Majority in Halakha and in General 2, Lesson 2

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re in the topic of majority, following the majority, the laws of majority. Last time I talked about the different laws of majority: “most of it is like all of it,” following the majority, and nullification by majority, exactly right — nullification by majority. These three laws, simply speaking, come from “follow the majority.” Following the majority is explicit in the Talmud in Chullin. About nullification by majority, it’s written by several medieval authorities (Rishonim), especially Rashi but also others. And regarding “most of it is like all of it,” there are some later authorities (Acharonim) who say this, but there’s no other source — meaning, it’s not that somebody brings some other source for this matter. Clearly there’s also some underlying reasoning behind it, and I tried to demonstrate that, or show it, through the dilemma regarding democratic majority. Because a democratic majority, or a majority in a community decision, would seem to be derived from “follow the majority,” but as I tried to show, it can’t really be learned from there, because “follow the majority” is a rule that tells me — at least in the simple understanding, we’ll soon see — it’s a rule that tells me what the truth is. When in a religious court the judges disagree about the law in the case before them, then the rule of majority tells me what the truth really is, what the correct ruling is. And the majority is some kind of indication, or a way of getting as close as we can to the truth. But with democratic majority, the claim — yes, Plato and all those questions about rule by philosophers and so on — in the end the bottom line was that with democratic majority we are not looking for the truth; rather, we are looking for what the public wants. That’s what it’s supposed to be, at least. We’re looking for what the public wants, and the majority in this case functions differently. It’s not some rule that helps me get closer to the truth; rather, it’s a mode of decision or a mode of representation of what the majority wants, of what the public wants. Because once there are disagreements, you ask yourself: okay, should we take step X or not take step X? When part of the public says yes and another part says no — in the simplest case, though there may be more than two opinions — still, you have to arrive at one position and say what the public wants. The question is a binary one: does it want X or does it not want X? So the simplest way to translate a complex situation into a binary answer is the method of majority. I mentioned that there’s a whole field here in behavioral economics and things like that — Shmuel Nitzan wrote a book about this for the Open University. And majority is the most primitive algorithm. There are much better algorithms for representing what the public wants, but it’s the simplest, and that’s why people usually use it. Especially since, with the full algorithm, there’s a theorem that says it’s impossible, that there is no such thing — that’s the punchline of that book there. Anyway, so what we basically see here is that the concept of majority functions in two ways: sometimes it functions as a tool for clarifying the truth, and sometimes it functions as a tool that represents the character or what the collective in question thinks — in this case, say, a religious court, or the public, or a community, or the representatives of the community, whatever. And I said at the end that maybe you can nevertheless derive democratic majority too from “follow the majority,” because if “follow the majority” also yields the rule that “most of it is like all of it,” then that’s actually closer, I think, to what happens with democratic majority. In democratic majority, the most similar principle is not following the majority but rather “most of it is like all of it.” When you have a majority of something and you need to decide what the character of that thing is, then its character is the character of the majority. What’s the alternative — that it should have the character of the minority? There’s no choice. So you say that the majority determines the collective character of the group. And that is really the rule that “most of it is like all of it.” I mentioned the Passover offering: if most of the public is impure, then you can bring the first Passover offering, and it isn’t deferred to the second Passover. Why? Do all of Israel have to be impure in order for them to bring it because impurity is permitted for the public? No — “most of it is like all of it.” Meaning, if most of the public is impure, then the Jewish people as a collective are considered impure. And that has nothing to do with nullification — I talked about that, because in nullification the minority must not be distinguishable, whereas here I know exactly who is impure and who is not. This is not a mixture in the sense that I don’t know the identity of each individual item. I do know the identity of each individual. Rather, I don’t need to decide about every single individual whether he is impure or pure; I need to decide what the public is. And if I need to decide what the public is, then that is the rule that “most of it is like all of it,” not the rule of following the majority or nullification by majority. That’s what I talked about last time. Now I want to narrow in a bit more, get a bit closer as we continue. Specifically, to majority in a religious court, or majority in making halakhic decisions — but not democratic majority. Here too, the picture I described is not so simple. Seemingly, as I mentioned — I think Sefer HaChinukh — when he talks about “follow the majority,” quite clearly he goes in the direction that the majority in a religious court is meant to reveal the truth, to get as close as possible to the truth. Again, we need to be careful: obviously there’s no guarantee that the majority is always right. But if I need a simple algorithm, because this is a rule of thumb, then I say: generally the majority is more likely to be right than the minority, so if I have to decide whom to follow, I follow the majority. That’s basically what Sefer HaChinukh writes. He says that generally reason suggests that the majority is more correct than the minority, and therefore the Torah said, “follow the majority.” By the way, he draws conclusions from this. The conclusion, for example, is that when there is a majority of wisdom — a majority of sages, sorry — a minority of sages against a majority who are less wise, then you follow the majority of the sages. Meaning, the whole law of “follow the majority” applies only when they are equal in wisdom, more or less — meaning, when you cannot clearly determine that one person is wiser than the others. That’s a direct consequence of Sefer HaChinukh’s conception that the majority in a religious court serves to hit the truth. That’s what I started with last time. Plato thought that democratic majority too, political majority, is also supposed to hit the truth. And therefore he says: so why not give rule to the philosophers? Why shouldn’t the philosophers decide? And I said, you could soften that and say: we’ll weight each person’s vote according to his intelligence, an IQ test, okay? Let’s say that’s a more refined proposal. But still, the core of that proposal is that I am trying to arrive at some truth. Trying to arrive at the wisest decision possible. And my claim was that in democratic majority, that’s not what we’re looking for. And therefore Plato’s question doesn’t arise. You don’t need to look for excuses. There are answers, but you don’t need answers. The question doesn’t arise at all. It’s a misunderstanding of what democratic majority is trying to achieve. But in a religious court — and that was the antithesis I drew — there, seemingly, yes, the majority does come to hit the truth. So if that’s the case, Sefer HaChinukh is right, and in a religious court Plato’s proposal really is correct.

