Torah and Torah Study, Lecture 1

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Lag BaOmer and Pardes
• Maimonides, Nachmanides, midrashic exposition, and one interpretation versus multiple interpretations
• Secret teaching as a tradition from Sinai versus spiritual intuition
• The value of conceptual language: Kabbalah, Tolkien, and Freud
• The fit between the hidden and the revealed, scriptural decree, and topological defects
• Kindness and judgment in Kabbalah, Abraham and Rebecca, and a transgression for the sake of Heaven
• Kindness and judgment as political-economic models, charity and taxes, and the Torah of Israel
• Conclusion and postponing the discussion of Lag BaOmer

Summary

General overview

He opens the topic of Torah and Torah study through the subtopic of the relationship between the hidden and the revealed, in honor of Lag BaOmer, and assumes that there are parallel planes for reading the Torah, like Pardes, even though the source for that framework is unclear to him. He sets Maimonides’ view against the more common approach associated with Nachmanides: according to Maimonides, a verse has one interpretation and the midrashic exposition is not an interpretation but an extension, whereas according to the other approach, plain meaning, midrashic exposition, and secret teaching are parallel interpretations. He questions the idea that the hidden teaching was transmitted in an esoteric tradition from Sinai, and suggests seeing it instead as spiritual intuitions of people with deep perception—intuitions that have value, but not absolute authority. He then develops a model in which the correspondence between the hidden and the revealed is not one-to-one, but rather a correspondence at the level of outcomes, and that correspondence breaks down in cases of scriptural decree. Finally, he demonstrates how foundational kabbalistic concepts such as kindness and judgment are not identical to their everyday meanings, and uses that to interpret biblical figures and political-economic models as expressing the tension between rule and exception.

Introduction to Lag BaOmer and Pardes

He connects the lecture to Lag BaOmer and defines the discussion as an inquiry into the relationship between the hidden and the revealed, and how Lag BaOmer expresses that relationship. He presents the familiar framework of Pardes and says that its source is unclear to him; in particular, the level of “hint” seems unclear to him, and it may not really be a plane of interpretation at all. He focuses the discussion on two main planes, plain meaning versus secret teaching, and argues that a verse or a passage can be read on both planes in parallel, so that on the hidden plane “completely different things” are taking place, tied to “higher realms.”

Maimonides, Nachmanides, midrashic exposition, and one interpretation versus multiple interpretations

He cites Maimonides in the second root and argues that according to Maimonides, “a verse never departs from its plain meaning” means that only the plain meaning is the interpretation of Scripture, while the midrashic exposition is not an interpretation. He presents Nachmanides as taking the opposite view, in the spirit of “the Torah has seventy faces,” where both the plain meaning and the midrashic exposition are interpretations of the same verse. He brings an example from Minchat Chinukh on “do not place a stumbling block before the blind,” and argues that Minchat Chinukh concludes that there is no prohibition against literally tripping a blind person on the road, because he understands the midrashic exposition as replacing the plain meaning. He rejects that as “an impossible conception” and says that the plain meaning of the verse remains true, while the midrashic exposition is an extension that adds another dimension. He reinforces this from Yad Ramah on Bava Batra, which cites “do not place a stumbling block before the blind” as a source for the prohibition against causing harm, because the verse in its plain sense is dealing with actual physical harm.

Secret teaching as a tradition from Sinai versus spiritual intuition

He raises the question of the source for reading the Torah on a metaphorical-hidden plane, and formulates it as the question of whether this is “from Sinai.” He describes the kabbalists’ position as a principled view that the hidden teaching was transmitted from Sinai as part of the Oral Torah, in the sense of a mode of relating to the Written Torah, and also mentions claims of revelation attributed to the Ari, along with the difficulty posed by “It is not in heaven.” He expresses a personally skeptical stance toward esoteric traditions passed along in a “thin trickle,” arguing that they are prone to distortions compared to a broad tradition. He proposes an alternative according to which the hidden teaching consists of spiritual intuitions that are recognized as valuable when they are “picked up” and awaken recognition in others. He cites Gershom Scholem quoting Agnon about a mystic whose words “sound familiar” as a criterion for valuable mysticism. He adds that parallels among mystical systems around the world—such as male-female duality, yin and yang, kindness and judgment—indicate that we are dealing with some perception of real dimensions of reality.

The value of conceptual language: Kabbalah, Tolkien, and Freud

He describes the experience of studying Kabbalah as learning a language that at first looks like “mathematics” of concepts such as sefirot, configurations, and worlds, and seems to say nothing; but later it develops into a sense of meaning, of “right and wrong,” and shapes one’s view of the world. He argues that the very fact that this language begins to “say something” is an indication that its founders “hit on something real,” and did not just invent a game-world in Tolkien’s style. He compares this to Freud’s psychoanalysis as a “brilliant delusion” that lacks scientific validity but has intellectual value because it creates a language and a conceptual system that make it possible even to formulate claims, test them, and reject them. He says there is no need to ground authority through claims that “everything was given from Sinai” or through divine inspiration, and sees that as a “childish conception.” In his view, it is enough to assign weight and respect to the creations of sages or people with deep insight, without turning them into a binding source of authority.

The fit between the hidden and the revealed, scriptural decree, and topological defects

He presents two possibilities for the correlation between the revealed and the hidden: a direct translation, in which every concept in the revealed has a counterpart in the hidden; or synchronization by means of a “third factor,” in the style of Leibniz’s clock parable, where there is no direct causality but the results are coordinated. He uses an example from Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach) about axiomatic systems that generate the same set of “legal words” through different rules, in order to distinguish between local equivalence of rules and global equivalence of outputs. He argues that halakhic reality shows that the fit is not perfect, and that the expression of this is “scriptural decree”—a Jewish law that has no explanation on the revealed plane, though it still has a reason. That, he says, shows that there is no one-to-one translation between the systems. He compares this to the breakdown of mathematical mappings between coordinate systems and to “topological defects,” and adds that a miracle is a “topological defect” between the theological system of considerations and the physical system, because if there were full correspondence there would be no need for miracles.

