The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 10
This transcription was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- An essential connection between parable and meaning, and the necessity of embodiment in action
- “By way of parable” in different wisdom traditions, and reservation about including philosophers too broadly
- The Rashba controversy, Maimonides, allegory in Torah narratives, and concern about implications for commandments
- Foundational myths, emotional investment in factuality, and the meaning of history
- Truth, rooting in reality, and a one-to-one correspondence between idea and event
- Torah versus philosophy: events as the mode of transmission and the essence of the approach
- Was Job real or not, and the possibility of a parable without an actual occurrence
- Custom, folklore, and symbol: “there’s no such thing as folklore”
- The law of large numbers, statistics as an “invisible hand,” and economics
- Maimonides’ boundaries between aggadah and Torah, and the line between faith and heresy
- Prophecy, the prophets’ parables, and visions as revelation of realities
- Cryptic writing, chapter headings, and non-systematic presentation as part of the nature of wisdom
- Maimonides versus “the Nazir”: human limitation or a higher mode of perception
Summary
General Overview
The text presents a view according to which parable and symbol are not just external examples, but are essentially connected to what they signify, because every true idea must become embodied in concrete action in the world, and every meaningful act carries within it the hidden content behind it, even if a person is unaware of it. From there, it discusses the controversies surrounding allegorical interpretation of the Torah and aggadah, the Rashba’s ban on philosophy studies and on allegorizing Torah stories, and the distinction between Maimonides’ approach to the aggadot of the Sages and the question of the historical plain meaning of Torah narratives. It then argues that the damage done by the allegorists is not only an educational danger but a kind of heresy regarding the real-world dimension of Torah, because in Judaism truth must have a root in reality, and every idea must have a one-to-one historical representation, unlike a Platonic model in which ideas exist only above. The text goes on to discuss the meaning of customs and how they become rooted, the question of whether “Job existed or did not exist,” the “invisible hand” and the statistical law of large numbers as an image of a guiding hand, and finally cryptic and non-systematic writing in Maimonides and others as a claim that concealing secrets is not necessarily intentional but follows from the nature of wisdom and the way truth is apprehended.
An Essential Connection Between Parable and Meaning, and the Necessity of Embodiment in Action
A parable is understood as being essentially connected to what it signifies, not as an incidental external example. Every true idea must find expression in the practical world, and therefore parables arise on their own out of meaningful acts, especially acts that the Torah or the Sages chose to mention. Every meaningful act automatically points to all the hidden layers behind it, and the correspondence between act and idea is like a puzzle whose pieces belong together even when a person is not aware of it.
“By Way of Parable” in Different Wisdom Traditions, and Reservation About Including Philosophers Too Broadly
A note is quoted: “Indeed, this path of parable characterizes wisdom in its pure form throughout all its periods, even in ancient and modern Jewish philosophy, the Alexandrians, the Spanish thinkers, the kabbalists, and the investigators of generations and new realities, that is, the researchers.” The speaker is uneasy with the claim that the parabolic mode is also characteristic of philosophy, and argues that Jewish philosophers at times wrote in much the same way as ordinary philosophers, and that it is not clear what justifies including them in this list. It is argued that the Alexandrian allegorical method comes not from a distancing from the Torah’s own concern, but from seeing the Torah as profound wisdom, and this is connected as well to the interpretive scheme of peshat, remez, derash, sod, especially in the midrash of the Zohar and in Rabbi Isaac Arama, noting that he was attacked by philosophizers who relied on “the Rabbi of the Guide.”
The Rashba Controversy, Maimonides, Allegory in Torah Narratives, and Concern About Implications for Commandments
The polemic against allegorical interpretation of the Torah is presented, such as reading “Abraham and Sarah as matter and form,” along with the Rashba’s ban even on studying philosophy before age twenty-five. The question is raised: why is this a problem, if Maimonides himself says not everything is literal? A distinction is then drawn between the aggadot of the Sages and the events of the Torah themselves. Maimonides, in his introduction to Perek Helek, is described as dividing people into three groups: the fools who believe because they take everything literally, the wicked who reject because they take everything literally, and the wise who understand that many things are parable, especially regarding the aggadot of the Sages, where “an incident that happened” is not necessarily a historical event but comes to teach something. The text describes how Maimonidean circles slid into allegorical readings of the Torah itself, and from there asks why the events need to be real if the goal is the message, along with the concern that interpretive freedom in the stories will spill over into the commandments, to the point of saying that the commandments too are only parable—which is what the Rashba did not want to allow.
Foundational Myths, Emotional Investment in Factuality, and the Meaning of History
An analogy is drawn to the myth of Trumpeldor and the sentence “It is good to die for our land,” as against the possibility that he actually uttered a Russian curse. The question is asked why both sides are emotionally attached to the event itself and not only to the values it teaches. Why do those who challenge the myth bother attacking its factual basis, and why are its defenders not satisfied with saying that the message alone is enough? This is tied to the broader question of why a real event is needed in order to convey a moral message.
Truth, Rooting in Reality, and a One-to-One Correspondence Between Idea and Event
It is argued that something true must have a root in reality, and especially with regard to Torah there is a clear demand that a true idea be embodied in a practical event. A two-way movement is presented: behind every act there lies an idea, and behind every idea there lies an act. The worlds are “connected” in such a way that everything that happens below has a root above, and vice versa, in a complete one-to-one correspondence. The distinction from Plato is put this way: for Plato, “horseness” exists above and horses below, whereas here “horseness itself is also down here”—meaning the idea itself requires concrete representation in the world of action. Abraham is described as representing the very attribute of kindness, “the father of the attribute of kindness,” the root of kindness, and not merely someone kind to a certain degree.
Torah Versus Philosophy: Events as the Mode of Transmission and the Essence of the Approach
It is argued that the Torah does not present detached theoretical ideas, but conveys the metaphysical layer through concrete events, and in so doing also conveys the approach itself—that there are no abstract ideas without practical embodiment. The claim is that one can agree with philosophical ideas, but if they remain in the abstract plane, “then you’re a philosopher,” whereas the Jewish view demands embodiment within “bodies, within acting people, within objects, within historical events.” The Maharal’s conception is mentioned: analyzing a historical event has a causal-scientific layer and also a layer of representative meaning, and everything is supposed to represent and be a kind of essence rather than something detached.
Was Job Real or Not, and the Possibility of a Parable Without an Actual Occurrence
The Talmudic discussion of Job is brought, including the formulation: “Rabbi Yohanan said that Job did not exist and was not created, but was only a parable.” It is argued that the question is not interesting merely as historical investigation, but as a clarification of whether a message requires actual occurrence, or whether a parable that was not a real event is enough. One possibility raised is that even someone who says Job did not exist could still agree in principle that meaningful events ought to be realized in practice, and that Job serves as a fictional figure teaching what should have happened, along with discussion of whether this ties into the question of “can such a thing happen in reality?”
Custom, Folklore, and Symbol: “There’s No Such Thing as Folklore”
It is argued that on a deep level, “there’s no such thing as folklore,” and that a symbol is not some detached emotional thing, but an essential act representing something essential. So if in some place people cooked something on Lag BaOmer, then either there is a meaning behind it, or it is “just nonsense”—there is no middle category of an empty symbol. A view of the validity of custom is presented according to which the fact that a custom becomes rooted over time points to an inner truth, along with the assumption that “the public—leave them be, they are the children of prophets,” so that something experienced over time as service of God by a God-serving community becomes binding. The text distinguishes between new phenomena from “five minutes ago,” which are speculative, and customs two hundred years old, which inspire much greater trust, and describes discussion of criteria such as “a generation” and “the majority of the public,” not as mathematical measures but as an evolutionary principle of survival over time.