[Speaker E] And does he propose weighting?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He doesn’t propose it, he doesn’t go into details, but I’d guess that if I had proposed something like that, Sefer HaChinukh might have agreed. In other words, the Platonic principle is accepted by Sefer HaChinukh in the context of a religious court, because when you’re looking for the truth, it makes sense to give more weight to someone who is a greater Torah scholar. Right? If you have a religious court sitting with, I don’t know, the leading sage of the generation and two others who just started learning — then they are a majority against him. When you ask yourself what the truth is going to be, it is far more reasonable that he is right and not they. Okay? So if you are looking for the truth, then that algorithm is called for.

[Speaker C] Beit Shammai claimed that they were sharper, and that wasn’t accepted.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In a moment, we’ll get there. I talked about this once.

[Speaker B] And also, in the Mishnah they begin with the lesser one and so on — it’s clear they aren’t all equal — and yet when it comes to the final decision, they’re all equal.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so I don’t know. You can discuss proofs for and against, but clearly there is such a view among the medieval authorities (Rishonim). What to do with it — good question, I don’t know.

[Speaker B] Bottom line, it’s not clear that you’re talking

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] about truth — but there is a lesser one and a greater one. That’s not related to worthwhileness.

[Speaker B] The fact is—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that there is a lesser one and a greater one — you see it there.

[Speaker B] When you speak about truth, are you talking about factual truth or legal truth?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Both. My assumption is that there is truth on the legal level too, not only on the factual level. It’s an assumption, of course, but maybe I’ll still get to that.

[Speaker G] Meaning, the goal — what you’re trying to do — is to get to the truth and not to the correct decision.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be that that is the correct decision.

