The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 13

Table of Contents

• The Torah as an inner law that animates the world, and common sense as listening to the logos
• Rabbi Lichtenstein on prophecy as epistemological dynamism and as a bridge between reason and hearing-based truths
• Building common sense through Torah, da’at Torah, and the safeguard against intellectual nihilism
• “These and those are the words of the living God,” public authority, and criteria for spiritual trust
• Common sense as the final measure, and a person’s progress in clarification and decision-making
• The Pythagoreans, numbers, and refined idolatry as against inward listening
• Abraham: “Leave your astrology,” father of a multitude, and the inner and outer logos
• Wisdom and action: logos, practical implications, study and action, and reason versus definition
• Abraham as creation ex nihilo and as the root of kindness and listening
• Conclusion and looking ahead: wisdom and understanding, and the next two paragraphs

Summary

General Overview

The text presents a view according to which the law of the Torah operates within the world, animating it and directing reality, and listening to it takes place through common sense and inner uprightness, as a kind of additional faculty of cognition beyond the five senses. It adopts a distinction brought in the name of Rabbi Lichtenstein, according to which prophecy is not only a historical phenomenon or a body of texts, but an epistemological and cognitive mode of knowledge, from which comes the possibility of bridging between reason and hearing-based truths. It qualifies the use of pluralistic language such as “these and those are the words of the living God,” and argues that true common sense is the product of inner formation through Torah study and service of God, not arbitrary gut feeling. Later it interprets a passage about Abraham and leaving astrology as a transition from a “Greek” mode of looking, based on external investigation, to an inner listening to the “echo of all,” the invisible intellect, and connects this to the relation between inner logos and outer logos, between wisdom and action, and to Abraham as a creation ex nihilo and the root of the attribute of kindness.

The Torah as an inner law that animates the world, and common sense as listening to the logos

The world contains within it the law of the Torah that animates it, directs it, and determines how it behaves. Common sense and inner uprightness are the way of listening to that inner “voice,” and they function as an additional sensory medium beyond the five senses. Common sense is not a mathematical proof and not a logical refutation, but a faculty of recognition that distinguishes between sound reasoning and crooked reasoning by listening to what the world “broadcasts.” This listening belongs more to epistemology than to formal logic, and is presented as a kind of “sense” that enables one to understand what is right and what is not.

Rabbi Lichtenstein on prophecy as epistemological dynamism and as a bridge between reason and hearing-based truths

Rabbi Lichtenstein states that someone who identifies with the Greek speculative-scientific tradition has difficulty with the phenomenon of prophecy and sees it as hallucination, whereas a ben Torah relates to it with awe but may still leave it distant and vague. He describes a situation in which the prophetic books reach Torah students through “indirect channels,” and prophecy is perceived as a foundation for discussions in Jewish law without engagement with the prophetic experience itself. He emphasizes that within the framework of the book, the emphasis is on dynamism, development, and unfolding, and the sacred writings are understood as an expression of the spirit that prevails throughout all the paths of Judaism, not as a one-time phenomenon. He defines the framework of the book as less historical and more epistemological, so that prophecy is another way of knowing reality, not merely an event that happened in the past. He proposes two ways of bridging between reason and hearing-based truths: to analyze the material of hearing-based truths with the tools of reason, and at the same time to point to a new cognitive path that bursts forth from the experience of prophecy, whose channel is not only analytical reason or ordinary intuition, but hearing-based truth.

Building common sense through Torah, da’at Torah, and the safeguard against intellectual nihilism

The text argues that prophecy is a kind of human power that appears at different intensities, and that it can be developed so that it becomes more powerful; therefore even an ordinary person has some connection to this capacity. It identifies common sense as something acquired rather than innate, built primarily through Torah study, and says that a person’s formation through Torah changes what he calls “common sense” at every stage. It distinguishes between “what people usually call common sense” as a general inner feeling, and true common sense, which in practice does not belong to everyone, but to one who has built himself through the toil of Torah. It connects this to the concept of da’at Torah and argues that everyone has some measure of it, and that the more one develops it, the more straightened and aligned one becomes. It clarifies that there is also natural intuition among the nations of the world, and that without a core of inner uprightness it would be impossible to develop a refined uprightness, but Torah is the tool for exposing and developing what is already there.

“These and those are the words of the living God,” public authority, and criteria for spiritual trust

The text warns against drawing liberal conclusions of “everyone has his own truth” from statements like “these and those are the words of the living God,” and argues that this may lead to nihilism in which the concept of “correct” has no meaning. It states that true common sense is an objective standard, and that there is “one common sense” toward which one draws closer through self-development, not a collection of equally valid intuitions. It argues that “these and those are the words of the living God” was said about Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, not about anyone who comes up with interpretations out of passing feelings, and that “the words of the living God” require that the speakers themselves be speakers of the living God. It defines identifying who is speaking the words of the living God as a matter of inner feeling that has no mathematical criterion, and connects this to “If he is like an angel of the Lord of Hosts, seek Torah from his mouth.” It presents decision-making as something done, in a certain sense, publicly by a community of servants of God, and explains that the goal should be to uncover the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, and not to follow “whatever your stomach is grumbling for.”

Common sense as the final measure, and a person’s progress in clarification and decision-making

The text states that in earlier stages, reliance on common sense involves more clarification, consultation, and conversation with others, and that as a person advances he can trust his initial common sense more. It argues that in the end a person has no measure other than his own common sense, but that common sense can also include listening to one’s surroundings and recognizing that those greater than oneself are right. It gives as an example the possibility that a person’s common sense may decide that the Chazon Ish is right against his own local reasoning, and presents common sense as a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to stirrings of the heart.

The Pythagoreans, numbers, and refined idolatry as against inward listening

The text interprets “those who imagine that everything in the world is made from forces included in numbers and their relations” as a reference to the Pythagoreans, who saw numbers as a basic component endowed with mystical properties. It presents this as a refined kind of idolatry, because numbers are treated as independent entities revealed through scientific investigation and the documentation of phenomena. It explains that the Pythagoreans arrived at their belief through arithmetic relations they found in astronomy and music, and yet remained within a “Greek” framework of looking rather than listening. It states that the superior soul that truly seeks God rises above them, because the powers of the soul are sustained by the echo of an invisible intellect working wonders, and not by turning a scientific law into an existing “thing.”

