The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 17

Table of Contents

• [0:07] Adding an intermediate level between Plato and the Stoics
• [2:06] The Semitic Jew — Platonism with an additional logos
• [6:36] The creation of the world of ideas — from below upward
• [10:52] Philo and the Platonic idea in the Torah
• [12:40] The connection between logos nomos and the idea
• [14:33] Light is the best among existing things — sight and sound
• [27:23] A note on the four forms of interpretation
• [28:28] The historical division between halakhic decisors and analytic scholars
• [32:45] Peshat, remez, derash, and sod in the writings of the Ari and the Talmud
• [33:47] “Come and hear” in the Talmud and “come and see” in the Zohar
• [35:37] The revelation at Mount Sinai — hearing and seeing the sounds
• [44:01] The necessary parable — the demand for full correspondence
• [45:27] Parables in Kabbalah — describing the light and emanation
• [49:27] Rashba’s criticism of parables and philosophy

Summary

General Overview

The text presents the difference between Platonism and Semitic-prophetic thought as it emerges in the Nazir, and sets up the Alexandrians as mediators who essentially connect Plato’s world of ideas with the Stoic logos by adding another logos “behind” the world of ideas. It sharpens the point that the deeper difference is not just the addition of another level, but also a change in the direction of cognition: with Plato, one ascends from the world and its concepts to ideas that are a conceptual reflection of properties, whereas in the Semitic view, what truly exists is “the thing in itself,” which is not derived from our conceptual world and which inwardly contains a divine dimension. From this there develops a theory of sight and hearing: sight is seen as clear but superficial, while hearing is the ability to grasp what lies behind the visible, to the point of “and all the people saw the sounds.” From there develops the idea of the “necessary parable,” in which there is an essential correspondence between the tangible world and the higher world, so that even historical questions about figures and myths become charged in relation to the validity of the values they embody.

Platonism, Stoicism, and the Alexandrians

The Platonic approach understands the world of ideas as a static world in which nothing “happens,” but which causes what happens beneath it. The Nazir says that the Alexandrians mediate between Platonism and Stoicism by connecting the world of ideas with the Stoic logos in a meaningful synthesis that is not artificial or merely syncretistic. The Alexandrians add “another world” beyond the world of ideas, and that is the logos of the world of ideas. So just as our world has a logos that animates it, behind the world of ideas there is another logos, and there is even the possibility of a chain of levels, where behind every plane there is yet another plane.

The Difference Between Plato and Semitic-Prophetic Thought

Plato’s world of ideas is presented as a world of “inferior” ideas that are the static forms of this world, while our world is understood as an imitation and realization of them. The Platonic conception turns properties and predicates such as “horseness,” “yellowness,” or “being green” into existing entities, and builds the world of ideas out of our world by abstracting from what appears. Semitic-prophetic thought claims that what truly exists is the thing in itself, an abstract thing not taken from our conceptual world. It is not a collection of properties, but the “owner of the house” of whom the properties are predicated, and about whom our language can say almost nothing except for the fact of its existence. This description places the thing in itself as a divine depth within the inwardness of every being, and emphasizes that the construction is not only from below upward, but begins from the assumption that abstract worlds are reality as such, while the visible forms are only what is revealed from them.

Existing Concepts and the Debate over “Good” and “Jew”

The text argues that concepts themselves are existing things even prior to their descriptions, and that the debate over “what is good” or “who is a Jew” is not merely a semantic dispute but a struggle over the correct description of one concept lying in the background. People’s emotional insistence in such arguments is seen as evidence that both sides are referring to the same existing concept and not just to different names for different things. Even with respect to abstract concepts like “horseness,” an internal division of matter and form is asserted, and therefore the division is not identical to the Platonic division between the world of ideas and our world.

Philo, “In the Image of God,” and Logos Nomos

The text presents Philo as “the greatest figure of ancient Jewish religious philosophy,” close in time to the remnants of the prophetic age, and says that he sees the Platonic idea in the Torah when he says, “This example, this principle, is Moses’, not mine,” in the context of “and in the image of God He created man.” He is described as not being satisfied with identifying “image” in the Platonic sense as an idea, but as “rising above and overcoming” the idea within a Torah-based parabolic structure, so that the idea serves as a “point of transition, a symbolon” for moving toward “a word of law, logos nomos, heard from within it as the word of God.” Logos nomos is identified with the Stoic logos, as an inner law that animates the thing and according to which the thing behaves, and is presented as something distinctive to the Alexandrians and the Stoics. The description explains that Philo inserts a life-giving utterance into “earthliness” itself, so that the world of ideas is not understood as static but as a realm within which a living law is heard.

Light, Sight and Hearing, and “Hearing the Visible”

The passage “light is the best among existing things, and the best of the senses is sight” presents sight as the clearest sense, and establishes an analogy in which “as the intellect is in the soul, so the eye is in the body,” and each of them “looks” at its objects. The very use of the language of “looking” with regard to the intellect assumes that the intellect is not only a function of internal processing but also a faculty of cognition, and the debate is framed as the question whether intellectual cognition is visual or auditory. From sight there is a movement toward grasping the harmonious order of the stars as “their orderly dances according to the laws of perfect melody,” and from the harmonious movement “the laws are heard,” until sight itself becomes a symbolon for that which lies behind it. The text presents hearing not as an alternative to sight but as the understanding that the visible is a representation of something hidden, so that with the eyes one can also “hear” when one assumes that the visible points to an inner logos.

The Revelation at Mount Sinai: “And All the People Saw the Sounds”

The revelation at Mount Sinai is presented as a situation in which “the great wonder of the visible sound” takes place, and in that context there appears the wording “and all the people saw the sounds.” This is described as the ability to grasp the hidden directly by rising to a level at which the sounds themselves are seen and not merely heard. The explanation assumes that hearing characterizes the perception of something that is not within the conceptual world of the perceiver, while sight describes clear and direct perception when one is on the same plane. The connection is made also to the language of study: “come and hear” in the Talmud is linked to listening to the world behind the overt language, while “come and see” in the Zohar is linked to direct vision of that very plane.