[Speaker G] Meaning, maybe there isn’t just one truth.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the point I’ll get to in a moment. It’s somewhat connected to the earlier comment, and I’ll get to that in a second. But for now I’m going step by step. At this stage I’m saying that the antithesis to democratic majority, which seeks what the public wants, is the majority in a religious court, which seeks what the truth will be. And then the majority is only an instrument. In democratic majority, the majority is constitutive. Meaning, what the majority determines — that is the truth; not that the majority hits the truth. That is the democratic truth. In a majority within a religious court, the majority is only a means through which we try to get as close as possible to the truth. And if so, then the proposal of Sefer HaChinukh and other medieval authorities (Rishonim), who say that one must follow the majority of wisdom, is called for. By the way, I’m reminded now of the beginning of Sanhedrin, where it speaks about one who is learned and two who understand, say, in a court of three for monetary law — there too there is no hint that when there is disagreement between the learned one and the two who understand, the law follows him. Meaning, there are all kinds of difficulties one can raise against this matter. It needs separate thought, but for now I’m not going into it. The claim that the majority in a religious court is basically meant to reveal the truth is — despite the fact that I’ve assumed it until now — not so simple. Even with majority in a religious court, things are not simple. And clearly underlying this question sits the question — among others — whether there is halakhic truth at all. That is: who says there is halakhic truth? Maybe there are several answers and all of them are equally correct; you just need to arrive at a bottom line, so you hold a vote and the majority determines it. If that’s the picture, then the majority in a religious court starts looking a lot like democratic majority, because that basically means I’m not asking what the truth is; I’m asking what the religious court says. And if I’m asking what the religious court says, then again the majority criterion is not a means to something correct. Rather, what the majority says — that is what the religious court says. After all, it’s not a means of getting to truth or hitting something; it is what the court said. I mentioned last time Rabbi Chaim and Rabbi Shimon, in a somewhat different style, that they ask: how do we derive the law of nullification by majority, or the law that “most of it is like all of it,” from majority in a religious court, from “follow the majority”? And they say there that since the Torah wants a religious court of three judges, say in monetary law, the Torah wants a court of three judges. If there are two against one and we rule like the two, then we ruled on the basis of two judges, not three. But the Torah requires three. So in order for this to count as three, clearly one is assuming here the law of nullification or the law that “most of it is like all of it” — you can go in either direction — and therefore maybe from “follow the majority” we can derive the other two laws as well, and not only the law of following the majority. Here this really may connect to that direction. Because what I’m basically saying is that we want the entire religious court to rule. I’m asking what the religious court rules. That is closer to “most of it is like all of it” than to nullification. In other words, what does the religious court rule? And then I say: if the religious court rules liable, why? But there is one judge who says exempt. Because if you ask one question — what did the collective say — then you have to go after the majority, and what the majority said is what the collective said. That’s it. And even though here again, nullification is not the simple reading — nullification isn’t really it — because there is someone here saying the opposite, and we know exactly who he is. So this isn’t some mixture that got mixed up and we don’t know where the majority and minority are. In a case where we know where the majority and minority are, the laws of nullification don’t apply. Therefore the correct concept here, or the more correct concept, is “most of it is like all of it,” not nullification by majority.

[Speaker F] Wait, but does that mean that the third one accepts the view of the other two?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. No, of course not. He does not accept the view of the other two. He has to sign at the bottom of the ruling. He doesn’t have to accept their view, and he’s also supposed not to reveal his own view when he goes outside. Therefore there may be room to say that here there are laws of nullification outwardly. Meaning, the person outside doesn’t know who obligated and who exempted, and if you look from the outside maybe you could say the law of nullification applies here — we don’t know.

