan example, after he learned all the rules, can he be a writer? That won’t help. Can he be a writer after ulpan? No. That’s not a writer who came out of ulpan. That’s not a writer. Yes, exactly. Was there a Yiddish writer who maybe started in ulpan? No, obviously. No, no. That’s not what I’m claiming at all. I’m claiming exactly the opposite. That you have to go through ulpan. Exactly, that’s the answer to what you asked. After he knows… No, the method that he would be born—that’s true—but if he is now in a given situation, then he goes through ulpan. After he learned the rules, and only through that succeeds in grasping the language, now he also tries to understand. Meaning, the fact that he learned in ulpan doesn’t permanently lock him in; he isn’t limited because of that. That’s his way of entering. After all, he’s not an infant, so he enters through rules. But after he learned the rules, he already speaks the language. There was a Yiddish person who now… Now you’re asking a different question. What happens? Is that person preferable to an infant who was born that way and never went through ulpan at all? I think the answer is that he is preferable. That person who went through ulpan. It’s not clear at all. What you said is obvious to you; it’s not obvious to me, but I think he is preferable. Because in the end I still think that the infant is also missing something. The infant is missing something because after all, the rules are also something. I don’t even know how to define it. Understanding based on complete clarification, understanding the fundamental laws. I’ll say it this way: to know that the apple fell on Newton because he sinned, on the basis that I also know the laws of gravitation—that seems to me, even on the plane of understanding, more complete than just knowing that the apple fell. But an infant will never understand those rules. Why? I just don’t know why. Just like that. Why would an infant be preferable? An infant simply hasn’t absorbed the rules. Fine, okay. Suppose he’s not an infant born with the rules. Is it preferable to be someone who went through ulpan and learned, or someone who simply lived in the environment of people who speak the language? I think it’s obvious that no. Rationally? Obviously he goes through it de facto. Completely obvious, he goes through it here. Isn’t it simple to turn him into the second form, meaning into the form of… Not simply into the second form, but he’ll absorb much better after ulpan. But after ulpan he’ll continue. Ulpan doesn’t finish the learning. But the ulpan will put him in a better position, in my opinion. I think not. I think the same with us. Someone who now exerts himself and enters into the Talmud and tries to understand without going through a Rabbi Chaim—his face will just collapse on him. Right. Right. It’s the same thing, in my opinion. I’m sure it is. But I wanted to note about language: it’s not exactly parallel because the rules of language were created following speech. I think it’s exactly parallel. No, the rules here are not rules versus Jewish law. These essences and these things in Torah were created before the things… before. These rules… Rules are something created after reality… Rules are something created in order to bring closer. Fine, but rules of language are things that have no meaning at all—meaning, there is no meaning to rules of language without a living language. They were created from the living language. I don’t think that’s true. What do you mean? It’s exactly the same thing. My claim is that language is a perfect analogy. Meaning that the halakhic rules too are not the truth. They are an approximation of the truth. And therefore they were created only after the laws. It’s not that first there were rules and from them the laws were detailed—what suddenly? The fact is that we are always correcting those rules, and they don’t fit with all kinds of laws. Once they didn’t study these rules at all, once they didn’t know these rules at all; it wasn’t true and it wasn’t necessary. But what happens? Because the understanding after rules—someone who continues onward and doesn’t stop in ulpan but also tries to understand after he learned the rules and uses them—is, in my humble opinion, more complete. I think that’s the meaning of this historical process that forces them more and more to use rules. Because in truth, people in the prophetic period, who in effect had some kind of immediate sense of what is true and what is not true in Jewish law, did not discuss all the topics / passages the way we discuss them in a detached scientific manner. In a certain place, they really didn’t develop that analytical ability, that scientific ability, the ability to work with rules. Which is also a human ability that needs to develop. So what do they do? They take away their second ability, and as compensation they make them use intellectual processes and approximations, and afterward in redemption what is supposed to happen is that eventually, out of those tools, understanding will also develop anew. But then in a more complete form. It will be such a gathering, a miracle, sorry, like… everything in the world in some place is a miracle. How does this happen, for example, in ulpan? A person after learning a set of rules suddenly grasps the matter. After all, that’s incomprehensible. You can’t understand such a thing. Right, right. But the gap is big; he can no longer learn the language, say, the way it was created naturally. So they take him through rules, and what can you do—after the rules he can learn, he becomes a different person. After all, after the rules he also learns the second part of the matter, not only the general