Majority in Halakha and in General 2, Lesson 1

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but not if you do it separately. If you do it separately, that’s something else, it’s a different entity, it becomes reawakened again—Rabbeinu Tam in Beitzah—that’s a question in its own right, a very interesting question. But if it happened all at once, you can’t do it hypothetically. Meaning: I have twenty percent, but twenty percent is the majority of thirty percent, right? So it’s as if I have thirty percent. The thirty percent is the majority of fifty-five percent, so I have fifty-five, and fifty-five is already a majority. It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work that way—why? Because the thirty percent is not a natural unit. Why on earth should I look only at the thirty percent? The natural unit is the whole system. When you ask a question, the question is about the whole system, not about the thirty percent. If that were a natural unit, it would be something else. In that case there really would be room to say: if I had a mixture of twenty within thirty, and then all those thirty fell into fifty, and then all those fifty fell into ninety, then you could start debating it. And on that there are disputes. There is this whole issue of “reawakened again,” and all those discussions. In any case, the source is “follow the majority,” and here I really want to set up a basic distinction that splits this whole area into two categories. And here that brings us to current events. I heard someone say that there was some Chabad rabbi who passed away some time ago, a really interesting Jew, and in his classes he would often hint at current events, but always before doing that—or not always, but several times before doing that—he would say: the latest current event that interests me is the Exodus from Egypt. All the other conclusions you draw, draw for yourselves. In any case, for our purposes, I want to talk a bit about something I mentioned once—I’m not sure. There’s a very well-known argument; maybe let’s start differently. You know the line of Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, after the Labor Party lost in 1977 after the political upheaval, he said that the people were wrong, we need to replace the people. Now everybody still mocks that terribly to this day; it’s considered almost a paradigm case of stupidity. But actually there’s nothing stupid about it at all. It’s a completely legitimate statement, and I don’t see in it any… replacing the people is maybe a different matter, and I also don’t remember whether he really said it or whether they just mocked him. What he said was that the majority was wrong. Meaning, that the people were wrong. And I don’t understand what the problem is—that’s a totally reasonable and legitimate statement, and in my opinion in most cases it’s probably also true.

[Speaker K] “Follow the majority,” no?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question whether they were right or wrong is not the question of what we do. That’s exactly the point. If he hadn’t accepted the election results because of that, that might have been a problem. But if he says the majority was wrong, that has no connection to the fact that the majority decided. The majority may well have been wrong.

[Speaker J] In any case, for our purposes—and Tosafot also says something like this—“follow the majority,” go after the majority. So there is a reality in which the majority is wrong.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And what the comment here is—ah, that’s a nice point, because it connects to what I’m about to say. The question is whether we’re really talking here about majority and good; we’ll get to that in a minute. In any case, that statement actually raises two questions. First: does the majority determine? And second: is the majority correct? Two different questions. In elections, the rule is not that the majority is correct. The rule in elections is that the majority determines. Okay? But there’s no necessity to accept the conclusion that the majority is correct.

[Speaker C] What does it even mean, a rule that the majority is correct? That’s not a rule, that’s a fact.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I mean a probabilistic rule or some other kind of rule—not a legal rule, but a rule in how we view reality.

[Speaker C] What does “correct” even mean in a question of preference? Elections are a matter of preference. I’ll touch on that in a moment.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll touch on that in a moment. So the question of whether the majority determines, and the question of whether the majority is correct, are two completely different questions. Democracy deals with the question of whether the majority determines. The rules of majority—at least the halakhic rule of majority—deal with the question of what the truth is going to be, or whether the majority is correct in that context. So these are two different questions. In the context of whether the majority is correct, maybe I mentioned this once too, I don’t remember anymore, I had a column about it on the website. On the question whether the majority is correct: you know, people often bring all kinds of statistics saying that the more educated a person is, the more likely he is to be an atheist. In more educated groups, the percentage of atheists rises. And there are all kinds of reasons and explanations for that, but very often these statistics are used—atheists really love using them—to show that basically they are right.