Kindness and judgment in Kabbalah, Abraham and Rebecca, and a transgression for the sake of Heaven

He defines kindness and judgment in the language of the hidden as the difference between acting according to rules and acting in a way that departs from rules, and argues that the everyday meaning of acts of kindness versus legal judgment is just a particular case of that structure. He cites “lying with his sister—it is kindness” and “the world is built on kindness” to explain that kindness can denote a departure from ordinary structures, and connects this to “a transgression for the sake of Heaven,” as with Lot’s daughters, whom the Sages praise because they acted מתוך a perception that “there is no man in the land.” He explains that a pious person is called pious because he does more than strict law requires even in matters between man and God. He quotes Rabbi Pinkus on Abraham, who slaughtered three calves for tongues with mustard, and on Rebecca, who says, “I will draw for you, and for your camels I will also draw,” as examples of behavior that is “out of proportion,” expressing a “substantive object of kindness,” and not a model for ordinary people to imitate. He places this within the broader theme that the world cannot stand on pure judgment, and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, “combined” the attribute of mercy with it.

Kindness and judgment as political-economic models, charity and taxes, and the Torah of Israel

He argues that kindness in the social sense exists in a capitalist world, where giving is seen as an exception to private ownership, whereas socialism speaks in terms of justice rather than charity and therefore seeks to turn giving into a binding rule. He interprets communism as an attempt to establish a world on “the attribute of judgment alone,” and therefore as a systemic failure, similar to Rashi’s comment that a world created with the attribute of judgment could not endure. He formulates capitalism as demanding giving beyond obligation, and communism as turning giving into law, and argues that neither extreme works without a mixture. He addresses the question of taxes, tithes, and charity, and argues that in the capitalist conception even collecting taxes for welfare is “charity by coercion,” not recognition that the money “belongs” to the poor. He adds that “we compel charity” in Jewish law, and so there is a parallel structure there as well. He states that “the Torah is distinctly capitalist” in the sense that it contains no conception that another person has a property right in someone else’s assets; rather, the person has an obligation to care for the other. He criticizes the rhetoric of “I deserve it,” such as in demonstrations by the disabled, as a claim that is incorrect in his view, even though he supports meeting people’s needs. He argues that laws that try to solve problems formally produce the opposite result, and that “you do not solve problems through laws,” presenting this too as another expression of the fact that a world of judgment alone does not work without education toward values and without the exceptions of kindness.

Conclusion and postponing the discussion of Lag BaOmer

He concludes by saying that he did not actually get to Lag BaOmer itself, and suggests continuing to talk about it in the next lecture on Thursday, which is Lag BaOmer.

Today we’re going to begin the topic of Torah and Torah study, but today I’m going to talk a bit about the hidden and the revealed, which is a subtopic. But in honor of Lag BaOmer, I’ll deal a little with that issue and with the relation between the hidden and the revealed in connection with Lag BaOmer—in other words, how Lag BaOmer itself expresses the relation between those two things. It’s possible that in some year I already spoke about this, I don’t remember anymore, but fine. I hope you don’t remember either. I don’t remember; I already don’t know—maybe yes, maybe no. All right, I’ll give a bit of an introduction. It’s conventional to think this way, although it’s not entirely clear what the source of the idea is, that there are four planes of relating to the Torah—PaRDeS, yes? Plain meaning, hint, homiletic interpretation, and secret. The source for this isn’t clear. Meaning, I once tried a bit to look for it. There’s some friend who wrote something about it and brought several things there, but it’s not entirely clear what the source of this idea is. But it is fairly clear that there are some parallel planes of relating to the Torah, in the hidden and in the revealed. Let’s leave aside for now the homiletic and the hint. Hint—it’s not even clear what it’s doing there. Meaning, maybe “hint” just got inserted and isn’t really something that even pretends to be interpretation; it’s a bit less of the game. But right now I’m talking about the hidden and the revealed. So these two planes of relation basically assume that when we read a verse or a section in the Torah, we can relate to it on two parallel planes, each one standing on its own. You can read it on the level of the plain meaning, and you can read it on the level of the hidden meaning. And then completely different things happen there—matters connected to higher realms.

That in itself, the existence of these parallel planes, also raises several problems, and I think I spoke about them even apart from the issue of the hidden and the revealed. Because basically, as Maimonides for example writes in the second root regarding the relation between plain meaning and homiletic interpretation, Maimonides claims that the homiletic interpretation is not an interpretation of the Torah—unlike Nachmanides. Nachmanides says there are seventy faces to the Torah: there is plain meaning and there is homiletic interpretation, and these are all interpretations of the same verse, different planes of interpretation. But Maimonides claims that a verse never departs from its plain meaning—“what is the verse itself referring to,” as the Talmud asks. The Talmud asks many times, he says, “what is the verse itself referring to”—I think it appears once, maybe twice—but a verse never departs from its plain meaning. Maimonides claims that “a verse never departs from its plain meaning” means that only the plain meaning is the interpretation of Scripture; that is, the homiletic interpretation is not an interpretation of Scripture.

Usually people understand “a verse never departs from its plain meaning” to mean that an interpretation in the homiletic mode does not mean there isn’t also an interpretation in the plain sense; the plain meaning also remains. Meaning, the fact that you interpreted it homiletically doesn’t mean the plain meaning was uprooted; the homily is added onto the plain meaning. Maimonides reads it differently. Maimonides says that “a verse never departs from its plain meaning” means that only the plain meaning is interpretation; the homiletic reading is not interpretation. I’ll give you an especially amusing example—maybe I mentioned it, I don’t remember. The Minchat Chinukh, when he talks about “do not place a stumbling block before the blind,” says: after all, the Sages expand—or add—a prohibition against causing someone to sin and against giving bad advice, advice that is not fair; that too is “do not place a stumbling block before the blind.” The Minchat Chinukh discusses it, and his conclusion, as far as I remember it, is that there is no prohibition against tripping a blind person in the road. Fine—“do not place a stumbling block before the blind”—what, there’s no prohibition? The prohibition is only to give bad advice and cause someone to sin. Meaning, the Minchat Chinukh understands that when we interpret a verse—again, I don’t know to what extent this is technically homiletics, but let’s say for the discussion—when we interpret a verse, what we are basically saying is that the homiletic reading is the interpretation of the verse. We uprooted the plain meaning; we replaced the plain meaning. Meaning, the Minchat Chinukh assumes like Maimonides, but in reverse. He too agrees that there is only one interpretation of a verse; he just claims that once we stated the homiletic interpretation, now it turns out that the homiletic reading is the interpretation—the homily displaced the plain meaning, so now the plain meaning is no longer interpretation.

