The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 15
This transcript 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
- The conception of the thing-in-itself and auditory logic versus Kant
- Concepts, definitions, and the dispute over “Who is a Jew”
- Name, description, and inner apprehension of “the thing itself”
- Rabbi Kook, “Ein Ayah,” and trust that does not rest on formal rules
- Immediate recognition, returning lost property, and identification that is not characterization
- Access to objects versus inaccessibility to the essence of the Holy One, blessed be He
- Schopenhauer and looking inward
- Section E: the doctrine of intermediaries, forces, and angels versus the scholars’ reading
- Seeing demons as fact and the question of non-sensory cognition
- Light, the scent of knowledge of God, parable and analogon, and two-way ascent
- The ear of understanding, wisdom and understanding, and mediation that ascends and descends
Summary
General Overview
The text presents a view according to which Hebrew-Semitic logic does not stop at what appears to the eye as the outer layer of properties and definitions, but hears and recognizes through appearances the thing itself, in contrast to a Kantian reading that limits cognition to sensory appearances. It illustrates that disputes over concepts like “Jew” are real disputes because a concept is not a collection of definitions but an inner reality that the definitions merely characterize, and that even immediate recognition identifies belonging without articulated “signs.” It goes on to argue that the doctrine of intermediaries, forces, and angels is not a speculative invention meant to bridge the one and the many, but knowledge that arises from divine cognition and vitality, and finally describes a movement of parable and analogy in which the light and higher revelation are themselves a parable for what is above them, and cognition not only “brings down” the higher into human language but also raises the human being to higher worlds up to the threshold of prophecy.
The conception of the thing-in-itself and auditory logic versus Kant
The Nazir puts forward the claim that the Hebrew never sees the thing “as it is, the final absolute essence,” but everything revealed appears to him as a hint, likeness, and parable for what is above it, within a special auditory quality unique to Hebrew auditory logic. The text sharpens that the novelty is not the distinction itself between “the thing-in-itself” and the way things appear, but the ability to “see through” the appearances and listen through them until one reaches the thing itself. It distinguishes this from Kant by arguing that for Kant cognition is limited to sensory translations of the world, whereas here there is also an acknowledged auditory-cognitive access that is not merely sensory.
Concepts, definitions, and the dispute over “Who is a Jew”
The text presents a debate between defining a Jew as someone born to a Jewish mother or converted according to Jewish law, and an essentialist-subjective definition of “whoever feels himself to be Jewish,” and rejects the solution of simply swapping names like “Jew” and “Yankele,” because the dispute is not about a word but about content. It states that both sides are talking about the same concept, because a concept is not the collection of its definitions, but something beyond the definitions that those definitions merely express in form. It argues that a definition cannot convey a concept that has no inner-real root in the hearer, but can only sharpen something already understood vaguely, and that all speech presupposes meaning behind the words that is not an empty convention.
Name, description, and inner apprehension of “the thing itself”
The text distinguishes between a definition as description and a collection of properties, and the name as a “pointing to” the thing itself, and argues that in some sense the name is tied to the substance more intimately than the definition precisely because it is not a description. It presents “the meaning behind the words” as something that is “the thing as it is in itself” in the sense of apprehending through the form what lies beyond it. It describes inner insight as the way a description such as green and square can generate in the hearer something that is not reducible to form, but touches the substance of the concept.
Rabbi Kook, “Ein Ayah,” and trust that does not rest on formal rules
The text brings a story heard from Rabbi Brazilai in the name of Rabbi Kook in “Ein Ayah,” Sabbath part 1, sections 106–107, in which a man comes to Rabbi Chiya and says, “Your sons are my sons and your wife is my wife,” and tries to undermine things through rules such as “most acts of intercourse are attributed to the husband.” It presents Rabbi Kook’s answer as the view that recognition of one’s wife and children is not built on formal arguments but on unequivocal inner recognition: “This is my wife and these are my children.” It describes how the rabbi does not argue in the language of doubts and presumptions, and the challenger “collapses on his own” in the face of certainty that does not depend on external mechanisms of proof.