[Speaker G] You have to believe in something. Yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So my initial intuition usually says that the rule—for example in the context of whether the majority determines, that’s a legal, halakhic question. But if the question is whether the majority is correct, then usually the rule is that the majority is wrong. Not that the majority is usually right, but that the majority is usually wrong. Meaning, if you want a rule of thumb for what to do, ask the majority and do the opposite of what it says. As the Sema writes, the opinion of the layman is the opposite of the Torah’s דעת in section 3 of Choshen Mishpat. He doesn’t write it in those words, but that’s how they put it in the yeshivot. He more or less says that. Why? You know, the explanation can be presented in layers.

[Speaker M] Are you talking about the wisdom of crowds?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The wisdom of crowds is a completely different story. The wisdom of crowds means that when we ask a binary question and the majority says yes, probably the answer is no. But if you ask how many leaves are on the tree, or how much does the ox standing in front of you weigh—the classic experiments of the wisdom of crowds—and you collect a great many opinions, and you don’t count what the majority says on a binary question, but instead add them up and calculate an average, then that’s not a bad tool for estimating a problematic reality. And why? The explanation is very simple: the law of large numbers. Meaning, if each person’s errors are distributed symmetrically around the true average—one errs upward and one errs downward—and you gather a great many people, then it will land pretty close to—

[Speaker C] The expectation will also be close. What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying, that’s a very reasonable assumption in the absence of knowledge—that if people make mistakes, then it’s probably somewhere around the true answer. Why assume they overestimate or underestimate? Especially when you’re sampling broadly. There may be certain questions where that isn’t so. But if you want a rule of thumb, something general, in my opinion this is the most reasonable thing there is; I don’t see what else it could be. In short, the wisdom of crowds is a different matter. For our purposes, in binary questions where you really want to know what the truth is, the majority is an indication that the answer is not correct. Why? So look, I had several explanations for this, in layers. The first layer is basically that there’s an intelligence pyramid, right? There are few smart people and many stupid people. Okay? So the most natural interpretation is that probably the minority are the smart people and the majority are the stupid people, and therefore the minority is right and not the majority. Okay? Except that this isn’t true, because intelligence isn’t distributed like a pyramid but like a Gaussian. Meaning there are a few very smart people, a few very stupid people, and many in the middle, yes? The donkeys walking in the middle, as the Kotzker says. So the distribution goes both ways. Okay? Now what happens is that the minority can belong to either side. So it isn’t right to assume that if there’s a disagreement between minority and majority, usually the minority are the smart ones—you can’t know that. But still I thought to myself: fine, then let’s talk about a truncated Gaussian. What does that mean? Let’s take a place where, say, they do some kind of

[Speaker E] some sort of

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] screening and select people from a certain intelligence level and up. You filter, say, a university, I don’t know, and let’s say the filtering is decent. Okay? So they filter out the smarter half of the Gaussian, and then the distribution basically leaves only that upper half of the Gaussian, right? Now if you take a poll in such a group, then I’m right. Because there are few smart people and many stupid people, right? And then if there’s a dispute between minority and majority, the minority is right. What would happen in the reverse Gaussian, where there’s a filtering of the stupid and the smart are thrown out? There the majority is right, correct? So now let’s go back to the statistics about believers. Okay? Meaning: in the upper half of the Gaussian, the minority believes. Then if the minority—in mathematical terms this isn’t correct—if the minority among the upper half of the Gaussian believes, then there the minority is right. In the lower, less intelligent half, the majority believes, and there the majority is right. So from both sides it turns out that basically… fine, clearly not, it has no connection, and even if it were connected to smart people, according to this it still wouldn’t be true. Someone once remarked to me that in the end it’s distributed like a Gaussian even after you cut it in half. Right. Fine. But there’s another remark someone once gave me: stupid people don’t necessarily give the wrong answer. Stupid people are distributed fifty-fifty between those who give the correct answer and those who give the incorrect answer. Therefore even in the Gaussian truncated from above, the smart people will give the correct answer with, say, an eighty percent probability, while the stupid people are fifty-fifty, so the majority will still come out right. But in certain questions where the answer is—the question is confusing—in a place where if you’re not smart, you’ll give the wrong answer, not that you’ll answer randomly right and wrong, then what I’m saying is still true. On confusing questions, the minority is right. On questions where you have no clue and you’re shooting in the dark if you’re stupid, there the majority is still right. Okay? Okay, so that’s the conclusion regarding whether the majority is right, and the question whether the majority determines is really my topic.