So what do you do with “a verse never departs from its plain meaning”? I have no idea. Maybe “a verse never departs from its plain meaning” is on the level of the idea. Like when they say “an eye for an eye” means money. So “an eye for an eye” means money—there are those who want to argue that we derive by a verbal analogy from “under” to “under” that it means monetary compensation and that we don’t actually take out the eye. So the commentators ask there: then why does the Torah write “an eye for an eye”? Let it write “money for the eye.” So they answer that the Torah writes “an eye for an eye” to teach the idea that really the idea was that it would have been fitting to take out his eye, but in practice, halakhically, it means money. Fine, so you can say that “a verse never departs from its plain meaning” means you don’t ignore the plain meaning, but on the halakhic plane it says—well, yes, then you are ignoring it. In terms of ideas, do whatever you want, but in Jewish law only the homiletic reading works. By the way, this needs checking. I haven’t checked it. We need to look at the various occurrences in the Talmud of “a verse never departs from its plain meaning”—whether they can really be interpreted that way. I don’t remember right now.

So that is an impossible approach. It’s just not true. There’s no such thing. It’s obvious that when it says “do not place a stumbling block before the blind,” it is forbidden to place a stumbling block before a blind person—besides the fact that they expand it. What? That it comes to save a person from unfair advice, and that really is “do not place a stumbling block before the blind.” Yes, that’s an expansion of the idea that you cause a blind person to stumble—so this is blindness of a different kind. So it’s clear: it doesn’t come to replace the plain meaning; it comes to add to the plain meaning.

There are explicit examples. In the Yad Ramah, for example, in the second chapter of Bava Batra, he brings from “do not place a stumbling block before the blind” a source for the prohibition against causing damage—the opening lecture for Bava Kamma in yeshivot. Where does the prohibition against causing damage come from? That’s always the opening lecture. The Yad Ramah says the source is “do not place a stumbling block before the blind.” Why is it forbidden to place a stumbling block before the blind? Because you are harming him. He falls, he gets hurt, he is injured, so from here we see that it is forbidden to cause damage. It is obvious that he understood the verse in its plain meaning, not only in the sense of unfair advice and so on. You don’t need him for that; it’s obvious.

In any case, the meaning of the matter is that according to Maimonides—we’ve gone in the opposite direction, but maybe it’s worth deviating a bit to address this—the assumption is that there is only one interpretation. If I move to the plane of the relation between the plain meaning and the secret, then there too you have to decide which one is the correct interpretation. You can’t accept two interpretations. Maimonides claims that every verse has only one interpretation. For Maimonides this isn’t such a difficulty, because he probably wasn’t on especially friendly terms with esotericism—at least he didn’t know it. Even though there are all those legends—you know this? I think Abarbanel, and Kaf HaChayim brings it, that Maimonides at the end of his life met some old man who revealed all the secrets to him, and then he regretted everything he had said and repented, and all sorts of fairy tales. There are those who say he converted to Islam. There are all kinds of stories about Maimonides. On that too there are all sorts of discussions; scholars have dealt with it a bit.

In any case, Maimonides, consistent with his approach, maybe on the plane of the secret too would say the same thing. He would say: there is only one interpretation; there is no secret at all, and homiletic interpretation is not interpretation; it is expansion. We spoke about this, that homiletic interpretation is only an expansion of what is written in the verse, and it is not exposure, not interpretation in the sense of uncovering the meaning of the verse. The common approach, like the approach of Nachmanides, is that “a verse never departs from its plain meaning” means that the plain meaning is also an interpretation, and the homiletic reading is also an interpretation, and the secret is also an interpretation. There are seventy faces to the Torah, as he writes, and all of them are interpretations. These are interpretations that operate on parallel planes.

In every verse—is it there? What? That this exists in every verse? Not in our hands, but I assume that in a kabbalistic conception, if you ask a kabbalist, surely he will tell you that every verse should also be read on that plane. I don’t know if he knows how to read it on that plane, but it’s like the fact that we don’t have a homiletic interpretation for every verse. Regarding homiletics I’m not sure there has to be one for every verse, but I think that in the realm of the secret, the logic says yes—that one should see the entire Torah on the plane of the secret, because everything there is supposed to be conducted that way. It’s not that suddenly you take a verse and make a secret out of it; rather the whole text is supposed to be read on this plane and also read on that plane. So either Abraham and Sarah were Abraham and Sarah, or they are Wisdom and Understanding. If they are Wisdom and Understanding, then everything written about Abraham and Sarah is really written about Wisdom and Understanding. This is not a local homily. A local homily doesn’t deal with the whole section; it deals with a verse, an extra letter, a word. You can say that maybe there doesn’t have to be a homily on every letter and every word in the Torah; maybe there was and we lost it, but it doesn’t have to be. But in the secret, in the simple sense, this is supposed to be a really continuous parallel reading of the entire thing.

There is the Vilna Gaon who says, “Jewish law uproots Scripture,” and if you look in the book Even Sheleimah, Rabbi Menashe of Ilya, his student, says something like that. In the Mishnah too. So it sounds from them as though the homiletic interpretation uproots the plain meaning, not that they live together. I don’t think that’s correct. I think what he means to say—not that what he says isn’t correct, but that’s not what he says—but what he wants to say, I think, is that “Jewish law uproots Scripture” means that you can interpret Scripture against its plain sense. But that does not mean its plain sense is not also an interpretation. Rather, don’t challenge the homiletic reading from what is written in the verse—that’s not a question. Jewish law uproots Scripture. Understand? That’s something else.