Immediate recognition, returning lost property, and identification that is not characterization
The text connects the concept of immediate recognition to the law that “for a Torah scholar, as is known, a lost object is returned on the basis of immediate recognition,” and to the topic in tractate Chullin 96, and explains that immediate recognition is not a collection of signs one does not know how to formulate. It describes immediate recognition as direct knowledge: “This is mine, period,” without the ability or need to specify characteristics, and presents this as an example of the ability to reach the object itself and not only its properties. It compares this to the difficulty of defining for a computer how to recognize letters and images, and argues that the gap is not merely technical complexity but an essential difference in which human recognition is based on a clear intuitive sense and not on an algorithm of characterizations.
Access to objects versus inaccessibility to the essence of the Holy One, blessed be He
The text raises a difficulty: if one says that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot be known except through His revelations, then seemingly the same should be true of every object. It answers by distinguishing that with objects, differences in perceived forms indicate that there is a difference in the objects themselves, and therefore the form is an indication of something that exists in the thing itself, even if the concepts belong to human cognition. It argues that with the Holy One, blessed be He, there is no apprehension of “what this essence is,” but only understandings of attributes and revelations, and there “it truly stops at the revelations,” unlike a table, where through the form one develops some grasp of the table’s essence. It sharpens that according to Kant there is no difference between objects and the Holy One, blessed be He, because in both cases there is no access to the thing itself, whereas here, precisely by going beyond Kant, a difference emerges: in objects there is some apprehension of the essence, while in relation to the Holy One, blessed be He, there is not.
Schopenhauer and looking inward
The text mentions that Schopenhauer argued there is one place where one sees the thing-in-itself: when one looks inward into oneself and grasps from within rather than from without. It presents a discussion that is hesitant about that certainty and raises the possibility that even in a person’s inwardness there remains a question whether one grasps the thing itself or the way it appears to the eye of cognition, but leaves that as a separate issue.
Section E: the doctrine of intermediaries, forces, and angels versus the scholars’ reading
The text quotes: “The doctrine of intermediaries, forces, or angels for the Alexandrians… thus Hebrew inner wisdom does not come from the calculation of cold intellect alone… but flows out of the divine vitality bursting forth and rising in its multiplicity,” and interprets this as a consequence of section D. It presents the way of scholars and philosophers who look from the outside and explain concepts like angels as an “invention” meant to bridge the one and the many or “to raise Him, blessed be He, above His world,” and rejects this as an external interpretation. It states that in the Semitic conception, ideas are not necessarily speculation of an intellect organizing sensory data, but cognition that can also “see” or “hear” ideas, and therefore knowledge of forces and angels is presented as a fact acquired through cognition, not as an invention created to solve a philosophical problem.
Seeing demons as fact and the question of non-sensory cognition
The text brings an example from the Talmud / Talmudic text in Berakhot 6 about the possibility of “seeing them” through details like “a firstborn daughter of a firstborn” and actions done to the eyes, and treats it as an illustration that the discussion is not about thinking but about the fact of seeing or not seeing. It describes personal skepticism toward grandmothers’ testimonies alongside the claim that they are “open to ideas” and therefore see things others do not, and concludes that the point is that such concepts are treated as reality and not as invention.
Light, the scent of knowledge of God, parable and analogon, and two-way ascent
The text quotes a long passage beginning with “Every sense and scent of knowledge of God” and describes a poetic-moral-intellectual state bursting forth as a revelation of the light of glory and a mighty spirit, lifting the human soul “to higher worlds close to divine life” and revealing “a hidden supernal light concealed from human eyes.” It states that even “the holy sown light” is not absolute as higher selfhood, but “a parable and a sign, a likeness, an analogon of what is above it,” namely “the unseen and the unforeseeable, heard from within it by the ear of understanding, as in prophecy.” It develops the point that the parable is not only a one-way translation of the abstract into human language, but a two-way act in which the parable also brings the human being to the thing signified and makes progress to higher categories possible. Therefore, a parable is not merely arbitrary, but must be suited also to the thing itself and not only to human understanding.