Pardes, Plain Meaning and Hidden Meaning, and Forms of Looking

The text suggests the possibility of connecting “seeing and hearing the visible” and “seeing and hearing the audible” with Pardes, while distinguishing between the perception of peshat as the perception of the outside and hearing the visible as the perception of remez, and between engaging the inner utterance as engagement with sod. It states that the division between peshat, remez, derash, and sod is not a division between texts but a division between modes of reading, and that every text can be studied in all these ways, including the Talmud and the Zohar. This is illustrated through the historical distinction between halakhic decisors and analytic scholars, which in the past was understood as two modes of activity within the same person and within the same books, not as a classification of people. This parallels the possibility of reading both the revealed and the hidden as two sides of the same doctrine of parable.

Nefesh HaChayim, Gate 3 Chapter 11, and the Life-Giving Speech

Nefesh HaChayim, Gate 3 Chapter 11, is cited as the basis for the idea that “He, blessed be He, and His speech are one,” and that every “and He said” in the account of creation is the soul and life-force of the thing created through it. The passage describes how His speech “stands within them to animate them and sustain them at every moment,” and how lack of purification causes “visions to fail in the eyes of flesh” from seeing the manner in which the speech spreads. Of the future it is said, “and all flesh shall see together that the mouth of the Lord has spoken,” and this sight is presented as an attainment parallel to that of the giving of the Torah, where “and all the people saw the sounds.” A statement of the Sages is also cited: “they would hear the visible and see the audible,” and it is interpreted as a purification that allows one to see spiritual matters with the senses while at the same time turning the tangible into something that had to “be made audible to the ear,” because of the shift in the plane on which the human being stands.

The Parable That Lowers and Raises, and the “Necessary Parable”

The text defines the parable as having a double power: it lowers an idea into the human world of concepts so that one can hear it, and it also raises a person to a higher conceptual world so that one can see the idea in its own place. It distinguishes between an incidental pedagogical parable, which can be replaced and whose details are not necessary, and a “necessary parable,” in which there is a binding correspondence between every detail of the parable and every detail of what it represents, because the parable is an essential expression of what it represents. According to this view, kabbalistic descriptions and the Torah are understood as a framework in which the images are not arbitrary but arise from a correspondence between the worlds, to the point that light in the lower world is described as a necessary emanation of the higher “light,” and therefore the details must align. This distinction explains how one can both “listen” to the secret through the revealed and also “see” that same plane through the study of the hidden, and in this way the claim that language is a parable takes on a special meaning—not in the sense of an accidental approximation, but in an essential sense.

Allegory in the Torah, Rashba, and the Ban on Yedaya HaPenini

The text mentions that on page 20 the Nazir discusses Rashba’s responsum, section 416, in which he placed Yedaya HaPenini under ban because he said that Abraham and Sarah are matter and form, and offered allegorical interpretations of the Torah’s narratives. In that framework it is said that one may not study philosophy before a certain age. It states that Maimonides said something similar regarding the aggadic teachings of the Sages in his introduction about the three groups, but there is no known source where he applied this to the Torah itself, and therefore the explanation is given that Rashba does not accept this expansion. The text asks why it should matter at all whether Abraham and Sarah “really existed” if the main thing is the binding message, and presents the depth of the opposition as connected to the status of the parable as a “necessary parable” and not as an educational fiction.

Myth, Trumpeldor, and the Connection Between Values and Reality

The text gives modern examples involving Trumpeldor and Marie Antoinette to show that the dispute over historical facts consistently divides according to identification with or opposition to the values those stories carry. It rejects the explanation that this is merely a “psychological effect,” and says that every such effect has a philosophical explanation. The point is that an ideal that does not come to expression in reality does not exist even “above,” in the world of values. It argues that if a “myth” has no realization in this world, that undermines the very existence and validity of the value it embodies, because the connection between the parable and what it represents is one-to-one and essential. From this it explains why the claim that Abraham and Sarah are not historical figures is not merely a question of narrative, but undermines the assumption that the values represented by them truly exist and are genuinely binding.

We talked about the difference involved in adding one more level beyond the Platonic approach. That is, the Platonic approach sees the world of ideas as some kind of static world, a world in which nothing happens, but which is basically what causes what happens beneath it. And the Nazir says here that the Alexandrians mediate between Platonism and the Stoics. In other words, they take Plato’s world of ideas and the Stoic logos and combine them in a synthesis that is not syncretic. As we said, it’s not artificial or something like that. It’s a meaningful synthesis; it’s not by chance that they connected doctrines of two different masters. And they basically added another world beyond the world of ideas, and that is the logos of the world of ideas. Meaning, just as our world has a logos that animates it—and maybe that is even the ideas themselves—within the world of ideas, or behind it, there is again a logos. And the Platonic world of ideas is a world of inferior ideas, as he says in section 10 where we finished, which are basically the forms of this world in a static kind of way, fixed somehow in some world above, of which our world is some imitation, some implementation, some realization of it, let’s say.

We also talked a bit about the difference between Platonism—before we talked about this, we talked about the difference between Platonism and Semitic heavenly thought in a somewhat different sense. It’s close, but a little different. Here he says that ostensibly the Semitic Jew is really a Platonist-plus. Yes, there is some world of ideas, and behind it I insert another logos that animates even it. In other words, there is also something behind it. And as he said here, actually not just one thing, but a whole chain: behind every something there is something else. Every thing is really beyond the plane behind it.

At the beginning, when we spoke about the difference between Plato and Semitic thought, we also said that even the logos of this world—not the logos of the world of ideas, but the logos of this world, which according to Plato is basically the world of ideas—is different from the logos as the Semitic Jew understands it. We said that in fact, according to Plato, those ideas—even though they exist—what are these entities that exist? They are the attributes: horseness, say. Yes, horseness exists. That’s also a noun, let’s say. Or being colored, or being green, or all the properties or attributes—those are things that exist for Plato. That’s what goes beyond Aristotelianism in Plato.

But we said that the Semitic conception basically says that there are also things where what really exists, the thing in itself, is an abstract thing—but not that. It’s not something taken from our conceptual world, as we said, and it is necessarily not taken from our conceptual world, because the thing itself is precisely the substance once abstracted from our conceptual world. That is what really exists: the thing in itself, in Kant’s terms, or matter in Aristotle’s terms. Meaning, if I want, say, to look at a horse, then what exists of it in the abstract sense—I’m not talking about horseness, I’m talking about the horse itself, which Plato did not talk about. The Semitic Jew looks at the horse, so when I look at the horse itself—who is the horse? The horse is not the collection of its properties. The horse is the owner, the one characterized by all these properties. It is the thing itself, yes. That is something about which we can say almost nothing except perhaps that it exists, and that it is one, or two—we talked a bit about that—but it is not something we can talk about in our language.

