Rabbi Israel Salanter, Law and Justice, Lecture 1

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One of the articles from the book Or Yisrael by Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, the father of the Mussar movement, the founder of the Mussar movement. This is from Otzar HaChochma with OCR, so here and there there may be some glitches. I tried to go over it and make sure everything was okay, but here and there I think I missed a bit. Maybe a few words of introduction. Well, the Mussar movement is something you could talk about for a long time, but it’s a movement, yes, the Lithuanian movement that somehow arose alongside—or some would say in opposition to—Hasidism, and of course with the Haskalah in the background, and there’s some attempt here to refresh the Jewish Torah world a bit and lead it in other directions. It starts with Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, who wandered around and spoke—shalom aleichem—who spoke in synagogues and tried to awaken people a little. In the end a movement emerged, with some students and different study halls, Kelm and Slabodka and Novardok and various yeshivot and study halls like that that somehow came out of him, built a little differently or sometimes very differently, but still all of them somehow traced themselves back to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. He himself was really a very interesting figure, a combination of tremendous sharpness—meaning, he was very sharp, very learned. There’s a story that they asked Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, yes, where his father ranked on the scale of the greats of the previous generation, the Beit HaLevi. So Rabbi Chaim said that his father was number three. Number one was Maharil Diskin, number two was Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, and number three was the Beit HaLevi. So if Rabbi Chaim said that, then it seems to me he definitely deserves a place of honor.

[Speaker B] That might be an invention of—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —the Mussar people, maybe, and they did well to put him in second place so they wouldn’t sound unreliable, yes, very nice. Anyway, no, you really can see that he was a very impressive person, also in terms of—

[Speaker C] A similar story about the meeting between Hannibal and the Roman general Scipio, who defeated him fifteen years later. They both knew Greek.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Those were the hobbies of my childhood, Hannibal and Scipio. Okay, so he basically combines some kind of worldview or moral outlook that is different from what had been accepted before him. He brings aggadic literature and thought into the dried-out Lithuanian world, yes, the one that deals only with learning. On the other hand, he does it in a very, very scholarly way. That’s his strength, so maybe that’s part of the reason he really managed to gain influence in that world, because they didn’t—yes, they didn’t tell about him the jokes they tell about today’s mashgichim. You know them? There are lots of jokes about mashgichim. Yes, why does the mashgiach walk around between the tables during study time? Do you know why? So people can see what comes out of someone who doesn’t learn. So those nasty jokes of that sort—they didn’t tell them about Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. This man could definitely hold his own with any scholar, and also part of his ideology was an ideology of pilpul. Meaning, he wanted to forcefully promote dialectical study specifically—pilpul in the pejorative sense, not pilpul in the sense of what other people call pilpul because they disagree with that method of learning, but pilpul that really is pilpul, meaning not entirely genuine. But he said, as an ideology, that in order to compete with the intellectual challenges outside—the Haskalah and so on—you had to offer parallel challenges inside the scholarly world as well. And he thought that this would be, let’s say, competitive, that it could play on that field, and so he was very much in favor of pilpul. And I think we’ll see some of that in this article too. But the important point here, as opposed to ordinary pilpul, is that in ordinary pilpul it’s clear that the conclusion is wrong. Meaning, the whole question is just discovering how—where exactly, meaning where the mistake is. Because the people who construct pilpul, the professionals, yes, who know how to do pilpul professionally, it’s very hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong here. It looks like completely brilliant scholarly reasoning. Even though it’s clear the conclusion is off. Here, in a certain sense, my feeling is that the situation is the opposite. Meaning, it’s clear that the conclusion is right. It’s just that the considerations are a bit too pilpulistic, meaning not always careful enough, tending toward pilpul. But what compensates for it is that the conclusion is correct. Meaning, the messages, the ideas, the principles that he’s trying to convey through this pilpulistic method are correct ideas. And in that sense, I think it’s true that you can assign him to that branch called pilpul, but in certain ways it’s still something else. That’s one point. We’ll see it when we read, but just as an introduction, it’s something worth noticing. Okay, a few more words—you can’t do בלי the continuation of the Mussar movement. The Mussar movement began to spread through the yeshivot, established yeshivot of its own that belonged to its stream, in different shades, of different kinds, not all of them related in exactly the same way to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. By the way, it seems to me that none of them were at his level; if I may try to assess it that way, he really was—I mean, his writing is on a level, or not just the writing, in general. I think he… I’m much more impressed by him than by his students, let’s put it that way. I don’t know, maybe that says something about me. But… But that’s one point. The second point is that in the end there was what’s called the Mussar controversy, yes, the famous series by Dov Katz, very interesting books, I think. And there was a very big controversy around this. Some of the yeshivot saw it as neglect of Torah study, others saw it as saving the generation. Again, “saving the generation” doesn’t necessarily disagree with that, meaning “It is a time to act for the Lord; they have violated Your Torah.” It’s true that it’s neglect of Torah study, because a Litvak isn’t prepared to see these things as real Torah study, but it’s necessary—meaning that’s what will save things, or stand in the breach and save the situation. So in that sense, it’s not certain there was a real disagreement there, but clearly, bottom line, there were those in favor and those against. Maybe not many people know that at a certain point this controversy led to splits in yeshivot, protests, very bitter fights over it. It seems to me that today’s Ponovezh would be embarrassed in comparison with some of the things that happened there. But in the end the feeling somehow is that Mussar won. It won in the sense that it became completely accepted that one is supposed to study Mussar. Today in most—I don’t know if all, but most—major Lithuanian yeshivot, studying Mussar is entirely legitimate. That’s on the one hand. But on the other hand, they don’t actually do it.

[Speaker D] But that’s not study.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. What, lawlessness? No—what’s the lawlessness in the background?

[Speaker D] They give a bochur Mesillat Yesharim, Or Yisrael, Duties of the Heart, a quarter of an hour or half an hour in Elul if I remember right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, half an hour every evening like that, seven to seven-thirty.

[Speaker D] And in Elul they added more. But with no guidance at all. Fine.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You don’t need any, these aren’t serious things, no guidance needed. We’re Litvaks, don’t forget. So that’s exactly it—a kind of Pyrrhic victory. Meaning, Mussar became legitimate, nobody argues with it, but my feeling is that part of the reason is because it no longer threatens anyone; nobody does it seriously anymore. So why fight with it? Meaning, as long as it was very… It’s like Hasidism, you know? The feeling today is as if Hasidism is already legitimate, there’s no longer an argument between Litvaks and Hasidim. There are just a few exceptions—Breslov, Chabad, yes—that aren’t exactly… they somehow remained on the margins. It’s exactly the opposite, of course. Meaning, the only ones who really remained Hasidim are Breslov and Chabad, and about them the argument is still at its height. Meaning, all the others simply are no longer Hasidim, so there’s no argument. Meaning, that’s… so they wear a shtreimel, so what? Amshinov. Yes, Amshinov.