The ear of understanding, wisdom and understanding, and mediation that ascends and descends
The text links the “ear of understanding” to things said “at the end of the previous article” in section 14, and presents understanding as a mediator that brings wisdom to the human being and gives it a graspable form, while describing understanding as a kind of voice carrying a message. It adds that understanding not only brings down abundance but also carries the human being upward, and describes this in kabbalistic terms as the female principle turning “both upward and downward,” so that cognition is a two-way drawing-near that enables the chosen one of the people, the prophet, or the sage to ascend to the heights and apprehend the things themselves through parables and not only receive them as lower appearances.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And this—if now, in light of this background, we read section D again, we say: the Hebrew never sees the thing as it is, the final absolute essence, but what is revealed appears in his eyes as a passage to what is above it, hinted at within it, resembling it, which includes the special auditory quality of Hebrew auditory logic. So here—I don’t remember exactly where we got to—but in fact the question arises here: why is this Jewish? Kant said this too. He relates here to Kant, not directly, but it’s pretty clear he’s referring to him. So why is this Jewish? Anyone—even any philosopher who thinks a little—understands that what he sees is only the way things appear to his own eyes. He doesn’t see the things themselves. Ah, that’s exactly the point. That’s what I
[Speaker B] want to sharpen here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, the point he wants to stress here is that, unlike the Kantian conception—where Kant said that you can’t see the thing itself, all you can see are the forms in which it appears to you—that comes from Kant’s assumption that the only way we can grasp the world outside us is sensorially. And therefore we can see only the sensory translations of the world outside us. But if we accept the fact that there is also an auditory mode, a mode of listening to the world, then the deep meaning of that mode is some kind of access that Kant never recognized at all, direct access to the thing itself—not through its characteristics, not through the color, this shape, but the thing itself. To see what lies beyond the whole collection of properties that I perceive through the senses. In other words, the point he’s making here is not the distinction between the thing itself and the things that we see, but our ability to see through the things that we see—to listen, in his language, to hear through the things that we see—and also reach the thing itself. At that stage Kant didn’t speak about this at all—on the contrary.
[Speaker B] Matter—but you can also see the form.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not form—matter, matter. Yes. Meaning, the form is only something that exists for us.
[Speaker B] So can this even be described?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, because to describe it is always in terms of form. Every description belongs to form. Maybe inner insight? Yes, right, right—inner insight, right. You can explain to him—tell him it’s green and square and whatever—and through that he’ll also get some kind of inner insight, and that’s really the matter of this concept, that’s the thing itself. We spoke about these concepts that are under dispute, like Jew, yes? One says this is the definition of a Jew and the other says that is the definition of a Jew. I think I mentioned this, right? There’s a debate, say, between two people today. Let’s go back to the previous point. There are two people arguing over what a Jew is today. One says a Jew is someone who converted or is born to a Jewish mother, going back to Abraham our forefather and Sarah. And there is someone who claims that a Jew is whoever feels himself to be Jewish, or some essentialist definition of that sort. Fine, let’s set aside for the moment the circularity of the definition, and assume okay, let’s say there are two alternative definitions here. Seemingly there’s a very simple way to solve this dilemma. What’s the problem? Call this one “Jew” and call that one “Yankele.” Yankele is this, and Jew is that, and everyone… Why fight over the same—after all, we’re fighting over a word. Each of us is talking about a different concept. I’m talking about someone born to a Jewish mother or converted according to Jewish law, and you’re talking about someone who—I don’t know what—some other definition that I can’t even formulate because it’s always circular.
[Speaker B] Let’s say we ignore that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but you’re changing the definition, you’re proposing another definition. I’m saying: how can it be the same concept if it has a different definition? So you’re talking about a different concept. So let’s give them different names and stop arguing. Why are we arguing? I don’t get it.
