The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 19

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How close to it something is, exactly, exactly—there’s something circular here. Meaning, even before you know how close it is to the Idea, how do you know at all what the Idea looks like? That’s really the question. And in light of that, of course, how do you determine how close it is to the Idea? So I don’t know. That is, I don’t know whether Plato has an answer to that. At least I don’t know one, I’m not familiar with one, and I think there’s a basic problem here. But on the practical level, say, it’s clear that I know what a perfect horse looks like, right? Forget all the philosophical problems involved in that. Clearly there is some ideal image of a perfect horse, yes? Completely symmetrical, proportional, whatever it may be.

[Speaker C] Right, I mean, that’s supposed to—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —be the connection between these two components of the aesthetic: between symmetry and proportion, or the relation among the parts, and closeness to the perfect thing, because apparently one of the definitions of the perfect thing is that the symmetry there is complete. But again, it’s clear these are things that I don’t know how to describe in a linear way, in a way that says, okay, this is how you define an Idea; once I know the Idea, let’s check how close this object is to the Idea, and then I’ll know how beautiful the object is. In other words, the question of how you define the Idea is not entirely clear. But Plato says there are some kind of inner eyes with which one can somehow see the Ideas.

[Speaker C] On the—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] factual level, I think he’s right. That is, we do have some image of an ideal horse, say, and when I see a horse I can see in what way it’s deficient and in what way it’s imperfect—or at least someone who understands these things can see that, yes? Meaning, a person really does have some such Idea of a horse. It’s just that Plato claims that this Idea is something that exists, that it’s something real. How do you see that something? How is the Idea present within me? If you claim it’s just something I was born with and that it has no actual ontological significance—just that I was born with some notion of what a horse is, and it’s not clear where it came from, but that’s how I was born—fine, then I’m basically ignoring the problem or repressing it. But if you really claim that there is such a thing, and that I can somehow know it and know the horse and then decide what the distance is between those two things, and thus determine the beauty of the horse, then it really is a big question how I know the Idea. In any case, these are two components that keep interacting throughout the history of aesthetics. One component is basically relating to the horse as it appears to my eyes, irrespective of what it reflects or what stands behind it—the question of how it looks in terms of the mutual relations among its parts, for example. Or yes, in later periods people even tried to assign quantitative measures to these things—the golden ratio, if you know it. Yes, in the Renaissance, during the Renaissance, they tried to give quantitative criteria for beauty. And one of the claims was that after examining a great many classical works, they saw that in many of them—and also in the human body—this proportion appears. There is a proportion of square root of five minus one divided by two; that’s called the golden ratio. They defined it differently, actually: as the proportion between two parts of a line. Say you have a line made up of two segments, A and B. I want to know what the ideal proportion is between A and B, the one that looks beautiful. How should you divide the line in a way that looks beautiful? It’s not fifty-fifty—fifty-fifty doesn’t look beautiful. That’s probably too coarse, too simple. What is the refined division that still looks beautiful? So it turns out—and there were people who actually experimented with this—one of them, named Fechner, did aesthetic experiments. That was how he studied aesthetics: he simply tested people, asked them what looked most beautiful to them, this kind of division, that kind of division, and he arrived at a conclusion about the preferred ratio. And it turns out that this preferred ratio really does characterize a great many classical works. In many classical works you can see that they’re built this way. I once saw in Time-Life Mathematics a description of this—if anyone has seen it—in art, sculpture and painting, plastic art. There’s a certain ratio there that says that if we divide a line into two parts, A and B, then the ratio of A to B is like the ratio of B to A plus B. You follow? A divided by B equals B divided by A plus B. As a fact, that’s what comes out. Now if you do the math, you’ll see that A divided by B is the number I mentioned before. You can’t derive A and B separately from one equation, but you can derive A divided by B from one equation. If you extract A divided by B from here, you’ll discover that it is square root of five minus one divided by two. That’s called the golden ratio, and the claim—which seems actually to be confirmed—is that people somehow do find things with this ratio, say rectangles whose sides stand in this relation to one another, to be more aesthetically pleasing rectangles. In various paintings too, in classical works, you can really see that this ratio appears a lot.