[Speaker C] The Litvaks also have rebbes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Litvaks also have rebbes, so by now all the boundaries are blurred anyway. In any case, in this area of Mussar, on the one hand it won in the sense that it became legitimate, but on the other hand in practice it didn’t change much. Meaning, anyone familiar with Mussar study time in yeshivot knows it doesn’t really happen. People make fun of it, it’s neglect of Torah study, they don’t really do it. In places where there’s a strong mashgiach, he tries to whip them into doing it anyway, but who’s going to study with fervor just because the mashgiach is cracking the whip? Meaning, still, it can’t really be effective. And the feeling really is—my feeling is—that part of the legitimacy of the whole thing is because of its weakness, meaning that it doesn’t really hold water, it can’t compete with anything. No real scholar is actually going to prefer studying Mussar over studying some Ketzot HaChoshen, so it doesn’t threaten anyone, and nobody bothers to argue with it. Among other things, people don’t know this, but the Chazon Ish, for example, held an anti-Mussar position. With all his central standing in the Lithuanian world after the Holocaust, here in the Land of Israel, he held an anti-Mussar position. Some of his writings were censored accordingly so that it wouldn’t show too strongly, because usually the people who publish the non-halakhic books are, of course, the Mussar people, so they control what gets written there. Whoever writes the minutes, you know, he’s the one who decides what happened in the meeting. So that’s it. In short, that’s more or less, it seems to me, more or less the end of the Mussar movement, or its slow death throes to this very day. It’s still twitching, but it seems to me that’s roughly the situation. I know people will be angry when they hear this, but I think it’s an accurate description of the situation. In any case, this book, Or Yisrael, is a book that contains a collection of homilies. It’s not something very, very systematic, but it’s a collection of homilies that came out in several formats. At first I knew some other format, not the regular traditional editions. In the Dorot Library, there’s all kinds of classical literature like that that came out, I think, from the Hebrew University, and one of the volumes there is devoted to the articles of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. That’s actually where I first got to know it. Afterward I saw it a bit also in the actual books themselves. There it’s divided into articles, making it easier to read. In any case, this article is one that seems to me to contain quite a few interesting ideas. In certain ways it’s typical of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. I think you can get an impression here of what Rabbi Yisrael Salanter is, because he also really enters a little—though he doesn’t quite dig deeply; there are places where he digs more deeply—but he also enters a bit into the question of the soul and what happens at the foundation of halakhic / of Jewish law or Torah action, and in that sense it also reflects how he relates to things. We’ll see here both the dimensions of pilpul and, on the other hand, correct ideas that pass through a pilpulistic medium, and I think in that sense it’s quite representative and also, I think, quite interesting. Okay, so he begins with—yes, if this were a regular edition, then the first two or three paragraphs would basically be kind of mottos. Meaning, one motto is some passage in Sanhedrin 71a, Yalkut Shimoni, and Sanhedrin 27. Fine, here it’s presented as a first paragraph. In Sanhedrin 71a: “The stubborn and rebellious son never was and never will be.” His wording, by the way, is fairly difficult, but in this respect his students write more clearly. But that’s the situation. “Never was and never will be, and why was it written? Expound it and receive reward.” Yes, the famous Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin. This is basically a dispute over whether the stubborn and rebellious son ever existed or not. Famously, one says it never was, never was created, and never will be, and why was it written? Expound it and receive reward. And the other says: it was, and I even sat on his grave.

[Speaker E] The one who said—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The one who said that was Rabbi Yonatan, who was a priest. What?

[Speaker E] The one who said it was Rabbi Yonatan, and he was a priest.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, okay, I hadn’t even noticed that, that’s interesting. So maybe that means there’s some metaphorical statement here—he didn’t literally sit on his grave. That somewhat explains how one says, “I sat on his grave,” and the other says, “It never existed, was never created, and never will be.” You have one witness. One witness is believed in matters of prohibition, meaning, what, he tells you there’s a grave of a stubborn and rebellious son, how can you say there never was one? So if it’s really some metaphorical statement, then maybe it’s easier to understand.

[Speaker C] Not believed in matters of prohibition? What? Not believed in matters of prohibition—he’s a priest and sits on a grave.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so he’s believed because he didn’t sit on the grave. A person does not declare himself wicked either, fine. He didn’t sit on the grave because in fact there never was one. In any case, the difficulty is very great. Is the rest of the Torah really not enough, even if a person were to live a thousand years, to expound it and receive reward? Yes, the question is: if this section really isn’t necessary, then why was it written? In order to give reward? Have I finished all the rest of the Torah, all the rest I’m done learning, and I need these three or four verses because otherwise I’ll have nothing to do, nothing to learn? It really sounds strange. The question is a good one, it really is strange. What is this… learn and receive reward. That’s the first citation. The second citation, Yalkut Shimoni 921, Yalkut Shimoni: “Why did Israel merit to bring more than Aaron?” There, in the portion of Shemini, it’s discussing the two goats, the goat for Azazel and the goat for the Lord, so the Talmud discusses there who needs to bring a goat—does Aaron need to, does the High Priest need to bring a goat, or does Israel need to bring a goat? And in the course of the discussion this appears, a segment from the discussion: “Why did Israel merit to bring more than Aaron? Rather, he said to them: You have in your hand at the beginning, ‘they slaughtered a goat,’ and you have in your hand at the end, ‘they made themselves a molten calf.’” Meaning, the calf—you were partners in the sale of Joseph through the slaughtering of the goat, that’s the sin at the beginning of the road, the other tribes, and the sin at the end of the road, which is the sin of the calf. So you need to bring a goat more than me—that’s what Aaron says. Again, very puzzling. Surely Aaron too had both a beginning and an end, because at the beginning he was a partner—meaning the tribe of Levi was a partner—in the sale of Joseph. He too was part of that business. And at the end, in the sin of the calf as well, as the verse says, “And the Lord was very angry with Aaron.” Meaning Aaron too cooperated with the sin of the calf. So what does Aaron mean when he says to Israel, you have beginning and end, and therefore you need to bring a goat more than me?

[Speaker B] Third citation: Was Aaron really there at the beginning, in the sale of Joseph?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Aaron meaning the tribe of Levi. The Aaron spoken of here means the High Priest, because this is about Aaron for generations—meaning the High Priest has to bring a goat on Yom Kippur. In Sanhedrin 27 it is written, Exodus 34, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers,” etc. The Talmud discusses there when the iniquity of the fathers is visited. “Children shall not die for the fathers”—children for the sin of the fathers—and on the other hand there is “visiting the iniquity of the fathers.” The Talmud asks when it’s this way and when it’s that way, and the Talmud answers: when they continue the deeds of their fathers. Meaning, when the children continue the deeds of their fathers, then the sin of the fathers is visited upon them too, in addition to their own sin. But if not, then not; then indeed each person is punished only for his own. “And reason suggests that this is only when the quality of the children’s deeds is equal in value to the deeds of the fathers, not when the deeds of the fathers were greater sins in quality than the sins of the children.” Here it’s not entirely clear to me what he means, because basically he’s just repeating what the Talmud says. Fine, what does he mean, “reason suggests”? He means to say that reason suggests what the Talmud says, that logic says this. Maybe he means to say that it has to be the same qualitative type of sin, not just the same quantitative intensity. Meaning, not just that you be sinners on the same level as your fathers, but also in the same type of sins. Because if, for example—what’s the idea behind it—if I sin greatly in Sabbath observance, will the iniquity of my fathers be visited upon me if they sinned greatly in theft? So he says reason suggests no. If it’s a sin of the same type, the same quality, then if I sin with the same intensity as my fathers, the iniquity of my fathers will be visited upon me, and if not, then not. So he says reason suggests that it also has to be the same type. So that—from here a new paragraph begins, it’s just that with the OCR I didn’t fully do it; I corrected some things but missed some. “And we say in tractate Yoma 67: ‘My mishpatim you shall do and My chukim you shall keep.’” There’s “My mishpatim you shall do” and “My chukim you shall keep.” There is mishpat and chok. So “My mishpatim you shall do” means things that, had they not been written, reason would dictate they should be written, and these are idolatry, etc. So mishpatim are things that make sense, that have a rationale behind them, that had they not been written, reason would dictate they should be written. Meaning, what does that mean? Even if they hadn’t been written, I would know them. Meaning, basically, it’s obvious—they needed to be written, that’s obvious. And the example for that is idolatry. In the Talmud here, idolatry is treated as something that is simply rational, meaning that idolatry is something problematic, foolish, or something like that, and therefore it’s obvious that it’s mishpat and not chok. “My chukim you shall keep,” the Talmud continues, means things that Satan challenges, etc., since their obligation has no entry in human reason—rather, “I am the Lord; I decreed them,” etc. So chukim are the heard commandments, the non-rational ones, whose obligation has no entry in human reason, and mishpatim are the intellectual commandments, the rational ones. “And reason suggests that the quality of the sin of mishpat rises above the quality of the sin of chukim.” Meaning, someone who transgresses something that belongs to mishpat, a rational commandment. Why? I assume because the expectation is that if this is so self-evident, how can it be that you don’t observe it? It isn’t just some formal command; there’s something obvious about it too, you should have been more careful with it. It’s easier to be careful with. Once, I think, in one of the previous years I spoke about this—that in the yeshiva in Yerucham we were bothered by this when we were talking with the students on some occasion, I don’t remember exactly, and we were very troubled by the self-sacrifice we find among Greenpeace people. I mean, really, people pay heavy prices, are willing to suffer and spend money and travel by ships to the North Pole and all kinds of things like that for these values—and they’re good values, I have no criticism, I think it’s right to preserve our planet to some extent. And somehow with us, we drag our feet, not really willing to pay heavy prices for values we believe in. And at some stage, I think, we came to the conclusion in that conversation that in a certain sense it’s easier to give your life for values of that sort. Not that it’s unworthy of appreciation—after all, most people don’t do it—but it’s easier to get there because you see the results before your eyes, the things make complete sense logically. Now try to give your life for redeeming a firstborn donkey—come on. Meaning, okay, not only has the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded me and I don’t understand what He wants from me, now I also have to go fight holy wars over the matter? So it’s a bit hard to create identification with things that aren’t rational, when I don’t understand what good they do. So here, that’s exactly what he’s saying, and therefore someone who transgresses something that belongs to mishpat and not to chok is considered a greater sinner than someone who transgresses a chok, period. “And we say there on page 85”—what?