[Speaker B] Again, here too you’re only thinking about the name.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because you want the word, you want ownership over the word. Yes, I waive the word for you, so—
[Speaker B] I waive the word for you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll call myself Israeli, okay? What—obviously that’s the question. If that’s the root of the matter, of course, no doubt I’m willing. Why do we need to fight? I don’t understand—is it over this word? Obviously not. We’re arguing over subjective content, not over a word. The point is that both of us are in fact talking about the same concept. We really are talking about the same concept. Because a concept is not the collection of its definitions. The definitions are the form of the concept. But the concept itself is something beyond the definitions, which the definitions characterize. So when both of us argue over who is a Jew, we are having a real argument, because we are talking about the same concept. And you claim this is its definition and I claim that is its definition. But do you understand what has to be assumed for that? You have to assume that a concept is not a collection of definitions. A concept has some basic meaning that the definitions come to express. But the concept is that thing—it is not the definitions. Otherwise arguments really have no meaning. No meaning at all. Any argument you bring me here, I’ll show you that you’re simply talking about two different concepts. I’ll propose fitting concepts for both sides and they’ll part in peace, each man to his fellow, and say, “Be strong,” and that’s it. Why fight? If people fight, notice, both sides—even if one of them doesn’t recognize it, and maybe that’s one possible way to try to speak with people, like that day we talked about earlier—to try to explain to a person that he shouldn’t say on the one hand, “Well, there’s nothing there, it’s all nonsense, it’s all definitions and so on,” and on the other hand fight over them. That just doesn’t sound logical. Because if you’re fighting over them, that’s a sign that not everything is definition. It’s a sign that there is something essential behind the definitions, and you insist on your right that this is the correct definition and not his. That’s already progress. Meaning, now both of us already agree that there is such a concept, we’re just arguing over what its correct characterization really is. Fine, maybe that’s at least a way to start trying to deal with the clarification.
[Speaker B] There was some class—anyway, there was some discussion whether Judaism is a collection of laws or something like that, or beliefs or something like that, and the rabbi says it’s a symbol. Meaning, it’s not—he really disconnects it from all its practical implications and all that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And every concept is like this. Every concept is like this. There is no concept on earth that is definitions. There isn’t one. If there were one, we wouldn’t understand what it was saying. A concept we don’t understand—a definition can never convey it to us. Only something we already understand, a definition can perhaps clarify further, or define it, sharpen what we understand better. A definition can never convey to you a concept when you have no clue at all what it means. Only something you already know in some way—maybe vaguely, maybe as something you never bothered to define for yourself, or weren’t able to define for yourself—then the definition comes and perhaps places it into clearer patterns. But something that has no root in reality at all, that’s just convention, some agreement between two sides—“let’s define this word this way”—then it can’t be… that word won’t be accompanied by any inner meanings. When you say the word, you won’t—it won’t come with any feeling of what that word means. A word that you say, you—there’s some feeling that accompanies what you say, that what you say is this. Yes? Words whose whole meaning is only convention—you can’t speak them. I mean, what? You’re just playing. It’s not… All speech assumes there is meaning behind the words. And that meaning is really the thing as it is in itself. That’s the demonstration of our ability to grasp the thing through its form. Through the definition of the concept Jew, we do not stop at the definition. That definition comes to characterize the Jew himself. Jew is the name of the concept. The definition is, say, someone born to a Jewish mother or who converted according to Jewish law. The name is Jew. In a certain sense, the name is connected to the matter much more intimately than the definition, precisely because it’s—you don’t know how to explain it. It’s just that. There’s no—you don’t… A definition is a description, yes? A definition is a collection of properties: someone born to a Jewish mother, converted according to Jewish law. These are concepts I understand. “Jew” is a collection of letters; I mean, it has no inherent meaning—you could in principle have chosen any other word. Precisely because of that, it is more intimately connected to the thing itself. Because it’s not a description of it; it points to it itself. It’s simply—it itself. Our ability to see through the descriptions to the things themselves—that’s the second ability. Someone showed me a few… Itai Poni showed me a few days ago something he heard from Rabbi Brazilai, some passage from Rabbi Kook in “Ein Ayah.” Were any of you in that class by any chance?