On the contrary: precisely the concepts that Plato calls abstract—horseness, yellowness, all the properties when they are just properties and do not characterize a substance—he also turns them into nouns. Do you understand or not? I want to know. Again. When Plato speaks of the ideas as existing, how does he create the world of ideas? It could be that he creates it from below upward. And in the end, what gets created? A world of ideas that is basically a reflection of our world. Even though philosophically our world is an imitation of it, how did we create it? We created it as an imitation of our world.

It’s like Marx’s famous statement that religion is the opium of the masses, or that man created God—“In the beginning man created.” There are various things like that. So is that true or not? It’s true. When I come to the conclusion that there is a God, I sort of create the concept of God—the concept, not God Himself. After I created it, then I have already reached the conclusion that that same thing created me. But clearly the first one who thinks is me, because after all I am the one who knows everything. In that sense, man indeed creates God.

So the same here. Plato really does say that our world is some sort of imitation of the world of ideas. But when he tries to say something about the world of ideas, it is always something drawn from our conceptual world, from our world. So he says: now in this world we see a horse, we abstract it, we see horseness, okay—so now I’ll determine that there is such an idea of horseness and that it now exists independently. But again, this is really some form, some something that belongs to the plane of form in our world. Because the horse as I see it here—I’m really seeing the form, I’m not seeing the horse itself. The horse itself is not something I can say has four legs. As it is expressed for me in the world of forms, it is something with four legs. But the thing in itself has no legs; it makes no sense to talk about how many legs it has. It is the thing itself, the thing that has these characteristics of having four legs and a tail and so on.

When you say that such a thing exists, you are saying something different from what Plato says when he says that the ideas exist. It is something entirely different. I’m saying that the horse itself—not horseness, which is an abstract concept—the horse that I see, the concrete horse, that is what I see of the abstract horse. But the horse that truly exists in the world in itself, that itself is an abstract concept. You don’t need to abstract it and arrive at horseness. True, about that concept I have nothing to say in my conceptual world; I don’t know how to construct that world. I call it some kind of divine world, really, at the deepest level of things. The thing in itself, deepest within every entity—horse or person or table—that is God. If you penetrate deeply enough inward, the point that is its selfhood is really some divine element.

I am basically taking a concept that is not drawn from my world; it is drawn from above, and with it I build the world in itself. I do not go out from my conceptual world and try to abstract and ascend and build some abstract worlds. I start from the assumption that there are abstract worlds, and I understand that they are what the world in itself is, and that its forms are what I see. I come from two directions; I do not come from below upward. That is the difference we talked about, which we mentioned a bit at the beginning. I wanted to elaborate on it a little more here because it is a difference that goes beyond the difference the Nazir points to.

The Nazir speaks of a situation in which the Alexandrians added another logos to the world of ideas. That is the difference above Plato—we advanced one more step. The difference I’m talking about is that the first step, which Plato also took, does not look the same either. It’s not only that we advanced one more step. That is, there is a logos for our world, and there is a logos for the world of ideas, and even the logos of our world goes to the world of ideas. The ideas are part of the form. You can say that this too is called abstract, okay, I agree. That is, horseness also exists. But horseness is not a substance that has properties and existence in itself. Concepts too are existing things. I think we mentioned these examples, right, of “Jew,” “good.” I think we mentioned it when people argue about what “good” is or who is a Jew. We said that there is some concept here that exists even before its descriptions, and we are only arguing about how to describe it correctly. Otherwise, it’s just a semantic argument; everyone can call what he wants by a different name and we can part in peace.

If we are really arguing, and we see that this argument is at times very emotional, meaning that it matters to people to determine that this is good and not that, or that this is Jewish and not that, that means they insist that both are talking about the same concept. The concept they are talking about—not the descriptions they give, which contradict one another, but the concept itself they are talking about—is one concept. And that concept is itself, prior to the descriptions. It is the concept itself, and it exists. Now we observe it and derive one description; someone else observes it and derives another description. Okay?

Now that concept is not a Platonic idea. Even horseness has that same division between matter and form. That is, I don’t mind taking Platonic abstraction, but I’ll do the same analysis on it. Meaning, horseness itself is also a concept—the concept of horseness—and it too has matter and form. Meaning there too I’ll make the same distinction. So it’s not the same distinction Plato makes between the world of ideas and our world. That is the point I wanted to clarify here.

All right, let’s start section 11. Eleven, right? You said we finished 10. “The greatest philosopher of ancient Jewish religious philosophy, close in time to the remnants of the prophetic period, Philo, sees the Platonic idea in the Torah, saying: ‘This example, this principle, is Moses’, not mine, as it is said: “And in the image of God He created man.”’” But he rises… Up to here this is in Platonic style, yes. Meaning, “he sees the Platonic idea in the Torah”—what does that mean? He says that too in paragraph 15. Do you have it? Or don’t you have the photocopy? All right, in paragraph 15 he shows that Rabbi Yehuda Abravanel, a Jewish Neoplatonic philosopher, inserted Plato so thoroughly into the Torah that he completely identified him with Moses our teacher. That is, not that Plato was Moses our teacher, but that this conception is Moses our teacher—the Torah conception. Totally…

Meaning, he tried with all his might to erase the differences that exist between Platonism and the Jewish Torah conception. And here too, basically, you see something like that. But now he continues. That is, he inserts the Platonic idea into the Torah through “in the image of God He created man.” “Image” is of course the thing one sees; ostensibly it is a visual imitation of God, yes. But it is an idea.