Abraham: “Leave your astrology,” father of a multitude, and the inner and outer logos

Abraham is presented as one who heard the sacred utterance, “Leave your astrology,” and the change of his name to Abraham is explained as a transition to being “the father of a multitude,” with “multitude” interpreted as murmur, resonance, and a loud echo. It states that “the father of the outward utterance is the inward utterance,” and connects this to a note about logos endiathetos and logos prophorikos from the letter aleph in the first utterance. The note explains that Abraham is called the father of tone, echo, and logos prophorikos, the outward utterance, and that his father is the inward governing intellect, endiathetos, the inward utterance. The note includes the wording, “the departure from Haran, from the holes of the senses, to hear the echo of the invisible intellect,” and this is presented as a departure from a sensory conception toward hearing that which is not grasped by the senses. The text states that he is not sure about the precise details of Philo’s intention and suggests reading Philo again in order to understand the exact relation between the different aspects.

Wisdom and action: logos, practical implications, study and action, and reason versus definition

The text states that action is not a set of external commands but an essential expression of wisdom, even “another aspect of wisdom itself,” and it describes wisdom as matter and action as form. It interprets Moses’ words to the angels, “Is there murder among you?” as a distinction between the Torah itself and its human expression, and argues that the same wisdom has different expressions in different worlds. It argues that the practical halakhic implication is a means of understanding and not the reverse, and compares this to a scientific experiment that comes to test a theory in order to reach the laws behind the facts. It states that the concrete laws and actions are the “experiments” by which one tests reasonings and builds a worldview, and that someone who waves the lulav understands the commandment of lulav differently from someone who studies it academically. It interprets “Great is study, for it leads to action” as referring to study that is tied by the navel-cord to action, so that action is the expression of the reasoning and not merely its technical result. It raises an ongoing difficulty regarding the difference between rationale and definition, points to the artificiality of the distinction, and argues that there is no definition without understanding, and that one cannot ask only “what” without “why” when extending a law from an ox to a car based on an understanding of the principle of damage.

Abraham as creation ex nihilo and as the root of kindness and listening

The text argues that Abraham began not only to study Torah but also to fulfill commandments and bring the Torah down into details, and therefore it is said that he observed even the rabbinic law of eruv tavshilin. It describes Abraham as a creation of something from nothing, as one who cuts off his past with “go forth,” without preliminaries and without any description of his merits in the Torah, and it cites the Maharal in Netzach Yisrael as an example of this idea. It interprets kindness as creation ex nihilo, as giving without a prior cause, and distinguishes between kindness, mercy, and repayment of a debt, even placing ordinary acts of kindness closer to mercy than to absolute kindness. It connects listening with creation ex nihilo in that reasoned inference is always from “something,” whereas common sense as an initial determination operates without a reason and therefore belongs to the root of wisdom rather than understanding. It presents Abraham as “the first listener,” who generates truths ex nihilo, and notes that Maimonides describes Abraham as a great philosopher, but he himself tends to describe him as one who leaves philosophy in the direction of prophecy.

Conclusion and looking ahead: wisdom and understanding, and the next two paragraphs

The text concludes by stating that the relation between wisdom and understanding, between inner logos and outer logos, between the matter of logos and the form of logos, is the foundation for the next two paragraphs, which are written in esoteric language. It presents Abraham as one who brings into expression the utterance that already existed in the world and brings it down to the practical level so that it can be grasped in human eyes. It suggests continuing the discussion in another meeting and connecting what follows with a lecture on repentance, because these things are “really connected to repentance.”

That same understanding we saw in section 11: that the world is basically aligned with the Torah. “Aligned against” isn’t exactly the right expression; rather, within the world there exists the law of the Torah as something that animates the world, directs it, and determines the way it behaves. We saw two innovations there in that passage. The first innovation, beyond the claim itself—which we’ve already encountered—the first innovation was that the way one listens to that inner voice is simply common sense, or inner uprightness, what sounds like orthos logos. Plain common sense. What our common sense tells us is really the result of some kind of listening to what the world is transmitting to us. That is the way to listen. Basically, someone might ask: fine, there’s all this talk about listening, hearing—what exactly do you do? You don’t do it with your ear. So the answer is: what is the meaning of this concept, “common sense”? What is common sense? “My common sense tells me such-and-such.” I have no proof. I’m not showing that you’re wrong through an explicit Mishnah. I have no refutation of you or proof for me on a mathematical level. So then what? My common sense tells me that this is a straight argument and that is a crooked one. So what does that mean? What is this common sense? What is it? That common sense is really listening to that logos that exists within the world. You could say it’s another sensory tool that a person has beyond the five senses, a sixth sense if you like, another way of looking at the world, of seeing what’s going on in the world and understanding what is right and what is not right. It’s a sense. It belongs to epistemology, not to thought, not to logic. It seems to me I told you that it’s worth reading Rabbi Lichtenstein’s article at the end. There are a few articles here that I think are worth reading; at the end of the book several articles were printed, and Rabbi Lichtenstein writes here a point that may be very important, beyond all the beautiful remarks here. He says as follows—I’ll read you just a few key sentences. I think this is a very correct distinction about the foundation of this book.

Usually, one who identifies completely with the speculative-scientific Greek tradition has difficulty with the very phenomenon of prophecy. It seems to him a hallucination, a product of illusion. A Torah scholar, by contrast, relates to it with awe and love, recognizing it as an exalted phenomenon of the penetration of the Infinite into the framework of our narrow world. But he tends to make do with that general recognition and may recoil from approaching the holy inner chamber. It becomes a kind of distant thing, sublime, inaccessible, something to which we have no approach. The words of the prophetic books—which not infrequently reach Torah scholars through indirect channels, meaning people simply don’t study the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)—of course serve as the basis for several detailed discussions in Jewish law. But prophecy itself, both the experience and its results, is seen only from afar and in a vague way.

And then he says: in the book the emphasis is placed, and placed forcefully, on dynamism, development, unfolding. The author does not discuss prophecy as a fixed set of writings and books. Meaning, that prophecy is not a collection of books. Prophecy is not just some phenomenon in relation to that concept. The author does not discuss prophecy as a set of writings. The holy writings are almost presented as the expression of a spirit that pervades all the paths of Judaism, and not as a one-time phenomenon; like a pool fed by a stream flowing through the whole reality of the Jewish people, and not as an isolated case. Jewish law, Kabbalah, Hasidism, even medieval philosophy—with a number of reservations, in parentheses—all of it rises in line with the measure of prophecy. And within the framework of the book—I’m skipping a bit here and there; it’s worth reading the article itself—the framework of the book is less historical than epistemological. Epistemological means the theory of cognition. In other words, the book does not speak about prophecy as a historical phenomenon, as something that happened once, but as an epistemological phenomenon, another way to sense or know what is happening in the world. That is the meaning of prophecy. Not that once there were prophets and we now need to study what they told us. The prophets who once existed were people who had more of a certain power that we too possess, and we too are meant to use it.