[Speaker C] Maybe it should be considered, that’s what his words imply. Why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “And reason suggests that the quality of the sin of mishpat rises above the quality of the sin of chukim.” Meaning, no—“reason suggests” doesn’t mean that it becomes so, it’s just said in a straightforward tone, not as a question. “And we say there on page 85,” in Yoma 85: “The Torah said: Desecrate one Sabbath for him so that he may keep many Sabbaths.” It follows from this that even though the sin of idolatry is a mishpat, as the Talmud above says, nevertheless the Torah’s warning to die rather than commit idolatry is a chok. Here there’s another distinction; now the pilpul begins. Meaning, idolatry is mishpat, it’s something rational—not to worship idols, or to refrain from idolatry. But the obligation to die—after all there is “be killed rather than transgress”—the obligation to die for idolatry is a chok, it is not rational. Why is it not rational? Because the Talmud says, “Desecrate one Sabbath for him so that he may keep many Sabbaths.” What does that mean? Why die for keeping the Sabbath? Lose one Sabbath, violate it—there’s no choice—don’t die over keeping the Sabbath, because if you die then you’ve lost all the future Sabbaths too. Whereas if you now live, true, you lost this Sabbath, but you can keep many Sabbaths in the future. Okay? And then the logic says—and this is true not only of Sabbath, it’s true of any prohibition—the logic says that it isn’t right to die over prohibitions. To die over prohibitions is to lose all my opportunity throughout the rest of my life to continue doing more commandments. And here, with idolatry, we are indeed commanded to die and not transgress. So he says that this obligation to die for idolatry is a chok, it is not mishpat, even though idolatry in itself is mishpat. The obligation to die over it is a chok. “And we say in Sanhedrin 7, ‘And Aaron saw,’ etc.” What did Aaron see? In the sin of the calf there, he saw Hur slaughtered before him. Hur was unwilling to do what they told him, so they slaughtered him. He said: If I don’t listen to them now, they’ll do to me what they did to Hur, and then the verse in Lamentations 2 will be fulfilled in me: “Shall priest and prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?” Fine? Therefore Aaron was afraid. It follows that Aaron’s sin was a chok, and was not in the category of continuing the deeds of the fathers, so that their sins would be visited upon him, unlike “they slaughtered a goat,” which was a sin of mishpat. Aaron is less severe than Israel. He too had both a beginning and an end. So what does beginning and end mean? The claim is that beginning and end—the third citation—is a hint to the solution of the riddle in the second citation. Beginning and end means that if in the end you do the same sin as at the beginning, then the sin of your fathers for the sin they committed at the beginning is also visited upon you. Right, that’s what the Sages say, after all, that many of the things we suffer from to this day—or the whole tractate of the Ten Martyrs, as is known—is because of the sale of Joseph. Meaning, that sin is visited also upon the children of the sinners. And why? Because they continued the deeds of their fathers, as the Talmud says, that if they continue them. Where? So he says, the sin of the calf is like “they slaughtered a goat.” Why is that the same thing? Good question, I don’t know exactly. But the assumption is that in some sense it is similar. And since that’s so, the sin of the fathers is visited upon them. But Aaron is not like that. Since Aaron—true, in the first sin the tribe of Levi was a partner, in the sale of Joseph. But in the sin of the calf, the sin he committed was not the sin of idolatry, which is mishpat. The sale of Joseph too is a moral sin, it’s mishpat. So he says it’s the same kind, and therefore the iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children because it’s mishpat and mishpat. Fine, this is pilpul, of course, because it’s not really the same kind of transgression. It’s mishpat and mishpat, but not the same kind. Okay? But Aaron is not mishpat; Aaron is chok. Since Aaron didn’t make the idol in order to worship idols, he did it because he feared they would kill him. So true, he should have died. But the obligation to die is a chok and not mishpat. So what he transgressed is basically a transgression of chok and not a transgression of mishpat. Actually, in light of what we saw last week, I have an even better answer, if we’re already getting into the pilpul questions—and it’s not even entirely pilpul; there are halakhic decisors who say this. After all, you remember we saw the responsum from MiMa’amakim by Rabbi Oshry, and he brought there several halakhic decisors who say that if someone violates the Sabbath under threat, then that labor is labor not needed for its own purpose. So it’s basically only a rabbinic prohibition. Because he performs the labor not for the result of the labor itself, but in order to escape the threat. So there’s labor not needed for its own purpose here; it’s basically only rabbinically prohibited.