part. So you can call it a miracle or not—it’s a miracle that happens in many places, and especially in Torah, that’s what I mean to say. That this may be the existing ability—call it a miracle or not—but that’s perhaps what is sometimes called the Torah of the Land of Israel. That returning here is supposed to bring them back from the legal analysis that was customary outside the Land of Israel—not to abandon it, but to build on its basis also the inner understanding that existed in the prophetic period. And then there will be a more complete Torah. I don’t understand what that adds. The goal is repair. What does it add that I know the rules once I understand the heart of the matter? For example, the Sages couldn’t build an airplane. And they had a wonderful understanding of which I don’t have the faintest trace. Understanding of other things. No, not of other things—of the same things, not of other things. Even in aerodynamics they understood better than I do. They just didn’t know better than I do. They understood. There are things where none of these rules will help—even if they are approximations and even if they are post factum, and that’s a philosophical question we won’t get into right now, what is the meaning of laws of nature, actual laws of nature or those currently in our hands—there too there is a difference between them. But in some place it’s obvious that you are more complete when you have both things. That’s obvious. This procedure of… I’m not sure about it, but it’s completely clear, I think, that this is a more complete state. Maybe let’s say that if they had totally complete understanding of the Holy One, blessed be He, maybe they wouldn’t have needed rules. If one understands everything, and even the processes of understanding don’t interfere with him—he understands everything—but human beings apparently cannot reach the maximum only on the plane of understanding. They also need the scientific detour. But if afterward understanding also comes, that will truly be a full stature of a human being. That is a complete person, at least intellectually. Fine, let’s move on. On one of the festivals. The symbolic and moral-practical way is found among the ancient nations, whose priests would bring their teachings before the masses in symbolic forms. And so their sages would teach in short sayings, like the sayings of the seven sages of Greece. The earliest philosophers too taught in this short way. And so too the words of the first among the בעלי philosophy of the new Jewish philosophy in the Renaissance period, Don Yehuda Abravanel, and Pico della Mirandola the Greek. Notice, someone wrote “Pico della Mirandola the Greek.” The ancient rhetoricians in their words did not intend only one matter—he’s talking about the Greeks—but many. They would first place, on the level of the plain meaning, like an outer shell, a story of some matter, some person and his deeds worthy of being remembered in a book, and afterward in that very story they would place, like a more inward shell, some moral matter, useful to a person in his deeds, praising the qualities under discussion and condemning inferior ones. And besides this—and this is already a third layer, like layers of an onion—and besides this, in those very things they would hint at some true wisdom from natural matters, or astronomical ones, or divine ones, and sometimes they would include in one story two or all three of the speculative intentions, like the inside of the fruit within the shells. And these inner intentions they called figurative, allegorical, allegory. And so in the work of Don Yehuda Abravanel on the book of Pico della Mirandola they hint in his commentary on the Torah, the Heptaplus, which contains seven meanings according to every expression of the Torah. We already mentioned Pico della Mirandola—that Christian who dealt with Kabbalah. He says down here that he wasn’t the first, even though he boasted that he was the first, but he was a Christian who dealt with Kabbalah and studied with various Jews, Eliyahu Delmedigo for example, who studied with him, and Don Yehuda Abravanel, and other Jewish sages. And in a certain place he also translated those kabbalistic ideas into Latin. His book, his commentary on Genesis, is called the Heptaplus. That’s what is mentioned here. Now there are a few points here, some of which we already discussed, but I think they are much sharper here. Here is the first point. First of all, regarding the symbolic way. We know this also—someone who knows books about Zen, for example, will find a lot of that there. These kinds of short sayings, a short anecdote, not some systematic explanation of a doctrine. Today I think even in the world people already understand that this is not primitiveness; it’s simply a different way to convey different things. Now what happens here—an interesting point, and I’m not sure I have a full answer for it, but the fact is true. The symbolic and moral-practical way. What does “symbolic and moral-practical” mean? There are really two characteristics here of this path, called primitive as opposed to the scientific path. A: it is fragmentary. It is not systematic. That’s basically what we talked about before as well. And B: it is moral-practical. Meaning, it doesn’t deal directly with ideas, but rather brings you a fact, or some saying, or proverb, or something like that. Meaning, these are also practical instructions, and they also come through the description of something practical. They don’t talk about the idea. The idea is hidden behind it. We’re talking about the thing. These are two domains, and I’m not sure I understand why they always come together, but they almost