[Speaker N] There’s wisdom, and there’s the wisdom of crowds, and they’re not the same thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. The wisdom of crowds is an oxymoron, I’d say. In any case, the claim—the dispute, the dispute I started describing earlier—between Baer the historian, Yitzhak Baer I think, the historian, and Haym Soloveitchik, Professor Haym Soloveitchik, also a historian. They have a dispute. Baer wrote an article in Zion, an old issue of Zion, in which he argues that we actually are the ones who invented democracy. In other words, “follow the majority”—sorry, the reverse. Baer wrote an article saying that the decisions accepted in various communities—the decision to follow the majority, or this rule of following the majority in communal decisions—was borrowed from Roman law. That’s his claim. And therefore it only begins in the eleventh or twelfth century, and from there we basically begin to see this approach—not in halakhic decisions, but in social decisions.

[Speaker K] What does Maimonides say about this?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maimonides says nothing about it.

[Speaker K] He’s from the twelfth century.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so by the Shulchan Arukh it’s already there. In any case, Haym Soloveitchik writes a sharp article against him; in the end it was even some kind of book. A book called Responsa as a Historical Source. Very interesting, I think. It was published by the Hebrew University, where he teaches philology. And he shows there how to analyze texts and extract historical information from them. Among other things there’s this nice rule there—people who work with texts know this, philologists know—that if there’s a corrupt text and a proper text, which one is original? The corrupt one. Right? Because generally we don’t corrupt a proper text; we correct a corrupt text. Right? So if there’s a corrupt text and a proper text, usually the original is the corrupt one and the proper one is later. That too, of course, is not always true—you still shouldn’t go overboard—but still, I think there’s something illuminating in it. So in that book he tries to show various rules of that type, and the whole book revolves around responsa about following the majority in the community. Through that he tries to deal with Baer’s claim, and through that of course also to show how one extracts historical information from responsa. He’s a historian, a Brisker historian, yes, which is an interesting phenomenon in itself. So his protest against Baer says: what do you mean? We invented democracy. “Follow the majority” is already in the Torah, and in the Sanhedrin they follow the majority. Everywhere—what do you mean? Following the majority is governed by ancient rules, long before the eleventh or twelfth century, so we invented the whole thing. The truth is that when you think about this dispute, it seems to me that Baer is right. At first thought; I’ll qualify this a little later. It seems Baer is right, and I’ll try to explain why. Again, I don’t know whether it came from Roman law; I’m only claiming that we didn’t invent it. That’s the point. Historically I have no idea whether it was borrowed from Roman law or not. There is the… maybe I’ll begin with a Platonic question, okay? One that touches on elections and public decision-making. Plato proposed the rule of philosophers, the wise. For him philosophers and wise men are synonymous terms; I assume there are quite a few people who would argue about that too. But the rule of philosophers means that the wise should make decisions for the foolish, or for everyone. In other words, you don’t need to give voting rights to fools, because they’ll only cause harm. So this Platonic proposal arouses very sharp resistance, I think, in the ears of a modern person who hears it. It arouses very sharp resistance. So I experimented a bit and tried asking people why. What do they have against the Platonic proposal, which on its face actually seems very logical. Apropos Yitzhak Ben-Aharon.