[Speaker F] Meaning, if theoretically an identical case came a second time, he could rule differently? No — he would still hold his view.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He would hold his view, and he could also change his view if he decided to change it. It doesn’t matter, that’s not the point. In any case, the question of what happens in a religious court — I want to start touching on it a bit. Because even in a religious court, as I said, it’s not entirely clear how the majority functions. It’s connected to the question whether there is halakhic truth, but you need to understand that it’s not only connected to that question. Because I can formulate it also with factual questions. When the religious court has to decide a factual question — what happened — usually it has to decide both a factual question and a halakhic question that pertains to the reality, meaning a decision on two levels. But even with respect to the factual question, it’s not certain that we are really aiming at the question of what happened. There are many such formulations even in modern law. It’s not certain that we are really striving for the question of what happened. We are striving for a legal determination of what happened. And a legal determination of what happened already gets folded back into legal questions. And there too one can say that the majority is not necessarily a means to reveal what really happened, but rather a means to know what the religious court says. We’ll see implications of this later, but for now I’m setting it up as two possibilities. So there is basically a question: what is the majority in the religious court trying to achieve? And one practical implication of this question we already saw: what happens when there are differences in the Torah level of the judges? Do we follow the majority of wisdom or the majority of people? We already discussed this once. I’ll touch on it now from a slightly different angle, one I don’t think I mentioned. I’ll begin perhaps with the Talmud in Eruvin. The Talmud says that Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel disputed for two and a half years and did not reach a decision, and a heavenly voice came forth and said: “These and those are both the words of the living God, but the halakhah follows Beit Hillel.” Then the Talmud explains why halakhah was ruled like Beit Hillel: because they were easygoing and humble, and they would present the words of Beit Shammai before their own words. That’s what the Talmud says. This principle of “these and those” — yes, it’s become some kind of founding ethos, it seems to me, in halakhic thought. You don’t always see it, this honoring of differing views, but I think that in the infrastructure of halakhic thought everyone agrees that it’s there. The whole question, of course, is who belongs to the study hall with respect to whom one can apply — or needs to apply — the rule of “these and those.” The question is where you place the walls of the study hall — “the walls of the study hall will prove it.” The question is where you place the walls of the study hall. But this principle of the Talmud appears in only two passages, basically. One is in Gittin regarding the concubine at Giv’ah there — whether he found a fly or found a hair, and the second passage is what I just mentioned in Eruvin regarding Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel. The first passage is aggadah, and the second is a halakhic dispute, or a collection of disputes. The question of whom to rule like in the collection of disputes between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel. So in the background — I spoke about this once, so I’ll do it briefly — in the background the question is really being asked, the very one Tosafot asks a few pages earlier in Eruvin: after all, “it is not in heaven.” So how can halakhic decisions be accepted on the basis of a heavenly voice? Tosafot offers several answers there, I think three answers, but it seems to me there’s a much more obvious and simple answer: what was the dispute between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel? Or not “what was” — there were a whole collection of disputes — but what prevented a decision? After all it says “follow the majority.” Hold a vote, and whoever has more — the halakhah follows him. Did they not know this rule of “follow the majority”? Well, actually from an academic perspective maybe not. Who says it even existed then? Maybe it developed later — fine, but let’s leave that aside; we are in the traditional yeshiva ethos. So the claim is that they really did know the rule of “follow the majority.” Tosafot brings a Talmud in Yevamot. The Talmud says that Beit Shammai were sharper. Beit Shammai were more incisive, more brilliant, let’s say. And Beit Hillel were more numerous. Last time I spoke about the pyramid of intelligence. Meaning, there are few smart people and many fools. Therefore, when there is a dispute between the few and the many, usually the few are right. There are few smart people and many fools — that’s the pyramid of intelligence. So here too, the same thing. Beit Shammai were sharper, and therefore they were fewer in number, while Beit Hillel were more numerous but less sharp than Beit Shammai. So the discussion really standing in the background of the dispute, and what did not allow them to reach a decision, was the question: what is the majority we are looking for? Majority of wisdom or majority of people? Majority of heads or majority of feet? What are we counting — heads or feet? So Beit Hillel had the majority of feet, and Beit Shammai had the majority of heads. And now the question is: which majority determines? Now if Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel also disagreed about that itself — on the question whether we follow majority of wisdom or majority of people — then we are in an inescapable tangle. Okay? By the way, I think I mentioned this in another context when I talked about paradox and anti-paradox. I said that if, say, Beit Shammai thought we follow majority of people, and Beit Hillel thought we follow majority of wisdom, then even then you couldn’t decide, but then it would be a loop. If Beit Hillel are right, then halakhah follows Beit Shammai; if Beit Shammai are right, then halakhah follows Beit Hillel — like the liar paradox. In reality, those positions are reversed. Meaning, Beit Shammai happened to think that we follow majority of wisdom, and Beit Hillel thought we follow majority in number. Fine? Now that too cannot be decided, but for a different reason. It’s not a loop, but rather each side is closed within itself. That’s what I called an anti-paradox. Meaning, if Beit Hillel are right, then halakhah follows them; if Beit Shammai are right, then halakhah follows them. So there is no objective way to decide whose halakhah it follows. It’s not a loop; it’s simply two possible answers and you can’t decide between them. And in a loop, there is no correct answer at all. In any case, we are in an inescapable tangle. What do you do? Do you follow majority of wisdom or majority of people? And since there is a dispute here about the rules of decision even before the whole set of disputes between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, there was no way to decide it, and therefore they disputed there for years.