[Speaker F] But they say no—he was under duress. He was under duress.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But he still has to die over idolatry. Idolatry is one of the things one must die for. So he says indeed, he was still a wrongdoer. But it’s wrongdoing of the chok kind. So first, it’s wrongdoing not of the same type as that of the fathers, and therefore the first sin is not visited upon him. Fine? That’s what he asked there in the Jerusalem Talmud—what does Aaron say to Israel? You had both beginning and end; he also had beginning and end, so what’s the difference? So he says no, he was in… after all, when is the sin of the beginning visited upon those who were there at the end? When the end resembles the beginning. In the case of Israel, the end resembles the beginning because it’s mishpat and mishpat. In the case of Aaron, the beginning is mishpat but the end is chok. And therefore the first sin is not visited upon him. And besides that—two things here, there are two considerations. First, the first sin is not visited upon him because it’s not the same type. And second, transgressing a chok is a lighter transgression than transgressing a mishpat. Now notice that beyond all the pilpul here, there’s a correct claim: that transgressing a chok is a lighter transgression. Meaning, it’s obvious that someone who actually worships idols is a greater sinner than someone who didn’t die rather than worship idols. Meaning, even if he was supposed to die, it’s still not a transgression of the same intensity as someone who just worships idols. Right? So again, the pilpulistic medium is obviously here, but through that medium correct things are being conveyed. Meaning, he’s not saying incorrect things here; he just somehow insists on putting everything into a Talmudic passage and resolving some Tosafot with it and explaining some aggadic passage here and another there, because that’s the mode of speech, that’s the discourse. But you have to pay attention to the ideas he’s saying—those are ideas that are correct and good. “And with this one can explain the verse”—again, continuation of the genre—Leviticus 18: “My mishpatim you shall do and My chukim you shall keep,” etc. We should pay attention to the change in this verse: mishpat is stated in terms of obligation and chok in terms of negation. Yes, regarding mishpatim it says “you shall do,” and regarding chukim it says “you shall keep.” What’s the difference between “you shall do” and “you shall keep”? The Talmud says that expressions like “beware,” “lest,” and “do not” indicate a prohibition. If “beware lest you do such-and-such” is seemingly active language, it’s like “do something”—beware.

[Speaker G] But no, “beware” is exactly—be careful not to do.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Therefore, the Sages say that the expression “beware” is a prohibition, not a positive commandment. Okay? So here it says, “You shall keep My statutes and My ordinances,” “you shall do My ordinances and keep My statutes.” So the statute is stated in the language of keeping, and My ordinances are stated in the language of doing. This is a positive commandment and that is a prohibition, yes? That’s what he says: that ordinances are in the category of obligation, while statutes are in the category of negation. See Menachot 36, “beware.” See Menachot 36, “beware” for a positive commandment becomes a prohibition, and so on. There is also the change in the verses: in the first verse ordinance comes first and then statute, and in the second verse, “and you shall keep My statutes and My ordinances.” At first statute and afterwards ordinance. So the order also switches: first statute and then ordinance, and in the first verse it is first the ordinance and then the statute. What is the idea? Here he wants to explain, in light of what he said above, these two difficulties in the verses. So he says that Maimonides wrote in the Laws of Repentance, chapter 3, and this is his language: “Every single person has merits and sins. One whose merits exceed his sins is righteous. One whose sins exceed his merits is wicked. Half and half is intermediate. And this weighing is not according to the number of merits and sins, but according to their magnitude. There is a merit that outweighs several sins, as it says in I Kings 14”—yes, again the transcription missed it—“because some good thing was found in him. And there is a sin that outweighs several merits, as it says in Ecclesiastes, ‘one sinner destroys much good.’ And they are weighed”—this is all Maimonides’ language—“and they are weighed only according to the knowledge of the God of knowledge, and He knows how merits are arranged against sins.” End quote. Meaning, Maimonides says there is an intermediate person, a righteous person, and a wicked person. Don’t think the criterion is the number of transgressions against the number of commandments, because different transgressions and commandments have different weights. None of us knows those weights; only the Holy One, blessed be He, does.

And I’ve already spoken about this, maybe more than once in previous years: what exactly does it mean that there are intermediate people, and does the fact that only the God of knowledge knows how to weigh commandments and transgressions help at all in understanding how it could be that someone comes out exactly balanced, with commandments and sins equal, and is intermediate? The fact that there is different weighting obviously doesn’t help, because even then—the chance that one weighted sum comes out exactly equal to another weighted sum is still zero. Meaning, it changes nothing. The Holy One, blessed be He, knows how to narrow it down, so maybe He… no, He can, yes, maybe He can narrow it down, He can know when it happens, but what are the odds that it actually happens? That’s the question. And although there are certainly many causes that increase the value of merits and sins—so what is it after all? Notice: Maimonides says none of us knows; only the Holy One, blessed be He. What is Rabbi Israel Salanter’s next step? To explain what increases the value of merits and sins. One line after Maimonides explained that no one knows except the Holy One, blessed be He, now Rabbi Israel Salanter explains it to us. So he says—of course, this reminds me of what they said to Rabbi Akiva: “A secret that the Ancient of Days concealed, and you go and reveal it.” Meaning, Maimonides says no one understands this except the Holy One, blessed be He, and now Rabbi Israel Salanter explains it to us. So of course he opens with a kind of apology. He says: although of course there are many causes that increase the value of merits and sins, we will not refrain from explaining one aspect of it. Meaning, he’s not really going to explain the whole matter, but one aspect.

And that is: “Many are the thoughts in a man’s heart,” and God turns his heart to his ways, and he knows that he has a sin in his hand, a sin he committed repeatedly, and instead of separating from it, according to his imagined opinion, he avoids delving into the sayings of our Sages of blessed memory that discuss it, because it is preferable that he remain an unwitting sinner, as they said in Midrash Rabbah: “Anyone who learned Torah and does not fulfill it, his punishment is more severe than one who never learned at all.” What does he mean? He means that if a person sins and cannot manage to deal with repentance, he keeps sinning in some particular transgression that he continually stumbles in. So he no longer deals with the sayings of the Sages that address that transgression, because he prefers to remain unwitting rather than become deliberate. And of course he builds an ideology out of that: it’s not worthwhile to deal with it. I’m going to fail anyway, so at least let me fail less—let me be unwitting and not deliberate. That’s the ideology, that it’s better not to learn. If you don’t learn, then at worst you’re unwitting. So he says, see there: this is not God’s way, to wrap the wicked in a cloak of righteousness. Yes? To turn something false into an ideology. And as the verse says in Psalms, “You return man to contrition,” and our Sages interpreted: “to the crushing of the soul.” And “You say, ‘Return, children of man’”—that is the continuation of the same verse, and so on. How is a person to be saved? Yes, you have to return, and you have to try to repent even to the crushing of the soul; not to despair of the matter. “How shall a person save himself”—and where is the remedy? He should bring to heart and say as follows.

So he says: fine, but how do you do it? How can one overcome this inclination that says: come on, let’s not learn, at least we’ll remain unwitting? So now he explains how to deal with that. Notice, we’ve come out of a question we’ve almost forgotten—that’s the way pilpul works. Meaning, we’ll come back to all of it in the end; the circles have to close in the end. Okay? So he says: “He should bring to heart and say: every matter is divided according to the act and according to the actor.” Now this is some sort of introduction. He means that every matter has two planes of discussion, or two planes on which it is judged: according to the act and according to the actor. Before he continues, I’ll just say it more generally: when I judge a person’s deed, there are of course two dimensions to look at. One dimension is what he did—the content of the deed, the consequences of the deed, meaning what actually happened. The second content is the psychological circumstances that accompanied the deed—what his intentions were, how much he knew, whether he acted unwittingly, whether he had an evil purpose, meaning how hard or easy it was for him to contend with that inclination or something like that. That is the consideration from the standpoint of the person. So that’s the act and the actor.

In last week’s Torah portion, Joseph says to the brothers: “Joseph said to his brothers: do not fear. Am I in place of God? You intended evil against me, but God intended it for good.” Yes? So what does that mean there? It means that in the end, from the moment you sold me, you intended to do me harm, but in the end it turned out good. After all, thanks to me Egypt, and you, and the whole world were saved from the years of famine. And thanks to this sale, everything turned out for the good. Now on the face of it, that is absurd. What does that mean? The fact that it turned out well exempts them? The fact that by chance things didn’t work out for them, they didn’t succeed in their plot—does that exempt them? What?