[Speaker B] In the classes there were…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Where he talked there about someone who came to the rabbi and said, “Your sons are my sons and your wife is my wife,” or he came to Rabbi Chiya and said, “Your mother is my wife and you are my son.” In short, he told him he was a mamzer. So he offered him a cup of wine, to drink a l’chaim, and he burst—or died, or I don’t know how to understand it. And Rabbi Kook there speaks—I think it’s a very beautiful passage in “Ein Ayah,” Sabbath part 1, sections 106–107. And Rabbi Kook there speaks about… about your recognition that this is your son and this is your wife not through the concepts of “most acts of intercourse are attributed to the husband,” or all sorts of formal halakhic concepts, but simply because it’s obvious that that’s the case. You can’t really undermine anything for me. Everything that fellow wanted to undermine was exactly the—“Wait, wait, most acts of intercourse are attributed to the husband, so wait, I have such-and-such a presumption and such-and-such a doubt and all kinds of things like that, so your wife is my wife and your sons are my sons.” So what does he say to him? Leave it. My trust in my wife and my children isn’t based on “most acts of intercourse are attributed to the husband.” Someone whose trust is based on that is in pretty bad shape. He says to him: my trust is based on some kind of unequivocal, clear inner recognition—not through all kinds of formal rules. This is my wife and these are my children, and stop confusing me. And that’s all. The moment he understood that, he gives him a drink of l’chaim; he doesn’t even argue with such a person. Meaning, he fell silent. You understand? The moment such a person is built on arguments—meaning, basically, I’ll change this presumption and bring that majority and that doubt—but he’s not willing to argue with him in his language. He says, what do you mean? This is my wife and these are my children, period. What do you want from my life now? So he collapses on his own. It’s a little similar to what we discussed earlier. In any case, there too Rabbi Kook mentions his words, and this is a point I think is interesting and worth noticing: for a Torah scholar, as is known, a lost object is returned on the basis of immediate recognition. And there’s a discussion in tractate Chullin 96 that deals with this question—what exactly are the signs, what is this immediate recognition. So let’s just think about the concept of immediate recognition even before the halakhic implications. What is immediate recognition? Immediate recognition means that I’m not really giving clear signs. Because if there are clear signs, then there’s nothing to talk about. I simply know that it’s mine. I know that it’s mine. It’s exactly what was there with his sons and his wife, yes? Immediate recognition. So a lost object is returned to a Torah scholar. To an ignoramus it is not returned. Simply understood, that seems to be because he lies, not because he lacks immediate recognition. Meaning, we fear he’ll just say so even though it isn’t really true. But that doesn’t deny that such a feeling may exist even in an ignoramus. But what matters here is that in the case of a Torah scholar it is—
[Speaker B] Someone who doesn’t lie—that comes before everything.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Though you could say that’s only an indication. Since he’s a Torah scholar, the fact that he doesn’t lie is an indication that he’s a Torah scholar. And now that he’s a Torah scholar, you know he has immediate recognition. So maybe both are true.