[Speaker O] It’s not about wise people, it’s about the wise king, the philosopher-king.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. For our purposes there’s no king; it doesn’t matter. Let’s take a vote among the wise. Or you know what, in a more moderate proposal, we’ll weight the vote: give each person a voting weight proportional to his intelligence. Fine? And we’ll have some kind of weighted voting. You can formulate it in different ways, but the claim is still that there shouldn’t be equal weight for all voters or all votes. The question is: what’s wrong with that?

[Speaker I] Because after all we want

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the best decisions, the correct decisions. Here there are two kinds. There are two kinds of objections that come up with respect to this proposal. By the way, this proposal is also discussed in Jewish law. I’ll get to that in a moment. One objection says that it’s hard to determine who is wise for this purpose. Who is wise and understands these things, yes? What does that even mean? I spoke earlier many times about the relation between philosophers and wise men. It’s not always true that someone who is intelligent in solving mathematical, scientific, or theoretical problems actually makes wise political decisions. So it is very hard to determine a criterion—measuring intelligence in general is not simple. But determining the intelligence relevant to political decision-making, which itself of course comes in several types—economic, diplomatic, security-related, social, religious, all sorts—it’s very hard to determine who is wise and who is not, so we have a technical problem. Even if we wanted to hand decision-making over to the wise, we don’t know who they are. It’s hard to identify them. The second type of objection says that even if we can identify who is wise, how do you know whether this person is also upright and decent? Because in the end, when you give power to a minority, the minority can use that power for its own benefit and fail to care for the general public, and make decisions that are not actually correct from the perspective of the public as a whole. Correct for itself, selfishly, but not the correct decisions for the public as a whole. So basically there are two objections here: first, can we determine who is wise for this purpose, and second, do we trust the wise minority, and can we determine who is wise?

[Speaker C] There’s also an issue here about the type of decision. There are decisions of preference and decisions of fact.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not relevant.