And therefore we ordinary people tend to see a contradiction between reason and what is heard through tradition. Reason means a philosophical and universal tendency, and we tend to see a religion rooted in it as leading toward the path reached by Plato. Fine. But the author paves two roads to bridge the imagined gap between these two approaches, and those two roads are really the two parts of the book. One is to take the material of what is heard—the words of prophecy—and discuss them by way of reason: to understand, expound by interpretive principles, analyze, and define. And the second point—and this is what matters to me here—is to point to a new cognitive path, a new mode of thought, breaking forth from the experience of prophecy. A path whose conduit is not only analytic reason, whether inductive or deductive, or even intuition in its ordinary sense, but audition, listening.

In other words, the point is that what the Nazir is really innovating here is that prophecy is a kind of power that exists in a person, in every person. Not only in prophets, in those who merited prophecy. Prophecy is a kind of power that appears in different intensities. That means each person has a different intensity of this power, perhaps; perhaps it can also be developed so that it becomes stronger. But basically this auditory reason, which draws from the root of prophecy, is some additional power to know the world—not through the senses and not through thought, but through, let’s call it, maybe a sixth sense or something like that.

What’s the difference between this and intuition? Right, he remarks there that it’s not exactly like ordinary intuition, and I’m not rejecting that, not saying I understand it fully or agree. Meaning, I don’t know. It seems to me that it is. It seems to me that he really does note there that it’s not like ordinary intuition; in some place he does leave it as different from what we know. So what do you do with that? How do you get to it? It could be that he means to say this is a directed intuition. Not an intuition you’re born with, but one that develops through study, Torah study. In that sense maybe it isn’t ordinary intuition—not raw intuition, where I just try to understand what I was born with—but also something you can build. That usually isn’t associated with intuition. Intuition is not something I build. People always refer to intuition as something innate. But that is clearly not true. Maybe that’s what he meant; I don’t know. It’s clearly not true. In other words, common sense is something acquired, not something innate. That’s a very important point. And it is acquired mainly through Torah study.

Common sense is acquired, no? Hm? No. No, it’s straight because it enters inward—that’s exactly the point. Torah is not some wisdom that you learn. Torah is a way of building yourself. When you learn another part of Torah, you have actually built another layer in yourself, another floor in yourself. Now you yourself are something more developed, something a bit different. And the same thing that beforehand you called common sense—now you have something else that you call common sense. It is built by Torah study, directly or indirectly. But that’s something built. With external cultures it’s no longer quite so straight; it becomes another culture. No—why? That’s another leap that I don’t have to accept, namely that this common sense is also relative. The fact that it is built is very nice—but it is built, and it is the correct thing. Meaning, not that it was built this way and could have been built otherwise. Before you studied Torah you also had common sense, but your common sense was crooked. We all—that’s exactly what needs to be explained: the gap between what we usually call common sense and the translation we are now giving to common sense. What we usually call common sense is some inner feeling I have that this is right. So that’s only part of the picture. It is that—but only part of the picture.

And that’s why I said that maybe I understand Rabbi Dessler’s reservation that this is not exactly the intuition people usually talk about. Because we are talking about a state—right, a state of feeling that this is correct—but not everybody’s. Everybody potentially, not everybody actually. Not every random person in the street who has some gut feeling is expressing a Torah-level truth or intuition. Rather, someone who built himself, who studied Torah, who invested in it, who developed it—his gut feeling, not because he has some proof in his head from tractate Sanhedrin, but his gut feeling, what we call common sense in everyone—for him that really is common sense. So it is intuition in the sense that it works the way intuition works for everyone. It is not intuition like everyone else’s, because sometimes the output is something else. It is something genuinely straight.

And this parallels what today is often called da’at Torah, “Torah judgment.” Absolutely yes. Except that da’at Torah, again, is also a concept that can be approached in those same two ways Rabbi Dessler spoke about. You can treat it as some kind of mysterious thing—da’at Torah and all that—whatever he says is probably because he has lofty perceptions. But each of us has something of this, right? It’s something that each person needs to continue developing. Even the greatest of the great—everyone has room to keep developing it. The more you develop it, the more aligned you become. But each of us, in some sense, has da’at Torah at one level or another.

Now this sounds a bit as if, regarding the Jewish people, there’s something in the—yes. In that aspect, definitely. And among the nations of the world, don’t they have intuition? They have what they were born with; that too is something. If there weren’t something there, we couldn’t move at all. And we’ll also see that later. And it’s obvious that if this uprightness didn’t exist somewhere within us, then it also couldn’t really develop. It’s not something you take from outside and put inside; it is also a process of uncovering something that is already there. Through Torah we uncover that thing. It is both uncovering and cognition. Knowing is really both uncovering and knowing. You can’t—leave that for a moment, I’ll get to that point soon; let’s leave it for now.

Good, so that was the first point. The first point was that the way to listen, the road to listening, is simply to listen to common sense. But of course common sense is not something I’m born with, because today this approach is very popular—everyone has his own truth, everyone has his own interpretation of Torah, and no one has a monopoly on Torah or truth and all kinds of things like that. So people often draw somewhat hasty conclusions from the supposed liberalism broadcast by various Torah sources: “These and those are both the words of the living God,” or sayings of that sort, as though common sense is basically something divine. If I feel something is right, that’s a sign it’s right. This can lead to complete intellectual nihilism. It can lead to a situation where anyone who says something is apparently right, and anyone else who says the opposite is also right, and everybody is right—and then in fact nobody is right; the concept of “right” no longer has any meaning.

So I think one has to be a bit careful with these things. Therefore, first of all, this statement that appears here about common sense has to be qualified. Common sense means genuinely straight common sense that has been built properly, not the mind I was born with. Sometimes things sound similar but are one hundred and eighty degrees opposite. There are people who very much like to emphasize common sense and subjective experience and inner feeling. We are talking about common sense as a truly objective measure. And therefore this common sense is one, not eighteen. The more we develop ourselves, the more we approach the correct common sense. Today “intuition” is a synonym for something that obligates no one. “My intuition says so.” Fine, you’re not obligated—everyone with his own intuition. We are not talking about that. In that sense this really is not like intuition. We’re talking only about a form that is not mathematical—not through proofs and such things—but an intuitive form of thought. But not every person’s intuition having equal validity. Rather, the way this mode of cognition works, this mode of thinking, is a way similar to how intuition works. But that does not mean everyone has his own truth.