always really do come together. Meaning, all those who work in this—let’s call it primitive because it is the fragmentary form—not only is it fragmentary, but these fragments also don’t deal with the idea, many times. They deal with… after all, the Talmud of course never deals with a halakhic rule in general terms. “Saving a life overrides the Sabbath.” It doesn’t say as a general rule that saving a life overrides the Sabbath; rather, “someone cooked such-and-such for him, what is the law, these and these disputed.” Always through some anecdote, or saying, or something like that. So besides the fact that it is also fragmentary and there is no organized, systematic, scientific description, it also doesn’t work on the ideas themselves. It works through some moral-practical parable behind which ideas are hidden. These are two characteristics that I think usually exist in all these kinds of texts, even though I don’t fully understand the necessary connection between them. Two different characteristics. I could have imagined aphorisms and fragmentary things that deal with wisdom—I don’t know—not with stories and sayings but that simply tell you an idea in a fragmentary way. But here there are both. It’s both fragmentary and it doesn’t say the idea. Meaning, they tell you a story about the sage who stood on one leg for two hours and wrote ice. And that’s it, next story. And they don’t tell you what it means; that you have to understand on your own. So here you understand that there are two situations. When you want to condense a great idea into a small passage, you can’t say it in three words—well, in practice you can. But the question is why, and it’s an interesting phenomenon. We don’t know exactly why, and why describing the idea itself needs scrolls, while sometimes you really can summarize it in perhaps the most beautiful way there is—maybe even more than all the systematic descriptions—through one act that only symbolizes it, an allegory of it. Now, in commentary on the Talmud it’s more understandable in aggadic texts, thank God he didn’t speak about that specific issue. And everything we said before I think is also true about laws. Laws too are basically some expression—and we’ll see this further on in that same passage we just read, or later on—an expression of a truth that is happening. And there is no difference between aggadah and Jewish law on this plane. These are two ways to convey different things. There is a difference between them on the textual plane, but in terms of reaching insight from aggadah and from Jewish law, there is no intellectual difference. And maybe this doesn’t work on the Talmud; maybe it works on Avot de-Rabbi Natan and on the teachings of priests. What’s that doing here? Fine. So after the previous passage he brings this whole passage from the Talmud here. Or maybe it’s later? Midrash? Doesn’t matter, Jewish sources are like this. Priests and things like that among the Jews too. The priests are really from Africa. After all, the priests were to a large degree the same thing; the priest was also a Torah scholar and he taught. There were preachers among the community, or they sat in the study hall. And here specifically he’s talking about Safed, Lebanon, and Maimonides. Fine, he’s showing you that even among science, at that point—we as people of science who are engaged in understanding the Semitic mode, so what do we do? We look for more places where we see Semiticness. He’s showing you that even among the ancient Greeks, before they became modern, you see that there too there is basically this kind of form. And he’s trying to explain to you how to interpret, or what the goal is in understanding the Jewish sources. He’s only trying to show you parallel phenomena in places where perhaps you wouldn’t expect them, even among the Greeks themselves. Now later in this passage he basically draws here an onion of three shells, or a core with two shells. There is the act, which is the outer shell—that’s what happens, the parable or the act. Inside it are traits and proper or improper modes of conduct, and deeper within that is a philosophical root. Yes, he speaks here about natural wisdoms, divine wisdoms, and so on. Natural science, laws of nature, from his point of view belong to the inner philosophical core. Now we have to notice here that the relationship between these three things is usually understood by us as though this is how people today create a parable in our world: we found a nice story that also illustrates this idea. He is not talking about such a concept. He says that this really exists inside the story. It’s not that by chance we found a story that can, completely accidentally, illustrate that other thing. The claim is more than that. Within every practical thing—we already talked about this in previous times—if there is a true idea, it always has a practical expression. And the opposite is also true. If there is an act that serves as a parable for something, then that something is inside it. It’s not some arbitrary combination of an act that happens to express something else. For example, Abraham our father represents the trait of kindness. Right? Now usually the conception is that he had some trait, that he performed acts of kindness and all kinds of things like that. So we also discussed this a bit in the Maharal classes at the beginning of the year: kindness is not a trait. Kindness is a force in creation. Kindness is a mode of conduct. Abraham our father does not symbolize it; he is it. The higher root of Abraham our father is the trait of kindness itself. It’s not that he is characterized by the trait of kindness. There is a force in the world above, in the