“But he rises and triumphs”—meaning crowns or rules, yes. “Triumphs” is an expression that people use by mistake because they make him triumph. “But he rises and triumphs, in the Torah and parabolic pattern, over the contemplated idea”—that is the image, yes—“which for him is only a place of passage, a symbolon, for the lawful utterance beyond, logos nomos, heard from within it as the word of God.” “Logos nomos” is a concept we saw above in section 10. Section 10 of the previous essay: “in the Stoic pattern,” he says, “logos nomos, the law heard as an utterance, unique to the Alexandrians as to the Stoics.” And this logos nomos is basically… it is the Stoic logos. That is, “law-utterance,” translated into Hebrew. And this is basically the law that is inside the thing, according to which the thing behaves. Yes, the law animates the thing; it is the utterance of the Holy One, blessed be He, that remains inside. “Which is, according to the Torah and parabolic quality unique to the prophetic Semitic logic…”

Meaning, what Philo actually did here to Plato is that after he took his world of ideas and found it in the Torah, he did not stop there. His goal in all this is to show that Philo is not just a Neoplatonist, period, as scholars may have understood him. He is a Neoplatonist, but also a Jew. That is, there is here… always, according to the Torah parabolic quality unique to prophetic Semitic logic, he takes Plato and understands him too in those categories. Meaning, he takes Plato’s world of ideas and also adds to it a logos nomos located within it, behind it. That is what he means when he says that “the contemplated idea is only a place of passage, a symbolon,” as though a symbol for the law-utterance, a representation of the world of law, of the lawful utterance.

Okay, what is the connection of this to the Torah? “In the image of God He made man.” So he says that there is an idea of being human, of humanity. So that is basically what he says here; therefore he finds the world of ideas in the Torah. And the Nazir says that he does not stop there. That is true at the first stage, but he does not stop there. He says that within this humanity there is also some utterance that animates it. It is not a static world, not a world of dry laws. These laws are nouns.

Section 12. “The duality of appearance. Light is the best among existing things, and sight the best among the senses.” Do you have this? Which one of us photocopies? Is there someone here officially assigned to that? If not, it’s worth deciding so we won’t get stuck. There isn’t someone who photocopied, though maybe he stopped coming. Someone who is here willing to take this on? Let me read now and explain, but just so next time we won’t get stuck.

Now he is talking about hearing what is seen. “Light is the best among existing things, and sight the best among the senses. As intellect in the soul, so is the eye in the body. Each of them beholds: this one the intelligibles, and that one the sensibles.” “The best among existing things and the best among the senses” does not mean ironically; he really means it, even though he emphasizes hearing. But we already said, when we talked about the difference between sight and hearing and between light and sound, that sight is indeed more superficial, but much clearer. And as a sense it is certainly the best sense. So what he says is that light is the best among existing things and sight the best among the senses. Because as a sense, what do I expect from a sense? I expect it to understand in the best possible way, or know in the best possible way, what it knows. And sight really is the best sense. True, one must not stop at sight; one has to continue on to hearing. But that really is already a continuation beyond the senses. But the best of the senses is sight.

He says that “as intellect in the soul, so is the eye in the body.” We already talked about this—that there is also visual thinking and auditory thinking. There is also an eye of the intellect and also an ear of the intellect. Someone is free to ask here whether sight is the best sense because it’s best for sighting. No, no, no—on the contrary, he says: “As intellect in the soul, so is sight in the body.” He makes the metaphor explicitly. He does not say sight in the body is sight in the body. He says the same about intellect in the soul.

Just in passing: this comparison between intellect in the soul and the eye in the body assumes some of the auditory element nevertheless. Because we are actually assuming that the intellect also beholds. You understand that beholding is not an act of thinking. Beholding is an act of cognition. We have already talked about this several times: for the Nazir, epistemology and logic—what is called epistemology—and logic are not separate domains, or domains with a sharp boundary between them. What he calls auditory logic, which ostensibly is logic or reasoning, a large part of it—and perhaps its foundation—is sensation, something like sensation; it is cognition. Okay? Cognition in the sense of contemplating, in the broad sense of the word, that which is outside me. Thinking is processing data already inside me, or processing data, or yes—thinking.

So here, when he compares intellect in the soul to the eye in the body, he already assumes—even in the visual part of the intellect, in the contemplative part, from the word eye of the intellect—that the intellect also fills a cognitive role and not only a thinking role. Okay? Today this is a bigger novelty than it once was. Today people don’t really think this way. But apparently for him it is self-evident. He doesn’t even argue with the idea that the intellect only thinks; the only question is: how does the intellect know? Does the intellect know visually or auditorily? That is the question. And it is clear that the intellect is an organ—not an organ, but a function—that also knows, not only thinks. And that is an interesting point you can see here by implication; he does not say it explicitly.

You are surely talking about the next stage—how clear it is, as a logical connection, something very built and clear, and without the auditory element in the matter. And this is exactly that distinction between the auditory and the non-auditory. The question is whether, as I understand it at least, whether you… we talked earlier about the existence of concepts or the question of the logos, the concept in itself and the form of the concept. If I look at the concept “Jew,” I am not looking at it with my eyes. With what do I look at it? With the intellect. Only there are those who look at it with the intellect and grasp only what outwardly appears of it—that is called gazing at the concept “Jew” or observing the concept “Jew”—and there are those who try to listen to what the concept “Jew” says, and that is called hearing the concept “Jew.” But in any case I assume—or he assumes—that there is some concept. Maybe also within me, but it is a concept that is not myself, but something other than me. And I can either observe it or hear it.

Therefore I think that this basis of the comparison also assumes that even those who grasp the intellect as a visual thing, as a visual function, still grasp it as a cognitive function and not merely a thinking function.

We are in section 12. So let’s read again from the beginning of section 12: “Light is the best among existing things, and sight the best among the senses. As intellect in the soul, so is the eye in the body. Each of them beholds: this one the intelligibles, and that one the sensibles.” Each of them beholds. Even those who grasp the intellect visually grasp it as beholding, not only thinking.

The prevailing view today in the modern world is that the senses are what connect us to the world outside us. The intellect has nothing to do with our connection to the world outside us. The intellect can analyze the data that the senses bring us and understand what they mean. But the intellect itself has no access to the external world except through the senses. Intellect is an internal organ—that is the view—a sort of thing closed inside me. Everything I draw on comes only through the senses.

Here his assumption is, even as I said before, according to someone who grasps the intellect as a visual function—but visuality too, beholding too, is a sensory mode of action, a mode of cognition. So he grasps the intellect as something that knows, only not deeply but only through characteristics. That same knowing intellect grasps the concept “Jew” and grasps that in fact it is the collection of its characteristics; it is not some concept sitting behind those characteristics. But again, he relates to that same concept “Jew” that exists outside him. He already knows it from outside. After he has already seen five thousand Jews, there is already in his mind a concept sitting out there as “Jew,” and he relates to it. He does not feel it from within.