The same applies to “These and those are both the words of the living God.” Yes, today every study hall on earth—anything calling itself a study hall—some people sit there, delight in the radiance of the Divine Presence, call it a midrash of the Sages, and every one of them builds on it mountains upon mountains that seem good to him. It may be very amusing, but it has nothing whatever to do with “These and those are both the words of the living God.” For that to be true, the speakers have to be speakers of the living God, so that their words are the words of the living God—not every nobody and leper-like fellow sitting under some tree and coming up with interpretations of one midrash or another suddenly becomes “the words of the living God.” Because sometimes it’s very irritating: on the one hand you really do find statements that seemingly testify to enormous pluralism. Once you drag that down to too concrete a level, somehow people find for themselves some anchor saying that whatever each person understands is fine. There is something pedagogically true in that—meaning, you do have to lead a person to a state where things somehow come out of him. But that doesn’t mean that whatever comes out of him is automatically correct. I mean, that’s outrageous. What, every person who sits there and has an interpretation of a midrash—finished, so now he too has legitimacy, and you have no monopoly, and his interpretation too is a legitimate Judaism, and that’s that? Everyone has his own truth? That is not what is written in “These and those are both the words of the living God.” That was said about Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, not about a collection of people who open a midrash once a year, see what it says to them, and what feelings it arouses in them.

And also this whole question—what? Who decides what are “the words of the living God”? The living God decides that. Who decides who speaks them? If there were a mathematical criterion, then fine, it would be clear. I think here too some kind of clear inner sense is needed, that the person standing before you is speaking the words of the living God. There is no other criterion. In other words, you know—that’s what is written: “If he is like an angel of the Lord of Hosts, seek Torah from his mouth.” Someone where you know, where you feel, that what he is saying here is the words of the living God. I don’t know—there’s no other definition for it. It’s a matter of inner feeling.

And in that inner feeling, one can apparently trust the public, perhaps wider than just Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, because otherwise, of course, you couldn’t even begin to build this whole framework. That decision of who speaks the words of the living God is, in a certain sense, a public decision. Once the public accepts him upon itself, you feel that he speaks from the conscience and the truth of the Jewish people. Why? If you sincerely do this, then he becomes the Jewish people, the truth. I don’t know. If they really persuaded the Jewish people, and really appeared as speakers of the words of the living God, then I think their words really would be accepted. My basic assumption is that if I am commanded not to follow him, that is a sign that I am also supposed to understand that I must not follow him. So according to that there are criteria. What? Yes, criteria are part of the matter. As with a prophet.

If you were in awe of him, then not every person really—yes, but again, the question is whether that really is why. No, the question again is—not every time that something I feel, something that sounds to me like it speaks to me, is called persuasion and words of the living God. Obviously you need some measure of reflection. Again, don’t take intuition too lightly. You have to reflect. You have to see how it fits with what is written in the Torah regarding certain criteria for a prophet. That too is part of the commandment of reflection. Not everything is gut feelings. Part of it is—but in the end, how do you decide who is the leading sage of the generation? Who decides who is the leading sage? Leave aside “words of the living God” and all that. There are even halakhic practical consequences to who counts as the leading sage of the generation. There are rulings, for instance, that the leading sage may do and others may not. According to some opinions, for example, the power of a religious court to declare property ownerless is exercised only by the greatest court of the generation. Or administering punishment beyond the strict law—the Rosh cut off the nose of a woman who committed adultery, the court of the Rosh. In Rif too there is something like this mentioned once. They said there that these were the later courts who were permitted to do that. So how is this actually determined? By a clear feeling of the God-serving public that here is where the word of God is found. There are no criteria for that. You don’t—this is a sort of decision, you know, “It is enough for Israel; if they are not prophets, they are the children of prophets”—at least in that sense. And again, the whole public. Ah, the voice of the multitude as the voice of God? Yes. Again, the whole public—the whole public of those who serve God. The whole public of those who serve God will feel that this is one who speaks the word of God.

Right. And you built yourself. Right. What you built for yourself—again, the basic point is that you are trying to understand what the Torah says, what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants, not what my stomach is growling for. I want to understand what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants and what the Torah says. Now true, within that understanding I too am a component—there’s no use pretending; it’s an illusion to think that what comes out here is some neat, clear, objective, unequivocal set of instructions. I too am one of the components in how exactly to understand the instructions. When the Torah says to seek someone who fears Heaven—do I know the criterion for fear of Heaven? No. Some sort of feeling that this Jew fears Heaven. Do I know what’s in his stomach, what’s in his head? No. But there is some kind of feeling, you understand? So yes, in the end I too am involved. But my aim should be to try to uncover what the Torah, or what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants from me. If that truly is my aim, and also the aim of a certain public, and they reached the conclusion that this Jew is their guide, then he really is that Jew. But on condition that the people are really doing this, and “provided he directs his heart toward Heaven,” that they are acting from true motives, motives of serving God, understanding that this is really what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants of them. Then yes, true, I have no other criterion. I think there cannot be any other criterion.

On the one hand this seems terribly open-ended—meaning, three people could decide for themselves; well, three people aren’t a public by any standard, but never mind, some particular community could decide for itself. Fine. It could be that this really is the present state of affairs; today there may simply be no one who merits the trust of the whole public. Fine. Who says that’s only a bedi’avad situation? Meaning, maybe it would have been better if there were one, but perhaps there is one and we just aren’t willing to recognize him? More likely there isn’t. Until not that long ago there were such people. Even the Chazon Ish, for example—it’s true not everyone followed his, let’s call it, ideological-political path, but no one denied that he stood head and shoulders above the rest. People said, fine. Maybe the Briskers—there were this and that—but okay, maybe that’s not the best example. What I’m saying is that today the conception of what a rabbi is has become a bit more liberal. Meaning, you could study with Rabbi Shlomo Zalman—he passed away two years ago, something like that, right? Four? Fine, he passed away several years ago. Jews studied with him, and many of them did not at all adopt his social and educational outlooks, and that didn’t matter. They sat and learned with him, and he could still be their rabbi, and they held that he was great, perhaps even the leading sage of the generation, and that was that. So the conception isn’t always totally all-encompassing. Maybe that too is a function of the person. Perhaps if the person really were of such stature—like, I don’t know, a rebbe—then maybe no one would even dare deviate from the ideological-political-social direction he sets. Could be. Fine, there are levels to this.