[Speaker B] Indications and deficiencies and all kinds of who is an ignoramus—there are all kinds of definitions—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not important, I’m not going into the topic there now. But what is this concept of immediate recognition really? The concept of immediate recognition is not a collection of signs that I don’t know how to point to precisely. Clearly not, right? It’s not that if you gave them—today there’s a lot of work with computers—trying to recognize letters, recognize handwriting, or recognize an image. A very popular field today in computing. And somehow they can’t manage to define well for the computer what every human being, every child, does just like that. And for the computer they feed more and more images so that it can recognize an image or a letter or something like that, so it will understand that this letter—even if there’s some small change in it—you need to try to define for the computer what is common to these two letters even though this one is different from that one, and why a change at this level is already the letter bet and not aleph. But changes of such-and-such kind are all still forms of the letter aleph. Usually the assumption is: okay, because it’s terribly complicated, there are many possibilities. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think that’s true. The real answer is that it simply does not work through characterization. It does not work through characterization. It’s not that if I had a precise enough computer, I could formulate every characterization exactly, with infinite memory, as much as you want—feed it all the characterizations you want—and then it would know how to identify. It would not be the same identification. It’s something else. You have some clear feeling that you are standing before the letter aleph. It’s not through all sorts of rules and all sorts of details and signs like this and signs like that that you don’t know how to define. It’s not that you don’t know how to define them; it isn’t based on that at all. It’s based on some clear intuitive feeling that you are standing before the letter aleph. In the immediate recognition of a Torah scholar, the same thing with a lost object—it’s also not that he doesn’t know how to formulate what his signs are. He has no signs. He knows that he is standing before his object. What is that? It is exactly moving to the object not through its characteristics but to the object itself, to the thing as it is in itself—perhaps getting there through the characteristics, yes—but the point I’m making is not through thirteen characteristics because of which it is mine, but “this is mine,” period. There is no doubt about it, nothing to argue about. That is the concept of immediate recognition. That’s exactly this hearing. That’s exactly the attempt to see the thing itself through its characteristics. So that is the important point, I think, that the Nazir wants to stress here. Not Kant’s distinction itself between the thing as it is in itself and how it appears to my eyes, but that after the thing appears to my eyes in the forms in which it appears, through that I can also approach the thing itself. It is not true that the thing itself is inaccessible. The thing itself is accessible—it is not accessible to the senses; it is accessible to cognition, in other modes of cognition. And this is a Jewish claim—there is a Jewish secret here. A gentile can do this too, but the gentile does not recognize his ability to do it.
[Speaker B] I’ll explain this more.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe yes, maybe no—but it’s a Jewish claim. Not that it’s only a Jewish ability; with regard to certain fields, maybe there is here also a specifically Jewish ability. Maybe there is. But I’m talking even at the simple philosophical level: you approach an object—you’re talking here, I think, about something that even a gentile has, immediate recognition of his own objects. I don’t think that’s a privilege reserved for Jews. Yes, right, exactly. No, you can say they identify letters like computers. We identify letters like human beings. Yes, right, that’s nonsense, really. The point is this is a Jewish statement, not a Jewish trait. The Jewish statement claims that beyond Kant, every person—not only a Jew—but the Jewish statement here, this second Jewish logic, is a logic directed to the whole world. Maybe not everyone can use it everywhere and in every matter, but in principle there is here a statement about the entire world, not just about us: that within everything there is something I can listen to and understand not through its characteristics—or through its characteristics, but reach it itself. Why through the characteristics? Why specifically through the characteristics? Seemingly the characteristics do not belong to this realm at all. The characteristics contribute nothing. Apparently they do. Again, no one can know what the relationship is between the characteristics and the thing itself, because this is exactly the kind of domain that I don’t know how one can even talk about. But apparently yes—apparently seeing the characteristics contributes something also to grasping the thing itself. There’s no escaping it. The fact is that a definition also clarifies for me a concept that I already knew before. Give a definition to something, and it still causes me to grasp it better. If I knew it beforehand and now I’m only formulating many words, then the definition actually does nothing. On the other hand, if I didn’t know it beforehand, a definition cannot teach me ex nihilo something I have no clue about. So you see that somehow defining characteristics well does help inner apprehension too. But one has to know that after the good definition there is also inner apprehension—it does not stop at the definition, it does not stop at the characteristics. All this, and before that we haven’t yet spoken—I was thinking: people always say that one cannot know the Holy One, blessed be He. Our knowledge of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not like knowledge