What does the beholding intellect contemplate? When he says here “this one beholds the intelligibles and that one the sensibles”—what does the intellect contemplate? Something it already knows from previous sightings? Sightings of the eyes? Then it does not behold it—what does it behold? Then it thinks about it. But then why is this a visual function or a non-visual one? I think this analogy wants to say that the intellect too is a cognitive faculty, what we said before.

“By means of light, sight is borne upward and gazes upon the nature of the stars and their harmonious motion, their dances ordered according to the laws of perfect melody, which brings supreme delight to the soul and increases its thirst to continue gazing.” To keep gazing farther and farther. “Then it proceeds further, as it loves to inquire into what the reality of these visible things is—whether they are uncreated, or whether they are created.” Whether the world is eternal or not eternal. He is alluding here to that midrash about Abraham our father in a pretty obvious way: looking at the sphere and asking who turns the sphere, whether it was created or not. Clearly that lies in the background here.

“And what is their cause? The visions of the world and its visible motions are only harmonious dances from which are heard the laws, the laws of the true primordial melody, engraved in the soul of those first ones who invented the art of music.” What he is basically saying is that following sight, you need to use sight. Hearing is not an alternative to sight. Rather, hearing is the conception that sight is only a symbolon, what he called earlier. That is, it is only a representation of something that lies behind what you see. And that is basically how one hears. One hears by means of the same tools by which one sees. If you assume that what you see is only a representation of something behind what you see, then you are basically hearing. With your eyes you can hear. After all, one hears what is seen. And likewise at Mount Sinai.

“In the chosen event, the event of Mount Sinai, the great wonder was the visible voice, ‘and all the people saw the voices.’” This is like seeing and hearing the visible. There are two versions here. In Rashi there on the Torah, he writes “they heard what is seen and saw what is heard,” and that is also below. And in the Mekhilta it says “they saw and heard the visible.” In any case, I think there are actually four actions here. One can see and hear what is seen, and one can see and hear what is heard. I think—and here I’m not sure, I don’t know whether that is what he means to say—I think these four things are basically the four levels of interpretation: plain meaning, hint, exposition, and secret. These four ways of looking at the world: seeing and hearing what is seen, and seeing and hearing what is heard.

Seeing what is seen is the plain meaning, yes, what you see outside. Hearing what is seen is hint, to see what is hinted behind what is seen. If you look, say, at the letters, you expound what is there—that is exposition already, yes? The question is where exactly the boundary lies between hint and exposition, and the two extremes are much clearer, so in short the difference between hint and exposition is a bit more difficult. And beyond that, hearing what is heard, inserting logos into the world of ideas—that is the secret. To deal with that infinite light within things, that is exactly the field of the secret.

So I think these four things are somewhat connected to the four ways of expounding the Torah and also of grasping the world, because he says here, “as it loves to inquire into what the reality of these visible things is.” Exposition—I don’t know whether he really means exposition in the sense of plain meaning, hint, exposition, and secret. I’ll get back to that in a moment. So this is just a remark regarding these four forms. It may be connected to the four ways of grasping the Torah; two of them seem to me fairly clearly to be so, and the two middle ones are a bit unclear to me.

The Ari writes that the division of Torah into, say, plain meaning and secret—leave aside hint and exposition for the moment—also applies, say, to all four of these categories. It is not a division by books. I think I once mentioned somewhere—I already don’t remember where—that the division that once existed between, say, what today exists between halakhic decisors and heads of yeshiva, decisors and lomdanim, yes, there is a division between decisors and lomdanim. Today it is a division by people. There are people who by nature are decisors, and people who by nature are lomdanim. Heads of yeshiva usually belong to those identifiable as lomdanim.

Once it was not like that. Once the division between decisors and lomdanim was a division of books, not of people. You—take all the medieval authorities, say—the medieval authorities were lomdanim and they were decisors. There was no division between the people. Anyone who was a medieval authority, and usually—I don’t know if every one, but broadly speaking—he was also the rabbi of his place. It was not lomdanim and decisors. True, there are books—books of halakhic rulings and books of study. There is Maimonides, which is plainly a book of halakhic ruling, even though today even in the study hall it is not placed at all with halakhic rulings; it is placed among the books of novellae. Maimonides is from Aleph; it is not where the Tur and the Shulchan Arukh are, and not by accident. But in any event, in its plain sense Maimonides is a book of halakhic rulings, while the man was certainly both a lomdan and a decisor, right. In his responsa he gives learned responsa too regarding… he was not Rabbi Chaim, but he was what was then called a lomdan and what was then called a decisor.

Where was Maimonides once? On one Purim once I think I did some short skit: Maimonides reading Rabbi Chaim. In any case, yes, and other books—Rashba, or novellae on the Talmud—they look like… yet certainly he was a great decisor in his generation. So back then there was not a division of people. And this is not only true of then; I think it was true until two hundred years ago or something like that, maybe even a hundred and fifty years ago. There was no such distinction. The yeshiva world began with this distinction, essentially from Volozhin. At the beginning of Volozhin not yet, but the fruits of Volozhin are this distinction. The Beit HaLevi, say, and the Netziv, who were heads of yeshiva in Volozhin—they were not; they dealt with both fields.

Today there are almost no halakhic responsa by heads of yeshiva; there is almost no such thing. Rabbi Shlomo Zalman was a head of yeshiva, and that really was considered a great wonder—that a person knows how to learn and also knows how to issue halakhic rulings. But that really is not common. So therefore—why did I remember this? I don’t even quite remember why I started talking about it—but there is… the division between secret and plain meaning is also not a division between texts. Exactly. That is, any text can be learned by way of plain meaning, hint, exposition, and secret. The Zohar too, the Talmud too, the Mishnah too, and the Bible too—all of them. It is not that the Bible is plain meaning and the Zohar is secret and the writings of the Ari are secret and the Talmud is plain meaning or exposition or whatever we call it. No. Each of those texts can be learned in four ways.

And that was always so. No, no, of course, this example does not really continue to the historical development. I remembered that example because there too, today it has somehow truly split, but once it was… halakhic ruling and lomdanut were two ways in which the same person looked. When he looked this way he was a decisor, and when he looked that way he was a lomdan. Today it has already become two people, two types of people.