spiritual worlds, called the force of kindness or the trait of kindness. That force finds expression in the practical world in the figure called Abraham our father. Now when Abraham our father did a certain act and we learn from it something about the mode of operation of the force of kindness, this is not learning by way of parable, as though by chance we found an act that helps us convey the idea to you because otherwise it’s hard for me to convey it to you. It’s not that. The act is the lower description of what is really happening above, what the trait of kindness did above when Abraham our father went below. And it’s the same thing. Meaning, this is one entity whose spiritual part is the force of kindness and whose… This parable, it’s some nice story that in some way describes another idea. Over there you didn’t think of that idea, and it’s not that we don’t grasp that this is part of them. But it helps me somehow convey things to you in the form of parable. A parable that also serves as an example—is that what the Rabbi is saying? Yes, yes, an example, exactly. But here I’m not talking about an example. The force of kindness itself is Abraham our father. Simply, within the force of kindness there are also emanation, creation, formation, action, right? The force of kindness—its feet in the world of action are simply what we call Abraham our father. That’s not an example. Here too kindness is expressed. It’s not an example. It is that itself. What does that mean, something actual? It’s like a pattern. Not an example of an example. It finds expression, as it were. Yes, yes, something external. No, it is that itself. Again. And that itself—not that it is expressed. It is the trait of kindness as it is perceived in this world with the eyes. How do you see kindness with the eyes, with physical eyes? You look at Abraham our father, and then you see the trait of kindness with your eyes. The trait of kindness in the intellect is simply someone who is kindly in his actions. Exactly. Abraham is the trait of kindness. That means he is kindness itself; we didn’t just happen to find someone who really describes for me nicely what kindness is. The fact that he performs acts of kindness—what? It’s not. We said that performing acts of kindness is in general a very external implementation of kindness. Kindness is something much more inward than doing acts of kindness. Kindness is a beginning, creation something-from-nothing. An act that arises from a person’s inner drive, not according to… that is called kindness. The shaping of that thing as the very trait of kindness in the world of action is Abraham our father. Not only Abraham our father—and not only Abraham our father. What do you mean, he is an example in the sense that he is a force called kindness. Now there are many people who also draw from that, like a priest—it’s called the father of the trait of kindness. The father of the trait of kindness, root. Just as Abraham is the root of kindness, Isaac is the root of strength, and Jacob is the root of beauty / harmony. What does “root” mean? Root means that it is he himself, meaning it is kindness itself. Everything else is the fruit of that root, the branches of that root. Is the Rabbi referring to Abraham himself as someone from whom there is drawing, while there is abstract kindness? There isn’t “there is”; it is he. The person himself is a whole stature. The person himself is not located only in the world of action. A person exists in action, in formation, in creation, in emanation, and upward to who knows where. When that force met him, it led him to that place. It is he. What do you mean “met him”? It is he, he is Abraham. No, he is not Abraham. What is Abraham? Is Abraham molecules? That personality—what is that personality? What is the Rabbi going to say now? The spiritual force in Abraham is Abraham, not molecules. The soul, I don’t know what to call it. The force of kindness. It’s not something else; it is that. It’s the same thing. And because of that, when there is someone who does acts of kindness, a man of kindness, I benefit because I… there is in him something of kindness itself. Abrahamic, or like Abraham, or he is a certain stature. A stature. Just as I draw from Abraham in some particular measure of stature. Right, exactly, he draws from Abraham. In his emanative level he draws from the force of kindness in emanation. And this goes all along the whole stature. Why specifically Abraham in this case? Because that’s the whole point: bringing all the spiritual things down into the world of action. Abraham is his full stature—after all, he is its feet. But everything that happens above has expression below, because everything is an expression of each other. So what I drew from Abraham, the trait of kindness above drew from Abraham’s trait of kindness. This happens throughout the whole stature. Why must it necessarily be drawing from Abraham? Why can’t it be simple and direct in him? He is the root. That is exactly the point. He is the root. Just as you see Abraham as a figure with feet in the world of action and a head of kindness, wholly kindness within the world, so too any person who is a man of kindness is the same thing, the same pattern. Simply put, up to this point I completely agree, but I’m still a bit stuck, because Abraham is the root of kindness, and even if I am a man of kindness, I’m not the root of kindness, I’m only his branch. Abraham as root—that’s the trait of kindness itself. What do you mean? Abraham is the horseness—we talked yesterday about the Platonic ideas. Who was talking? Chanokh, I spoke with you yesterday about this, the root, about the Platonic ideas, right? Horseness