[Speaker G] Why couldn’t they have learned this from the Torah itself? Why did it have to come several generations later?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And where in the Torah would you learn that right now?

[Speaker G] That’s the question. If you say that the whole halakhic system—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s always the question. Why did the daughters of Tzelofchad have to ask the Holy One, blessed be He, what their law was? Or the blasphemer? I don’t know. There are things the Torah didn’t write and had to be added. I don’t know. I have no idea why some things were left to interpretation and not written explicitly. You can ask lots of questions like that; I don’t know why it is that way. Maybe, by the way, the Torah did write it and they simply didn’t know how to derive it from the Torah. That too is possible.

[Speaker G] Let’s say here you’d have to say there are many things the Torah didn’t write and we don’t know. Still, we don’t have a heavenly voice from heaven.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But there’s a problem — no, that’s exactly the difference, because the rules of decision are known to us. So in a standard halakhic dispute, say about the laws of selecting, hold a vote and the majority will determine it. No problem, even when it isn’t written. But when the dispute is about the rules of decision themselves — that is, who counts as the determining majority? Majority of wisdom or majority in number? What are we going to do? Hold a vote? In that very vote we’ll get stuck in the same tangle. That’s exactly the point. Only here is there a problem. In all the other places there is no problem at all. Therefore in this exact case Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel got stuck and couldn’t reach a decision, and they had to resort to a heavenly voice. So I think the question why they used a heavenly voice there is not difficult at all. It’s quite clear, if indeed this is the basis of the deadlock in the dispute between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel — majority of wisdom versus majority in number.

[Speaker F] They did this for two and a half years. What? They did it for two and a half years.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. Very nice.

[Speaker C] What, doesn’t that contradict Sefer HaChinukh? He said majority of wisdom. No — why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because in the end the decision was like Beit Hillel. Fine — the question is whether Sefer HaChinukh understood the dispute between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel that way. Tosafot says that this is why they disputed and couldn’t decide, because Beit Shammai were sharper. But I’m not sure Sefer HaChinukh also understood it that way. The fact is that Tosafot himself, when he asks why we do not heed a heavenly voice, did not answer what I said. It’s not the simplest explanation — or maybe it is the simplest — but no, it’s not the explanation the medieval authorities (Rishonim) seem to have assumed. About Beit Hillel. In any case, what is under discussion here is the question whether the determining majority is a qualitative majority or a quantitative majority. While in the subtext, really, the question is whether we are looking for the truth or looking for the decision of the religious court, right? Because if we are looking for the decision of the religious court, then there is no reason at all to assume that the determining majority would be the majority of wisdom. Majority of people — after all, what you want to know is what this collective says. That doesn’t depend at all on who is wiser and who is less wise, who is more qualified in quality. But if you are looking for the truth, then greater Torah scholars have an advantage, and then there is definitely reason to say that the majority of wisdom determines and not the majority of heads or majority of feet.