It’s very hard for me; I myself also have not experienced that kind of experience, so I can’t describe it. But I assume that this is probably what ought to be here. Some sort of decision that the public somehow decides—not that a collection of individuals decide. That’s… fine.

The first point was that the way to listen is simply to listen to common sense. That is the way to listen—though of course, in earlier stages, that involves more clarification, more consultation, more talking with people. The more a person advances, the more he can take his raw, initial common sense and trust it. The more he advances, the more he can trust it. But in any case, in the end, the final measure for each of us is only common sense; there is no other measure. Very often I… my common sense, for instance, can tell me that in some topic, if the Chazon Ish says one thing and I say another, my common sense tells me the Chazon Ish is right. Common sense is not always the argument I happen to have locally right here. Fine? But many times my common sense may be shaped not only by listening to the stirrings of my own heart, but perhaps also by listening to what surrounds me. Common sense is a complex thing. But in the end, the only way any person can decide is through his common sense.

“The exalted soul that truly seeks God, in its investigation of the order of the heavens and the cycles of stars and constellations, rises above those who imagine that everything in the world is made by powers included in numbers and their relations, and who revere visible being, while the invisible intelligible realm they do not grasp. For the soul, whose powers are inward, is sustained by the echo of every invisible intellect, wonder-working. And so the father of the Hebrews heard the holy saying: ‘Go forth from your astrology,’ and his name was changed and he was called Abraham, father of resonance, father of multitude”—multitude here from a root of murmuring, sound—“father of the multitude, the murmuring echo of every exalted voice, for the father of the external utterance is the inner utterance.”

Here there’s also a bit of clarification of the words. First of all, regarding those who believe that everything in the world is made by powers included in numbers and their relations—that’s the Pythagoreans he spoke about earlier. As is known, the Pythagoreans held various mystical beliefs about numbers; they thought numbers were the basic components of the world. It’s not clear to me in what sense they really thought numbers were a material entity composing physical reality in the world—I wonder about that—but they grasped numbers as something with many mystical qualities, the basic being in the world. Gematria doesn’t exist? What? Does gematria also come into this? Numbers express aspects—or letters even more than numbers. Numbers too, but letters even more, express aspects of divinity in the world. They are not entities in themselves. They are expressions of certain aspects of the divine. What they thought was that the number two is not—yes, right. It’s a more refined form of idolatry.

And therefore he says there is a difference between the exalted soul that truly seeks God in its investigation of the order of the heavens and the cycles of stars and constellations. The intention is that the Pythagoreans also investigated these things—the order of the heavens and the cycles of stars and constellations. But they made all kinds of arithmetic symmetries in the heavens. One of the conclusions, one of the things that led them to believe in the mystical power of numbers, was various whole-number ratios between distances among stars, or all kinds of whole numbers they discovered in astronomy. And in music too, for instance, where frequencies are tied to whole numbers in some sense. And in a certain sense this really is a subtler form of idolatry. It’s still not like the Aristotelian Greeks, say, who believed only in what they saw and considered everything else fiction. In that sense the Pythagoreans are more Platonic; they believe also in abstract entities, in things behind the things. But still, the exalted soul that truly seeks God rises above these imaginers, because they do not grasp the invisible intelligible. “For the soul, whose powers are inward, is sustained by the echo of every invisible intellect, wonder-working.” In practice, even their belief in mystical entities called numbers comes through scientific investigation, not through listening. They look at the distances between stars, arrive at some law, some natural law or law describing the matter—but unlike Aristotle, for whom the scientific world is fiction, not something that really exists, the Pythagoreans treat this law as a thing, as something that exists. The numbers are things. They discover them through scientific means, and after discovering the law, the law itself is now another something, an existing thing.

Yes? But still, their way—we spoke of this also when we talked about Plato—their way of looking at the world is still Greek. They do not listen, they look. Because the way they arrived at those numbers was through scientific investigation, simply recording the things they saw. Only they saw that numbers rule here, okay, so now numbers also exist. In the same way Plato arrived at his ideas, which for him too exist.

Abraham, in a certain sense, begins prophecy. Abraham is the man who listens. “Father of multitude,” and therefore he calls him here “father of multitude,” father of voice, and voice is the thing one listens to. “And therefore the father of the Hebrews heard the holy utterance, ‘Go forth from your astrology,’ and his name was changed,” and then his name was changed and he was called the father of resonance, father of voice. And what does it mean, “for the father of the external utterance is the inner utterance”? There’s a note below, which is really a continuation of section 31 in the first essay. There he spoke about two foreign terms: logos endiathetos and logos prophorikos. In section 31 of the first essay these are rendered into our language as inner logos and outer logos. And there it came up in the context—here too—in the context of the relation between wisdom and deed. There it was discussed, and we spoke about it, in the context of how the deed expresses wisdom externally. In other words, the external expression of wisdom—wisdom is an inner thing—the external expression of wisdom is the deed. But wisdom also sits inside the deed. This is something that relates in an essential way; it is not just some set of commands to regulate matters in the world, as we discussed— I discussed this last year. I’m coming from that from last year; fine, we won’t go through all that again here. But the essence of it is that the deed relates to wisdom in an essential way. The deed is a kind of parable for wisdom. It is not even derived from wisdom, but rather another aspect of wisdom itself. That’s the form—the wisdom is the matter and the deed is the form, if you like. And that is the way we grasp wisdom: through the deed.

When the Torah says, “You shall not murder,” what lies behind that is some idea. What Moses says to the angels: “Is there murder among you? Are there thieves among you? Why do you want the Torah, in which it is written, ‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not steal’?” So what’s really the point there? The point is that the angels wanted the Torah itself, not the human expression given to Moses in which it is written, “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” and so on. For them, that exact same kind of wisdom, that exact same principle of wisdom, has a different kind of expression, one relevant to the world of angels. In other words, the practical expressions are the form of the very selfhood of wisdom.