itself exists in a spiritual world. It finds expression in this world through concrete horses, right? Now the same with kindness, only in Abraham. Only in Abraham? Yes. Because horseness itself—not the… Again, horseness itself also has expression in this world, that’s according to Plato. According to Plato the ideas are only above, and here there are only concrete objects, and all concrete objects belong to essences that draw from that idea above. Here there is a different conception. The idea above as it exists below—horseness exists below, not the horse. Horseness is Abraham our father. Do you understand? Kindness is the idea; Abraham is the horseness of kindness and he… If that is the idea of kindness, then you draw from him. But Abraham died. So where did it go? When Abraham died, where did it go? To Isaac. After Isaac passed away, it went to Jacob. After it received form, received some… you can already transmit it, you can already copy-paste it. In that sense Abraham is the father of the nation; Abraham is its root. The Vilna Gaon writes—and that’s a question—that in every generation all the figures exist. The Gaon writes that in every generation there is Abraham our father, there is Moses our teacher, there is Jacob our father. This whole structure, the spiritual structure of the world. We talked about this responsum of the Rashba with the ban, which appears on the next page, those who think that Abraham and Sarah are matter and form, and that it was an allegory, against which the Rashba protested. So we already discussed that this is true. The ban is on them, not on something else. The conception is correct. Now if this really is the structure of the world, the structure of the world in the spiritual sense remains. The fact that we populate it with different figures—that is written in many places. A thousand generations, meaning that in every generation it is exactly the same. It takes this generation, certainly, certainly. Certainly. And that is the great message of this universality, that every generation is built in exactly the same way spiritually, from the forces that are expressed here. Every generation is composed of everything, meaning every figure you read about in the Torah exists in every generation. And that is also basically the root of the conception that you cannot separate one person from another. The connection of one person with another cannot be directly from the physical part of him. Why there? Why from there does he draw from him? You asked the same question. No, the person in him. The person in him is the person, not molecules. It’s some root-stature. So why there do you draw from him? Let him be like you—so what’s the difference between you and him? In the root-stature. Just as… and that’s not exactly the point here. There is a root-stature whose head is in the upper worlds and whose feet are in the lower worlds. That is exactly the point. What are all these allegories saying? Basically this is also how the philosophers, and all this Averroist knowledge that sees Abraham and Isaac as matter and form—what are they actually saying? They’re saying there is here the power of matter, of form, of kindness, of some trait here in the world. Because when you bring the spiritual worlds down below, it’s not like Plato, who brings down horseness and turns it into horses. That is not bringing anything down below. We bring horseness itself down below. Do you understand? It’s a different world. That’s it. That is the allegorical conception, the conception that all these figures are symbols of forces. They are not examples of forces. They are the forces themselves. When one says Abraham and Sarah are matter and form, and that in each of us there are aspects of matter and form, I suppose, and all… there are various aspects—what is special about Abraham and Sarah? That they are matter and form themselves. Do you understand? Meaning, they are the thing itself. They are matter and form and the matter of matter and form, as it were. Meaning, they are the thing itself. They are the matter of matter and form. You need to understand that according to this conception, you don’t need to be some great genius to write a parable, for example. Because everything is a parable. Meaning, if there is some act here, an act of kindness for example, or an act with Torah value, say, once you look at it you can also look at the idea behind it because it really is there. And today we understand this as though you really found a nice thing—meaning, you have an act and you matched it to an idea, and look, you found a successful parable. Every act is a successful parable. Because every thing that is an act has an idea behind it. Every thing that is a true idea has expression in a pattern of action. We talked about this when we spoke about the practical difference down to the smallest details here. Meaning, behind everything—and this is the whole conception here—that everything in the practical world represents an idea. It’s not that we happened to find a parable. Everything is a parable. The Ari ruled like Maimonides, even though Maimonides was perhaps the Jew farthest from the Ari’s spiritual world that one could imagine. The Ari ruled like Maimonides against all the kabbalists who came before him. Why? Because if you correctly grasp Jewish law on the revealed plane, then you state the law correctly, meaning it also fits the hidden plane. And one who understands the hidden plane—it won’t help him; if you understand the revealed plane all the way through, you’ll also hit the target. Because the correspondence is necessary, simply because when you know the hidden, you know the revealed and you manage to align