Many times we say, “Wait, ‘an eye for an eye,’ and you tell me that means money? But it says ‘an eye for an eye’! How can you interpret it as money? The Torah doesn’t write that!” He says: Jewish law uproots Scripture. But that doesn’t mean that “an eye for an eye,” in the plain sense, also stops being an interpretation. It just means: don’t challenge the homiletic reading. I think that’s the intention. I once had an argument about this with Henshke many years ago, among other things about this Gaon, because he claimed that the Gaon says the same thing about Mishnayot—that when they establish an interpretive restriction for a Mishnah, he says the Mishnah too turns over like seal material. And there too you basically overturn the Mishnah and establish restrictions, and it is interpreted both on the plain level and on the homiletic level. And by the way, there I think he explicitly writes that it is both this and that.

So with “it is lacking and thus should read”? An interpretive restriction, or things like that. And do you also read it in the regular way? Yes. Both in the regular way and in the far-fetched way. That is his claim. And now here he’s citing some article or something that basically says that when they establish an interpretive restriction, the Gaon claims the amoraim are disputing the Mishnah. They establish an interpretive restriction only in order to manage somehow with the wording, some sort of appearance of fitting the wording. But they really mean to disagree with the Mishnah. They are not claiming that this is what the Mishnah really says. And I think what is written in the Gaon is exactly the opposite. “Like seal material”—“this is among the greatness of our Oral Torah,” that’s how he writes. Sorry, “from the greatness of our Oral Torah.” What is great about our Oral Torah if you abuse it, do whatever you want with it, and play games? “From the greatness of our Oral Torah” means that everything enters into it. Meaning, this too enters into it and that too enters into it. How does it manage to write, in a single formulation, several planes of reference, all of which are true? There I can understand the amazement—how do you manage to do that? That’s why I think the Gaon did not mean that.

Here in Pirkei Yisrael he writes that “it is lacking and thus should read” is, as it were, for the melodies. Melodies, yes. Yes, known. No, there are all kinds of inventions there because that really seems— I once wrote about the interpretive restrictions, and I also spoke about it here. I think there is a simple explanation for it; there’s no need to get into all these stories. At least for interpretive restrictions. “It is lacking and thus should read” is already more delicate.

In any case, the claim is that there are parallel planes of reference. Right now I am speaking only about the plain meaning and the secret; let’s leave aside homiletics for a moment. There are parallel planes of reference, and you can read things on both planes. Just as an aside, there is of course confusion, dispute—I don’t know what to call it—a problem with the source of these things. Where does it come from? After all, when you read verses in their plain meaning, you don’t need a source. It’s the text; you read it the way you read texts. Meaning, you know the language, you read it, you interpret. You can argue about what the correct interpretation is and what isn’t, but this operates with the same tools by which you interpret any text. But the secret assumes that there are parables here, metaphors, or borrowed references of one kind or another. And for that you need a source. Meaning: who told you that it really comes to say all those metaphorical things? So the question is whether this goes back to Sinai, in other words. What is the source for all this way of relating?

Of course, if you ask kabbalists, they will tell you yes, in principle. That doesn’t mean it didn’t develop. Obviously it developed over generations upon generations, but the Oral Torah also developed. It’s just that there is some core that was given at Sinai, and around it there are interpretations. Regarding the Ari, the claim is that he had some revelations from above—I don’t know exactly, things like that—which maybe added various further matters for him. And then of course the question arises of “it is not in heaven,” and all kinds of issues like that. But the claim is that this was transmitted at Sinai and is essentially part of the Oral Torah that was given at Sinai. Which of course on this plane, “Oral Torah” means another mode of relating to the Written Torah. Because in the Oral Torah there is one part that is entirely law given to Moses at Sinai—that is just Torah transmitted orally, not connected to the Written Torah. And there is Oral Torah that tells us the meanings of words in the Written Torah, or how to relate to the Written Torah. In other words, Oral Torah that says something about the Written Torah, only it says it orally. It is not written in the text itself. So the hidden dimension, in principle, is Oral Torah in the second sense. That is, it is a way of relating to the text of the Written Torah, and it was given at Sinai, and there is a tradition for it.

I personally am rather skeptical about this matter. I don’t know—I don’t have much confidence in traditions that are transmitted in a very esoteric way. Things that are transmitted in a very esoteric way and nobody knows them except for a thin stream of people—there can be lots of distortions there. It doesn’t look like something… They’re always telling us that the greatest strength of our tradition is that it was transmitted on a broad front, from master to disciple, with everyone learning it. So I can understand that I might have some confidence in such a traditional process. But over there, where it’s some secret of secrets, from master to disciple—I don’t know.

I tend more to think—and again, this really is a personal position; I have no conclusive claims in either direction—I tend to think that this is some kind of spiritual intuition. In other words, there are people who have good spiritual intuitions, and if they really manage to grasp something that seems right, then it catches on. So that is basically the secret. The question, of course, is how to relate to such a thing. Because if I relate to it that way, then clearly the relation can be selective. Meaning, if there are good or useful spiritual intuitions, then I’ll adopt them, but if not, then not. This is not Torah given at Sinai that I am obligated to. Rather, what? It can help me. Meaning, there are people who have some deeper vision than I do in these areas at least—of spiritual worlds, of spiritual dimensions of reality, something like that—and one can make use of what they said.

Gershom Scholem, in Devarim BeGo, brings a passage from Agnon, where Agnon writes in The Book of Deeds—I no longer remember exactly how it goes there—that some person, some kind of mystic, I don’t know exactly what, met someone, and everything that man said sounded familiar to the narrator. Meaning, everything he said sounded familiar. And Gershom Scholem claims that the definition of a mystic of value, a mystic of stature—for a mystic carves out his insights from his subjective world, from his experiential world, from the world of concepts that he develops or something like that—but if you speak and nobody finds any point of contact there at all, they don’t understand what you want, it’s your own language, for yourself, it says nothing to me, it doesn’t seem right, it doesn’t speak to me, I don’t find it within myself—then you have no value. Then you are a mystic without value, or at the very least it says nothing. The significant mystics are those who, after carving things out of their subjective personality, the people around them understand that there is something here. They understand that they have grasped something real. So maybe I don’t see it, but once it is said to me, I understand that there is something here. I think that is the meaning of spiritual intuition.