[Speaker F] And in practice you have some agreed factor that ranks the sages. Yes, I talked about this once—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time, I talked about it last time. Sure — those are the answers. The answers to why Plato isn’t right and why you can’t always identify the relevant wisdom, or the sages used their power badly, or all kinds of technical things. I argued there’s no question here; no need to look for excuses.

[Speaker B] After the heavenly voice came out, did Beit Shammai accept it? From the Talmud it seems not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] From the Talmud it seems not. Beit Shammai continued to act according to their own method. But anyone who didn’t belong to one of the two schools accepted the decision of the heavenly voice in favor of Beit Hillel, and in the end…

[Speaker B] So they don’t obey the heavenly voice?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Beit Shammai, no. But the people outside, yes. The people outside, yes. And more than that, the Talmud also says, “Beit Shammai in place of Beit Hillel is not a Mishnah,” so I’m not even talking about ordinary people outside the schools; I’m talking about the Torah scholars, the Amoraim. In the end, the Amoraim accepted the heavenly voice as a halakhic decision, and that’s it — the Jewish law follows Beit Hillel. Even though, again, in the Talmud itself in several places Jewish law is ruled even like Beit Shammai. And that’s a big question, how that works, but I talked about that once when I discussed halakhic ruling. What I want to note here is some kind of — I don’t know — philosophical, mathematical comment, maybe, I’m not sure. What exactly is under discussion here? In another formulation one could state it this way: are we counting a quantitative majority or a qualitative majority? Again, majority of wisdom is basically a majority of quality, while majority of people is a majority of quantity, right? That’s the formulation, a reasonable formulation of the two sides in this dispute. But that raises the question: what is quantity at all, and what is quality? This is a question philosophers in Greece already dealt with. In Giv’at HaMoreh by Shlomo Maimon, he also deals with it quite a bit. The question is how to define quantity and quality. There he comes to say that we count quantities of wisdom, not quantities of people. What defines wisdom as quality and people as quantity? I’m asking this because in the end it will project onto our understanding of majority in a religious court, but I want to pause for a moment and discuss quantity versus quality. So the accepted proposal — I no longer remember whose it was originally; it comes from Greek philosophers, and Shlomo Maimon brings it there — the accepted proposal is this: quantity is something additive. That is, you add another unit and the quantity grows. With quality, when you add another unit, nothing changes. In other words, quality is the thing that does not change when you increase the quantity.

[Speaker F] Let’s take an example — just a second, I—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll take as an example the temperature of water, okay, as against the quantity of the water — how many liters there are. So if you add — say there is water, ten liters, at a temperature of thirty degrees, and you add another liter of water at thirty degrees, the temperature hasn’t changed even though you increased the quantity. So that means temperature is the quality of the water. By contrast, the amount of water increased, so the number of liters is quantity and not quality. That’s the claim. I never understood this distinction, because I can formulate it in a completely symmetrical way in the opposite direction. Let’s return to wisdom and people, okay? What are you really telling me? Say we add — fine — two more judges. If I add two more judges at the same, let’s say, roughly the same Torah level — I add two more at the same Torah level — I did not increase the Torah level of the court, but I did increase the quantity. Therefore, seemingly, the Torah level is the quality of the court or of the judges, while the number of feet is the quantity. Okay? But to the same degree I can say the opposite. Meaning: I have twenty-three judges at a certain Torah level. Now I’ll add more Torah level to them — I’ll teach them another tractate, or more medieval authorities (Rishonim), or something else, whatever you want. Fine? Without adding even one judge. Okay? Now the number of judges has not changed, but their wisdom has increased. So here’s proof that wisdom is the quantity and the number of judges is the quality. You’re assuming what you need to prove. The moment you describe it in the first way — adding people and asking whether the wisdom changes — and you don’t look at adding wisdom and asking whether the number of people changed, you have already assumed what quantity is and what quality is. You’re assuming the conclusion. Meaning, there really isn’t a definition here that distinguishes quantity from quality.