[Speaker C] Approximately how much is it? Did they calculate the square root—roughly a bit over half?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, square root of five is two point something, minus one is one point something, divided by two, so it’s half and a bit. 0.57, 0.517, I don’t remember exactly anymore, something like that. So does this still hold today?

[Speaker C] What? Does this still hold today?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think it still holds—not as the average evaluation.

[Speaker C] No, no, we’ll get to that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Today maybe not proportion. No, no, we’ll get to that.

[Speaker C] I’ll get to that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Exactly. That is, today this isn’t considered an aesthetic value—it’s not considered the value of a work of art—but it’s still something people talk about.

[Speaker C] Are people being trained to love things that are not aesthetically pleasing to them?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not that. Rather, today our relation to a work of art is not—that is, I don’t determine my relation to a work of art by the question of whether the symmetry in it appeals to me. That symmetry may still appeal to me, but that is not what determines my attitude to the artwork today. Today the work of art means much more to me in terms of what it symbolizes. Expressionism is basically a more extreme expression of this approach, which is very widespread today. It’s a view that says a work is judged by how much it succeeds in conveying something to me, expressing something, and not by such geometric values or purely formal values of the thing itself, yes? It is grasped more as a whole and not as some analysis of one part against another or something like that. So these are exactly the two parameters we talked about in Plato. In Plato both of these parameters appear, and there is some connection between them; the connection probably stems from the same circularity we spoke about earlier. That is, his definition of a perfect horse, or of the Idea of horseness, is a horse that fulfills some kind of theoretical relations, or something completely symmetrical. Fine? He wasn’t aware of it, but it’s quite clear that this is a function of human psychology. A person who was born with a different relation to symmetry would consider—yes, tweak some molecule in his brain and it could be that in his eyes the golden ratio would be square root of five minus two divided by two and not minus one divided by two. Fine? It seems pretty obvious that this is a function of us and not a function of the world. But psychology did not enter Greek analyses of art at all. That only arose at the end of the Middle Ages. So in Plato these two things appeared. After him, his most prominent Neo-Platonic successor in the discussion of aesthetics was Plotinus, whom the Nazir talks about in section 13, and Plotinus claimed—or thought, I don’t know if it was even a formal claim—but he said that beauty is really only expression and not symmetry. That is, he dropped this criterion of symmetry. If we go back to the Greek characteristics we’ve talked about more than once, I think, this is actually becoming more Platonic than Plato. Yes? That is, all of Greekness was basically attention to the form of the thing, right? That’s how we always defined Greekness: attention to the form of the thing, to how it looks; attention to some external face, not to the question of what it reflects, what stands behind it, but what it is—meaning, how I see it. So if its mathematical relations are like this, then great, and if the mathematical relations are different, then not great. Fine? Meaning, everything is determined by criteria that today may seem low-level, but they are external. With Plato this still operated in a mixed way in the realm of aesthetics, these two types of aesthetic evaluation. With Plotinus only one remained. That is, only the expressive value remained. Meaning, only the question of what it expresses—that is, it expresses its Idea, according to Plato. Plotinus still remained with that, but only with that. And basically what he says is that the value of a work is the question of how much it expresses its Idea, and from this he also drew all sorts of conclusions—for example, that it really isn’t important to look at the parts of the Idea. Why does he omit the second part that Plato had? It isn’t important to look at the relations among the parts because, on the contrary, the very existence of parts is only the result of realizing the Idea. The Idea itself has no parts. The Idea of Ideas, according to Plato, is something actually very close to our concept of God. It is static, that’s what the Nazir says. It is a thing, not a force in creation. It is not something that activates creation. It is some sort of primordial form that everyone later imitates; it somehow unfolds into particulars, but it is not something active. It is some additional layer that lies there somewhere inside. Fine? But we already said that Plato is actually very close to Semitic thought; he is the Greek thinker closest to Semitic thought. So Plotinus is only a continuation of Plato. In any case, what he left us with is a situation in which the value of art is determined only by what it expresses, by how much it expresses the Idea, and not by the proportions between the parts. Here, of course, the question we asked about Plato returns with even greater force: so what is this Idea? Or how do you compare how close something is to the Idea, or how much it expresses the Idea? How do you compare such a thing? At least with Plato, he had some kind of definition—even if circular, still some kind of definition. Fine, the perfect symmetrical relations define what a perfect horse is. Now I ask: what is the relation between this horse and the perfect horse? How do I know what the perfect symmetries are? I don’t know, but let’s say I do know. But Plotinus removes that from the picture altogether. He leaves only the value of the work as reflecting something, not as formal values. So now the question is even stronger: how do I determine how much it really reflects? In the Middle Ages, these two conceptions were used in a mixed way: on the one hand, the symmetrical-formal conception of art, and on the other hand, the expressionist-expressive conception of art. At the beginning of the modern period, during the Renaissance, many major works of art were indeed created, classical works to this day, but conceptually it was still a classical conception, still a classical period. No new conception of art was introduced there; on the contrary, the emphasis was on producing what the Greeks had done. All the great artists of the Renaissance were artists who tried to repeat Greek works, basically, or create in that style. Hm? Yes, right.