And therefore, yes, I think we did discuss this, that the halakhic practical difference is a means for understanding, not the other way around. In other words, understanding is not a means to know what to do. We do not study a Talmudic passage in order to know what to do. In my view, I do not study a passage in order to know what to do. Many people do, but I don’t believe in that. I think I study a passage in order to understand the passage. But the passage expresses itself in concrete things, in events, in laws. That enables me to grasp the matter and examine my different understandings. I want to test understandings, so I say okay, there’s a practical difference; I’ll check whether it’s right or wrong. That is the substitute for experiments in the scientific world. In science one does an experiment in order to test a theory. But what is the goal? Is the goal to know all the facts? Obviously not. The goal is to understand the laws behind the facts. That is the goal of scientific work. The facts, in a certain sense, are a means. The thought that the goal is just facts is superficial. Because if we wanted to know all the facts, no problem—I could write down for you all the facts on earth in a book, perhaps very thick books, but no problem, one can record all the facts without understanding anything. That’s nonsense. Scientifically nothing has been done. The role of science is not to know all the facts—on the contrary. It is to use the facts in order to infer the laws behind the facts.

So in certain respects, science—it may be that the people funding science want it in order to know more facts—but scientific inquiry itself aims at the laws. The facts are an instrument. And similarly, in a similar sense, the same thing exists in learning. The laws, the practical differences, the oxen and pits—those are the experiments we perform on our theories. Here we test whether our mind is thinking straight or crooked. Whether our understanding is correct or not correct. And that’s how we build a worldview. We do not—again, I don’t like the expression “we.” I’m speaking about myself. I don’t like it when people say “what we think” and “what Judaism says”; it annoys me. Whoever identifies with it, fine. I’m telling you what I do. I study the laws and concrete acts in order to test the reasoning through them. My purpose in studying a passage is to arrive at the correct reasoning, not that the reasoning is a means to understand and know what to do and draw conclusions in cases, say, not explicitly mentioned in the Talmud—as is often the standard excuse for why we should waste our time on one or another legal conceptualization that our ancestors didn’t engage in. In my opinion, that’s not right. We deal with this because this is what one ought to deal with; this is the goal. We engage in Jewish law in order to test the reasoning and know which reasoning is correct and which is not.

Of course that’s not the whole picture. There is also the doing, obviously one also acts, and that too has importance in its own right, not only as a tool. But again, it too is an instrument for understanding. Someone who waves the lulav understands in a completely different way what the commandment of lulav means than someone who studies it academically. At the most basic level of understanding, someone who does not wave the lulav cannot come up with conceptual arguments about lulav. That’s just how it is. It can’t be otherwise—go and see that it can’t. It doesn’t matter whether one understands why or not, but it won’t work. You can’t explain it rationally, because someone who doesn’t wave the lulav doesn’t attribute to it the sort of importance that would make him begin investigating it and proposing arguments about it. It seems to me that even if for the sake of an intellectual exercise he did so, it still wouldn’t be it. Somehow, in order to grasp what lulav is, you also have to wave it.

That’s what is meant by “Great is study, for it leads to action.” And it’s a famous paradox. If study is great, then it is being presented as a means. Action is what is great; study leads to action. So which is greater, study or action? They ask: is study greater or action greater? That’s the discussion. And they answer: study is greater because it leads to action. So what then? Action is greater, because even study only leads to action? No. Study is greater. Why? Because study of that kind, which comes to expression in deeds, is a completely different kind of study than studies that do not come to expression in deeds, than external wisdoms. Therefore study is greater. I could have explained that action is greater, that action without study is insufficient. But then action would be the main thing and study only a means to know what to do. So ask the rabbi what to do and do it. Why do you need to explain? What’s the goal? Maybe the goal is also to understand what I am doing, that there is value in the deed when I understand it as well.

Who says both aren’t great? Meaning, why does one have to decide that specifically one side is right? Why must only one side in a conceptual inquiry always be right? Maybe both sides are true. That is the straightforward reading of the matter. They established both—but they didn’t say that study and action are both… Right, because you are grasping study in an academic way. Fine, I learn one kind of wisdom, another kind of wisdom, and here I do what the Holy One, blessed be He, commands. So there is wisdom and there is action; what is really greater? But if you understand that “study” here is something else, not academic study, but study that leads to action—“leads to action” not in the sense that now I know what to do, but that it is umbilically tied to action. The metaphysical principle automatically comes to expression in deed, not because I think that this is proper and one can infer conclusions this way or that way. This very reasoning—the expression of it below is the deed, not that the deed is derived from it. The reasoning is a thing. And it is a thing that exists in a more spiritual world, let’s say. It has spiritual existence. It exists here too, but it has a more spiritual existence. And its more external aspect is the deed. It is the very same thing itself. Maybe, in a sense, this is what Rav Aba says. The whole distinction you make between action and study is only because you still grasp study in the same way it is grasped in the university—there is study and there is action, and now we need to decide which is greater. The answer is that they are not two things at all; they are two aspects of the same thing. Study leads to action; action is the expression of what you learned. They are not two things at all. It is study of a different object. Fine, it could be that it’s not literally written here, but it’s not so far off.

Reasons for commandments—the whole idea that there is such truth in reasons for commandments that one can use them to permit things, as though there were some principal concept—so for example… To exclude what? I didn’t understand. To exclude what? To exclude the idea that commandments are just maybe a concept, maybe an act, but there’s no such thing as reasons for commandments. That we cannot get to them. We cannot get to the full reasons, but we can get close. To get to the reason for the commandment—we didn’t explain, in rabbinic enactments whose rationale depends on the act, that here too is it reason or definition? Here I was just talking with two Jews who reminded me of an embarrassing question I’ve struggled with for many years: the difference between a reason and a definition. We explain conceptual reasoning. Rabbi Shimon—usually it is accepted that Rabbi Shimon expounds the reason of the verse, and the law does not follow him; we do not expound the reason of the verse. So then what are all the conceptual arguments we make? Only in places where there are no verses? Obviously we also try to understand verses, among other things, right? The verse tells me something and I try to understand what it says and infer conclusions from it. The verse says an ox gores a donkey, so if a car runs over a house that counts too. Obviously yes. Why obviously yes? Because you understand that it is the same thing. What does “understand” mean? You are expounding the reason of the verse? But we do not expound the reason of the verse. So every extension is based somewhere on understanding.

On the other hand people always say: yes, but we only define, we don’t understand. Meaning, it is a legal definition, not the reason. It is the definition of the commandment, not the reason why it was given. This is a very artificial distinction. There is no definition without reason. How do you know that this is the definition of the commandment? Fine, that’s the definition. Because I understand that this is what the commandment says, so clearly that is the definition. True, in the legal sense what interests me is the definition, because in the end that determines what I will do. But the definition is derived from understanding. There is no definition without understanding. Where did the definition come from? If the definition were given at Sinai together with the commandment, fine. But when I extract a conceptual definition while studying the passage, the Torah, whatever it may be, and I bring out the definition—obviously I am assuming some understanding in the background. What is the relation between definition and reason? Who knows? I have no idea. No chance. It’s a very metaphysical question.