[Speaker I] If God sees it as something positive, then how can I see it as something negative?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? But God didn’t see it as something positive; God turned it into something positive. But what does that mean? How does that help the judgment here? Their judgment is the same. There is a statement here that seems very problematic. Now true, we’re already used to this. I also spoke about this once. We’re used to the idea that attempted murder is not the same as murder. Even though on the conceptual level, what’s the difference? The person did everything he could: took the weapon, loaded it, aimed it, pulled the trigger, but the firing pin was broken. So what—he’s exactly as wicked as the one who succeeded, except that in addition to being wicked, he was just unlucky, that’s all. So because of that he’s exempt? He’s exactly as wicked as the other one. So why is an attempt considered less than the actual deed, at least in terms of punishment? Or even in terms of social attitude—it’s not just punishment. Yes, the attempt—these are people with blood on their hands and these are people without blood on their hands. What difference does it make, if someone has blood on his hands, whether the other one failed and was merely unlucky? So because of that he deserves to go free? What difference does it make whether he has blood on his hands or not? I mean, one who set off an explosion and failed to kill. There are some who don’t have blood on their hands in the sense that they don’t carry out the explosions themselves but are only in some rear-echelon role.

[Speaker J] There was some discussion that someone very, very wise is considered something, even though it’s not clear he’ll do great things with it. Like, we value things…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but here this is moral judgment. The question is what justifies this kind of moral judgment?

[Speaker K] Because there is a difference between the actual deed and intention.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Why? He did the deed. There’s something here that is not simple.

[Speaker C] Now look, with Joseph, with Joseph it really seems…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …to me that he didn’t…

[Speaker C] …really want to murder. If he really wanted to murder completely, he would have checked the gun properly and not missed.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Just bad luck, his hand…

[Speaker C] …shook on the trigger, and because of that he missed the target. Is that the legislator’s rationale? Why is attempted murder punished less severely?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not convincing at all.

[Speaker C] It seems to me there’s some legal definition that the punishment is only about fifty percent.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, today I understood—someone told me actually the opposite, that today according to the law attempted murder is literally…

[Speaker L] Murder.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what someone told me today—that actually, in Israeli law at least, it’s treated the same. I also thought not, I don’t know, but that’s what someone told me some time ago. Where’s the judge? What? Where’s the judge? So with Joseph, what is written there is something a bit more moderate. He didn’t tell them they were fine. He says to them, “Am I in place of God?” meaning, this is God’s job, not my job. If something practical had come out of it, then that would be the job of flesh and blood; a court judges people for their deeds. For their thoughts too they must be judged, but the Holy One, blessed be He, will judge them. I brought the Gemara in Nazir about “a transgression for the sake of Heaven is great”—I brought it just last week. “A transgression for the sake of Heaven is great,” right? I think I brought it—that the Gemara says there: if one intended to eat… no, sorry, that’s not “a transgression for the sake of Heaven,” it’s almost in the same place—if one intended to eat pork and what came to his hand was lamb, he still requires atonement. And the Rabbi of Brisk wants to claim that this is literally a transgression. I think it’s hard to say such a thing.

[Speaker M] In Yevamot or in Nazir do they connect it to the sale of Joseph?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Connect what to the sale of Joseph?

[Speaker M] What? Rabbi Akiva? Rabbi Akiva says that over this he cried. There in the Gemara it says he cried over the fact that those who wanted to sell…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes? Was that with the sale of Joseph? I don’t remember anymore. Could be. I know Rabbi Akiva cried there, but was it about the sale of Joseph? Yes? I don’t remember; we’d have to look. In any case, the Gemara says that if one intended to eat pork and what came to his hand was lamb, he requires atonement. So the Rabbi of Brisk claims that this is literally a transgression in the full sense, only one is not punished—but it is completely a transgression. That’s hard to say, but certainly he requires atonement. Meaning, not only is it obvious that he won’t get off, but there is some kind of problem here. Why? Because the fact that he didn’t succeed—after all, all his intentions, all his acts, he was wicked in the fullest sense exactly like someone who eats pork; it just happened not to work out. The pork he wanted to eat turned out to be lamb. So what? The degree of wickedness is the same. In logic the Rabbi of Brisk is right. It’s the same transgression—what difference does it make what I ended up eating? Now okay, here the question is why there is no punishment. Punishment is already a question in the theory of punishment. Do I impose punishment according to the severity of the deed? That would be a kind of revenge: the more wicked you are, the harsher the punishment you get. That is a conception of punishment as revenge. Or is punishment something like atonement? Or to somehow rectify the consequences? Then of course, if there are no consequences, there is nothing to rectify. Or deterrence—then too one can discuss it. It may be that psychologically, deterrence is more needed where the transgression was actually realized, not where the person tried but in the end failed; maybe that leaves less of a psychological impression. So in terms of deterrence there is room to discuss making the distinction. But if we’re talking about punishment as revenge, as something because you are not okay, because you are wicked—you are equally wicked even if in the end it turned out to be lamb. What difference does it make?

Therefore what Joseph says to his brothers there—“Am I in place of God?”—means that if it had happened in practice, then the one to judge it would be the earthly court, flesh and blood. We judge things that happened. Evil intentions are judged by the Holy One, blessed be He. It’s not that you are righteous; you are wicked, but it is the Holy One’s role to judge that. “Am I in place of God?” means I don’t judge that question, because in the end it turned out for the good. But in truth, in terms of real judgment, if I knew the intentions and if I judged intentions, then in the true sense evil intentions are exactly like an evil deed. There is no difference at all. Of course, again, not intentions that just passed through my head incidentally, but a decision to do something including carrying it out, except that in the end I failed—something went wrong there. I am equally wicked; there is no difference. Therefore, when we judge a particular action, he says it should be judged from the standpoint of the act and the actor. I think that in a certain sense it is even more from the standpoint of the actor than from the standpoint of the act. Because from the side of the act—fine, what happened happened. Whether it succeeds or doesn’t and what the consequences will be no longer depends on me. The question how wicked I am is much more meaningfully judged by my intentions and my degree of culpability regarding the deed, from the side of the actor and not from the side of the act.

This reminds me of some argument I’ve been involved in online in recent days about some issue… maybe I spoke about this too once, I no longer remember. About the claim that anyone killed because he is a Jew is holy. Nonsense and absurdity without root or branch, simply nonsense. There is no source for it, no reasoning, just a completely foolish thing. And everyone repeats it and writes it enthusiastically and comforts poor people who lose their holy loved ones. If the person did something for it—say, in the Holocaust, then “the holy martyrs of the Holocaust.” In what sense were they holy? They weren’t holy at all. Terribly unfortunate, and their relatives are unfortunate, but does being killed make you holy? If a person did something and because of that he was killed, then certainly yes. But if someone was simply grabbed because they discovered in the population registry that he was Jewish and they shot him in the head—they didn’t ask him anything, and he had no choice in his hands, and he chose to do something and because of that they killed him—then what holiness is there in that? How is that relevant? Well, I don’t know, as “holy”… fine, if it means something else then I don’t care. But if it means a person worthy of great esteem because of his spiritual standing or something like that—I don’t know exactly what to call it—what does that have to do with anything? That person simply didn’t have one more moment to flee or convert; they caught him and shot him in the head. So that made him holy? What does that have to do with holiness? It’s irrelevant. These are statements apparently intended to comfort people somehow; I’m not sure exactly what. But they have no real content. It’s like if I wouldn’t be comforted by that nonsense, because someone could also tell me: look, all your relatives who were killed in the Holocaust won the Nobel Prize. They didn’t win it, but just to comfort me we say they did. What kind of thing is that? I don’t really understand it.