The Law of Large Numbers, Statistics as an “Invisible Hand,” and Economics
The example is given of a die being rolled “six billion times” and reaching an equal distribution, described as a “real wonder” of the law of large numbers, and as a “law that is a phenomenon of nature.” The speaker describes a paradox in which on the macro level we know what the result will be, but on the micro level it is hard to explain how each roll somehow “knows” to arrange itself so that a one-sixth distribution emerges. From here an image is drawn of “providence, the invisible hand,” and the economic theory of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman is mentioned, according to which lack of government intervention allows the market to reach a natural equilibrium. A claim is made about the “years of exile” and the Israeli instinct to bypass regulations, alongside the statement that the invisible hand does not happen by itself but is connected to the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world with rules of providence that do not intervene, yet “in the end will sort them out,” while noting that many disagree with this.
Maimonides’ Boundaries Between Aggadah and Torah, and the Line Between Faith and Heresy
The speaker presents himself as leaning toward the position that aggadot of the Sages that do not claim factual things are probably not factual, but says that regarding the Torah itself, “I don’t know,” and is not sure where the line runs. He rejects a formulation according to which the parable is a reality “and there is no essential connection between the parable and what it signifies, and it’s only a parable in the plain sense,” and argues that Maimonides “certainly did not hold that in any full sense,” while emphasizing the difficulty of defining the boundary between metaphorical parable and heresy. It is argued that even significant heresy “represents something real that has a root” and does not exist for its own sake, and the Reform movement is given as an example of something that represents “something real” but went “down crooked paths,” with the speaker deliberately leaving the exact definitions somewhat unclear.
Prophecy, the Prophets’ Parables, and Visions as Revelation of Realities
Reference is made to prophetic parables such as “the parable of the vine, the parable of the vineyard, the parable of the eagles,” and it is said that prophetic visions include “wild things” that are “the essence of the world of Atzilut.” It is argued that the prophetic parable is not merely description but the seeing of realities, and that what looks to the reader like a parable is, for the prophet, a sensory apprehension of a world inaccessible to ordinary sense. This is connected to the fact that Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, distinguishes between types of parables, and an example is brought of “the parable of the harlot woman and the parable of matter,” as a point of entry for understanding prophecy and its purposes.
Cryptic Writing, Chapter Headings, and Non-Systematic Presentation as Part of the Nature of Wisdom
A passage from Maimonides’ introduction to the Guide is quoted: “Let not the reader expect from me, nor hope, that when I mention one subject I will complete it… it is enough for the intelligent person to incline this for years… and you already know that the Account of Creation is natural science, and the Account of the Chariot is divine science… do not ask of me anything beyond chapter headings, and even those headings are not arranged, nor one after another, but scattered and intermingled with other subjects.” The text presents an interpretation according to which the disorder is not necessarily “in order to conceal from the masses of readers,” as is attributed to Gersonides, but rather a necessity imposed by the content itself. In the name of the Efodi it is said that the matter “appears and peeks out and then disappears again, as though that is simply its nature,” and therefore a sage “will speak of it only in parables and riddles.” The position of Akedat Yitzhak on the red heifer is also brought, according to which the Torah “does not intentionally conceal anything,” but there are things that simply cannot be written explicitly—”whoever understands will understand.”
Maimonides Versus “the Nazir”: Human Limitation or a Higher Mode of Perception
A question is raised whether Maimonides sees the non-systematic character as a human limitation due to “the shortness of our understanding,” using the image of “mountaintops” above water that hide the unified connection underneath, or as an essential feature of the right way to grasp wisdom. In contrast, a conception attributed to “the Nazir” is described, according to which non-systematic perception is “the higher perception” and not a limitation, while systematic description is inherently limited. The text connects this also to the form of halakhic writing and to the idea that scientific perception is an outside view by means of comparison and classification, whereas grasping essence is a singular perception of the thing “as apprehended from within the thing itself,” culminating in a description of knowledge as a kind of “swallowing” that is not the result of limited understanding but of complete knowing, and the discussion comes to a stop at that point.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The conception of parable, the symbolism he’s talking about, isn’t just a conception of parable in the sense of “by way of parable.” He says the parable is essentially connected to what it signifies. It’s not just some external example of the thing it points to. And really, within every idea—every true idea—there has to be expression in the practical world, in actuality. And therefore, in effect, the parables arise on their own. Meaning: every act that happens in the world, maybe every meaningful act—it’s hard for me to give too many examples here—but every meaningful act, certainly acts in the Torah or acts the Sages chose to point out, automatically also points to all the hidden things behind it. It’s not that there’s some accidental relation here between the parable and what it signifies. Rather, it’s like a puzzle that contains these things within it. Sometimes the person isn’t even aware of it, and still those things are there. And allegory or parable, according to the conception he’s offering here—we read in note 13 below something in the translator’s wording about wisdom, that it too proceeds through parable. Let’s look at note 13. “Indeed, this path of parable characterizes wisdom in its pure form throughout all its periods, even in ancient and modern Jewish philosophy, the Alexandrians, the Spanish thinkers, the kabbalists, and the investigators of generations and new realities, that is, the researchers.” Now, philosophy—again, I’m not entirely clear what he means when he says this parabolic path is characteristic also of philosophy. That doesn’t always seem true. I mean, philosophers—certainly Jewish philosophers too—did write in a way very similar to ordinary philosophers. We already talked about this a bit when he said that basically they begin with what’s written and only afterward formulate their philosophy on the basis of the verse. But that’s not exactly the method of parable. I mean, I don’t see—even though we’ll see in the next note that he also refers to Maimonides, who wrote the Guide—even so, I don’t see the essential difference between that and the writing of non-Jewish philosophers. It’s not fully clear to me why he includes Jewish philosophers in this list too. “The Alexandrian allegorical path does not come, as some say, from having distanced themselves from the Torah’s own concern, but because they saw in it profound wisdom, like the words of the great figures of modern Jewish religious philosophy or the neo-Kantian school. Similarly, the midrashic Pardes—peshat, remez, derash, sod—and especially the midrash of the Zohar, on which Rabbi Isaac Arama also relied in his philosophical work together with Torah. Although he was attacked by many of the philosophizers who mocked the allegorical approach and relied on the Rabbi of the Guide.” Here there’s a point that I think is important to understand, and it relates to what we’re learning here. You’re familiar with the controversy around the Rashba—