I’ve heard several times that people say in the name of Rabbi Chaim that the difference is that in a definition, unlike Rabbi Shimon, it’s reason. Right. Rabbi Chaim himself is known for always saying: we don’t ask why, only what. You can’t ask what without why—that is exactly the point; that’s the difficulty. You can’t ask what without why. If you ask only what, then if the Talmud says something, you have only its narrow novelty. What is written is written. If it says ox, it’s an ox—not a donkey, not a dog, not a car. Clearly Rabbi Chaim did not work like that. So somewhere the reasoning entered for him too. You understand that if my property damages your property, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an ox or a dog. You are already assuming a certain understanding of what damage is and what liability for damages is. It’s very hard to draw the line. Rabbi Chaim said this precisely at that point between reason and definition. Fine.

So how did we begin this whole discussion? Ah, the inner and outer logos. So here below he explains in note 11. He says that Abraham is called the father of tone, echos and logos prophorikos, the external utterance, whose father is the inner guiding intellect, endiathetos, the inner utterance. This is written in the first essay in section 31; there he mentions those concepts. Let’s maybe read a little more of the next bit here in the note. Abraham became wise and a lover of God, and his name was changed to Abraham, meaning the chosen father of tone, echos, father of the echo of all utterance. For the created utterance, the external one, makes heard an echo of voice, and its father is the higher intellect, the inner logos. And see above, etc. The departure from Haran—from the holes of the senses—to hear the echo of the invisible intellect. This, I assume, is a kind of hint to what is called the lights of the ear, nose, and mouth. The departure from Haran, from the holes of the senses. And the lights—what are the holes of the senses? Ear, nose, and mouth represent the senses. And the world of emanation was created from the world of primordial man through lights that emerged from the ear, nose, and mouth, those lights. And basically this is some kind of going out of light from inside to outside. So the interpretation he offers here is a departure from the holes of the senses—a trying to grasp things not through the senses. To grasp the inner light, not through the senses. That is the light that comes out from—the phrase says: “to hear the echo of the invisible intellect.” Yes, something that cannot be grasped by the senses.

Fine, these are matters we may get to much later. Whoever wants can peek at page—in part two, “The revealed and hidden face,” on page… section here, page 223. There he also speaks a bit about these things, perhaps in hints. In any event, Abraham is basically the one who also began to do, not only to study Torah. This is a very important point regarding Abraham, maybe one not many have noticed. Shem and Ever studied Torah. Everyone studied Torah. But commandments—actually carrying out what the Torah says, in other words bringing the wisdom down to the practical plane—that began with Abraham. Not for nothing did our Sages say that Abraham fulfilled even the laws of food preparation for a Festival that falls on Friday. The meaning is that he brought the Torah down to the level of details, to the level of specific observance; he brought it down from the level of ideas to the level of acts.

Abraham in general is a kind of creation ex nihilo. Abraham was created out of nothing; he came out of Terach, out of utter nothingness. In the portion of “Go forth,” it begins there: “Go forth from your land and from your birthplace and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Abraham leaves everything that was before and now goes out toward something new. Abraham cuts off his whole past. He starts from nothing. The Maharal speaks about this a great deal in Netzach Yisrael—if I remember correctly, chapter 11—that Abraham really begins everything from nothing. He begins with “Go forth.” He does not begin in some place and then is told to go. He begins with going. That is, he is created from nothing. Nothing before is described. In Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, for example, he cites the books of the Sabeans, among whom Abraham lived, and Maimonides writes that he himself saw those books, and that many of the deeds described in midrash—the fiery furnace, Nimrod, all those things—are described in historical records of that people called the Sabeans. And none of that is mentioned in the Torah at all. It doesn’t say why he was chosen, why he was righteous, why God chose him—nothing. “Go forth from your land and from your birthplace and from your father’s house”—with nothing, no preliminaries, no nothing. Because Abraham truly represents being from nothing.

Every original creation is in the category of being from nothing. And that is really the true understanding of what kindness is. Kindness too is creation out of nothing. Because repaying a debt to someone is basically paying him because I owe him. There is a prior cause. But kindness, by contrast, is giving to someone whom I do not owe. Without a reason. Just like that. Notice—even that is not mercy, because mercy is somewhere in between. “But I pity him”—that too is some kind of reason; it is not just pure giving. Kindness is simply giving, because the giving comes out of me not because there is some reason, not because I owe someone something. It is being from nothing. It has no prior cause. That is kindness. Kindness is creation ex nihilo, action without rules, action—we’ll still talk about the concept of kindness, I assume. It is not necessarily entirely human. Right, true kindness is really divine kindness, when the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world. People always ask, what is the kindness in that? “He wanted to bestow good.” But that is always grasped on a very low level. What does “wanted to bestow good” mean? He wanted to do good for people? That is a very low expression of the matter. Kindness is exactly creating something from nothing in the first place, simply giving—not for the sake of. It is not even for the sake of doing good at all. I have to give. Meaning, it simply flows from itself. I do not need something to make it grow. Any creation that does not come from something earlier is kindness. The creation of the world, by definition, is kindness—not because afterward God also gives us things and all that; that’s all true, but in a certain sense it is only the external expression of what kindness really is.

So does that mean what we usually call kindness—doing good—is not kindness but mercy? What you usually do as acts of kindness is mercy, not kindness. Then it is no longer kindness. Because if it is “because of,” then it is no longer kindness. And when we say Abraham was the man of kindness—gratitude, for example, is also an intermediate case. Gratitude: someone who does me a kindness, I owe him gratitude. Now what does “owe him gratitude” mean? Gratitude by definition is not a legal obligation; I do not owe him as I owe someone who lent me money. But it also is not kindness to return gratitude to him—that is, to repay him with good in return is also not pure kindness. It is something akin to mercy, let’s say—not mercy, but something similar. Because there is some reason, but not a reason that legally obligates me, a reason that still in some sense leaves it voluntary on my part. But there is a reason. It is not simply giving for no reason, just giving without. That apparently exists only with the Holy One, blessed be He.