[Speaker C] I’m stupid and I want red metal; you’re smart and you want blue.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said I’d get there; I’m getting there now. This reminds me, by the way, of a book by—you know it? There’s a book by Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. He wrote it after the French Revolution, somewhere at the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth, I think, and he tried to explain there why monarchy is good and why French democracy is problematic. Now when I read it, the initial tendency was to say that he was some dark, old-fashioned monarchist. But when I read it, it was very illuminating. It was very illuminating because in truth the advantages of monarchical rule far outweigh the advantages of democratic rule. Except for one problem: you don’t trust the king to make decisions properly. If I could solve that problem, there would be a lot of logic in giving rule to a king rather than to a parliament or a government whose horizon is four years—or in our case three months until the next election. So if you want more correct decision-making and decision-making over a longer term, it’s very logical to use a king. He proposes, by the way—and he’s realistic—some kind of balance between king and parliament. Meaning, he argues that the combination that existed in Britain, which leaned more toward the king than today of course—it’s a process that receded there—was the most successful combination, because it takes the advantages of both sides. You have the king who makes cardinal decisions, and the parliament makes sure he doesn’t do improper things or something like that, in a nutshell. In any case, for our purposes it’s the same thing: basically those two objections regarding the wise majority, the Platonic proposal, are both based on fears. Fundamentally they actually accept the Platonic thesis, that it would be worthwhile to give extra weight to wise people. They just say it’s technically impossible to implement, or I don’t trust them, or I can’t identify them, or something like that. I think there is a very basic mistake here in the question. Those two objections may be true, but they’re unnecessary. In other words, even if I knew how to identify the wise people, and even if I had complete trust in them, it still would not be right to give them power. And this goes back to Burke—it may be that a true democrat would come and say to him: you’re right about everything, and still I think the public ought to rule, even if there’s no concern that the king will abuse his power and all sorts of things of that sort. And why? Because the decision made on the public, political, social plane is a different type of decision from the decisions made in a religious court, for example. Decisions made in a religious court at least aspire to reach the correct answer. What does Jewish law say in the case before us? There are disagreements, we follow the majority because we have no other way to determine what the correct halakhic answer is, so the halakhic rule is that we follow the majority. The majority is not always right, but the majority determines. There that really is a default, because we have no choice, because we have no other way to arrive at the truth. So okay, we follow the majority. In a democratic majority, following the majority does not come from the fact that the majority is correct. That’s what I distinguished earlier between whether the majority determines and whether the majority is correct. Rather, it is really a matter of the majority standing for the whole. It really starts with the question of what the public wants. Because the democratic conception is generally based on some value saying that a person has the right to determine his fate. And if we are a group of many people, then each person has an equal right to decide, regardless of IQ and qualities and whatever else, an equal right for each person to influence his fate. But what happens when there are conflicting desires or conflicting values? What do we do? So here, before we decide what to do, what are we looking for? We are basically looking for some measure that tells me not what the truth is, but what the public wants. If the whole public wants to go to war, then the state goes to war. If the whole public does not want to go to war, then it does not go to war. Not because that’s correct, but because that’s what the public wants. Now representative government, what is called representative democracy, is a system that basically comes to serve as a mechanism replacing a public referendum. So through representatives you conduct a referendum among 120 person-like people instead of eight million voters. Okay? But in the end the goal is still to know what the public wants, not to know what is correct. Because each person has the right to determine his fate. So all I need to know is what he wants, not whether he is right. He can be a complete fool leading us to catastrophe. But that’s what he wants, and here he gets one vote in that ballot, because it is each person’s right. And whoever doesn’t want to—like I said, the refined people of Jerusalem had to check who they sat down to eat with. If Yitzhak Ben-Aharon sees the public that way and is unwilling to accept the results of the vote, then he shouldn’t enter the game, he shouldn’t take part in the game. If you participate in the game, you need to be ready to sign your name at the bottom of the decision even if you were in the minority. Okay? And that’s not because the majority was right, but because you accept the rules of the game. And in those rules the basis is not that it’s just some arbitrary game rule, but because the majority is a measure that tells me what the public wants when opinions are distributed. There’s a distribution of opinions—how am I to determine whether the public wants to go to war or not? These want this and those want that. I ask what the public wants—a binary question. Don’t answer me that these want this and those want that. I want to know what to do. So you have to give one answer for the collective. One answer for the collective—by the way there are all kinds of measures. It’s a very interesting field in mathematical economics. There’s a certain Shmuel Nitzan from Bar-Ilan who wrote an absolutely excellent book about it for the Open University, a fascinating book, I really recommend reading it. I don’t remember what it’s called, but you’ll surely find it. He proposes there many algorithms or mechanisms of representation for determining what the public wants. And it’s not always the majority. The majority is the simplest among them and by no means the most successful in many cases. For example, if an issue is very, very important to the minority, but not to the majority, then it’s not clear that you should follow the majority. In other words, there are many parameters for changing the algorithm. By the way, there’s some very interesting theorem there by Condorcet, I think—I don’t remember—some theorem saying that a solution satisfying all our requirements does not exist. Meaning, there is no solution; it simply does not exist. There’s a theorem that says such a solution does not exist.

[Speaker C] From game theory—there it’s preferences.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, so he uses it in mathematical economics, but yes. So the claim is, again, that the purpose of majority rule—the majority is just the simplest mechanism, but that doesn’t matter to me right now—what it is trying to achieve is not what the truth is, but what the public wants. And that begins from a conception of the human being as having rights, a liberal conception saying that a person has the right to determine his fate. So what does it even mean to say we’ll let the wise minority decide, or we’ll weight votes by intelligence? It’s simply irrelevant. I’ll say more than that: not only in places where the question is a matter of preference. In all places in democracy the question is one of preference, because even if we say, shall we go to war or not, and say there’s a majority that thinks we’ll succeed in war and therefore we should go out, while the minority says we won’t succeed—the dispute appears to be a factual dispute. Even there, the majority is what determines, not the truth. Why? Because if the majority is wrong but insists on being wrong, that too is its right. Meaning, decision-making is determined by what the public decides, even if the underlying question is a question of what the truth is. And therefore Plato’s question in the context of a public majority, a democratic majority, is irrelevant. Because Plato is looking for the better way to get closer to the truth, but democratic voting does not seek the truth; it seeks what the public wants.