[Speaker B] where he comes out—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] against those who interpret the Torah allegorically—Abraham and Sarah as matter and form, that’s the famous example—and there are several allegorical interpretations of the Torah there, and the Rashba put those people under a ban. More than that, he also banned all those who study philosophy before the age of twenty-five. He declared a ban on the study of philosophy, saying it was forbidden before age twenty-five. The question is: what exactly is the problem? After all, what they said was that they were relying on Maimonides. That’s Maimonides, who explains that one should not necessarily learn everything literally, but allegorically. But there is the qualification we mentioned—that it’s not at all certain that Maimonides really applies that also to the events of the Torah, to what the Torah itself describes. Maimonides is known, in his introductions to the Talmud, in Perek Helek there—it’s well known that he writes about three groups: the fools, the wicked, and the wise. The fools are those who take everything literally and therefore believe it. The wicked are those who take everything literally and therefore don’t believe it. And the wise are those who understand that not everything is literal, that many things are parable. But that’s with respect to the aggadot of the Sages. Not everything that appears in the Talmud, some incident that happened, necessarily really happened exactly that way. Maimonides really rejects taking all those stories he describes there in the Talmud literally. But those events, of course, have some sort of parable within them—they are there to say something, not to describe an event. Because in the end, the event itself really doesn’t interest us—what happened and what didn’t happen. Clearly, even if it did happen, everything that is told comes to teach us something. Now if it’s being brought in order to teach me something, then it’s less important whether it actually was. So what’s the problem if someone comes and says that all of it is parable—even the Torah? Here, the perception is that these philosophical Maimonidean circles got carried away with the Torah itself. And when it comes to the Torah itself, that’s already a completely different story. After all, whether Abraham and Sarah really existed—that really does matter to me. Doesn’t it? Or maybe it doesn’t? What interests me is what I can learn from what happened there, right? So if the whole purpose of the Torah as it was written is only to teach me something that emerges from the events, then why should I care whether the events really happened or were only a vehicle for passing on the message? And therefore, apparently, and quite clearly, from the Guide they came to the conclusion that one doesn’t need to accept even the Torah’s words in their plain sense; maybe these too are just parables meant to convey this or that philosophical message. So what really is the problem? What is the problem? I remember we talked about myths—the Trojan myth and all those kinds of things. What was the problem we talked about? Why do you go and shatter foundational myths, when really the whole significance of a myth is the message it conveys and not the act itself? Yes, the myth of Trumpeldor: “It is good to die for our land.” Whether he uttered a Russian curse there or whether he said, “It is good to die for our land,” in the end the point of the myth is to educate, say, the citizens of the state to self-sacrifice for the public, or for establishing the state, or defending the state, whatever—it conveys sacrifice for the public, like with Trumpeldor. So then the question is: whether Trumpeldor existed or not. And if he didn’t, then what? In the end I’m using him as a device for transmitting a message, just as aggadic stories are narrative stories. So what’s the issue? Why all these emotions on both sides? Why do those who challenge the myth bother challenging this myth of Trumpeldor not on the value level—meaning, they don’t say, “We don’t agree with these values”—rather they say, “Trumpeldor never existed,” or “That statement of his never existed.” And those who defend it say no. They don’t say, “Fine, what do I care whether he existed or not? What interests me is the story as something that can educate me toward civic values or Religious Zionist values here in the state—what do I care whether he existed or not?” Both sides are somehow very emotionally attached also to the event itself, not only to the moral content. Why? Why is it so important that there be an event in order to convey the value message? And my question regarding Maimonides’ words isn’t about the… The problem there wasn’t that he wanted some moral meaning in things, but rather that it simply got carried away because of… too much interpretive freedom regarding Torah stories. Meaning, first of all a person has to observe Torah commandments, and what matters there is that the commandments are binding. That’s stage one. Now if we accepted the notion that things are parabolic, then everyone could come and interpret the Torah however he likes, everyone could invent some ideology and attach it to this or that event. Interpretation is never objective. There’s some boundary, there has to be some boundary. Exactly—the Torah in its interpretation: whether I interpret a fact or I interpret a parable, that has significance. Interpretation always asks what lay at the root of the act that Abraham our forefather did, or Sarah did, or Moses did. That’s interpretation. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that extra merit, and in effect the Holy One, blessed be He, gives us the land. You’re saying we’re the children of matter and form, not the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and by that merit the Holy One, blessed be He, gives us the land? Yes, that too. On the interpretive plane, we’re in court, we represent a certain conception, and by virtue of that the Holy One, blessed be He, gives us the right to the land.
[Speaker B] The right to the land is also us and also the roots, of course—the right to the land in the sense, I don’t know, the right to the land in the sense—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] allegorical, you know, it’s allegorical. So now what? Now what? Try to grasp that point. Every time you understand what happened, so what? Then it didn’t happen? When you say that taking the Land of Israel means—
[Speaker B] means grasping the inner meaning of the Land of Israel as a symbol, does that mean not conquering it at all?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Allegory. You’re moving here from the level of symbols to the level of commandments. The moment you talk about symbols on the plane of events, you can say that the commandments too are parable. That he didn’t want. Now there is—and maybe this is what I meant, I’m not sure—it could be that this was the Rashba’s concern, that he was afraid only of the move from interpretive freedom toward the commandments. But there the hero of what happened there isn’t the point. Still, there was somehow a fear that it would move in the direction of the commandments, and then you’d get a total removal of responsibility here. But Maimonides really says that there’s a principled issue here in the question whether it happened or whether it was only a parable. On the level of straightforward interpretation—and here, if you’ve given interpretation up to a certain point, meaning in the end if there’s some process and someone writes it in a reasonable way, you won’t be able to interpret it too wildly. But the moment you have a parable, what it signifies can have countless facets, and that’s part of the distortions that can arise.
[Speaker B] As opposed to the fact that the person really—you can’t say it wasn’t things, you know there was a person, if—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] if it’s a symbol, then you’re saying it didn’t happen, it’s all theory. And that brings us back to the question of what truth is. Is there a claim that what we’re saying here isn’t true? Until now we’ve only talked about the dangers, right? But beyond the dangers, the question is: what is true? If the truth is that there was no Abraham and Sarah, and they only represent matter and form, then okay, it’s very dangerous—but what difference does it make? We asked a different question. We said: the Rashba held this and Maimonides held that—what difference does it make? So clearly—well, not clearly, but there is a difference in the plain meaning and in the implications up to a certain level. The interpretation here will come in any case, according to his view. Interpretation has to give meaning to the fact. The meaning of facts is a bit different from the meaning of parables. As long as I am bound by what emerges from these parables or these facts—if I’m not bound, I can be unbound by either of them. That’s my own choice, whether I feel subject to what emerges from the Torah. But if I do feel subject to it, then what difference does it make whether it’s only a parable or whether it really happened? Why does that produce such a sense of obligation? I don’t know. And even within aggadot there can be halakhic consequences. Maybe that’s part of the fear too. But why? Is there such a difference? Let’s go to the most extreme case—to a completely allegorical story. That’s already something totally different. Here you need proof that there was someone who really existed, not one of the people who just knew him. And that’s what the Rashba wants to say. He says there is a living person here, one like this, in whom this found expression—it’s more than just theory. No, the question is what the truth is. Is there a claim that what we’re saying isn’t true? Until now we’ve only discussed the dangers, right? But beyond the dangers, the question is the truth. If the truth is that there was no Abraham and Sarah, and they only represent matter and form, then yes, it’s very dangerous. But we asked a different question—we said the Rashba held this and Maimonides held that, so what difference does it make? So clearly—well, not clearly—there is a difference in the plain sense and the implications. Where does the Rashba get the certainty to determine this, and why specifically here? Those are two questions. How did the Rashba reach the conclusion that this is allegory? Here it’s simple. Here the question is whether they dealt with the pile—no, here there is no problem with that.