The same goes for books today as well. In fact maybe history repeats itself here too. Today the division is apparently what? If one studies Talmud, then one studies the revealed part, one studies, let’s call it exposition perhaps, where one expounds the Torah according to the hermeneutic principles by which the Torah is interpreted or something like that—that is more or less the basis of the Talmud. You could perhaps call it exposition. Torah is plain meaning; the Ari, Zohar—that is secret. So for us, ostensibly, the obvious approach is that the division is according to texts. But the Ari writes that this is not correct. The division is according to ways of looking. You can look at the writings of the Ari by way of plain meaning, hint, exposition, and secret, and the same with the Torah. About the Torah certainly—the Ari spoke about the Torah, he was not speaking about something else.

Therefore, when we look at these same ideas, then when we look at them through the Talmud, the Talmud is supposedly a revealed text. But even from the Talmud one can derive the secret. But one can derive it through hearing, because the secret lies—we talked about this once—because the secret lies behind the Talmud; it is not in the Talmud itself. The plain language of what is written in the Talmud has nothing at all to do with the secret. But behind it sits a secret; one must listen to what lies behind it, the logos behind it.

When I learn Zohar, then when I learn the plain meaning of the Zohar I am on the level that, when I learn the Talmud, I am only listening for. Therefore we said that in the Talmud they always say “come and hear,” and in the Zohar they say “come and see.” In the Zohar they say “come and see” because there we are on that very plane to which we are only listening through the Talmud. When we study Talmud, we are not on that plane; we are on the plane of damage law, legal reasoning, or things of that kind. That has nothing to do with worlds and sefirot and things like that; we are not on that plane. So in order to understand that plane, we have to listen to it through what is ostensibly seen. Through the gaze we understand that there is something behind, and thus we hear the hidden world behind it.

If we study Zohar, then we are learning directly that world itself. It is not hidden behind anything; we are learning it. True, there is also something behind it. The Ari dealt, say, with Atzilut; he did not speak at all about what is beyond Atzilut. So there too one can listen for it. Someone on a higher level sees Adam Kadmon; someone who studies the Ari only listens for Adam Kadmon. As he said here, every thing is only a symbolon for what is behind it. But this is the meaning of the expressions “come and hear” in the Talmud as against “come and see” in the Zohar.

And this is essentially called seeing the voices and hearing the voices. Hearing. Hearing the voices is when I am not on their plane. When I am not on their plane, then I need to hear in order to understand that there are voices here. I cannot see them; with the eyes one sees nothing. Why? Because I am below, and voices are a spiritual thing, yes? So I am trying to understand something that does not belong to my world. That can only be done through listening, because it does not come to me directly.

By contrast, if I rise to the world of the voices themselves, I can see the voices. “Come and see,” as in the Zohar—I can simply look at the ideas themselves, at the voices themselves. That is called seeing the voices. At Mount Sinai the people of Israel rose to that level—you know, among the levels of prophecy—so they were on that same plane. Then I see the hidden; I do not listen to it. That is “they saw the voices,” or “they heard the voices.” And this is really what we saw above in section 6, where we talked about parables: that the Hebrew does not see the thing as it is, but what represents it. And the thing as it is he only listens to; he cannot grasp it, but he believes it exists and he listens to it.

At first we spoke about the role of the parable as bringing the thing closer to me. That is, what is a parable? A parable comes when I do not understand something. So if I don’t understand something, they put a parable there. What does the parable do? It describes that idea in a conceptual world that I do understand, in my conceptual world. That is, it brings the thing down to me. But in section 6, subsection 6, he says that the parable does another thing as well: it also raises me up to the thing, it does not only bring the thing down to me. And that is really to say that I rise to a world of concepts that is not from my world.

We talked earlier about the difference between me and Plato—that is why I gave that introduction. Plato always speaks in our conceptual world. Even when he ascends upward, the conceptual world he uses is still our conceptual world. Semitic logic is, on the one hand, to bring things down into our conceptual world, but on the other hand I too can ascend to the conceptual world. The kabbalistic conceptual world is not drawn from our world at all—various sefirot and things, and you have no… it’s like Chinese, ostensibly—and you use that conceptual world to describe that world. Okay? So that is basically the second effect of the parable. The parable also takes me upward to that world so as to understand the idea in its place, in its source. It does not only bring the idea down to me so that I understand it in my language. Both things exist. The parable does both things. And of course this presupposes some sort of correspondence between what is above and what is below.

This matter is described in Nefesh HaChaim, Gate 3, chapter 11. There he says as follows: “And the matter is, as is known in the Zohar, that He, blessed be He, and His speech are one. And every speech and utterance of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the act of creation, when He said ‘let there be,’ is the soul and life-force of that thing which was created by it.” That is the logos we are talking about here. “And all the myriads upon myriads of species within it, together with the constellations appointed over them, and the angels appointed over those constellations, and their root and the root of their root higher and higher in each world—and from then on, throughout all eternity, His blessed word stands within them to animate them and sustain them every moment”—that is the lawful utterance he spoke about earlier—“in all the particulars of their affairs and changes and the ordering of their condition.”

“And therefore in all ten utterances only the name Elohim is mentioned, because that utterance is the master of the powers of that…” okay, that is another matter. “But now the visions of the eyes of flesh are exhausted”—that is, now that prophecy has ended, basically in our language we cannot see with eyes of flesh the utterance that lies behind things. “They cannot see with eyes of flesh how and in what manner His blessed speech extends within them.” So what do we need to do in such a situation? Hear. Because we are not on that level where one sees the thing. We have descended; we are on a level where one no longer sees. When I look in the simple way, I do not see the word of God within things. So I must listen to it.

“And in the future it is written: ‘And all flesh shall see together that the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’” In the future that is the same ascent we talked about also in the “come and see” of the Zohar, what we just discussed. When one is in a higher world, then this logos itself, the divinity itself found in every thing, we see—we will be able to see it. “That is, our apprehension will become refined until we merit to apprehend and see even with the eye of flesh the matter of the extension of His blessed speech in every thing in the world.” We will be able to see it with eyes of flesh, as it were. Flesh there will mean something else, but for us it will be in the mode of seeing—it will be the clear and lower mode of apprehension. That is what is called seeing.