[Speaker C] So the meaning of the word Renaissance, yes—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the historical meaning of the word, yes, rebirth, renewal of love or something like that, yes. What is basically meant by what’s called a classical or classicist conception? It’s a conception that says: the earlier, the better. What existed among the Greeks was the best. People are always trying to go back and produce works like the classical Greek works of art. And today the Renaissance itself is also considered, among today’s classicists—who are the most extreme—the Renaissance also occupies something of the status that Greece occupied during the Renaissance itself. Fine? Classicism is always a return backward—that is, a return to some great period in art and an attempt to revive it. No, this doesn’t really mean decline of the generations as such, though it is in effect a view of decline of the generations. We need to try to understand or reconstruct what they did, not add our own layer. But in that Renaissance period, perhaps the most prominent figure in aesthetic thought was Don Yehuda Abravanel. He was a Jewish philosopher, very famous then and less known today. He had a very strong influence in that period and a bit afterward. To this day he has a book called Dialogue on Love or Conversations on Love, depending on how you translate it; the word apparently goes both ways, but it’s the same book. And that book basically deals with aesthetics and beauty. It had a very powerful influence during the Renaissance and a little afterward, and somehow today it’s been forgotten. But it is considered perhaps one of a few especially important or impressive classical works on the subject of aesthetics. A book written in Italian, though I think there may be a Hebrew translation, I don’t know. In any case, Don Yehuda Abravanel’s claim—he too was basically a kind of Neo-Platonist, or a continuation of Plotinus, if we’re describing one chain among several chains of development, the Platonic chain. Was he Jewish?

[Speaker C] Yes, yes, of course.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think he was even a rabbi. So he argued that one must first of all distinguish—his definition of beauty was grace that arouses in me love for the beautiful thing. The grace of the thing that arouses in me love for the beautiful thing, or causes me to fall in love with the beautiful thing—that is called the beauty of the thing. Some property of it that causes me to fall in love with it.

[Speaker C] That doesn’t sound like something objective inside the thing itself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, right, and in that sense he really is Neo-Platonic, because he truly takes—if I had to choose one of the two earlier directions we talked about, he goes in the direction of expression. Fine? The important parameter for aesthetics is how much the thing expresses, what its content is, not how it looks. Fine? But it’s true that he takes this one step further and says that beauty is actually a very specific kind of expression: it’s that magnet which makes me want to reach the thing or fall in love with the thing. Fine? There is a definition by Augustine, I think—the Christian saint and sage—who said, I think, that this is the gravity of love. My gravitation toward the thing, the force that draws me toward the thing—that is beauty. And he distinguished—this appears in section 15 in the lesson, so that’s why I’m giving this introduction; afterward we’ll read the sections. The discussion of Don Yehuda Abravanel is in section 15. He distinguished two processes in what is called the circle of love. That is, the beauty of the thing is basically the degree to which the upper Idea is reflected in it. He was a Neo-Platonist, and for him the upper Idea—his translation of the upper Idea—is God. But the degree to which the upper Idea is reflected in a thing—that is the beauty of the thing. So the source of beauty is God, and the beauty of a thing here in the world is the degree to which divinity is reflected in it.