[Speaker F] Yes, I have a comment. There’s some orthogonal vector to this whole discussion, because when you take another liter of water at thirty degrees and add it, true, the temperature doesn’t change, but you increased its entropy. Okay, wait a second — you increased the level of disorder, right? Okay. When you add another two to twenty, you increase the level of disorder within the wisdom, and you now have a good chance of reaching a decision that you didn’t have before. That’s the point.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be. Maybe I’ll get to a formulation similar to that later.

[Speaker G] I’m not sure human beings are linear; it’s not simple. It’s an independent entity. When we have an independent entity, that is the one unit. That’s the unit. For some reason we count them — what, the person votes?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] IQ, say. I increased the people’s IQ by five. So that’s not a unit? What? I increased the judges’ IQ by five — five units.

[Speaker G] No, no, because each one is not all of them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s all of them.

[Speaker G] But the majority looks at it as an independent body. What does it say? It’s—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is what each IQ means, or — I don’t know — I can add IQ too, to increase the quantity of wisdom.

[Speaker G] But IQ isn’t the point. But—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That IQ doesn’t say anything. The first 130 IQ doesn’t say—

[Speaker G] The point is that this is a human choice, the person as himself. Okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m going to suggest a definition which I think is similar to that. It’s broader, but it seems to me similar. The point clicked for me once when I was sitting in a synagogue in Yerucham, and the rabbi there was speaking about the laws of buying and selling. And you know that it is forbidden to measure on the Sabbath as part of the prohibition of buying and selling. So he brought a responsum — there’s a dispute about this — but he brought a responsum, I think, of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, though I no longer remember, where he argues that it is permitted to measure fever on the Sabbath. Measuring fever is permitted. And he was puzzled. He said he didn’t understand why — what is the permission to measure fever on the Sabbath? Clearly it has nothing to do with buying and selling, but there are many measurements that also have nothing to do with buying and selling, and they nevertheless prohibited them, prohibited measurement because of buying and selling. And what will you say — that it’s an abstract thing? Meaning, say temperature is an abstract thing. Time is also an abstract thing, and time one may not measure. With a stopwatch one may not measure time. Yes, that’s at least the accepted ruling among the halakhic decisors. There may be room to hesitate about that too, but that was his claim. Therefore he remained with the matter unresolved. He did not understand why Rabbi Moshe permits measuring fever while forbidding measuring time.

[Speaker E] Let’s say, is it analog? What? Analog measurement?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. In the end you measure the same thing, just by different methods.