The kabbalists who grasped a certain conceptual world and presented everything in terms of that conceptual world—the fact that it was absorbed, the fact that quite a few people see in it something that reveals further insights or further interesting or deep perspectives on reality, on the Torah, or whatever it may be—that is an indication that they probably grasped something true. By the way, here too, again, scholars work on influences, but I don’t know how much the influences are really known—I haven’t checked it in depth—but there are very interesting parallels among mystical teachings all over the world, of all kinds. It’s always, of course, almost always these dualities of male and female, yin and yang, and all this kindness and judgment and all this dualism appears in almost every mystical doctrine. Meaning, there are several things that are apparently real—people who have some powerful mystical perception grasp certain dimensions of reality, and you can be persuaded that this is indeed true.

By the way, this was one of the things where I really had some kind of lightbulb go on when I spent a few years dealing with these matters with a friend who has been involved in it for many years. So I studied with him for a few years, and at a certain stage you begin to get a feeling—because after all this talks about a set of concepts where you don’t understand what they are doing here. It is supposed to be some kind of mathematics. In other words, okay, this is here, that goes there, and if it connects from here then that comes out there—you can build some geometry or mathematics like that which says nothing to you. Meaning, you are playing with concepts; you are not… But it turns out that in the end it starts to tell you something. It starts to tell you something, and suddenly you also get some sense of what is right and what is wrong. Even though it is very strange—it talks to you about configurations and worlds and emanations and… what, what… how am I supposed to have a sense of what is right and what is wrong? How is this supposed to tell me anything at all? The fact that it tells me something—which of course somehow also connects to our world. Is this also about practical life? It is also about practical life, but about the way of looking at the world. All these fields seem to me like what you say—Chinese, Chinese. Meaning, they talk about concepts that are actually explained by concepts from everyday life. That’s what I’m saying. But the surprising thing—and these are sefirot—the surprising thing in this process, that’s what I’m saying, apparently that’s what should have happened. But the surprising thing in this process is that after you enter into this mathematics, you suddenly begin to get a feeling for what it means and whether it is right and how to do it right and how to do it wrong. And it turns out that basically—and this continues what I said before—it turns out that whoever built this language and this conceptual system probably really did latch onto something substantial, something true. He didn’t just invent a language and from now on start playing games that are unrelated to anyone and to anything.

Yes, someone can build some Tolkien-like language, a language he invented with no connection to anything, and you can live inside his world from here till kingdom come. He even has everything there—concepts and language and kinds of people and lands and worlds and creation theories and theology. There, everything we have, he also has. It is a very impressive creation in that sense. But it is not—apparently it says something to us because it is connected to the human world; a human being created it. But I’m only bringing that as an example. In the world of Kabbalah there should not, in principle, have been such a thing at all. Meaning, you can learn the rules and play the game, that is, know what goes with what and exactly how things are built, these detached structures and so on. But at some point suddenly you get some sense of right and wrong. You suddenly understand that it contributes something to how you look at things. I’m not saying every detail—at least for me, definitely not every detail—but yes, the general patterns of thought, the patterns of relation, I definitely think they capture something real. These are not just the hallucinations of some madman who decided to speak in some language he invented.

By the way, one can say the same—I think I’ve spoken more than once already—about Freud’s psychoanalysis. Yes, which is of course all nonsense. It has no connection to reality; it’s a collection of Freudian hallucinations. Psychoanalysis itself is a Freudian hallucination. But it’s a brilliant hallucination. Meaning, it’s a brilliant hallucination because before what he did, if you wanted to deal with psychology, you had no language for dealing with it. You had no conceptual system. And how do you begin to treat human behaviors, human traits, or human reactions systematically? What do you do? What do you say? How do you begin to develop psychology? You need a language for it. You need some conceptual system. Now, it could be that this conceptual system is fabricated out of nowhere, with no connection whatsoever to reality. But within that conceptual system you can begin to formulate claims, put them to an empirical test, examine them—this is right, that is wrong—you can also refute the claims. But there is still something there to refute. Meaning, you need a language even in order to refute things. And then you can start improving things a bit and changing them.

Therefore I think that even though it has no scientific value, it does have what we might call intellectual value. It has some indirect contribution, even if one day psychology becomes a science. So I think Freud has a contribution to that matter, even though what he did has little connection to science. He invented some conceptual system that probably is not completely detached. Meaning, there is probably something in the conceptual system he invented, even though it really is invented. That is, there are no empirical indications for all the concepts he uses. He describes isolated cases; that’s what’s called qualitative research. He didn’t do statistical studies. He took some case he treated, a person did such-and-such, and then he asked him, “Tell me, did you have such-and-such?” and it turned out that the dream maybe really symbolized something he had actually experienced, and then he inferred that this thing in the dream symbolizes that. But I don’t know exactly—it could be yes, it could be no, it could be you just guessed right. You’re not doing statistics; you can’t really establish such a thing. Today they are returning to qualitative research after they despaired of trying to make this into a science. But still, I’m saying, even though it isn’t scientifically valid, the invention of the language is indeed very significant. And in that sense I think it’s somewhat similar to this matter of the language of the hidden.

Without committing myself to the claim that all the configurations and all the details there really exist in some sense—I don’t even know what “exist” means in this context—but exist in some sense, I am really not committed to that. That is not necessary at all. But it does capture certain general structures that I think provide an interesting way of looking at reality. And then if I return to us, basically my claim is that there doesn’t have to be some oral tradition transmitting the hidden dimension to us. No. That’s how they try to say it because—why do they say that? Because otherwise how would they persuade you to take it seriously? After all, it’s completely detached. A conceptual system that—why should I relate to it? No, it was given at Sinai, so obviously it’s true and you have to study it and understand it and connect to it and act accordingly, and so on and so on. And I claim that you don’t need the thesis that it was given at Sinai in order for me to take it seriously. Meaning, I also take seriously the spiritual intuitions of people with deep vision. True, I don’t see that as an authoritative source. It carries weight. If a person said something, and I believe he has some mystical or spiritual power of perception, then I will give some weight to what he said. And it is not a matter of authority. Meaning, if I decide it doesn’t seem right to me, then no. Nothing happens. But I still think that is good enough for these things to have value.