[Speaker A] Almost like a divine calculation. Right, yes. So if that’s the case, does God have some kind of physical standards of measure? What suddenly? It’s the physical expression of God. Any measure that God has, whether physical or not, any measure is an embodiment of God.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] God has no measures at all, neither physical nor non-physical. As I understand it, the further down you go—

[Speaker A] Here I understand it as imagining that God appears in some perfect form, and then asking how much this resembles that perfect appearance which the Holy One, blessed be He, has.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That may be true in a certain sense, but in a moment we’ll continue. The Nazir adds something else in his interpretation of Don Yehuda Abravanel, and I think it’s very important, and it seems to me—again, as far as I can tell from what I’ve read here—it seems to me they didn’t really notice it in the Hebrew Encyclopedia, in the entry on aesthetics. So it seems to me they didn’t really pay attention to this point in Don Yehuda Abravanel. In any case, what is commonly described in his view is that there is some sort of circle of love. That is, the Holy One, blessed be He, brings beauty and life down into the world, and this causes the world to try to rise toward Him, and it also causes God to try to come closer to the world. How does God come closer to the world? God does not descend. He raises the world up to Him. I think that at the root of these descriptions stand Kabbalistic outlooks: awakening from below and awakening from above. The question of whether I draw close to God—if I see something beautiful, I want to come closer to it, that’s my initiative. But when God casts beauty down here, that is really taking me toward Him. Not that I come closer to Him, but that He wants to come closer to me. And how does God come closer to me? He takes me closer to Him. That is called His coming closer to me. And when I come closer to Him, that’s as if it’s my initiative.

[Speaker A] So that’s what it says here in section 15, if you want to look. It says there are three levels in beauty: that which brings it forth, and it itself, and that which is affected by it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s in the middle of the section.

[Speaker C] So he’s just calling our service of God—he defines aesthetics simply as service of God, drawing close to the Holy One, blessed be He. Right, but he also means aesthetics in the way we’re talking about aesthetics.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He says that aesthetics is part of, or an example of, every type of service of God. There is ethical beauty too. In Plato, the highest Idea of the good, the beautiful, and the true is the same thing. It’s the same one. It’s not that there is one highest Idea of the good, another highest Idea of the true, and another highest Idea of the beautiful. These three highest Ideas, since this is an undivided thing, as we said earlier—not a thing with aspects and parts—it is the same thing, the upper Idea as such. We distinguish it through three channels: through beauty, through truth, and through goodness—the good. It’s like, by analogy, in Japan, as you know, there are several ways of learning Zen from teachers. You can learn it through flower arranging, through archery, and through wrestling, fencing I think—four classical ways, as far as I know at least. But it’s not that they’re learning different things; they’re learning the same thing. They’re learning the same thing, just in four different ways. So that is the conception of Plato and all those who follow him. Meaning, Kant basically divided philosophy into logic, which deals with the true; aesthetics, which deals with the beautiful; and ethics, which deals with the good. Those are the three basic categories, the three fundamental concepts. The value of a thing—whether it is beautiful or not beautiful; the value of a thing—whether it is true or not true; and the value of a thing—whether it is good or not good. Those are the three kinds of evaluation we know. So basically there are three domains in philosophy. Platonists claim that these three are simply three different ways of looking at the same thing. They are three only for us. They are not really three. They are three different ways of looking at the same thing. When you see something very beautiful, you see the divinity in it. When you see something very good, you also see the divinity in it. And when you see something very true, you also see the divinity in it.

[Speaker A] It’s a little hard to accept that idea. Those Zen people and so on, they understand how attachment and arranging—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They don’t understand; they experience. It’s not understanding in the Western sense.

[Speaker A] You can grasp how that leads to the same thing, but I—being within Jewish divine culture—I understand how something divine is good and how something divine is true, but I can’t manage to understand how something divine is beautiful.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Something that is perfect is divine. That’s very clear. Perfect beauty too is a certain kind of perfection, no? Why do they appoint as High Priest only someone who is beautiful, right? Why is King Saul, who was chosen, described as handsome and taller than everyone else?

[Speaker A] So in the Bible beauty is something—it—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] is indeed perceived as beauty; it is a relevant parameter. Beauty is not something to be dismissed. Beauty is a certain kind of perfection, and perfection now doesn’t mean that everyone who is ugly therefore has to—there is something deficient in him. In everyone who is ugly there is something deficient, and that’s true, and that’s nothing terrible. He is to be given proper respect, yes—what about that famous story involving the son of Shimon HaTzaddik or Shimon ben Shetach?