of other things in the world. He is distant, abstract; we know only His revelations—again, as is written in various books and things like that. Seemingly all objects are the same in this respect. With all objects too, we know only their revelations, so what is the difference? So is it really the same thing? Let’s try to think: two identical objects—two identical objects—obviously their form in my eyes will also be identical, right? I mean in cognition, not in the eyes. Two different objects will have different forms, right? What does that mean? It means that in the objects themselves there is some difference. I don’t know in what concepts to formulate it. I can say their color is different, but that’s again a statement about what is in me. But clearly the root of that—why is there a different color in me from these two objects? Because in the objects themselves there is something different. What does that mean? It means that this color is nevertheless an indication of something that exists in the object itself. True, in the object itself there is no color; the whole conceptual system through which I deal with objects does not exist in the objects themselves, it exists in me. But clearly it reflects something that is in the object itself. We haven’t yet spoken about that, right? Last time? So in fact through the form I really do grasp something inside the thing. I’m not just talking about the form. True, the form is the only way I can approach it, because I always need somehow to speak about it in some language. I speak in the language of color, in the language through which my cognition grasps the thing—but that is a language for speaking about the thing itself. With the Holy One, blessed be He, it is not so. Or in the earlier terms, as I said: through the form we grasp the thing itself by way of apprehension, not by way of definition—yes?—by way of apprehension. That too does not exist with the Holy One, blessed be He. And in what sense? I think this is what books mean whenever they say that apprehension of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not like apprehension of other objects. This is true even after Kant, not only before Kant. When I grasp a table, then, as I said earlier, through its form I also understand what a table really is, in some kind of raw way. Again, the moment I begin to talk about it, it will again be in my concepts, but the understanding that accompanies my speech is a real understanding of what a table is. With the Holy One, blessed be He, we do not really have a grasp of what this essence called the Holy One, blessed be He, is. We have all kinds of understandings of attributes, of revelations, of how He appears—but there it really stops. There it really stops with the revelations. We cannot grasp such that we would have some inner insight into what the Holy One, blessed be He, is. So often people call this negative attributes, they call it other things, each one formulates it differently, and there are differences too, but fundamentally it is clear that there is here some inability to reach the essence itself. Even through objects—even if with other objects through the form I do develop some insight into what the essence itself is—with the Holy One, blessed be He, that apparently does not exist. I think that is the basic meaning of the difference. According to Kant—sorry, just one more second, just to sharpen this—according to Kant there really are no differences, because according to Kant even with ordinary objects I do not grasp the thing itself, only its characteristics. I have no access to the thing itself. Precisely because I go beyond Kant and claim that… The conception here will be—someone who remains at the Kantian level, then it really is the same thing. The Holy One, blessed be He, and objects—everything, I see how it is revealed to my eyes. That’s what I see. So what’s the difference? It is exactly the same thing.
[Speaker B] You could also say that a subject is an essence. What? Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Everything has a divine root, as it were.
[Speaker B] But here it’s really seeing the thing as it is in itself, really, really—with all the channels there and there—and here it’s actually there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s something else.
[Speaker B] No, he didn’t say it about the Holy One, blessed be He. About every essence!
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In our soul, the connection—yes, that remains—
[Speaker B] here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Schopenhauer mentioned that there is one place where we do see the thing
[Speaker B] as it is in itself—when we
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] look inward, into ourselves. When a person looks at himself, he grasps himself from within and not from without. But why don’t I see the thing as it is in itself? Because the thing stands outside, and I have the collection of characteristics through which it appears to my eyes. And I do not know what stands behind that collection of characteristics, I cannot penetrate that mask. What it means to penetrate—I can’t define that; we already spoke about this earlier. But when a person looks inward at himself, he—
[Speaker B] always finds the thing as it is in itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? He doesn’t see the soul in between?
[Speaker B] No, leave
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] those abstract concepts
[Speaker B] aside; let’s talk simple philosophy. He doesn’t always see everything, he… two levels of the subconscious, two levels.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but in principle he does. The fact that he doesn’t always see—in practice, okay, I also don’t always see the color of something. That’s not… But the question is whether there is still a principled limitation there, not the practical limitation. And whether in principle there too there is the limitation that I can see only from outside and not from within—only the characteristics as they appear to my eyes, and not the thing itself.