So true, then perhaps it will not be our sight of today, but it will be as clear as our sight of today. It will be the mode of apprehension parallel or analogous to sight. “Just as there was already an apprehension of this sort at the giving of the Torah, as it is written: ‘And all the people saw the voices.’” And this is also what happened at the giving of the Torah—that we were… what does it mean to see voices? Here it basically says everything we said. What does it mean to see voices? We are in a lofty state, and in a lofty state one can simply see the voices; one need not listen to them. Listening is already a sign that they are in a world higher than me. If I am in that same state, then I see the voices.

Okay, that is another matter, and it is also written here: “And on this basis one may explain the statement of our sages, may their memory be blessed, that behold, they would hear what is seen and see what is heard. Meaning, that they had then become so detached from all bodily powers and their material was so greatly refined, that all the existence of sensory, physical matters—which before they would see with the sense of sight—was now nullified for them from being seen by their sense of sight and from being contemplated at all. So much so that, by way of analogy, if one wanted to explain to them physical sensory matters, one would have to recount them and make them heard by the ear so that they would hear of their existence. And spiritual matters, which before one had to understand by the ear, they now saw with the sense.”

See what he writes here: that hearing through the ear is a subtler apprehension of a world one is not in. But it is interesting that he applies this downward too. What is he saying? That if they were at Mount Sinai and someone needed to explain to them what a table is, that too would be by hearing and not by seeing, because they are up above. You grasp hearing as apprehension of something whose world I am not in, not necessarily something higher than me. It is something belonging to a different conceptual world, okay, something not in my conceptual world.

In any case, here too you can see this very idea. This is what is written here. The parallel, the double action of the parable—raising me to the thing and bringing the thing down to me. Bringing the thing down to me and thus enabling me to hear it; raising me to the thing and thus enabling me to see it. That is when I rise upward.

In other words, the parable—let’s call it the Torah, which is basically some kind of parable or some kind of blueprint of what happens in the world—enables me to do both things. If I study the revealed dimension, then I need only listen to the spiritual things. That is bringing the things down to me, formulating them in my language. And if I study the hidden dimension, the Zohar or something like that, then I am basically ascending into that conceptual world, and there I look at the things themselves, not hidden behind anything. So the parable does both actions. These are two sides of the same parable. The Zohar and the plain sense, the plain and the secret, are two sides of the same parable. One is the bringing of the thing down to me, and the other is my ascent to the thing.

The possibility of doing this exists only for a necessary parable. The kind of parable we usually know is not a necessary parable. If I want to clarify some idea to someone and I give him a parable, I can invent another hundred such parables. It is not something necessary that in this exact parable everything should be exactly like what I want to explain. One of the ideas I want to convey is found in that parable too. But many times we run into a situation where someone takes a parable too far: wait, wait, but in the parable it also comes out this way. Fine, I didn’t mean that it was exactly the same thing; it was meant to tell you some idea that you’ll see more clearly in this language.

There are parables that are necessary parables. Meaning, the things I say as the parable are required, in all their details, to correspond to the thing signified. It is not some idea that happens to be found here and there; it is exactly the same thing down to every little point.

Is that something essential to the parable, or are there such types where I need to be precise in the parables I give? No, but you can’t be precise in the parables you give—even if you want to, you can’t. Because there is no such thing. So that is my next sentence. Such a necessary parable can come only if the very conception of what a parable is changes. Usually a parable is understood as simply this: I take something, I see some idea in it similar to that, fine, so let me tell you this story and it will be clearer to you than that story.

The necessary parable, which says that there is in fact a one-to-one correspondence between every detail in the parable and every detail in the thing signified, is a parable whose connection to the thing signified is clearly essential. It is not that by chance I found the same idea here too, but that the parable is actually some actual expression of the thing signified. It is not just that it happens to have certain similarities; there is some real connection—they affect one another in an obvious way. In effect, that one is a lower expression of this one. So if that is really the case, then clearly every detail here points to something there, right? That is what I call a necessary parable.

Now the conception is that kabbalistic descriptions, say, and the Torah itself too, are a necessary parable. Meaning, when you tell me that Jacob represents the attribute of beauty—okay, you said fine, he also had some aspect of beauty in some way, maybe one can explain it. But okay, there were many other things too. Why are you starting to ask difficulties—wait, then how does that fit with his taking two sisters, and with his taking… fine, I didn’t mean that. Don’t take my parable too far.

The point is that this is not a parable. Meaning, I am obligated that all the details correspond, because it is a necessary parable. The same with all kabbalistic discourse. They speak there of light. The parable in Kabbalah is not about electromagnetic light. But on the other hand, all the descriptions used to describe light are also supposed to fit that concept they call light. And someone who knows a bit knows that there they… it has to fit all the way through. That is, if light does not behave that way, you have a difficulty; if light in the world does not behave that way, why? Because the term “light” there is not being used as some incidental parable for the light that is called that here. It is a necessary parable. For that reason light was created. Not only for that reason, but it is a representation: the representation of that upper light is the lower light. So everything happening below is an expression of something happening above on a somewhat different plane, but it is exactly the same thing. The parable is binding. Every detail I ask about points also to something happening in the thing signified.

Only such a parable can both bring the thing down to me and raise me up to it, because it basically means there is some correspondence between the two conceptual systems, between the two worlds. There is some clear correspondence, and if I grasp this conceptual world well, then I also have some grasp of that higher conceptual world. Meaning, when I hear the voices, I also have a certain kind of grasp like that of the one who sees them. It is not something else; it is a grasp of the correct thing, perhaps in a lower way. But it is a grasp of the same thing. It is not that they happened to give me some parable merely to bring the thing within my comprehension.

Often in Kabbalah there are deep dilemmas—and quite a bit has been written about this too—about whether it is a parable or whether it really describes reality. I think the answer is that both answers are correct, because there the concept “parable” is used in a different sense. Everything that happens below is indeed a parable for what happens above, but a parable only in the sense that it is described in my language. In that sense it is a parable. But it is not a parable in the sense that there is no connection between them, only some incidental resemblance that I exploit for pedagogical purposes to explain something better. Rather, it is essential. Meaning, one cannot choose another parable. The representation of the light there cannot be described by sound, even if I were to find some common feature. What represents the light there is really—that is, its emanation downward of that upper light is simply the electromagnetic light we know here. Therefore this is its emanation; it is not something else.