them. If you work completely correctly in the revealed, then it automatically matches the hidden, because it is already inside it. You don’t need to do it artificially, to take the hidden and attach the revealed to it. If you work with the revealed correctly, the hidden is already there. It’s not that there’s an accidental connection, some correspondence you create. On the practical plane you can work only from the revealed plane, as most halakhic decisors do. And so too in responsa. But then they’ll ask: if sometimes we have contradictions between the hidden and the revealed, between the Magen Avraham in the laws of tefillin, who says that when there is a dispute between the hidden and the revealed, then the law follows the revealed—why does he say that, of course? Because there is revealed and hidden. When the hidden disputes this very rule itself, the question is according to whom the law follows in that dispute. But that is the definition of revealed and hidden. Yes. But how does such a situation actually happen? It happens probably because of incorrect use of one of them; I don’t know which, but one of them. Correct use should have fit completely. Fine, so the whole dispute is that they didn’t use it correctly. Fine, that’s another question; still, there are seventy facets—different things are true. Certainly, true, seventy facets are full of it, yes. There’s still a lot more to continue with here; we’ll get to it in due time. But the thing again—they say stature, again a full stature—the upper part of the person that even if it is whole, still has an external part, the external part—no, there is no such thing. No, of course it’s a little complicated—it’s complicated, fine. But in terms of the fact that there is some… not that it exists in a higher world and does not find expression in the practical world. There is no such thing. No, there are situations in which I am not doing kindness; that doesn’t mean that at a given moment the concept of kindness does not exist within me. What? So where—what is the spark of kindness? This is exactly what people mean when they say the teachings distort—no, but not the spiritual person, not that you ruin… It could be that you did kindness and you didn’t do kindness. No, but we are talking about Torah, not that you did kindness. So where is the kindness that we have in Torah? Meaning, that it exists in potential all the time. When something exists in potential, then that’s exactly… Or maybe it doesn’t exist at all? No, it’s not that it doesn’t exist; that aspect exists in your personality even though you are not engaging it now. Because it says “a Torah of kindness,” because there is a Torah of kindness and a Torah that is not of kindness. Even when teaching Torah one can do kindness. It may be that in my soul, someone who really has kindness within him—there is no act of his that isn’t somehow bound up with kindness. I don’t know; that’s already psychology, I don’t know. The Ramchal, in the introduction to Ein Yaakov—there at the beginning of volume one of Ein Yaakov there are a few essays on aggadah, and one of them is by the Ramchal. The Ramchal writes there a similar idea. He talks about the scientific mistakes that one sometimes sees in the Sages. And he says that the Sages did not intend to make some scientific statement here; rather, the scientific statement came to express some idea, and the idea is formulated in the scientific truths that existed in their time. But I’m not sure he meant to say that they knew the real scientific truth and simply chose to mislead the public because—I mean that this was their purpose. They don’t mind using it as if… it’s an apology for why they don’t know quantum theory. I don’t think that’s the point. It’s simply a true principle: their goal was not scientific; their goal was to convey the idea. And the fact that they use a scientific principle is only in order to wrap the idea; they use the scientific principle in use at that period, like the theory of the four elements. That’s what we said. Right. So what is written here, actually? What’s written here, in effect, is that you can convey a true idea through false science. That somewhat contradicts what we said here, I think. Right, seemingly there is no such thing. Like the Alter Rebbe writes in the Tanya, he often uses fire, earth, wind, and all that. He says fine, it doesn’t matter—through that he explains some idea, even though all that is not physically correct. So there regarding fire, wind, and earth, I think it is true, but regarding other things, that really is a problem and I don’t know what to do with it. So I think that scientific mistakes are simply scientific mistakes. The only question is whether they also truly represent an incorrect idea; that is already a much more far-reaching question. Every Torah of kindness—I don’t know, I’m saying this as a remark, what I said; I don’t know. The thought structure of someone who arrived at mistaken ideas still operates according to the same basic pattern as the thought structure of other scientists who in the end arrived at those ideas, and only the fact that it isn’t correct shows something else. So what represents the idea is not the scientific fact but the mode of operation of their intellect. But they conveyed to me a scientific fact, and not in practice the mode of operation of the intellect. Right. And that doesn’t represent it, and it isn’t an essential contradiction to what is true, because the fact itself is not precise in the world, it isn’t true in this world. Maybe it could be for me—meaning, that it is something possible. I think you cannot hide something true inside something false. I simply don’t