Why am I bringing this? Because it reminds me of the same discussion here too. There is some sense that we are supposed to look at the practical result and not at what the actor’s role actually was in the action. Meaning, if I did nothing in this context and they simply caught me and killed me, then in what sense am I holy? The practical result is almost irrelevant to the evaluation of the act. What matters is the question what the person does, or what his motivations are, or what he invests for this thing, what prices he pays. That certainly matters. But that is from the side of the actor, not from the side of the act. Yet somehow in the final analysis it is accepted…

[Speaker L] Every Jew pays a price for being a Jew. What? No, so I’m saying…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then you can say instead—no, but what if they caught someone who was completely assimilated? They caught someone completely assimilated; only his mother was Jewish, unfortunately for him—what could he do? So he too is holy. That was part of those killed there. There were many among the victims who were not such great righteous people, let’s say, in their lives. They became holy in death—I don’t know exactly how. Again, if they did something, fine. A person can do something and it can atone and make him righteous; all true, depending on what he did. But the mere fact that someone died—so what if he died? A terrorist, I don’t know, killed an Israeli civilian—so if he was then killed, does that make him holy because he was killed over Judaism? What kind of nonsense is that?

Now the dilemma here is also, in some sense, around that same point. Do you evaluate an action or a person through what happened in practice, the result, or through the motives, the motivation, through the actor, through the question of how involved the person was in what happened? Therefore, when we evaluate—also generally regarding morality—many times, yes, Kantian morality is a morality in which a person is truly evaluated according to motivations. Kant says: the fact that you help others and do everything right to do does not make you a moral person. The question is why you do it. If you do it in order to get a commendation from the president, or because of social pressure, then you are not a moral saint. Fine, a nice person, but not a moral saint. A moral saint is someone who does it in response to duty, the categorical imperative. Yes, that’s the conception. Meaning, the motivation for why I do it is what determines whether I am a moral person or not, and not what I do. Even sheep—we talked about Amnon Yitzhak, my favorite story about Amnon Yitzhak, yes, about the rabbi who slaughtered the lamb; I won’t repeat it again. So every lamb can also help its friends—does that make it moral? As long as it is not the result of its choice but simply how it is programmed, that does not count as being moral. Maybe it’s pleasant to live next to such a lamb that helps its surroundings, but that doesn’t make it a moral entity. Morality is determined by your motivations, not by what you do. Motivations plus the attempt to do.

On the other hand, there is some feeling that if you did, let’s say, something and it had terrible consequences—maybe you didn’t even think of them, but it had terrible consequences—there is still a feeling that you are more guilty than someone who did that same thing but the consequences did not ensue. I don’t know, you killed someone, say, and someone else also killed someone. The first person was childless. The second had a family with fifteen children and seventeen wives, okay? He had to support them all. And he was Bedouin. And you killed him. So what happened? You threw dozens of people into distress. Now you knew nothing about any of this; you killed a person for some reason, whatever the reason was, in both cases. Still there is a feeling that one should come with greater claims against the second person, because the consequences of his action were in the end caused by his deed. Meaning, they are the result of something he did. So we attribute all the problematic consequences that came out of his deed to him. Here that is evaluation according to the act, not according to the actor. Because from the standpoint of the actor’s motivations in these two cases, it is exactly the same thing.

But there is still a difference. You know, it’s like the Sages saying: “Laban sought to uproot everything.” In the end he only wanted to kill one person. Pharaoh said, “Every son that is born you shall cast into the river, but let every daughter live”—that’s thousands or tens of thousands of children. But Laban is worse. Why is he worse? Because he sought to uproot everything. In the end he only wanted to kill Jacob. Just one person. True, but Jacob’s descendants are an entire people. The consequences of that act are more far-reaching than Pharaoh’s actions. About Pharaoh, after all, they say that the moment he would kill all… Pharaoh didn’t understand. He wanted to kill the boys and leave the girls. But if the girls married Egyptians, the child would still be Jewish. He doesn’t understand that this way he cannot destroy the Jewish people. To destroy the Jewish people, you need to destroy the women, not the men. So actually I once saw a pilpul on this too: why did the midwives receive houses of priesthood, Leviteship, and kingship—“and He made them houses,” houses, yes? The Sages interpret that as houses of priesthood, Leviteship, and kingship. So they ask there: why? It seems to me this is Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz, one of the great pilpulists. He says: what did the midwives save when they saved the boys? The boys are not all that important—what is there to save in the boys? The Jewish people would remain even without them. What wouldn’t remain? There would be no priests, no Levites, and no kings, because the son of a convert cannot be king. So therefore, that is what they saved for the Jewish people, and measure for measure the Holy One, blessed be He, rewarded them and made for them houses of priesthood, Leviteship, and kingship. Fine. But for our purposes I’m trying to show here—what?

[Speaker E] At the level of a nice homiletic idea—that’s pilpul.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I said that. Fine, okay. In any event, in the final analysis when we evaluate an act, there are these two dimensions. One dimension is the doer, the actor; the second dimension is the act. And evaluating the act is still some sort of combination of those two things. I don’t know exactly how to give a full picture of what weight each one has; every situation is different. But the fact is that apparently one cannot ignore either of these two aspects. So that is his claim: everything is divided according to the act and according to the actor.

From the side of the act, every good thing is divided according to the spread of its fruit. Correspondingly it will be said, “Blessed is the one who does it.” The greater the fruit of your action, the more blessed you are. That is from the side of the act. Meaning, if the results are better results, then your act is a better act. “And whatever adds to the giving of its power, though the power of its originator has ceased, so shall his reward increase.” Meaning, even if the tree goes on growing more fruit, but my power is no longer there in the matter—I already did the tree, and that’s it. Now that tree, suddenly, I don’t know, rain came from heaven and it yielded extraordinary fruit, which was not foreseeable at first glance. So that is not my contribution to the matter, but it is still a result of the original act that I did, although I am no longer involved; my power is not combined in the growth of those extra fruits. He says: still, it adds to his reward, because it is in the end the result of my deed. Yes, that is the definition of judging according to the act. And as our Sages of blessed memory said in Kiddushin 40: a merit has principal and fruit, a transgression has principal and no fruit. As for what I do with the verse in Proverbs 1, “they shall eat of the fruit of their way and be sated with their own counsels”—a transgression that produces fruit has fruit; one that does not produce fruit has no fruit. What is this? First he said that for a transgression we do not count the fruit, and now suddenly a transgression that produces fruit has fruit, and one that doesn’t produce fruit doesn’t. What he means is that if I am involved also in the consequences, then that too is charged against me even in the case of a transgression. But if there are consequences that come on their own, though they result from the act I initially performed, like with Laban—“Laban sought to uproot everything”—he wanted to kill one person. As a result there could have been consequences that there would be no Jewish people, enormous consequences. But that is not the result of his direct acts; it is the result of what he set in motion at the beginning. Right? So in such a case, for a transgression that is not counted, while for a commandment it is counted. Okay? That is apparently what he wants to claim here. But if there are consequences that are a direct result of my acts, then the result too is my doing. Suppose I lit some stack of grain, but I made such a large fire that it spread further. Then my initial act already took part in the further spread of the result. Right? Then in both a transgression and a commandment it is counted to my credit or my liability.