[Speaker B] How do you explain something that was in the past? After all—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Rashba explained that what happened in the past—the problem is the tradition about what was in the past. That’s what bothered the Rashba, that it was in the past. You don’t have to—I don’t know if he said that. Where there wasn’t—there’s no essential problem here like with the pile. Here, here I simply see the Hebrew Bible as an allegorical story. Or he was at some point and then he moves on. And that’s where the problem of Torah from Heaven comes in. Why? Because what people say nowadays is that the Torah is a plastic parable. Ah, you’re talking about Mount Sinai. We weren’t talking about Mount Sinai. Whether Mount Sinai happened or not. Okay, that’s one type of concern. That’s one type of concern. Why did he get to that? What gave him certainty about it?
[Speaker B] That’s exactly—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the point, I think, if I’m not mistaken. I think, as we already said, what bothered the Rashba wasn’t only allegorical interpretation—that’s pretty clear. What really bothered him was the denial of the real-world dimension of the Torah through allegory. And that’s also what bothers all the people arguing around postmodern debates today. Because ideas—there’s some kind of basic faith, and I think it’s true also in modern history though there it’s less clear—but regarding Torah it’s very clear: a true thing has to have a root in reality. These aren’t just detached truths. The Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, history unfolds according to certain ideas that unfold in parallel. And therefore every true thing, every true idea, is supposed to receive expression and be represented by a practical event. That’s exactly what we said before: in every parable that describes an act, there is always an idea hidden behind it. Here it goes in the opposite direction. Behind every idea there is an act hidden. And that’s every force—as we described last time, the force of kindness—behind it there always stands a concrete person. There are no abstract forces. We only saw abstract forces, and each one has a representation in this concrete world. The what? In what sense? Above and below are full—not in the Platonic sense, as we said last time. Plato held that horseness exists above and horses below. Here the conception is that horseness itself is also down here. Meaning every idea must have a representation below—not just a detailed manifestation, not just horses, but horseness itself. There was one horse that represented horseness, the father of all horses. Abraham represents the attribute of kindness; he is the father of all those who have something of the attribute of kindness. He represents kindness itself. Not just that he is kind—he is the father of the attribute of kindness, as they say, the archetype, the father of kindness. The root of the attribute of kindness, the root of the attribute of strength, the root—and that root. Abraham represents the essence of kindness, not that he is described by some degree of kindness. So there is here a certain understanding that every event, the whole metaphysical plane of ideas, is revealed in the world of action in practical form. That’s the whole force of the matter. The worlds are connected; it’s not some abstract thing, as we said before. Everything that happens below has a root that happens in parallel above, and vice versa. And the correspondence is one-to-one, and therefore complete. Fine. Now let’s see another side. I’ll relate more to the external side than to the direction you meant to go in. Therefore, at least at the level of Torah stories, the problem is that it cannot be that the Torah is telling us only parables that have no anchor in the plane of reality, in the real plane of historical reality. Otherwise it’s something detached. The whole content of Torah is that the Torah does not give theoretical ideas. It gives expressions, it gives the ideas, the metaphysical layer that exists behind the concrete events. But every thing has a concrete event, every idea has an event. Every concrete thing represents an idea.
[Speaker B] And part of this concrete intellectual event, these are the concrete events in reality, and those are the stories. Right, but also the… no, no.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The whole Torah is the parable.
[Speaker B] Where is the concrete event in which that finds expression? I don’t know—Maimonides says that the whole Torah is a story about—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so the Rashba’s conception—
[Speaker B] is—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that the Torah comes to explain this very idea itself. Beyond the ideas, the Torah transmits this very conception to you: that we are not dealing here with abstract ideas. That’s what I was trying to understand from her course and from the practical period. We’re telling you stories, and through them the ideas. Why? Because there is an essential connection between the stories and the ideas; you can’t deal with the ideas in isolation. In other words, beyond a set of ideas, the Torah also transmits this approach, which says that there is no such thing as abstract ideas. How does it transmit that? By the fact that it conveys everything through concrete events. It’s not some philosophical theoretical summary. It’s a philosophical essence conveyed inside a concrete event. And so that’s why the Rashba is so pained by this. I can agree with you about all your ideas; maybe we agree completely on everything. But it cannot remain on the abstract plane, because then you’re a philosopher. You’re not a Jew, you’re a philosopher. Philosophers can speak a lot about form. The question is—the Jewish conception is a conception that says that all these ideas have embodiment in the practical world, embodiment in bodies, in acting people, in objects, in historical events. And certainly the reverse as well. Meaning, the whole Maharal—we talked about this in the course on the Maharal—that every historical event can be analyzed on several levels. Every historical event. You can analyze it on the causal, scientific level—what happened here, what caused what, and so on—and you can analyze it in terms of what it represents. And everything has that—meaning everything is supposed to represent, and conversely, it is supposed to be an essence. One is not detached from the other. The Torah chose certain central things through which it conveys, apparently—I don’t know exactly—the basis through which perhaps all the rest can be understood. But I think the conception in its pure form says that every event is like this. Not only central events. Everything. Every day has its event, and every event has its idea. There is some event here—we’re here in a Torah class. Nice. And we asked why it’s like that. I mean, we’ve already asked several times in this Torah class, we’ve said: there is a statement here that every such event has an idea in it, and so on. And we asked: why is that? Why is that? No, why is that? You asked—this is what we received. Meaning, that’s the point. I don’t know why it’s like that, but one of the strongest messages the Torah conveys—and this is what the Rashba understood as something binding, and therefore the conception of those allegorists outraged him—is that he probably received from his teachers that same tradition you spoke about earlier, but a more essential tradition. Not simply because it happened and you have to believe it happened. Because if that’s all it was, why be outraged? Fine—even if you believe it happened, what do you care that someone else believes it didn’t happen? It harms something essential, it harms something in the Torah itself. And that’s what outraged the Rashba: there is an essential conception here. It’s not just one more piece of information he received from his teachers. Rather, it is the whole essence of Torah—that there are no detached ideas. Right, but the form represents the matter, attaching the form, all of that is true, but that representation took place in the concrete world. Otherwise we’re just Aristotle. We have nothing beyond Aristotle. Aristotle also said things like this. We called them Kabbalah—so what? There are other names for it, another language. The root of the religious conception, at least the Jewish religious conception, is the adhesion to continuing philosophy and finding it within action, within a practical world. Everything has to find expression in the practical world. That’s what we said: study that leads to action—that’s a different kind of study. Philosophy that comes to expression in the practical world is a different kind of philosophy. We are coming to say the same concepts, but with the understanding that these things stand behind every single event I see before my eyes—that’s another world. It’s another way of looking. Aristotle cannot look so alertly and so vividly at every event and every person around him. As far as we’re concerned, we need to look at every event, every person, every fly, everything moving around us, as something that represents something. And we need to understand what it represents and what it says. Nothing here is accidental. Everything represents and is represented.