[Speaker C] Yehoshua ben Hananiah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He said to her, “Go tell my Maker who made me.” Yes.

[Speaker C] He retracted over that. Right, that same woman who came and said, “Such an earthen vessel and such gold.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, that’s Alexandria. But there’s someone—I don’t remember who it was—one of the Tannaim who met some ugly man on the road, and he refused to beg him for forgiveness and so on. He said to him—he didn’t forgive him at all. I don’t remember who it was. But yes, this doesn’t mean you should belittle someone who is ugly; he was born ugly. But true, he was born ugly, and some part of the divine expression is not found in him. I think it could be—and here I’m not sure—but it seems to me there is also a kind of beauty that is inner beauty. That is, a very ugly person can still be very empathy-arousing—not only in the ethical sense, also in the aesthetic sense. That is, there is a certain kind of beauty that does not express itself through external form. And maybe that is somewhat connected to what we were just talking about. And that is an aesthetic value—not because he happens to be a good person, but because there is some sort of radiance in his eyes, you understand? Grace, exactly. It’s another kind of beauty, and it’s also beauty.

[Speaker C] It says about Leah that she was sallow and—meaning ugly—but she had grace and things like that. There is grace that is not—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. A lot of times this is called Platonic beauty, by the way—this kind of beauty I’m talking about now. It’s a beauty that doesn’t really find expression—it doesn’t have to be a blonde with blue eyes, yes, to put it bluntly and crudely. That is, there is a woman in whom you see a certain beauty that does not express itself in the form of a model, yes? It’s not in her body measurements; it’s something inward. I think everyone knows what this is. It’s not—I don’t know whether it’s so desirable to know this, but people know it. The fact is that there is such beauty. It’s a different kind of beauty, but it is beauty too. And many times such beauty is much more long-term. Often you’re impressed by all kinds of external things and chase after various models and so on, and after a day it disappears. That is, it’s not really something that can—it’s not true beauty, in short; it’s external beauty. Precisely true beauty is perhaps the expression of divinity. But again, I also think that even in external beauty there is something. There is some defect here, and yet something more perfect than what is externally ugly. There’s no getting around it. In my opinion, the High Priest was not chosen for inner beauty; he was chosen for external beauty. When beauty is spoken of there, we’re talking about parameters of external beauty. There too there is something. There is talk about the future to come, that people will be more beautiful, in some—