You don’t need—it’s like in the Talmud, where in order to give the Talmud authority, they invent that everyone there had divine inspiration and everything was really given to Moses at Sinai and it’s all Oral Torah tradition and—nothing of the kind. It is obvious that the Talmud, for the most part, is the creation of the Sages of the Talmud—the tannaim and amoraim, come on—and that doesn’t mean it has no value or no validity. It has value and validity because the assumption is that they probably were not detached from what they were interpreting. Again, even though I don’t think they were necessarily right about everything, that doesn’t mean it is worthless. Its formal validity comes from the fact that we accepted it upon ourselves, or if it is the Sanhedrin then “do not deviate.” But for that you don’t need to assume they are always right and that it all came from Sinai—that is, that everything was transmitted from Sinai.

Here too I think the attempt to anchor things leads to creating a theory that it came from Sinai, because the feeling was that without that people wouldn’t take it seriously. Then they also explain to you that no, it was all given at Sinai, and there was divine inspiration, and they didn’t make mistakes, and they were fiery angels from above, and all kinds of things of that sort. And to my mind this is a childish conception, because—first, because it’s not true, and if you make things up for me it won’t help me at all. And second, I also don’t need these inventions. Children need these inventions. A child, in order to do the right thing, needs to get hit if he does the wrong thing, whereas an adult should be told that this is what is proper to do. So here too, you don’t have to explain to me that it is certainly true. You can also tell me: listen, these are wise people, it carries weight, treat it with respect. But it wasn’t given at Sinai; they created it themselves. You don’t need this childish grounding; childish grounding is for children. That is the point.

Therefore again, to my personal taste, I think this is a field that definitely has value. I don’t think it came from Sinai, and I don’t think it has absolute authority like Jewish law, for example, or things of that sort—not at all. But yes, I think it has value; it’s interesting to study; it illuminates various interesting angles. Fine, that’s the first point.

The second point is how to relate to these two planes, the hidden plane and the revealed plane. And here there are several possibilities. In a number of places it seems that people related to this as though every word said on the revealed plane has a counterpart on the hidden plane. Every concept, every principle, every thing. It’s basically that you can speak of the same thing in two languages that run completely in parallel. This parallelism can stem from at least two mechanisms, if it exists, right? One mechanism is that it’s basically some kind of translation. Everything you say in the language of the revealed can be translated into the language of the hidden. What is called here a star is called there an angel. Fine? So everything you say here about stars, you would say there about angels, because basically it’s like translating something from Hebrew into English. You say the letters are completely different, but it says the same thing; it’s only a translation. That is one mechanism that could explain the correlation between the revealed and the hidden.

The second mechanism, of course, says no, this is not translation, but there is some third factor of synchronization. Everything will be true on the revealed plane and on the hidden plane. Like Leibniz’s parable of the clocks—I already mentioned that too. He says: when there are two clocks that always show the same time, one hanging here and one hanging here, and they always show the same time, you ask yourself how the correlation between them arose. One possibility is that one clock affects the other. A second possibility is that the second affects the first. A third possibility is that there is some third factor that makes sure to synchronize the two clocks with each other. There doesn’t have to be some causal relation between the two clocks. Correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

So the claim here too is that perhaps there is no correlation such that every term here is simply a translation of the term there and vice versa, or every principle here. But there is some guiding hand that makes sure that what is correct in the considerations of the revealed will also be correct in the considerations of the hidden, even though there is no one-to-one correlation. In a moment I’ll explain why this discussion is important, but I want to sharpen it a bit more.

I’ll bring an example from Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach. He has a game there in which he says: suppose you start with an alphabet of three letters—M, I, and U. Okay? Now you create a language that contains strings composed of those three letters: M, M, M, I, I, U—that’s one word. Or M, I, M, I, U—that’s a second word. It doesn’t matter. There are legal words and illegal words. How do you define the legal words? So you give axioms and transformation rules. Let’s say you say that the word MI—I—is a legal word, and now you give, I think he has four rules there, that tell you what you can do, how you derive other words from that legal word. For example, if you have a word that ends in I, then you can add once again whatever comes before the I, for example. Or if you have a word that contains two U’s, you can delete them. Or—doesn’t matter—rules of that kind. Then you take the first word, which you know is a legal word in the language, and use the rules to generate additional words. All the words that you generate in this way, all the certified words, as it were, are legal words. Okay. Words that cannot be generated in that way are not words—they are not legal words. That is the definition he gives to the language.

Now I won’t get into the games he plays there—it’s actually an interesting game—but now I want to ask: suppose there is some such set of words, finite or infinite, it doesn’t matter for the discussion, but some set of legal words out of all the possible strings of M, I, and U in different forms. Okay? Can one generate the same set—that same set of words—with a different collection of principles? Let’s say I choose a different initial word and entirely different transformation rules, unrelated to those transformation rules, but it turns out that if you do the manipulations—if you take the initial word, apply the rules—all the words that come out belong to the group that comes out of the rules there, and vice versa. In other words, the languages generated are the same languages. Every word that is legal here is legal there; a word that is illegal here is illegal there. In principle there is no obstacle to that happening. It’s very hard to do, but in principle there is no obstacle to it.

How would it be easy to do this? If I wanted to do it easily, then I would simply build a system of rules that I can prove is equivalent to that system of rules. If I have some proof that shows me that this system of rules is equivalent to that system of rules, then of course I have proved everything, so there is no problem. Right? But if I cannot show equivalence between the rule systems, it could still be that the set of words generated by this system of rules is the same set generated by that system. There is no necessity that this not be so. Meaning, it could happen. What is the difference between those two things?

The correlation of the first kind, in which these rules are basically equivalent to those rules, is what I call a local and one-to-one correlation, as I said between the revealed and the hidden. Every word or concept here has a parallel over there, and vice versa. It is simply a mapping; it’s another language. So here too, that set of rules is the same set of rules as here, only in another language, so of course it generates the same language. I can prove that it generates the same language. Okay.

With a completely different rule system, even if it generates the same language, I don’t know—you’d have to ask mathematicians—but it seems to me you wouldn’t be able to prove that if it’s infinite. If it’s finite, then generate them and prove it. But if it’s infinite, you won’t manage to prove it. You can prove it only through the equivalence of the systems of rules; you cannot, until you have generated the whole set of words, prove that there is equivalence between the two things. But equivalence might still exist. You won’t be able to prove it, but it’s the same set of words. Every word you generate here, you also generate there. So the correspondence of the second kind is not a local correspondence, in which every rule parallels another rule, but practically speaking it turns out that the set of results is the same set.