[Speaker B] So then, is it impossible to grasp ideas without these concepts? Suppose there had been no Abraham and Sarah. Could you still have grasped them?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You could grasp them, but only in a very abstract way. You don’t say “kindness” before there is Abraham and Sarah in the world. Maybe kindness really was only above. I don’t know exactly. People in reality didn’t talk about kindness except in a concrete way. But then, indeed, kindness was still only above—it was above. Certainly. Kindness looked different. Fine, kindness looked different—there is a stage. The Torah too was above before it was Torah. Right. There is some stage in which things come down from above to below. And then somehow the source of vitality is already below and not above. Maybe there was a stage—I don’t know—right at the beginning, we talked about that. So maybe, again, Abraham too is a stand-in; there was one at an earlier station and there will be one at another station. Now the question is what represents this specific historical mode of conduct. Okay, these are aspirations of things, but the Gaon writes—he writes that in every generation there is the Gaon, and in every other generation there is the whole gallery of these figures, and that reflects a conception that there cannot be a world in which the attribute of kindness exists above but doesn’t exist below. It always exists below too. The question is where it is expressed. Was there kindness even before Abraham? Where was it expressed? I think it becomes revealed over time. I said, if you look like the Gaon, that in every generation all the figures are present, then I simply don’t understand what Abraham was. He was the root of roots; he was the root of the Abrahams, really. But clearly what the Gaon says is a different approach. What the Gaon says is a conceptual point that there cannot be any spiritual thing that has no expression in the practical world. If a spiritual force is detached, then it isn’t here, it doesn’t affect here. If it affects here, then it exists here. And that is the meaning of emanation, of descent into the world of action—the emanation of ideas into the world of action. Now, how is that expressed? In principle, theoretically, could one grasp the whole spiritual world fully without believing that it has expression in the practical world? I think not. First of all, I don’t know how one could technically get to it. To reach something very complex by totally abstract means, without having a structure—you wouldn’t understand anything. You need your own structure, or the world’s structure, in order to understand also the structure of the upper worlds. This is basically a kind of copy, you could say an exact copy—but you need it in order to reach above. General ideas, perhaps you can grasp them even as some people do, from the events around us, even if you’re not aware of it. Aristotle somehow drew things out of what he experienced. But this detailed method, which says that the whole structure, all the pixels, all the detailed kabbalistic worlds, can be grasped through looking at the world around us, when we are inside—
[Speaker B] Kabbalah without looking at the world around us is the same—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] thing, we are—
[Speaker B] inside Kabbalah without looking at what’s happening. Exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can’t reach resolutions like that without examining reality as it is through the senses, as something you can grasp. Again, the intellect is also something an ordinary person can grasp. So that’s the way to convey the spiritual world to us. But we understand that there is a full correspondence, and from that we also understand—and this is an important point—that there is no such thing as something without meaning. There’s no such thing. Every event, every movement of something, every person who is born or not born, every such thing has some kind of meaning. Maybe not at such a detailed level that one can grasp it. It depends how sensitive you can be to it. Maybe there are people who perceive more than ordinary individuals, the forces that stand behind everything. But let’s say a simpler person, on lower levels, can still see the central forces; what moves things in the big picture—yes, you can try to understand what forces are behind it. The more elevated your spiritual perception is, the more you grasp this in this world, and the better you understand every event. The more you know the spiritual forces, the more meaning you have for every event that happens here. And therefore this connection is so important, and so productive, that everything is coordinated with everything else.
Take the topic in the Talmud, yes—Job, did he exist or did he not? The meaning of the discussion is not the discussion of whether he existed or not. Who cares? The Sages say there: Job never existed and was never created; he was only a parable. Could be. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe the discussion is about this very point. The question is whether everything that conveys a message to us must also exist in actuality. Or can we suffice with things that come through parables—parables in the realistic sense, parables that didn’t actually happen. What happens within Job is basically a parable connected to his mission. In the case of Job, that it is simply a parable for the lesson. But what does it express? What force does it express? After all, it still comes to teach something. Right, the discussion here is very interesting. Right, that’s what I’m telling you. The question is whether this whole phenomenon of a person whom Satan incites—but clearly, if all these attributed things were not in reality, then they are simply a parable and not reality. If they are attributed to a parable, that’s a sign that they are—what? But clearly we wouldn’t find all those extra things in the Temple, so it must be a parable, not reality. If these are things in a parable, that means they came to instill in us insights that are much deeper and more serious. Because in the end, when I hear this whole parable—on the contrary—what should the Holy One, blessed be He, have done? Go alone? No, apparently it always means to say that some matter—even strict justice literally. And something else—why not? A story that if it had simply been written, instead of I don’t know what, maybe some thing that cannot happen—it doesn’t mean that it’s reality, it means it cannot happen. And if it wasn’t meant for that, why shouldn’t it happen?
The one who says that Job really existed—I think that really corresponds to what we learned about the order of the Temple, that the question is whether such a thing can happen in reality or whether it only teaches us what should have happened exactly. Rabbi Yohanan said that Job never existed and was never created; he was only a parable. Rabbi Yohanan says that Job never existed and was never created. He basically takes it as a parable, but says that it happened in him. Fine, okay, that’s not the same thing. It could be that there were things—that there was something there—but he says that Job was not Job. Who is Job? It could be that anyone can say that someone wasn’t Job. He claims that this exists in reality, but Job himself is the parable. I didn’t understand. No, so he said from the standpoint of something like the Job-ness of Job—besides which I don’t know whether that always means that Job didn’t exist. It could be that he also wants to say that what happened to him is also called Job, that he too has something like the Job-ness that happened to Job. Maybe, I don’t know. It may be that the root of the argument is really this argument: whether every thing, every idea that arises, must exist in reality or not. That is one point of the dispute.
And then Ezekiel—you could connect it to what you explained here, or to what we opened the lesson with: that the one who says Job did not exist says so not because he thinks not everything has to happen, but because he says this is a fictional figure that comes to tell us what should have happened if the Holy One, blessed be He, had really gone with the attribute of strict justice. Then in the end even the one who says Job did not exist would agree with the view that events, in principle, should occur in actuality if they are tied to meaningful things.
And this all projects onto all these matters that for us have become a bit of folklore. That celebrated Saturday-night program I used to watch a little—so what did they cook in Morocco on Lag BaOmer, and what did people tell at weddings, and what did they fear there, and what did they cook there, and all kinds of folklore. All the symbols float around as symbols in the secular sense of the word—emotive symbols, floating as symbols in the emotive sense of symbol, detached from themselves, from their very essence. Yes, exactly. And here he gives a whole outlook: there is no such thing as folklore. There is no such thing as folklore. There is no symbol in the detached sense of the word “symbol.” A symbol is within the soul, directly connected to the thing you are doing now. If they cooked something on Lag BaOmer in a certain place, that means there is something essential behind it. Either it’s something, or you say it’s just nonsense. But in the end, the essence is—let’s say—that there is something behind it, and then you say “symbol.” No, no—the act itself represents something essential. The act is an essential thing. The emanation of an abstract thing—the essence is the act. And anything—a person can take any Jewish custom that has been accepted—it represents something, and one has to understand its meaning from itself, not from all the surrounding stuff.
Yesterday I was at… we were here on Friday night in the desert, and this desert was a metaphor for Lag BaOmer. There were presentations about the bonfires, those bonfires that move from one place to another. Suddenly we see—what is this, beautiful? Some barbecue grill? And Mishnah Berurah or something like that. Why all of a sudden, once it came out of… buy a grill and learn the laws of salting meat—suddenly to learn, to understand more deeply. It takes on a postmodern form there. But that really is the edge of the idea: if there is a certain thing that serves the worship of God among people who think it is worship of God—not people who are just… Since this thing is accepted as worship of God among a community of worshippers of God, and it takes root over time, then it is binding. That is the validity of custom. More deeply here, this is the validity of custom. The rooting of a custom indicates that there is something true here, even for the ones to whom it spread, because “Leave Israel alone; if they are not prophets, they are the children of prophets.” The public—everything I’m saying, I’m just writing as a thought I’m really passing on—sometimes you hear people using all kinds of customs and trappings, and it’s obvious to you that it’s all so external and foolish and so on. But no. If this thing enters and is grasped as an entity, grasped as consciousness, there is some meaning behind it. It can’t just be accidental. You can attach meanings to it after the fact—that doesn’t matter. Because the way it took root is not connected to the question of what its true meaning is. It could theoretically have taken root for completely different reasons, I don’t know what. But once this thing entered, took root, and was accepted as worship of God, it is binding. Right. It entered and was accepted—how long already? Once it entered, that’s one of the big things, it suddenly changes the root. That’s the thought here.