[Speaker C] area of redemption, because it affects all planes—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] even the external physical planes. No, that’s clear, it’s obvious. The fact is that beauty is understood as one of the forms of perfection; there’s no way around it. It is not the evil inclination. Nothing we are born with is the evil inclination; only the way we use it is the evil inclination. The way we use it is the evil inclination. No power is born for nothing. If you truly value external beauty, that is a sign that there is something in it. Now again, one has to know proportion, one has to know how to relate to someone who doesn’t have that external beauty, but it’s not something that has no root. External beauty expresses something, expresses a kind of perfection. Therefore, if we can include these three kinds of values in one category, we can call them three types of perfection: the truest, the most correct, and the most beautiful. Yes, all three are basically three detailed forms of one concept called perfection. And there are three kinds of perfection, but the fact is they are three kinds of one thing. And the way we describe the Holy One, blessed be He, is not as the truest, but as the most perfect. Fine? Perfect in every sense. Now, any breakdown into different senses is always our way of looking. The Holy One, blessed be He—this is what belief in divine unity says—is not a thing with aspects; He is not a thing with parts; He is one and unique. But we can look from different angles at the perfect thing: from the ethical angle, the aesthetic angle, and the logical angle. Yes, so let’s return to Don Yehuda Abravanel. Don Yehuda Abravanel says that beauty is basically my desire to cleave to the thing. At the root of the matter, of course, this is the desire to cleave to divinity. The beauty of the thing is basically the degree to which divinity is expressed here, and through that I aspire to cleave to what stands behind it. Come and notice: again, it’s not that I want to obtain some model-like woman. Rather—and I’m sorry I’m using somewhat blunt language here, but I’m doing it deliberately in order to bring out clearly the two sides of the coin—if I see what lies behind this, then I want to attain that. But I do not want to attain this external characteristic itself. This external characteristic expresses something that stands behind it, and that is what I want to attain. Fine? This is not the cheap kind of love one often sees today. So Don Yehuda Abravanel basically says that beauty is grace, the recognition of which causes joy and brings the soul to desire. That is called beauty. That is his definition of beauty in his book Dialogue on Love. And then he says that beauty basically has its root in divinity; divinity brought it down into the world so that the world would want to reach divinity, and there is a circle here. That is, the world wants to reach divinity, and divinity wants to draw the world to itself, to come closer to the world, even to come closer to the world. Yes, God cannot, as it were, descend or embody Himself. He does not come closer to the world; He raises the world toward Him. That is His mode. So this difference is basically the difference between awakening from below and awakening from above, yes? The question is whether I want to come closer to divinity, or whether divinity takes me to itself. Fine? These are of course the layers behind the aesthetic theory. All the non-Jewish thinkers who dealt with this did not speak on that level. For them it was discussed in terms of feelings, the psychology of aesthetics. It was not discussed as religious service. But it is clear that behind it Don Yehuda Abravanel also had a religious dimension. Now the Nazir adds another point, which I think is very important for understanding this circle of love in Don Yehuda Abravanel, but we’ll get to that when we read section 15. This is just the development I wanted to sketch as an introduction: basically there are two conceptions of beauty—the external conception and the expressive, expressionist conception. The expressive conception was basically begun by Plato, although with him it was still mixed with the external conception. With Plotinus only that remained, and with Don Yehuda Abravanel it already acquires a metaphysical dimension as well. It is not just psychology—that I love this—but something brought from a divine source standing behind the beautiful thing. Fine? But Don Yehuda Abravanel too is still Neo-Platonic. This is still not what the Nazir says. We’ll get to that shortly. So let’s start with section 13.

[Speaker C] Why did it stop? What? Today it’s Plotinus?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, roughly there. Plotinus ended the period; he lived, I think, in the third century CE, and he more or less concluded the Greek period of discussion of aesthetics. And from then on, in the Middle Ages nothing happened, of course—hardly anything happened there in anything—and in the modern period they basically started from Plotinus. The development is indeed mainly along that channel. I think that today very few works, as you yourselves noted, are judged on the basis of formal dimensions. In the Renaissance, yes, there were many like that, most of them I think, and that’s where they invented all the proportions and the whole golden ratio we talked about. I think that was a gimmick of—well, so in section 13 we already read it and talked about the relation between the inanimate—that sight grasps the inanimate—and hearing grasps the living, the moving, the active. The Greek view of beauty is basically a view of harmony. Beauty is basically harmony. The two dimensions we spoke about earlier: both beauty as harmony among different parts of the work, or among different dimensions of it, with the golden ratio and all that—that is obviously harmony. Harmony or proportion is beauty. But also the second type of aesthetic evaluation, the evaluation of how close something is to the Idea, is also harmony. How much does this horse accord with the Idea of the perfect horse, of horseness? That too is a kind of harmony—not harmony among the parts of the concrete thing, but between the concrete thing and the Idea that it expresses. So that too is really a kind of harmony. And that is basically the prevailing conception of beauty in either of its two senses. Therefore, I think, why do both these things express beauty? Exactly because of that—because they both basically express some kind of harmony. The question is whether it is horizontal harmony or inward harmony, but both express some kind of harmony. But still, such a conception of beauty—and parallel to it there is also such a conception of goodness. Good—the pragmatist conception of good. What is pragmatism? Pragmatism is: good is what benefits society.