[Speaker E] Just a second. That’s not precise. Because the desire to go to war or not, as an individual, is based on the amount of knowledge I have for making my decision.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, and then what?

[Speaker E] Now the ministers in the two cases maybe know otherwise.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I remarked at the end—not interesting. Not interesting. Only this: if I myself say, let them make the decision because they have more information, that’s perfectly Bayesian statistics.

[Speaker E] No, no, no, no.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’ll explain to you, it has nothing to do with statistics at all. That’s exactly it. The moment you drag statistics in here, you’ve made a mistake. Because we are not talking about the question of what the truth is. When I decide to make a mistake, it is my right to decide to make a mistake. Not because I’m not mistaken, but because it’s my right to be mistaken. I want to go into a mistaken war. Fine? Now if I myself delegate authority to representatives because they have more information or something like that, there’s no problem, because I decided that. But everything has to begin with me. So first of all I decide, and therefore the statistics are irrelevant here. Because statistics ask what the truth is. I am not asking here what the truth is; I am asking what the public wants. And now if I go back for a moment—I just want to finish because this has taken me too long—basically when I go back to the dispute between Baer and Soloveitchik, why did I say I think Baer was right? Because “follow the majority” is not the source for a democratic majority. “Follow the majority” is a source teaching me how to reach the correct halakhic decision. By contrast, a democratic majority is not about the correct decision, but about what the public wants. For that, in the simple sense, there is no source in “follow the majority.” And then I don’t know whether it was taken from Roman law, but it is a later development. I’ll show you this with two indications, at least one. This dispute arose—we also see it in the responsa Soloveitchik brings there—around the eleventh century. Why? Because, as I spoke about here, at that point the public really began spreading throughout the world. In Babylonia there was still a concentration of Jews, there was even governmental and legal autonomy. But in the eleventh century, and even a bit before, they began to disperse—the four captives, those myths that talk about the establishment of communities around the world. And then a new problem was born. How does a community make decisions? In the public framework, the king made the public decisions, and the Sanhedrin made halakhic decisions. But in a community there was no king, there was no national public structure of which the community was an organ. And a problem arose that was really new, at least in the intensity with which it appeared: how do you make decisions in a community? And then they began to deliberate. And by the way, the view of Rabbeinu Tam is already in the twelfth, thirteenth century—well, the twelfth century—that only unanimity counts. The rule of “follow the majority” was not said about public decisions. And this dispute continues for about four hundred years. Around the fifteenth century, more or less, a halakhic decision crystallized—there was no general session of course—but somehow a halakhic ruling formed that one does follow the majority. Okay? Along the way there are all kinds of responsa of the Rashba and the Rosh and others. In the Shulchan Arukh it is already written as a ruling that one follows the majority even in public decisions. It appears in the Shulchan Arukh, though that’s problematic; I spoke about this here, it’s not really Jewish law at all. In any case, along the way you see various responsa of the Rosh and the Rashba. And it is very interesting that in all the responsa I saw—really all of them, without exception—where this question comes up, and they all belong to the camp opposing Rabbeinu Tam, about how the decision is made here—of course if you follow the majority, that’s the group opposing Rabbeinu Tam—both the Rosh and the Rashba argue that yes, one should follow the majority in public decisions, and they say the source is “follow the majority.” But they always add: and besides, it’s impossible to function otherwise. Because if you don’t follow the majority, you are basically giving a veto right to the minority, which is even less logical than following the majority. Okay? So they say it’s impossible. Now why do they need that addition? In no source regarding a religious court have we heard that one follows the majority because it says “follow the majority,” and besides there’s no other choice, meaning how else could we function? Why is that said here? Because even the Rosh and the Rashba, who opposed Rabbeinu Tam, also understood that this question cannot be derived from the verse “follow the majority.” The verse “follow the majority” speaks about majority in a religious court. Majority in a religious court seeks the truth. Here we are asking what the public wants. That is a completely different question.