[Speaker B] If it started at the root—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, fine, it started—but it spread here.
[Speaker B] It suddenly spread here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but in terms of the plain meaning, the plain sense of the words and all that, it’s so, so clear that it is also grasped by the steadfast people as a custom that is so deep here that it is obvious to the point that you can’t abolish this custom.
[Speaker B] This custom is broad with products—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I wish. No, that’s not the main thing. It’s a custom that could spread and penetrate over time. Some merely local thing—that you can still discuss and cancel, all these matters. But again, if it really enters over time and is accepted by the whole public of worshippers of God, then there is something to discuss.
[Speaker B] Who worships God more than he does, and he too is here—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He talks about how it depends on another public. And it won’t be decided. You have to examine who really is the public that truly worships God, the one you relate to as the public that is your standard—this whole generation, just like that, why not. Right.
[Speaker B] Here, what you heard a little while ago, that it really will connect and that it’s destined to be here and that this is the custom.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. I’m saying the question is what is called a generation and what is called the majority of the public. I have no mathematical criterion, but the principle is the right principle—this kind of evolution. Here it may be a mutation, as you say, a mutation here that suddenly will turn out to be a mistake. But if it survives anyway, then there is some force here.
[Speaker B] There is something real here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It may turn out to be a story about something that maybe doesn’t matter at all. You see it now as a mistake, but if in another hundred years everyone buys shoes here, then there is something about buying shoes here. And that’s the difference here. There is a mode of conduct here—these are things one has to understand.
[Speaker B] Because you see all the considerations of choice. It can’t be that something I wanted suddenly—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, therefore I’m saying: I’m not talking about here and now. When you examine something that has just arisen—fine, five minutes ago—then it’s all speculation. And if you’re talking about something that’s arising now, you examine it in light of uncertainty, you raise all the considerations. But the fact that after two hundred years nobody goes here because of what happened two hundred years ago—that’s not only because of the holiness of the holy people who lived two hundred years ago; it’s not only because of that. I believe there is something more genuine here. If for two hundred years it has entered, I no longer doubt that validity, and it looks right. Now, if over ten or twenty years you fight against something trying to push its own agenda, then fight against it and say it’s nonsense—obviously it’s nonsense—and it will struggle against these things. But somehow in the background there is a guiding hand, and if this thing enters and takes hold of the public, then there is something right here over time.
[Speaker B] Maybe the right thing here is that this is how people relate to it here. If after two hundred years everyone says it was a mistake—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If today they think it’s a mistake, then after two hundred years what you think today means nothing. The question is what the whole public thinks. If the whole public really comes to think it’s a mistake, and that takes root, and the thing is entirely abolished, then you can talk about a mistake.
[Speaker B] That’s always the problem with—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Two parallel directions—always a problem. I told the group we spoke about this with, and it’s a bit hard to digest, to decide why to do it. Why do it? I’ll come back to what I said here—not from a place of convenience, no.
[Speaker B] I decide according to the rules I always use.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not trying to be clever. Come with the tractate and decide whether it’s right or not. Each of us will come with the tractate and decide what is right according to irrelevant criteria. If it really takes root, most theoreticians will say: if it takes root, then it should prevail, because it stands up against all that.
[Speaker B] Doesn’t matter—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s the same thing, it’s all reasons. That’s exactly the point on the macro level. Each person individually, and in every short span of time—each person at a given moment, it’s more intellect, more freedom, it doesn’t matter what happens. But things over time behave in a completely different way. I gave the example—we once spoke about the seven years—I gave the example of a die. Know that every die in the world, if you throw it six billion times, each time a different side, right? And then from there, I don’t know what happened, with all the causes, everything happens. And then after six billion throws, there are exactly one billion on each face. That’s something wondrous, a real wonder. It’s called the law of large numbers. True. It’s a tremendous law. Okay, and what does that mean? It means that, as Maimonides talks about chance events, basically yes, every die has completely free choice. Every die will decide according to its own conditions whether it falls on this face or that face. But in the big picture, when you look at everything together, in the big picture exactly what should happen will happen according to the statistics of things. Each one of us can act as he understands; there is choice, there is discretion, each one does his own thing. But once something has already been decided six billion times, you cannot bet that the die won’t fall equally on each face. It just won’t.
[Speaker B] The wondrous speed—six billion times everything gets decided. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m willing to bet you a thousand shekels that if you throw it a thousand times, the probabilistic range calculated here will be around one-sixth each time. A very small range. The range keeps shrinking; in large numbers it almost reaches zero. Fine. And you simply didn’t want to say this point—it was just connected to what we said earlier. Because in a die there is nothing random at all; everything is physical. If I know exactly all the forces and the velocity and how the die was placed on the hand, I’ll know exactly what it will land on. No, fine, that doesn’t matter—
[Speaker B] What the force is, here it doesn’t matter.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not connected to randomness, that’s what I’m saying. Take computer dice, or a machine here that just throws them; put it in a vacuum chamber so as not to lose forces to the wind. And there’s also some device—and this is to prove this point—they’re only trying to neutralize luck. They throw it with a machine from exactly the same point, to cancel out the force and make it identical. Deliberately, because there are still surrounding factors. Fine. Listen a second—the “almost certain” issue. Someone once said that in quantum physics there is the only real randomness, and on the scale of a die quantum phenomena are irrelevant. On the scale of a die there is nothing random. It’s all the physics of forces and of exactly how you throw the dice. And on that, this paradox works a thousand times more strongly. Because how can it be that it falls exactly sixty, sixty, sixty, sixty? It could just as well all fall on the same face. So why sixty-sixty? Why? Because all possible throws in the world divide into six kinds. And those kinds are distributed completely evenly. There’s no reason for one number to be preferred over the others. That’s obvious; that’s how probability thinks. But how is a paradox constructed? A paradox is always built on the fact that on the one hand they tell you what will happen, but on the microscopic level you don’t understand how it happens. You can’t explain why it’s true, even though you know it’s true. How is the paradox of the lice built? The paradox of the lice is built on the fact that you know exactly what should happen and what is correct that should happen; the problem is that microscopically it’s hard to explain, hard to explain why it happens. A paradox is always built so that there are two perspectives: one tells you the result with certainty—and that is the large-scale perspective—and the small-scale perspective suddenly leaves you unable to understand how that large-scale thing happens. That is what’s called a paradox. I’m not claiming the probability isn’t one-sixth; I’m claiming that if you track it microscopically, it’s simply incomprehensible how it happens. How does every die and every throw know to act so that it will be distributed exactly so that the probability is one-sixth, one-sixth? In the big picture it’s clear to me that if there is no preference for one number over another, then you’ll get one-sixth, one-sixth. And that is exactly the point. It works out in a way that has no microscopic explanation, and that is simply the issue—that we are not talking about one event. This event makes decisions about everything: one, two, three, four, five, six. Exactly. What about these six billion times—I don’t understand. What are these six billion, this reality in this reality? In six billion throws you get the result—and what am I trying to do? Because this force is weak; it doesn’t work immediately, but it exists, and that doesn’t matter. A weak force that takes a long time to crystallize. In large numbers. Large numbers—this could be physics, it could be mathematics. Statistics is a kind of physics, in my opinion. Statistics is a kind of physics, in my opinion. Using mathematical tools in many things—that’s physics. This law is a physical law; it’s not something mathematical. It’s not like the law that two plus two equals four. It’s a law that is a natural phenomenon; it’s not something abstract.