believe that. I really don’t believe that, and perhaps the Nazir didn’t either. I don’t know how to reconcile these two things, and I will say that at these points there were mistakes in the spiritual world. I don’t know. Let’s summarize for a moment what is actually written here in the second part of the paragraph. Within every act, within every fact in the real world, two things are hidden inside in actuality. It’s not a parable, not an allegory in the usual sense. They are actually hidden inside that thing. Now it’s interesting that he says this about Greek mythology, not about the Sages. You understand that if one says this about Greek mythology, then either you say that they have the same wisdom as the Sages, or you say what we said: that you don’t need to be wise for this. If you say a true act, one that grips me in some way, then it already hides something true behind it. That doesn’t mean the authors of the mythology also intended all these things. But clearly, if there was some act here that grips me on the realistic level—say it’s interesting to read as a story, simply interesting, it grips me—then it’s a sign that behind it there is also a true idea. But it’s hard to say that, no? There are lots of funny things or things like that. I’m not talking about a true fact. Mythology isn’t true, or almost all of it isn’t. But I mean that the fact that it has narrative success doesn’t come from nowhere; it doesn’t come out of emptiness. It means that in the other, more inward onion-layers, there is also something true inside this business. Apparently it comes to illuminate something for me. What does “public acceptance” mean? What does “public acceptance” mean? That the fact that among the Greeks this is received as successful literature indicates… Public acceptance here is an indication. Right. Let’s see exactly how this enters here. He says: “Also the words of the first masters of philosophy of the new Jewish philosophy championed this Greek mythology.” That means the ancient rhetoricians in their words did not intend only one matter but many. I’m not sure I agree with him regarding the authors of the mythology themselves. Where does the Nazir agree with him? Let’s look at the passage where the level beyond the parable, that is not the thing itself, is located. One of the parables contained under rhetoric and prosody, etc., and I prefaced it—but as you heard regarding Abraham, that he is kindness itself, where does that claim find expression here? Here: “they did not intend only one matter but many. They first placed on the level of plain meaning, within outer rhetoric, a story of some matter; afterward, in that same story, they placed, like a more inward shell, a moral matter useful to a person in his character traits; and besides these, in those very things they hinted at some true wisdom from natural, astronomical, or divine matters.” The parable here is not anything on the side of those three; it is only the means through which one can encounter all three. No, obviously. I said: in the previous passage we saw—and not only in the previous passage, but where he talked about the inner waters in section 7—and there we saw a conception that every intellectual thing that has a true metaphysical aspect must necessarily have expression in the practical world. Therefore one should understand this here as well not in the sense of “merely as a parable.” Rather in a necessary way, in the sense that it is really inside. Not in the sense that I happened to succeed in matching the parable and the moral. Rather, the moral is built in inside. There is no act that is true, or that speaks to me on the narrative level, that doesn’t also have all the other layers behind it. They come automatically. It’s not because I sat down and built it correctly and thus managed artistically to push all three things into one thing. Rather, within every one thing there are automatically packed two more inward onion-layers. This comes out of here, it comes out of what we said before. And I’m saying that in light of this one can maybe understand how he can say such things about Greek mythology. I’m not so sure I really believe that those who composed Greek mythology also thought about all the onion-layers. But precisely in such a conception, that really no longer matters. Maimonides too did not think about the hidden. He ruled on the revealed plane. But built in within his ruling there also sits a correct understanding in the hidden plane. Not because he thought and managed to coordinate them, but because these things must appear that way. The Holy One, blessed be He, embedded creation in such a way that every true spiritual thing finds expression in the practical world. So automatically, if you succeeded in composing a good story, then automatically there is already something true and important behind it. Do you understand? That’s the point. But here he is speaking only about the level of the plain meaning, very often stories that are grasped by the people and are really simple, meaning all kinds of things that don’t work. So if there is no thing that is grasped and doesn’t have something true in it, then why is it that the true thing without shells doesn’t catch on with many people—and besides, that’s only a minority—and the exaggerated thing and all that? Then apparently you didn’t represent it correctly. If you had brought the right story, it would have caught people. It would not have represented the true thing. Then you didn’t manage to represent the true thing. Fine, what time is it now? Quarter past six. Let’s just take a quick look at the next page, in section 32 in the notes, simply as a continuation of the discussion now.