Let’s return now to the revealed and the hidden. There is a set of principles of revealed halakhic thinking—let’s talk for the moment about halakhic interpretation for the sake of discussion, okay? There is another set of principles, which is the set of principles of the hidden—concepts, principles, an entirely different language. Let’s say there is no mapping between the languages. The principle from here has no counterpart there and vice versa. You can’t prove equivalence between the two systems of principles. But the products—let’s say everything one is obligated or forbidden to do halakhically as a result of hidden considerations—is the same as what comes out of revealed considerations. Like with the words, right? Meaning, there is equivalence, even though the legal system that generates these results is not equivalent to that legal system—or at least you cannot prove equivalence. This can happen; there is no problem. Suppose the Holy One, blessed be He, created His Torah or His world in such a way—then He can create two languages that are not equivalent to each other, and still every halakhic rule that emerges from hidden considerations will also emerge from revealed considerations and vice versa, even though you will not succeed in finding a mapping between a principle in the revealed realm and a principle in the hidden realm. This can happen; there’s no problem. It’s difficult, but it can happen. There is no obstacle—no problem—that it should happen. It is difficult to produce such a thing.

Why am I saying this? Because regarding the relation between the revealed and the hidden, it turns out that the correspondence is not perfect. Right? Where do we see that the correspondence is not perfect? In those laws called decrees of Scripture. Laws called decrees of Scripture are basically laws that have no explanation in the revealed realm. Right? And my assumption, and that of Maimonides and everyone else who assumes these assumptions, is that there is a reason why this law exists. It is not just an arbitrary law. But we do not succeed in explaining it on the plane of the revealed. Even King Solomon, wisest of all men, could not explain three or four things. Okay? What does that mean? Translated into our context, I would say: it has an explanation in the hidden and no explanation in the revealed. So it turns out that the correspondence between the hidden and the revealed is not perfect. If you made the calculation in the revealed realm, this law would not come out for you. But in the hidden it does come out, and that is what the Holy One, blessed be He, expects from us—to do it. So in the revealed realm this is called a decree of Scripture. The text simply has to tell me, because I won’t succeed in deriving that law; the text has to say it to me. Okay?

There are also disputes here between kabbalists and plain-meaning interpreters. Right, the Magen Avraham in the laws of tefillin says there that one should follow the revealed and not the hidden, but the kabbalists say that one should follow the hidden. And this is a second-order dispute, like Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel who disagree whether one follows the majority of wisdom or the majority of numbers. In everything. Yes.

So in short, this correspondence is not perfect. What does it mean that the correspondence is not perfect? It is proof that the correlation between the revealed and the hidden is not local. Let’s go back for a moment to the languages, the two languages I defined earlier. If there is a correspondence between this rule system and that rule system, then there will not be a single word that is legal here and illegal there, and vice versa. Because after all, I proved equivalence between the systems of rules, meaning everything this generates that also generates, and vice versa. So if the equivalence is local, it cannot be that there is a mismatch. Once a mismatch appears, then it is clear not only that the equivalence is global, but it is apparently not even complete. The equivalence—what comes out similarly simply comes out not because the systems of rules are equivalent, but in truth it misses now and then.

Yes, the mathematical example of this is when we do, say, a mapping between coordinate systems. Suppose there is a Cartesian coordinate system X and Y, okay? Now I shift it. Fine? So if I shift it, then say X becomes X plus A, and Y becomes Y plus B. Okay, something like that. It’s a one-to-one and onto mapping. Yes, every point here I can tell you what its coordinates will be in the second system. Right? There is a one-to-one and onto mapping between the two descriptions. What happens in a polar system? In moving from a Cartesian system to a polar system. For those who don’t know, there you have some more complicated set of formulas. But that’s not a one-to-one correspondence. Not everywhere can you move over. Not at all. Not at all. When there is a point on a two-dimensional system, okay? At the origin, at the origin it breaks. At the origin it breaks. At the origin r equals zero and every theta. The origin maps to a whole line in the polar system: r equals zero and all the thetas. That whole line maps to the origin in the Cartesian system. So it’s not one-to-one and onto, because r equals zero and theta equals thirty, and r equals zero and theta equals sixty, etc.—that’s the same point.

So the mapping—and this is what causes topological defects, by the way; I played with this quite a bit in a post, dealt with it a little—it’s very interesting, all sorts of phenomena. There are topological defects there; these broken mappings are fascinating. These places, these topological defects, are created in those places where the correspondence breaks down. And a decree of Scripture—a decree of Scripture is a topological defect in the correspondence between the revealed and the hidden.

By the way, a miracle too is a topological defect on the level of its logic. Because what is a miracle? The Holy One, blessed be He, intervenes in nature and performs a miracle. Why does He do that? Why doesn’t He do that all the time, alternatively? Because usually nature does what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants it to do. And there are places where it doesn’t work. Nature does not do what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants, so He freezes it and works in its place. He enters into the matter. What does that mean? That the theological considerations—what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to happen here—and the physical considerations that determine what should happen here are not in perfect correspondence. Because if there were a correspondence between every theological consideration and a physical consideration, or between the physical system and the theological system, there would never be a need for miracles. When there is a need for miracles, that means there is a topological defect in the correspondence between those two systems. Okay? Whenever something breaks, when there is something not explained in one system and yes explained in another, that means there is a mismatch between them. This is a mathematical phenomenon with a lot of interesting consequences in topological contexts.

In any case, basically the claim is that the concept of decree of Scripture is an expression of the fact that the correlation between the revealed and the hidden is not local. Meaning, it is not that every principle here or every concept here has a translation into a principle or concept there, or even into a combination of principles and concepts there. No. There is no obligation that there be such a correspondence. The product is supposed to correspond. What comes out practically as Jewish law—what one must, or must not, or may do—should also come out here, and of course with the exception of those cases in which that correspondence breaks down, what are called decrees of Scripture. Yes, I think the reverse is not supposed to exist. Meaning, what comes out according to the revealed and has no explanation in the hidden—that you would not do. Meaning, that would be a reverse decree of Scripture.