And Abraham our forefather, in that sense, is called the father of the trait of kindness, the root of the trait of kindness, because he was the one who created this whole business here out of nothing. Everything with him was out of nothing. The Jewish people were created through him out of nothing, he himself was created out of nothing, everything with him is out of nothing. Speech in Abraham is out of nothing. The speech was always there, and then Abraham simply enabled the Jewish people to hear that command, “Go forth.”

Fine, and this is also connected to listening, of course, because we already discussed that listening is the grasp of matter, while seeing is the grasp of form. Seeing is Greek thought, mathematical thought, scientific thought. It is basically handling the world of phenomena, drawing conclusions from the world of phenomena, as we discussed earlier with Pythagoras. You look at the phenomena and infer conclusions from them. Hearing is an attempt to grasp matter itself not through the mediation of form. That is hearing. There is also a certain aspect here of being from nothing. For binah, intellectual inference, always draws a conclusion from something—there is something, therefore something else, right? Common sense—I have no reasons why it is so; it is so. I have no reasons because it is so. That is wisdom and not binah, yes? You understand? So this too, in essence, has the same root as the trait of kindness. It is also being from nothing. It is creation out of nothing. Common sense is creation out of nothing. I have no reasons. Anything reasoned is not from nothing; it has a prior premise on which it is based, so there is a reason. The premise itself, the initial axiom, is from nothing; it has no reason. This auditory mode is connected through hearing to the trait of kindness.

To know truly in an auditory way is basically to work with the trait of kindness in its broader sense—not in the sense of beneficence, as I said earlier, that is only one expression of kindness, beneficence. Therefore Abraham is also the first listener. Abraham is the first listener because he is the first who knows how to generate truths from nothing. Maimonides, of course, describes Abraham according to the way he understood the concept of wisdom. Maimonides describes Abraham as the great philosopher of his age. But I don’t know. In my humble opinion it seems I would have described him a bit differently, in a certain sense, with all due respect to Maimonides. I think I would have described him a bit differently. He is precisely the one who came out of philosophy. The prophet of the generation. Right. He is the first who grasped things. Consciousness. Fine, that is much more for the future.

What? He created this orthodoxy? Right. He created this orthodoxy. Meaning, he didn’t create it; it was created in him. The encounter with reality created it in him. It wasn’t some… Fine, here it is always a question of how much of what I do is me and how much is the Holy One, blessed be He. The reason Philo called Abraham our forefather the first one who understood, and all that, also comes from there—that supposedly God chose Abraham and he became the first in piety. If God chose, I agree. But I don’t know if I agree completely, because in some sense it is like that for all of us. Each of us represents something particular in the world. Is that him, or is that the Holy One, blessed be He? Or maybe the distinction between him and the Holy One, blessed be He, is not all that sharp. Inside each person too there is something of the Holy One, blessed be He. That is perhaps something that I also—meaning, a person who is wise, the Holy One, blessed be He, created him wise, so it is him, but it is not from some self-identification of his. Yes, but a person who uses that wisdom—it could be that there were other people who had auditory capacity but did not use it. I don’t know. But they reached the conclusion.

It seems that today, for example, there are many people—we spoke about this so much last year that I keep assuming things as obvious—but there are many people today who have common sense and still are not willing to trust it. These are what I call analysts. The kind who produce proofs for everything. They have common sense no less than we do, but they are unwilling to trust it. Because common sense is fiction, illusion, nonsense; only proofs are something one can trust. You understand? That doesn’t mean they lack the capacity—they’re just unwilling to use it. So I don’t know how much of this is innate and how much is an act of the person himself. With God’s help we’ll talk about this more. We spoke about it a bit two years ago, if you remember, during the series on repentance two years ago, in the class on repentance. There too I spoke a bit about this question of what a person does as opposed to what the Holy One, blessed be He, does. How is repentance possible? We’ll still speak about it—I want us to meet several more times on matters of repentance, and then we’ll discuss it there too. This distinction between whether I do it or the Holy One, blessed be He, does it assumes, at some level, that there is a sharp boundary between what is me and what is the Holy One, blessed be He. And it’s not entirely clear to me how sharp that boundary really is.

Fine. “In the inner wisdom, law is the foundation of the world…” Ah, wait, we still haven’t finished explaining here. Abraham basically—what are logos prophorikos and endiathetos? The inner logos is the intellect, the utterance of the Holy One, blessed be He, that is the very substance of wisdom itself, the abstract wisdom. The outer logos is binah. Binah is the way I grasp wisdom. In our context, for example, it is the characteristics as opposed to the body of wisdom. Abraham our forefather is the one who began—he is the outer logos, Abraham our forefather—at least he was; it’s not entirely clear to me whether he was the outer and became the inner, I’m not sure exactly what Philo means. In short, there is in him an aspect of this and an aspect of that. I really need to read Philo again to understand, if possible, what exactly he means. But there is an inner logos and an outer logos. That is the intellect itself, the essence of the intellect, versus its expression in deeds. Basically, its manifestation outside. There is a difference between wisdom itself and how it is revealed outside.

Is evening prayer at 7:15? Evening prayer. Shall we make a quorum here? Because I just want to finish the second essay; I’d hate to stop here in the middle. Okay? No objections? If anyone… it’s another ten minutes. Ah, and at 7:30 there’s Rabbi Bazak. When’s the food? Above the food. And when does the food below arrive? Eight. Fine, let me just say one more sentence connected to what follows, and maybe we’ll do another short meeting to complete it. I want to finish the second essay in this time frame. Fine—if someone wants to go, we’ll stop; I’m not forcing anything here.

So what I just want to say is that this relation exactly—between wisdom and binah, between the inner logos and the outer logos, between the matter of the logos and the form of the logos, how one grasps the logos—when it’s between wisdom itself and how it is grasped, the relation between wisdom and binah, that is really what underlies the next two paragraphs. The next two paragraphs speak somewhat in the language of the hidden teachings, but that is apparently what lies behind them: the relation between wisdom itself and the way it comes to expression, and the way it is grasped. And that is basically what Abraham our forefather is doing in this paragraph. Abraham our forefather is the one who brings to expression that utterance which already existed in the prior world. The utterance was inside the world; Abraham our forefather brought it out and turned it into a practical layer. Now people can also understand it. It is now visible to human eyes; it can now be grasped. So that is the relation between wisdom and binah, and we’ll speak about that in the next two paragraphs. Maybe we’ll connect it with some class on repentance, because by now it’s really connected to repentance. That’s it, I think. Fine.