When we talked in… I think you weren’t here yet… another example? What? You mentioned Torah and Kabbalah—where are the parables not identical? What do you mean? Any thing connected to Torah—not every thing connected to Torah is such a parable. If some preacher in a synagogue tells you a parable, then it is not a necessary parable. But I think the parables in the Talmud, for example, the tales in the Talmud—for example—seem to me to be necessary parables. Yes. At least that is what you can see from the way the commentators relate to them, because they ask about differences in the parable; they do not suffice with there being a common idea. They ask about the details too, trying to explain why they chose this parable and not another. But if there is such a question—why on earth did they choose this parable and not another? They chose this one; if they had chosen the other you would have asked about the other. What kind of question is that? The question exists because they assume there has to be some full expression of the matter here. It is not like ordinary parables.

On page 20—I don’t know if you have it in front of you; look at it afterwards—he speaks there about Rashba’s responsum, section 416, where he excommunicated Yedaya HaPenini, who said that Abraham and Sarah are matter and form, and gave allegorical interpretations of the stories of the Torah. So he excommunicated him there and said that one may not study philosophy until a certain age and so on. They relied on Maimonides; they said that Maimonides also taught them to relate this way, even though I think in Maimonides there is no source for this. There is a source when he speaks about the aggadic passages of the sages. Regarding aggadic passages Maimonides really does say that this is indeed the proper approach—in that famous introduction about the three groups, yes. The group that takes the statements literally is the group of fools. Those who take them literally in order to mock are the group of the wicked. And those who understand that the statements are not literal are the group of the wise. So there he explicitly says it. But he says it about the aggadic passages of the sages. I do not know a place where he says it also about the Torah itself. Therefore I think Rashba really says there that this does not emerge from Maimonides, and that is why he permits himself to excommunicate them.

But what really is the point? There is a very deep point here that is important to understand. Ostensibly, truly, what do I care whether Abraham and Sarah existed or not? If that is what interests… let’s say—and what does “not interest” mean? All that interests me in Abraham and Sarah is what I can learn from them, right? So why should I care if I say they did not exist? The main thing is that I take as binding what I learn from Abraham and Sarah. That is what the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to convey to me in the Torah, right? Why do I have to believe that Abraham and Sarah existed?

What so upsets Rashba? And other medieval authorities too were upset by these things; he was not alone there. The same on the more modern plane—we talked about this a bit last year too, both here and in the evening classes—the same regarding the whole conception of myths. When all the post-Zionists deny the existence of Trumpeldor, or say that he blurted out a Russian curse instead of saying “It is good to die for our land,” or that Marie Antoinette did not say “If they have no bread, let them eat cake,” but I don’t know what she did—cursed them in Hungarian—so the question is: why should that bother me?

Someone who really understands the role of a myth well knows that a myth does not mean representing history. Myth and history are two disciplines that have nothing to do with each other. No—there is no point, and many have written this before me—there is no point in testing a myth by whether it is true or false. A myth is meant to convey messages to us, to educate us, yes? So what do I care whether Trumpeldor existed or not? Why does it matter what Russian curse? Good health to him. But I want to educate my children not to curse in Russian but to say “It is good to die for our land.” So I tell them about that saintly man whose name was Trumpeldor.

So why that strange correlation that exists, where everyone who opposes the messages conveyed through Trumpeldor tries to claim that Trumpeldor also did not exist, while those who identify with the messages conveyed through Trumpeldor also somehow claim that Trumpeldor did exist? Why do you care? Say you identify with the messages and Trumpeldor did not exist, or the opposite. Trumpeldor did exist, but his messages do not interest me—he existed, there were another hundred thousand Jews.

Because an ideal not connected to reality—your ideal too cannot be realized. If you show me, look, there was a person who succeeded in doing this, then your ideal is also genuinely realistic. But if you speak of an ideal in order to say okay, it’s not realistic—those who oppose the values conveyed through Trumpeldor do not say it isn’t realistic; they say it isn’t right. Those are not the right values; one should not die for our land. True, but I’m asking why those who do believe in the ideal also insist that it happened. Because then it makes their ideal more real. Even if you are right, that still doesn’t mean it really happened. The fact that it is convenient for you to say that he existed because it will help you educate the youth—look, there was even such a person too—that’s very nice. But what does that have to do with the historical question of whether he really existed or not? If there is evidence this way or that, then how do you explain this distribution of opinions—that specifically those who identify with the values also say Trumpeldor existed, and those who do not identify say he did not?

I think the deeper answer is—and this also leads to what you said, and that is why it also has educational value; it is not just a psychological effect. In my opinion there is no such thing as a merely psychological effect. There is no such thing at all as a merely psychological effect; every psychological effect has a philosophical explanation behind it. The deeper point here is that a myth that does not come to expression below does not exist above either. If it did not exist below, then above too it does not exist. It does not exist even in the world of values. There is no such value. If it has no representation here below, then it also does not exist in the world of ideas, let’s call it, in the higher world.

That correspondence we spoke of between parable and thing signified—that correspondence basically means that the parable is some realization of the thing signified. Realization in the sense not only of actual fulfillment, though that is also true and that is why it comes from the same root, but embodiment in a body, in being in the world of action. Now the reverse is also true. If it has no realization in this world, then it also does not exist above, because the correspondence is one-to-one. That means it does not exist.

So clearly, if Trumpeldor did not exist, then somewhere that also undermines the existence of this value in the world of values, and whether this value is right or not right. And therefore it matters very much to people—not “matters very much,” but rather, if I really feel that a value is true, I really identify with it, that means that it also finds expression in the world. Meaning, I make claims about history, claims about the world, as a result of belief in a value.

So when you say that Abraham and Sarah were matter and form, that is not just psychology, that I cannot therefore identify with the messages. Why should I care? The Holy One, blessed be He, conveyed messages to you through legendary figures called Abraham and Sarah. The point is not that. The point is that if those values have no parable in our world—but a parable, again, not a parable in the way we usually say “parable,” but a parable in the sense that it actually exists, that its projection is here—then above too it does not exist. That is the point.

Meaning, if you do not… true, in principle I don’t care whether Abraham and Sarah existed or not. It doesn’t interest me; it’s not relevant; there is no practical difference. The whole question is only whether the fact that they did not exist can still leave me with the belief that the values they represent do bind me. That is the point. Precisely because this parable is a necessary parable. All right, we’ll stop here.