Okay, so let’s return. I don’t want to get into all these examples. This is an example of what we earlier put under the term providence—the invisible hand. The invisible hand is that kind of statistics. The invisible hand—Adam Smith developed it, of course, but Milton Friedman also developed it, a Jewish-American economist who won the Nobel Prize in economics. And he developed the sharpened capitalist theory, which claims that the best form of economy is one that works itself out without anyone interfering, without government intervention, because then the invisible hand somehow arranges things optimally. The economy somehow reaches a natural equilibrium, and any government intervention only ruins it. Ah, interesting. Yes, it was a very famous law. And here in Israel he says that what benefits us, what benefits us, is that we have long years of exile behind us. Everything the government tries to constrain us with, we always bypass, and somehow in the end it works out. If we had listened to the government in everything, we would never have developed the exilic instinct whereby we always get around various regulations and laws, and today we’d be in terrible shape. And what benefits us is only the years of exile. And this is a claim that borders even on philosophy, even religious philosophy, Jewish philosophy.
[Speaker B] Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Jewish philosophy—not because of the Holy One, blessed be He, but because of the Jewish instinct. I think it’s really Jewish in that sense. The invisible hand doesn’t happen on its own. The invisible hand happens because the Holy One, blessed be He, really created the world with certain rules of providence that do not intervene in life, but in the end do arrange things. But whether that’s true or not, I don’t know—that’s the claim. And a great many people disagree with that claim. Fine.
[Speaker B] Again, let’s go back to Maimonides’ agreements.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maimonides certainly did not see it that way. And again, I’m presenting here a position that I myself feel is somewhat extreme. I’m presenting it so it will be clear what it says. I feel it is somewhat extreme. Again, I don’t know where to draw the line, but somehow I do lean toward what Maimonides says: that various aggadic statements of the Sages, one sort or another, things which in retrospect seem to come within them but are not making factual claims—then apparently they were not really factual.
[Speaker B] What you’re saying, in other words, is that there is such-and-such a reality, and then there is a moral or symbolic meaning there, and there is no essential connection—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Between the parable and what it stands for; it’s just a plain parable.
[Speaker B] Maimonides doesn’t think that way.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maimonides certainly did not hold that in a full sense. I said regarding the Torah—there you have Maimonides’ explanatory line. Regarding the aggadot of the Sages, yes. Regarding the Torah, I don’t know. But clearly Maimonides in a full sense did not hold that way. The question is where the line passes. I’m not sure it passes where people usually place Maimonides, but I also don’t think there is no line. Meaning, I don’t know—it still seems to me that one ought to look straight at this and say there is some line here. In other words, there is room also for parable. Let me put it differently: today there is a model of parable, metaphorical parable, the parable of here, a parable with no essential connection between the parable and what it stands for. Also underneath it, a root. So you’ll see there are such places. I don’t know—this perhaps needs a bit of explanation and dialectical analysis. But where does the line pass? People ask: what is the difference between this and heresy?
[Speaker B] That’s true. Seemingly there is no root. Meaning, on one side there is heresy, on the other side there is faith; there is no third side. There is the side of how the conception grew.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaningful heresy—except perhaps Amalek and the like, who try to destroy the very “is,” that is something meant to emphasize. But every meaningful heresy represents something real that has a root.
[Speaker B] It does not exist—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For itself. It represents some mistake, apparently, in our conception, which it comes to criticize. And that is also a correct view regarding Reform. The question is what to do with it and where to take it—that is another matter. The Reform outlook, for example—I’ll give an example—it is hard here to relate to it only as heresy against tradition, against everything. In my humble opinion it represents something real that someone tried to get at, but went about it in crooked ways. Wait, I didn’t understand the parable.
[Speaker B] I’m giving you a parable—how they do it, and it has no root. What caused them to do it may perhaps have some—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Root. The idea of death has some essential root. What the tombstone expresses, even though the tombstone itself did not happen as an event. It wasn’t backed as an event. Again, true—I don’t know how to define these things. I don’t know exactly. There’s some bomb here, a feeling that there’s a bomb on one side. But on the other side it doesn’t cross the boundary where people usually think it crosses. All the seminars and conferences and everything. It happens here; inside me it can take hold. It is simply some inner frequency, a frequency that has a root in reality as a degree of overlap. So again, what is the relation between this parable and the periphery, where there really are just parables—I don’t know. I don’t know where the line passes. But I feel there really is a genuine bomb here, something completely radical. There is something true here. How far to go with it, I truly do not know.
What we spoke about here concerning parable—for example, someone wants to make some humorous opening here or explain something, so he can quote some Chekhov or not Chekhov. It doesn’t have to be that every time someone uses a parable you immediately have to hold a symposium over whether it happened. Obviously it can also appear that way; maybe in Torah in some such form. Right, obviously. But I think the optimal way to read is really to find the correct parable and not invent a parable. And I don’t always know it. And maybe here is the difference between the Torah and me: there are those who believe that in the Torah one always finds the correct parable. That is the difference between the Torah and me. If I don’t know whether I found the correct parable, then I invent something. But then indeed even its action only awakens. Somehow the operative power of a thing depends on the real root it has. If it has a real root, it can take hold; if not, not.
Now the prophets—the prophets are also something. What happened here in the prophetic vision—I now remember in these contexts within foreknowledge and free choice, which is mentioned in the Prophets of Israel. In the book Yesodot there, he says that the Holy One, blessed be He, suddenly opens before the prophet that free choice is really how to relate to events, and not really to choose which event I choose. It’s like a momentary divine inspiration. Exactly. But about that, what Micah said, I simply don’t understand how he got there. And in the relation itself, that’s not an event. It’s a mental event. And it arose out of what is the characteristic event of individual knowledge—that each person controls his own knowledge. And the question was solved. I don’t care whether the Holy One, blessed be He, passes there within the order. But he doesn’t say it from information that the Holy One, blessed be He, passes there; rather he says it in order to solve the problem of foreknowledge and free choice. Did it solve it or not? I think not. Why? Because mental events are also events. So therefore maybe this is somewhat related to what you asked earlier.
[Speaker B] I want to address the parables that the prophets themselves—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Bring, for example the parable—
[Speaker B] Of the vine, the parable of the vineyard, the parable of the eagles—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All those are the same thing.
[Speaker B] The visions with those parables in prophetic vision—it’s just an analogy between them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All the visions the prophets speak of—this is really explosive stuff, there are crazy things there. The visions the prophets saw are the essence of the world of emanation. Maimonides said this. Maimonides says there are parables of one sort and parables of another sort; Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed, the parable of the promiscuous woman and the parable of matter—he claims there is such a parable of matter there. This whole Torah is here. Maimonides goes on here and finds some point of contact with prophecy and prophetic vision. Yes, Maimonides continues like that, and that everything has a purpose and so on and so on. But there are parables here that he says are explosive. The prophets’ parable here speaks explicitly. All kinds of prophetic visions are simply seeing the world of emanation with one’s eyes. It’s not—it is simply details of reality. We call it a parable because from our standpoint it is not a reality that we can relate to sensorially. But that is exactly the difference between a prophet and an ordinary person: a prophet sees these things sensorially, whereas for us they are grasped as some sort of metaphorical descriptions. But it is really seeing realities; it is not just descriptions.