[Speaker B] Maybe all of its content is that apprehension? The content of the thing as it is apprehended by itself?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but even that thing itself—do you grasp it itself, or the way it appears to your eyes? The truth is I tend to think that here too it is the same thing, and here too I do not grasp the thing as it is in itself in the same sense Schopenhauer spoke of. But that’s another matter. Okay, anyway. So that’s section D. Section E. “The doctrine of intermediaries, forces, or angels for the Alexandrians”—the Alexandrians, yes, that’s Philo and his virtuoso associates—“thus Hebrew inner wisdom does not come from the calculation of cold intellect alone, because of the need to raise Him, blessed be He, above His world, or as a means between the one and the many, as stated by the author of the history of philosophy, but rather flows out of the divine vitality bursting forth and rising in its multiplicity.” That is the implication of what was said in section D. Philosophers, as is their way, always grasp things from the outside. When they grasp things from the outside, they look, for example, at a common Alexandrian approach, where there were intermediaries there—forces, angels, all kinds of mediators between the Holy One, blessed be He, and us. So they said—there are all sorts of claims there that are very common in the scholarly study of various beliefs or approaches, where a researcher comes and looks at them from the outside and tries to explain why they invented these concepts. Why did they invent those other concepts? Why did they develop this approach or that? It is always an external approach. So what does he say? He says, fine, they needed to bridge the philosophical gap between the one and the many. Or between the—yes, I don’t know—raise Him above His world, yes, all the expressions here below; he cites the sources here. But the truth is that this is not correct. They didn’t create this for some purpose. And this too is again an external conception, because every abstract concept, after all, can’t be seen, as we know, right? Abstract concepts cannot be seen. And what cannot be seen is of course only inventions. So there’s no choice: one has to ask why they invented this invention. They invented it because apparently they needed somehow to bridge between the one and the many. That is the scholarly way of looking at the matter. The Nazir says: what are you talking about? In light of what we said in the previous section, that isn’t true. These things are not invented for some purpose, and in fact they are not invented at all—they are seen. Heard, yes. Meaning, when we say that there are forces or there are angels, it is not in order to achieve some bridging between one idea and another and remain at some level of metaphysical speculation, but rather we… we understand that such a thing exists. In other words, what operates here, in other words, is cognition, not intellect. And that is an important point that runs throughout this whole book—that is the Nazir’s central point. What operates here, the part of the human being that operates here when he establishes these concepts of forces or intermediaries or angels, is cognition, not intellect. Philosophers and scholars and all of them usually take this as an act of intellect—that is, it is something detached from the world; I do not see it in the world. So I think to myself and say, wait, if there is one above and here there are many, then how do you get from the one to the many? Yes, the classic question. Fine, so let’s invent an intermediate concept—mediators, such things—there’s no choice, we have to arrive at there being all kinds of worlds in between. That is the way of someone looking from outside. Because he understands this as an act of intellect, and an act of intellect is always detached from the world. It is an inner act. The intellect receives data from the senses, then processes them, thinks about what they mean, and invents for itself all sorts of concepts to organize them. But the Semitic conception is not like that. The Semitic conception says that I can also see ideas, know them, hear them rather. I can know them. Ideas are not an invention. They cannot always be grasped by the senses; sometimes they are grasped by a sixth sense, through some kind of non-sensory cognition. But it is cognition, not intellect. Meaning, these ideas are drawn from the world; they are not an inner invention of mine inside my own world. So they have a root in the world. And I know that there are angels and there are intermediaries not in order to bridge between ideas, but because I know, because I know.
[Speaker B] Are you not talking here about the chain of worlds? I mean, I could understand if you were talking about that… like angels—then I don’t understand what… I don’t feel angels. Yes, neither do I. This concept of the chain of worlds is only a possibility.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And there are various prophets or people like that who did feel them. I’m not saying that each of us feels everything. But the question “why did they invent the concept?”—it isn’t an invented concept.
[Speaker B] Rabbi Akiva felt that there is such an entity?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. He knew—he didn’t feel. For him it was clear that there is such a thing. What do you mean? He even gave you all sorts of algorithms for how to see them there in Berakhot, for those who know all the… the cat’s eyes and the tails of the… I don’t know what… you burn them and put it in the eyes. And that’s how… a fly’s eye…