Therefore, all the more so in the measure of goodness, which is greater than the measure of punishment, whatever bears fruit will have its fruit increased more and more. Now I’m skipping—according to these things we can resolve in the source—because here it appears in the same font, but in the source it is a note, a note where according to this he resolves something else; there is no point getting into it. “And so too every bad thing.” See? That’s the next paragraph there. Fine. “And so too every bad thing is divided according to the spread of its fruit. And whatever adds of its power to grow poisonous fruit, wormwood and gall”—bad fruit, yes?—“so shall the baseness of its value increase and its punishment become heavier.” And many times a person will guard his path to restrain his desire without strength when he sees clearly how his deeds have burst forth to bring ruin. He says there are times when the consequences of my deeds are charged against me. Fine? Now when I shoot an arrow and then regret it—it’s over, the arrow has already flown; I can no longer stop it. And once I did the act, the consequences will keep coming and I can’t take it back anymore. It’s like an arrow in flight. Right? So in that sense a person says: okay, then there’s no point. My deeds have already reached the lowest depths; their consequences are terrible. Again we return to the same inclination he spoke about above: not to delve into the words of our Sages of blessed memory, meaning not to get into the matter. Better to be unwitting than deliberate.

So therefore he says the person basically despairs of engaging with Torah altogether, or of trying to repent over the matter. “And how can a person lie to himself in this exchange, to be unwitting, when he is only imaginatively unwitting, for the unwittingness of Torah-study rises to the level of deliberateness,” as we say in Bava Metzia 33, “in the lower aspect of being distant from the transgression in the much higher aspect above.” He says this thought—that I won’t learn because it’s already hopeless, my deeds are already producing terrible consequences, I am already completely wicked, so at least let me be unwitting and not deliberate—is a mistake in two ways. First, you pay a heavy price for not learning, because you are committing additional transgressions beyond the previous ones, from which you could have refrained. Second, the unwittingness that comes from not learning Torah counts as deliberate. The fact that you intentionally did not learn in order to remain unwitting means they do not consider that unwittingness; it counts as deliberate. Therefore you lose much more than you gain. This evil inclination misleads you.

Now from the side of the actor: every good thing is divided according to the quality of its performance, according to the pain involved in fulfilling it. How do we evaluate the human dimension in the act? That is the question: how much price I paid for it, how much effort I exerted in doing the thing. As our Sages of blessed memory said in Avot, chapter 5: “According to the pain is the reward.” And so too every bad thing is divided according to the degree of pain involved in refraining from it, and the more pain there is, the more its severity is reduced. The more you suffer, the harder it is for you to refrain from the evil, then that evil is considered less evil. Because, fine, it was harder for you, what can you do? That goes in the denominator, not the numerator—the effort, yes? Therefore he says it is divided according to the pain involved in refraining from it. As we say in Menachot 43: “It was taught: Rabbi Meir used to say, the punishment for white is greater than the punishment for tekhelet. To what is this comparable? To a king of flesh and blood who said to two of his servants: to one he said, bring me a seal of clay, and to the other he said, bring me a seal of gold. Both were negligent and did not bring them. Which one has the greater punishment? You must say: the one he told to bring a seal of clay and did not bring it.” What does that mean? The seal of clay is very easy to obtain. If you did not bring it, then precisely because it is easy to obtain, it is a greater transgression. By contrast, a seal of gold is hard to obtain, so not bringing it is perhaps a transgression, but because it was hard to do, the transgression is lighter. Therefore he says here too: the greater your suffering in relation to this transgression, the smaller the transgression is. That is the principle.

“Therefore this is the law of man: to be watchful over all his ways, lest he fall into the net of despair, for as long as his eyes are open to sense his evil, without doubt, while desire still burns, he will guard his path and be saved from the greater part. And what fool would love such foolishness, to bless himself in his heart, saying: surely it is better for me to close the eye of my understanding so that I may lessen the severity by being unwitting in the smaller part, and abandon guarding myself in the much greater part.” Fine. So here he says—again a kind of pilpul, I think, but still—I’m debating it. The more you know, then apparently you are deliberate and not unwitting, yes? But on the other hand, since your suffering is greater, maybe the transgression will be smaller. Meaning, that is apparently his argument here. Therefore it is not worthwhile to fall into the net of despair and not to look at the sayings of the Sages.

All right, in any case let’s continue. “These are indeed the words of Maimonides mentioned above, for it is not in man’s hand to know the unfolding of matters, to explain the value of commandments and sins according to their spread, and likewise the value of the pain involved in fulfilling and observing Torah and commandment. For the powers of the human soul go from earlier to later, from the depths of the roots of the heart to their manifestation, and external causes are found in abundance to broaden and reveal some power that overcomes the other powers in its root. Therefore the person who looks with his understanding from the later to the earlier will err greatly in judging the roots of the powers that give rise to pain and pleasure. And so long as the power of the soul is hidden in its root, concealed from human understanding, so too it continues to cast its arrows toward human action. Therefore it is not in man’s hand to determine accurately the state and value of the pain involved in fulfilling and observing the Torah of God, blessed be His name, and He alone knows their true value,” as our Sages of blessed memory said in Avot, chapter 4: “He is the one who understands.”

What does he basically mean? When Maimonides says we cannot evaluate the weight of sins and merits, he says that is true both from the side of the actor and from the side of the act. From the side of the act, we cannot evaluate it because we can never know what the practical consequences will be, what fruits will emerge as a result of the deeds. Therefore there is no way to evaluate it. It may even be generations later. We cannot evaluate that, and that is from the side of the act. Also from the side of the actor we cannot evaluate it, because in the end, in order to evaluate the person, it is not enough to evaluate whether he committed a transgression punishable by karet, by court-imposed death, an ordinary prohibition, neglect of a positive commandment, a rabbinic commandment—these things. It is not only the severity of the transgression, but the question of what was in his soul—how difficult it was for him, how strong his inclinations were, what price he would have had to pay in order to transgress or not transgress. And these evaluations are in the depths of the soul; we cannot evaluate them. So neither from the side of the act nor from the side of the actor can we evaluate. Thus he explains Maimonides—why we cannot know the weight of sins and merits. He is basically saying there are two reasons, from the side of the act and from the side of the actor, why we cannot evaluate these things.

Now notice: Maimonides is not the goal here. Maimonides is part of the pilpul. His goal is to state this principle. The principle says that in order to evaluate a person you need to know the results of the action and the inner forces of the actor, and that we cannot evaluate. Maimonides is just the way to say these things and anchor them in some source. “And in general there are two levels in merits and sins, in obligation and negation. And that which comes on the higher level in the category of obligation for receiving reward will correspondingly come on the lower level in the category of negation for receiving punishment. And that which comes on the lower level in the category of obligation for receiving reward will correspondingly come on the higher level for receiving punishment in the category of negation. Therefore the doing of ordinances, as a category of obligation, and the keeping of statutes, as a category of negation, come on one line and one string.”

He is now returning to the beginning of his pilpul there, about statutes and ordinances—that this is keeping and that is doing, yes? “You shall do My ordinances and keep My statutes.” So what does he say? He says like this: as we saw here, to do a small commandment is a small thing, but not to do it is a severe sin—like the seal of clay, right? A small thing. Why didn’t you do it? There is a great claim against you that you didn’t do something so small—a commandment that a person tramples underfoot. Okay? So there is in fact an inverse relation between the value of the thing when you do it and the value when you do not do it. That is the foundation he wants to establish here.