[Speaker D] Therefore there are people for whom it is derived

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] from “follow”—no, Rabbeinu Tam says: what do you mean, there really is no source, and therefore you cannot impose anything on anyone. There’s no such thing; only unanimity. Okay, the Rosh and the Rashba say: look, it’s impossible to function that way. So what do we do? We expand “follow the majority” and apply it here too. Why? Because it’s impossible otherwise. They are not satisfied with “follow the majority.” On the contrary, the reasoning is probably the main thing, and “follow the majority” is just an illustration, as is the way of halakhic decisors to bring a source, but in fact this is what is called judicial legislation. And so they are really saying that we follow the majority because otherwise it’s impossible. And therefore in practice I think Baer was right and not Soloveitchik, that this really is a new phenomenon. Why is it a new phenomenon? Not specifically because of the influence of Roman law, but simply because in the eleventh century we began dealing with this question. That’s why it only arose at that stage. I assume that if it had arisen earlier, they would have said the same thing earlier. Meaning, because it really is the obvious solution. But that’s the claim. So why did I say I still want to qualify this—and here I’ll qualify it. Because I introduced this by saying that there are mechanisms that take “follow the majority.” There is also nullification in a majority, and there is also the idea that the majority counts as the whole. Now a democratic majority is really exactly the latter, right? A democratic majority is exactly the question of what the public wants. Now if the majority wants X and the minority wants Y, and I now ask only one question—what does the public as a whole want?—then the rule that the majority counts as the whole says that what the majority wants is considered, for my purposes, as the will of the entire public. Okay? That is exactly the majority-as-whole principle. Meaning, democratic voting can indeed be derived from a halakhic principle, but not from the rule of “follow the majority,” rather from the rule that the majority counts as the whole. There are those who might say perhaps nullification in a majority; I think the majority-as-whole principle is more accurate in this context. And then ostensibly it does come out of “follow the majority.” But that’s not quite accurate, as I said earlier, because in truth it is hard to derive it from “follow the majority.” It is a later interpretation. It is an interpretation that perhaps really emerged because of those same pressures. And that also nicely explains why the Rosh and the Rashba brought the verse “follow the majority” and added that it’s impossible otherwise. After they say it’s impossible otherwise, what do they mean? They mean: therefore from the verse “follow the majority” we will derive not only “follow the majority” but also the principle that the majority counts as the whole, because it’s impossible otherwise. So in the final analysis there may also be something to what Soloveitchik—what Haym Soloveitchik—said. Because it is true that the halakhic rule that the majority counts as the whole is an ancient rule; it was not something discovered in the eleventh century. Okay? But it is not the ordinary “follow the majority”; rather, it is the extension I mentioned, which really appears only in the later authorities. Only the later authorities derive the principle that the majority counts as the whole from “follow the majority.” According to what I’m saying now, it is actually written already in the medieval authorities. It is written in these responsa of the Rosh and the Rashba. What they are really claiming is that the rule that the majority counts as the whole is also learned from “follow the majority.”

[Speaker P] But the very application of the majority-as-whole principle to people’s will—that’s the new thing. It still isn’t—you’re talking about pure and impure, majority as whole.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But if you need to make a collective decision and there’s a distribution among people, it’s very reasonable to say that here too I’ll use the majority-as-whole principle.

[Speaker Q] And there’s also a question here that people don’t ask when they want to remain a collective.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s always true. Someone who doesn’t belong to the collective isn’t bound by the collective’s decisions; that’s a different matter. I’m talking about people who do decide to sit down at the meal. I said, whoever doesn’t want to sit at the meal should check whether he’s prepared to sit there.

[Speaker Q] There’s a question here whether

[Speaker C] you have a choice—we didn’t talk about that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Among the Greeks it was about ten percent, yes? Democracy with limited liability. Fine, that’s okay, those are correct points.