[Speaker C] That’s what’s good.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The social contract, or American pragmatism, or all the approaches that go in that direction, which say that values are means, not ends. They are means for achieving a more efficient society, a more pleasant society, a society better to live in—I don’t know, everyone with his own definition—but it’s meant to achieve something. There too, in fact, you assess the good by its harmony with something. There too there is basically a kind of aesthetic operation or an operation of seeking harmony. You are looking at how much this act fits what should be, or where it leads society—to the place where it really ought to be. There is an image of an ideal society, let’s call it an Idea, and now I’m supposed to act in order to lead society there. So here too I’m basically carrying out some kind of harmonizing action with the Idea. So again we encounter the fact that the good and the beautiful operate quite similarly. Both are types of values. The auditory good, or in general the auditory conception of value—both the good and the beautiful—claims that there is something beyond harmony. That is, according to this conception of harmony, beauty is always judged by how much this thing fits that. Good is judged by how much it achieves the desired goal, that goal. The auditory conception says that good and beautiful are things that have, at least also, a dimension of intrinsic value. Not only—one can ask whether this thing is beautiful not in the sense of how much it fits some theoretical Idea, but whether it is beautiful, or whether it is good. For example, prohibitions because of appearance—people often say, and not only often say, it is written, that this also applies in private rooms. Why does it also apply in private rooms? Because the purpose of that thing is not only to achieve social goals. That thing is also a value in itself. Meaning, it’s not merely that the fact it achieves social goals is the reason it is good—that is only an indication that it is good. But once I know that it is good, then it is good even in private rooms. You understand? This is a completely different conception of prohibitions based on appearances. Such prohibitions are not that the thing is really permitted, except that it’s forbidden because otherwise people might get confused and then who knows what.

[Speaker C] But the whole concept of appearance—so because of appearance?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but here you see it—so why is it forbidden in private rooms?

[Speaker C] Because of a kind of blanket rule, so that in order to establish an ordinance you have to make it sweeping.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not that kind of blanket rule—so that you won’t come another time. No, the conception he is offering is not like that. Meaning, there is appearance, and we saw this in other places too in Kol HaNevuah: appearance is an indication that something is good; it is not the reason why it is good.

[Speaker C] So why is there a blanket rule? Because people see it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because people see it, they arrive at the conclusion that it is good, and that is how I know that it is good. On my own I would not have reached that conclusion. But once I see that someone who walks immodestly in the street causes all sorts of problems around him, that is a sign that walking immodestly is itself a bad thing. It is a sign, not the reason. Now if it is a bad thing, then even in private rooms I need to dress modestly.

[Speaker C] But what is the meaning of “because of appearance”? “Because” sounds like a cause, if that’s the reason.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, no. “Because of appearance” is only an indication. Once appearance shows you that this thing creates a misleading appearance, then you understand that the thing itself is good—Torah—look what you’re talking about. And therefore it obligates even in private rooms. Yes, so this is basically a conception that says values are not judged only by what they produce; rather, they are beautiful or good—or whatever value it may be—in themselves. True, there is also the side of how it functions. Often that side serves as an indication for the side that tells us what it is in itself—whether God wants it or does not want it. That may be a more religious way of formulating it. It’s an indication. But ultimately I can’t now analyze the concept of beauty itself or the concept of goodness itself—why is it really good to dress modestly? All the explanations will always be in terms of what it will do, right? How do you analyze such a thing? Why is it good to dress modestly? Because it won’t cause such-and-such phenomena. Fine, but every such analysis assumes that you are trying to achieve some goal. But if it is the thing itself, because that is what God wants, then there is nothing for me to analyze here. It is either so or not so. Therefore all the discussions of beauty and goodness in this context lose some of their force. Either you feel that it is good or you don’t feel it. I don’t have many ways to convince you with analysis or reason or something like that. You have to feel it. It is probably somewhere within you if it is really good or beautiful. It is not something I can persuade you of through reason, that it is so. I can try indirectly to bring you to understand that you feel that too. So the Greek conception is basically an instrumental conception of the good and the beautiful. The good and the beautiful are some kind of harmony with something; they come to achieve something. The Semitic conception, on the other hand, says that the good and the beautiful are things in themselves.

[Speaker C] How do you grasp that? If I grasp the good and the beautiful as something that has some—I have some model of good and beauty and I compare it. I compare—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is good. It is good not because it resembles something else; it is good. That is what is called good.

[Speaker C] Why does that make me say it is beautiful?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How do you know that’s a standard? Suppose even at the simplest level—here is a window. You compare it to what? You claim this is comparison. To what are you comparing it?

[Speaker C] You compare it to something earlier that you had.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And how do you know that previous thing is a standard?

[Speaker C] Someone gave me some earlier hint like that; it’s just learning.