Fine, parables in teachings. I think from this point on there are several passages here that we’ll simply go through quickly. Ah—do you want the pages?
[Speaker B] Yes, there are several pages here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Some of it is about event-like things, some of it about metaphorical things, and some of it about a bar mitzvah. So we’ll go quickly. “Jewish religious earthly philosophy” is taken up by Rabbi Isaac Albalag. What is the name of the book? In the book Yesodot. There is a clarification of the picture dominant among the ancient Greek sages. “Ancient” meaning before the modern Greeks—not “the ancients,” not all Greeks. Of the Prophets of Israel, because Plato and Aristotle don’t use parables. “Ancient Greek sages” means ancient in the simple sense—those of the Prophets of Israel. The book itself is also constructed in an unsystematic way. By the way, I saw this—chapter 82 of the introduction: “The philosophy of Abu Abraham Ibn Ezra is entirely wrapped in secrets and is not presented as it should be for people of speculative understanding,” and this is the same opening as in Maimonides. And this is already the exemplary Jewish philosophy of Maimonides, as stated explicitly in the introduction to the Guide. Here too Maimonides somehow makes this claim.
In any case, he explains: “Let not the reader expect from me, nor hope, that when I mention a certain matter I will complete it, or when I mention a certain parable I will complete it. It is enough for the intelligent person to turn this over repeatedly, all the more so to compose it in a book. And you already know that the Account of Creation is natural science, and the Account of the Chariot is divine science. And the Sages said: ‘To a wise man who understands on his own, one transmits only chapter headings.’” That is in the Mishnah in Hagigah. “Therefore do not seek from me anything beyond chapter headings. And even those headings are not ordered, nor one after another, but scattered and mixed among other matters.”
[Speaker B] Why did he conceal natural science and divine science in that way?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does the interpretation of what the Account of Creation is and what the Account of the Chariot is have to do with this? He wants to say that these fields, these deep fields, cannot be grasped by way of chronological order. He sees it as a kind of chronological writing. That is exactly the point; therefore there are chapter headings here that are not ordered. And it’s not only in order to hide things from the masses of readers so that the masses won’t be able to piece them together, as Gersonides says. Gersonides says they do this intentionally—not that it is inherently necessary, but that they do it deliberately so that not everyone can enter the orchard. Gersonides objects to authors who add concealment and obscurity to their words out of jealousy or for the sake of their own name. Gersonides objects to that, but he thought the authors did it intentionally. Whereas that is not correct—not intentionally, but rather compelled by the content. And that is the claim here. As the Efodi adds in the introduction there: “When one of the perfected men writes any of these secrets and writes it in his notebook, he cannot explain it in a full, orderly explanation, because the matter appears and flashes and then disappears, as though that is simply the nature of this matter. And because of this, every great wise divine rabbinic man of truth, when he intends to speak of this matter, speaks of it only in parables and riddles.”
By the way, in Akedat Yitzhak, portion of Hukat, the last section, he writes—and he has an interesting claim about the Torah. He speaks there about the red heifer in the book Akedah. He says that what is demanded there—the question, how can it be that it has no reason, and what exactly is going on with the red heifer—so he says it is impossible that the Torah intentionally hides things from us. It is not concealment on purpose so that we won’t discover it because it’s dangerous for everyone to know. There are things that simply cannot be revealed because of their very nature, and this is somewhat like this argument. There are things that simply cannot be put into writing in a straightforward way; therefore they are hidden. It’s not because someone is deliberately hiding them from us. He argues there against this approach that the Torah hides something. The Torah hides nothing. Whoever understands, understands. You can’t write such things in an explicit formulation. Whoever understands can understand; however far he gets, he gets. And that is somewhat like the claim here.
Now the question is whether Maimonides really sees the limitation as belonging to the wisdom itself—I’m not sure he doesn’t, and I’m not sure he does. In other words, the question is whether Maimonides sees this as our limitation, that we basically see only things like mountain peaks sticking out of the water. If they fill them with plaster or with water, then you see only the peaks of the mountains above the waterline, and it looks as though it’s a collection of separate things. But if you remove the water and manage to enter what is behind the water, you will see that in fact the whole mountain is one structure connected to itself. So the question is whether he sees it that way or as something essential. On the contrary, the systematic perception is the limited perception. That’s not what Maimonides means to say. On the contrary, what we said before is the opposite: that systematic perception is a limited perception. Not that because we are limited we cannot give a systematic interpretation, but on the contrary—even if we were all-capable, the optimal way to describe things would be non-systematically, because systematic description is limited in its essence. I’m not sure that’s what Maimonides means here. I’m not sure it isn’t. Maimonides may really mean that we simply live in a world where there is water covering part of the mountains, and because of the shortness of our understanding we are unable to grasp it systematically.
But for the Nazir, the non-systematic perception is the higher perception. Meaning, if we really were capable of it, then yes, we could grasp things systematically? No—this is something essential to the material, to matter. What we see here, and what the Nazir means to say here, is that the non-systematic perception is essential to matter; it is not our limitation. This is the right way to do it. It’s not that if we penetrated deeply enough we would have a systematic description of things. The goal is to create a non-systematic description, like what we discussed in the previous lesson about Jewish law: when we study, we study as though systematically, trying to grasp the passage in a systematic way, but it is written non-systematically. And it is written non-systematically not so that in the end we will come and organize it—which Maimonides also could have done. It is written non-systematically, and written non-systematically only because that is truly the correct way to present things. And our way of grasping it is by way of systematic study, because we think systematically. But the ultimate goal is to create in us the true picture, which is really a non-systematic picture.
We said this also about scientific perception and non-scientific perception. Scientific perception is a perception from outside, a perception through external concepts that do not come from the thing itself, and therefore it allows one to compare and arrange things side by side, classify, associate, separate. The perception of essence is an individual perception—the thing grasps itself. You grasp the thing; you don’t grasp it through comparison to what it is relative to something else. You grasp the thing, what it says. Scientific perception is always through comparison to something else—what is here that is not there, why is this here like this and there like that. That is not absorption, as we said earlier. Absorption is in the form of absorption, “I stretched out my hands and came to drink.” The absorption is in the form of absorption not because of our limited understanding—on the contrary, because of complete knowledge. Our limited understanding is that we do not know how to absorb in this way, and so we try to do things systematically. And that is somehow our way to create within our picture the non-systematic world, the true world. It is not a way of grasping things; it is the thing as grasped within the thing itself. The way to grasp is always through systematic description; that is how we are built.
And therefore I say: regarding Maimonides, I’m not entirely sure that Maimonides goes as far as the Nazir goes, or as far as I think the Nazir goes—that is my current interpretation of the Nazir. Maimonides, I think, sees this as a kind of human limitation. The non-systematic perception in wisdom is because our hand is too short, and therefore it begins here and disappears there; I cannot grasp everything at once. I’m saying that the Nazir says: the fact that it begins here and disappears there is not an indication that we can’t grasp it all at once—that is the full perception. If we reached that stage, that would be the full perception. It is not a limitation. Fine, let’s stop here.