[Speaker E] Looking at the clock and saying a minute passed?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, you do — you measure from here to here, a minute passed. Yes, it’s forbidden to measure time. When you activate a stopwatch you are measuring. By hand — is a stopwatch muktzeh? No, no, not under the laws of muktzeh; under the laws of measuring. No, unrelated. That was the claim. And then suddenly something clicked for me, and I think I understood the difference there. The number system we use serves us in two different functions. Mathematicians make a distinction like this with infinite numbers: cardinals and ordinals — counting numbers and ordering numbers. I think it is somehow connected to this distinction as well, but I’ll do it with finite numbers, not infinite ones. The claim is that numbers are sometimes used in order to arrange, and sometimes used in order to count. Numbers sometimes function as ordinal numbers and sometimes as cardinal numbers. Where do you see that? Say when I count apples, then clearly the numbers are counting numbers. I am counting how many apples I have. I have nine, I add one more, I have ten. I add another one, I have eleven. When I “count,” in quotation marks, temperature — the degrees on a thermometer — that is an ordering number, not a counting number. What do I mean? I’m not counting degree plus degree plus degree, and then in the end I add one more degree, one more was added, and now I have thirty-eight instead of thirty-seven. That’s not how it works. This number called thirty degrees, thirty-one, thirty-two, and so on — it is an ordering number. It is a number that establishes a hierarchy among different heat levels. This is heat level number thirty, this is heat level number thirty-one, number thirty-two. Of course it’s a continuum, but just for illustration I’m making it discrete. So all I’m doing is arranging the heat levels one above the other. Or in another perspective: what really is the difference? You cannot point to a specific unit — and that is exactly the formulation you said — which I am adding in order to move from thirty-seven to thirty-eight degrees. Where is the degree that you added? It isn’t anywhere. I also didn’t take a degree and add it. I changed the state of the food, or whatever it is, or the human body, from a state of thirty-seven degrees to a state of thirty-eight. It’s just that we established some scale that measures levels of heat, and that scale is numerical, so we look at it as though there is one more than the previous one. But that has no meaning of one more than the previous one. It simply means that this is the next level after that one. The purpose of the numbers there is to arrange the levels one after another, not to count how many units there are. Thirty-eight degrees is not thirty-eight units of a degree. Nor is thirty-seven. Thirty-eight degrees is the next level of heat after thirty-seven degrees.

[Speaker F] So you could have given them names like A, B, C, D.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, and therefore the numbers here are more like names; it’s just that you need ordered names. And the moment you give A, B, C, probably you’ll need numbers here too, because even the A, B, C you arrange with numbers.

[Speaker D] So what is the definition of the word “measure”? Because “measure”—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly the point. That’s the claim. I’m saying that what was prohibited under measuring, in the context of the question of measuring on the Sabbath, what was prohibited was counting, not ordering. But the word “measure” here—

[Speaker D] Yes, the prohibition — not necessarily the word — the prohibition of measuring on the Sabbath.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know whether everywhere “measure” works like that. In the context of buying and selling — yes. Again, I don’t know whether in Hebrew that’s what it’s called, “measuring,” and I’m not sure I can decide that. What I do know is that the prohibition of measuring on the Sabbath is a prohibition on counting and not a prohibition on ordering. That’s my claim, at least according to Rabbi Moshe. Okay. And what is the claim, basically? Therefore measuring temperature is irrelevant. What is it in buying and selling? What are you counting in buying and selling? You count how many objects you are selling, or a certain amount. There it is clear that what you are doing is counting, not ordering. Right? So if in buying and selling you prohibit measuring by force of the prohibition of buying and selling, then it is very plausible that the prohibition is a prohibition on counting, not a prohibition on ordering.

[Speaker D] The one who asked the question didn’t understand the meaning of the word.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, not the meaning of the word. What is the definition of the prohibition? As for the meaning of the word, I’m not sure that’s the meaning of the word. In the context of the prohibition of measuring, “measuring” means counting. It could be that in another context you’ll find “measure” used differently, I don’t know. Is it permitted to weigh? Weighing is also counting.

[Speaker B] It’s not ordering.

[Speaker C] Regarding… physicists call this extensive and intensive.

[Speaker B] Extensive quantity and intensive quantity. Weight is an extensive quantity.

[Speaker C] I thought the distinction was between a continuous and a discrete variable.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. With temperature, even if it were a discrete variable — that’s what I said, only whole degrees — it would still be an ordering number, not a counting number. It has nothing to do with continuous or discrete. The question is: with weight, you take a unit of weight, add it here, and then you have more. You know where the unit you added is. With heat it’s not like that, even if it were made only of whole units. There is no specific degree somewhere that you took and added, and therefore now you have thirty-eight instead of thirty-seven. You didn’t count thirty-eight units here, and therefore you have thirty-eight. Rather, you moved through thirty-eight levels in the hierarchy, and when you reached the thirty-eighth level you know you are at number thirty-eight. But once you are there, you won’t be able to identify inside where the—

[Speaker G] the thirty-seven was before you went up to thirty-eight.