Where do we see this? There is a Nachmanides in the portion of Yitro, a very interesting Nachmanides on Sabbath observance. Nachmanides says there that positive commandments are in the category of love, and prohibitions are in the category of fear. Through this we can understand why for a positive commandment we spend only up to a fifth of our wealth, while for a prohibition we spend all our wealth in order not to violate it. And also why a positive commandment overrides a prohibition, and why for a positive commandment one is not flogged, not punished, while for a prohibition one is punished—and also why a positive commandment overrides a prohibition. The Sdei Chemed explains that “a positive commandment overrides a prohibition” here is very strange. What does he mean? “Love” is the positive commandment, and “fear” is the prohibition. What does that mean? It means that a positive commandment is a demand that a person climb upward, yes, to act and become righteous. Okay? If you do it, you are righteous. If you refrain from committing a transgression, that is fear. You are less righteous. In the end you just didn’t commit a transgression; you remained okay, but you did not become righteous. If you did a commandment, then you became righteous.

Notice what happens on the other side. On the other side the relation reverses. Meaning, if I do not perform a commandment, then that is a small transgression. When I do a commandment, that is a great commandment. Refraining from violating a prohibition is a small commandment. That is on the side of keeping the Torah, on the side of fulfillment. On the side of failing what the Torah says: if I do not perform the commandment, that is a small transgression. I simply failed to become righteous, okay, but that is not… yes, neglect of a positive commandment, exactly. But if I violate a prohibition, then I became wicked. Not only did I fail to become righteous—that is a great transgression. So the relation between a positive commandment and a prohibition is not simple. A positive commandment is more important than a prohibition from the side of fulfillment, but a prohibition is more severe than a positive commandment from the side of violation. And there is no contradiction here; it always goes together. The greater the fulfillment, the smaller the failure to fulfill it. Right?

Now the interesting puzzle is how this explains why a positive commandment overrides a prohibition. Nachmanides says that according to this, it is understood why a positive commandment overrides a prohibition. This is an interesting puzzle. Once I wrote a small mathematical model about it. Because… because… apparently when we make the comparison, it doesn’t work. What happens with a positive commandment overriding a prohibition? When you place here a positive commandment against a prohibition, yes, then you basically have two possibilities. Either to violate… let’s say I have no matzah on Passover and no flour on Passover, and I need to eat matzah, and I have only flour from the new crop, which is still forbidden until the day of the waving, the day after the first day of Passover—it is forbidden to eat flour from the new crop. Right? So I have two possibilities. Either to bake matzah from forbidden flour, and then what? I will fulfill the commandment of matzah, but I will violate the prohibition of the new crop. Or not to bake the matzah and not eat it; then I do not violate the prohibition and do not fulfill the commandment. The rule is that a positive commandment overrides a prohibition. Meaning, one should take the flour from the new crop and bake matzah. Okay? When we compare one side to the other—

[Speaker N] If you say love and fear, it is very understandable—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not clear. No, in my opinion it’s…

[Speaker N] It’s a positive force, it’s a force… fine, but…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But let’s now make the calculation in a more detailed way. After all, when I do… I have two possibilities: either to bake matzah from the new crop and eat it, or not to do that, right? On the one side I have a positive commandment and I have a prohibition, right? On the other side I have no positive commandment and no prohibition. Meaning, on the first side I have a major positive and a major negative.

[Speaker G] So it cancels out…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly! And on the second side I have a small negative and a small positive. So again it cancels out.

[Speaker G] Why? No, it’s zero!

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why is that zero?

[Speaker G] Because I didn’t commit a transgression; it’s not that you…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Oh, I think that’s the point. That’s the point in Nachmanides. But on the face of it, Nachmanides’ explanation is puzzling. Because when you tell me that with prohibitions the fulfillment is smaller but the violation is greater, then when you make the comparison now, you have to make it on both axes. So when you perform the commandment at the cost of a prohibition, you have a major positive and a major negative. When you don’t perform the commandment and you don’t have a prohibition, you have a small negative and a small positive. So practically speaking, it cancels out to zero on both sides, so why does a positive commandment override a prohibition? The only real way to explain it is what Chen said earlier. I think really, not committing a transgression is not a small positive; it’s zero. It has no value at all. It’s just not something negative. By contrast, not performing a commandment has a small negative value, but still negative. Small and negative, like an electron. Meaning, it has a small value of neglecting a positive commandment, okay? So in the end, the balance somehow comes out in favor of fulfilling the positive commandment at the cost of the prohibition.

But for our purposes, actually—and I see I’m wrapping up here—I’ll just say: he has basically prepared the groundwork; from here the second part begins. From here he closes the circle. We’ve really gotten all the way to the upper part of the first half of the circle. So what has come out of all this, beyond all the dialectical analysis? What has come out so far is that there is statute and there is law, right? That’s the first point. The second point is that the statute is said in… the small positive thing—not doing it is a major negative. The major negative thing—not doing it is a small positive. Okay? Like prohibitions and positive commandments.

Now regarding statute and law, this already shows us what he is going to do with it. With statute and law, he already said above that a statute is something where not doing it is a minor transgression, because it isn’t logical; whereas not doing something that is logical is a major transgression. So if that’s the case, clearly statute and law move on opposite axes, like positive commandments and prohibitions. Therefore one of them is written in the language of doing, and the other in the language of guarding oneself, what he said there in the verses—that one is written in the form of a prohibition and the other as a positive commandment. And therefore this one corresponds to that one. Meaning, to carry out a law is to do something understandable. To do something understandable is something small, right? Fine—something understandable is easier to do, so it is something small in the sense of action. In the sense of neglecting it, it is something great. To negate a statute is also something small. Therefore, doing something that is law, together with neglecting something that is statute, they are on the same plane. Therefore the verse compares doing law with guarding oneself regarding statute: “My statutes you shall keep.” Okay? So that’s what he says—that this is on the same plane, because statute and law are playing two opposite roles here. He says something here that is definitely worth thinking about: that statute and law have some different status in the service of God, and that status switches on the side of fulfillment and the side of neglect. Meaning, that’s really the bottom line beyond all the Maimonides and the Talmudic texts and the midrashim that he resolves with this.

All right. Now next time we’ll see what he does with this further on. So we’ll read the next passage and see what he says. Now here the next passage seems, on the face of it, a little unrelated—he starts dealing here with the topic of redemption—but in the end everything connects together. Let’s see.

The plain meaning of the verse indicates the redemption from Egypt. He is referring here to the portion of Bo, for regarding the plague of the firstborn it is written: “And when your children say to you, ‘What is this service to you?’ you shall say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck Egypt and saved our houses.’ And the people bowed their heads and prostrated themselves.” Meaning, at the time of the plague of the firstborn they told them this—that is the meaning of the phrase “And the people bowed their heads and prostrated themselves.” And on this Rashi explains, and so too in the Mekhilta: over the news of the redemption, and over the news of entering the land, and over the news of the children. What it says, “And the people bowed their heads and prostrated themselves,” is about those tidings. Rashi says that three tidings were announced here: the tidings of redemption, the tidings of entering the land, and the tidings of the children.

Now we need to understand why these were counted as three tidings, because at first glance he should have said two tidings—namely, the tidings of redemption and entering the land, which is the completion of the redemption, and the tidings of the children. Furthermore, the tidings of redemption automatically include entering the land, because at that point all that was lacking was entry into the land. Rather, it seems that these are two separate matters. The tidings of redemption refer to redemption from the bondage and the plagues of Egypt, which was a complete miracle against nature. And the tidings of entering the land refer to inheriting the land, and that had to proceed by way of nature, through war.

Now the redemption, which took place by way of miracle, came from the attribute of strict justice in the full sense, as Nachmanides wrote, of blessed memory, and this is his language: “And when God wishes to alter nature, He does so through the attribute of justice, for from it come deeds, actions, and changes in the nature of the world.” End quote. And entering the land, which was by way of nature through war, came from the attribute of kindness, because by strict justice Israel was not yet worthy of it; rather, it was the kindness of God that gave them the land as a gift.