In any case, that is regarding the correlations. Now, how is this language built? So I’ll offer one idea, which I’ll try to sharpen a bit. One of the basic ideas, perhaps the most basic, in kabbalistic thought is this contrast between kindness and judgment. In our everyday language, in the language of the revealed, there are meanings to what kindness is and what judgment is. Kindness is doing good to people, acts of kindness, and so on. And judgment is the system of rules, that is, acting according to the law. In the world of the hidden, kindness and judgment—right side is kindness and left side is judgment—judgment is action according to rules, and kindness is action outside the rules, action that deviates from the rules. That, it seems to me, is the definition of the concepts kindness and judgment in the world of Kabbalah. And the appearance of these concepts in the world of the revealed is a particular case.

Fine? If you lend someone money, then judgment says he has to repay the debt. Why? Because there is a rule, a law, that says if you borrowed, you have to return. When I give it to him, I’m performing an action according to judgment; that is not kindness. But if I give charity to a poor person—I don’t owe him anything; I didn’t borrow from him—then why do I need to give him? I don’t owe him; there is no law that obligates me. If I give it to him, then that is kindness. In the case of Jewish law, there is a law that obligates me, but it is a law of Yoreh De’ah, not Choshen Mishpat. He has no right to receive it from me. In the halakhic world that is a bit different than in the general moral world, but never mind—the logic still exists there.

So an act of kindness is an act done not by force of some rule. You deviate from the rule. But the Torah really uses these concepts in a broader sense. For example, sleeping with one’s sister is called kindness—“it is kindness”; sleeping with one’s sister, “it is kindness.” I think there is some verse; I no longer remember the exact wording. “The world is built through kindness.” Yes. So what is kindness in that context? How could the descendants, the grandchildren, of Adam and Eve have been born except by virtue of such kindness? What kindness? Weren’t Adam and Eve’s descendants all siblings? The children and grandchildren of Adam and Eve could be born only by virtue of this rule of the “kindness” of sleeping with one’s sister. Why? Because the children—the children— That’s why that verse appears—what verse did you say? “The world is built through kindness,” and therefore sleeping with one’s sister is called kindness—it appears in one of the verses.

Okay, but I think the concept of kindness in that context—it could be true as a continuation, but why indeed is it called kindness? It is called kindness because it is an action outside the rules. Sleeping with one’s sister is something outside the rules. Not that it is forbidden—that’s what I’m saying. Everything is forbidden; all the forbidden sexual relations in the Torah are forbidden. When you commit a prohibition, that is not an act of kindness. But I’m saying that when you do something that is absurd within the human rules—that’s the meaning, not in the sense that it is forbidden. Another man’s wife is also forbidden as a sexual prohibition. No, but that is understandable. It is understandable; it is passion; we understand how it happens. There are explanations for it—not in the sense that it is permitted, but there are explanations for why it happens; it is something that fits the laws by which the world is run, not the laws of Jewish law, not the laws of permitted and forbidden, but the logical laws of how the world works.

Now, when a person sleeps with his sister, the Torah sees this as something absurd, meaning something not understandable in terms of the ordinary human rules. So they call it kindness. That is, the expression of kindness in that context is not that you are doing kindness to someone. The translation in the case of Adam and Eve, there maybe it really does perhaps even translate to kindness in the ordinary sense, because otherwise there would be no humanity. But the meaning of the expression is an action not according to the rules. Say, a transgression for its own sake—in that sense there too it was a transgression for its own sake, because that is the only way humanity came into being. Like, by the way, the same thing was true with Lot’s daughters, of course. Lot’s daughters who slept with their father also thought that they were precisely in that situation of Adam and Eve’s children, because they thought humanity had been wiped out. “There is no man in the land to come to us in the way of all the earth,” right? That is explicitly what the verse says. They thought the whole world had been destroyed. Now if they do not sleep with their father, then humanity will not remain; there will be no humanity. And therefore they did it, and the Talmud sees this as a transgression for its own sake. The Talmud praises them very highly for this matter. And this somewhat contradicts the intuition one gets from the verses, but it is stated explicitly in the Talmud: the Sages praise them.

So this is the concept of going not according to the logical rules. Sometimes it really is done for a good purpose, but not necessarily. You deviate from the rules—that’s the broad meaning of kindness. For example, in the context of Hasidim and Mitnagdim, Hasidim are kindness. Why is a pious person called pious? A pious person does something beyond the law; therefore he is called pious, because he does things that are acts of kindness, beyond the law. Now this doesn’t mean that you are necessarily doing kindness to someone in the interpersonal sense. A pious person also exists in relation between man and God. Someone who does beyond what he is obligated is called pious. Why? He isn’t doing kindness to anyone. True, but he is deviating from the rules; he is doing things beyond what Jewish law or strict law obligates him to do.

There are two examples of this that I once heard from Rabbi Pinkus, of blessed memory, from Ofakim. He brought two examples. Abraham—when the angels came to him—I heard this division between kindness and judgment once when he was with us in Yerucham, and he spoke about it. The Arabs came to him—the angels who appeared to him as Arabs—and the Sages say that he slaughtered three calves in order to serve them tongues with mustard. Was he crazy? Couldn’t they eat some drumsticks? Three calves so there would be enough tongues? There are no refrigerators there, remember, yes? It’s not— The man committed massive wastefulness the moment he did something like that. It’s absurd. Meaning, none of us is supposed to do that, and it’s not even right to do that. This is not a model I’m supposed to imitate at all. So why did he do it?

The same thing with Rebecca. Rebecca, when Eliezer arrives with the camels—these are the two examples he brought. When Eliezer arrives with the camels, then “I will draw for you, and for your camels I will also draw”—a girl of three years old according to the Sages. A three-year-old girl. The man is Jewish, fine, he’s an adult Jewish man, forty years old, not old, he probably traveled a long way, he has strength, strength in his loins. He’s taking all the camels and everything, and this little three-year-old girl comes and says, “I’ll water all the camels, I’ll draw, I’ll do it all,” from that same well where nobody succeeds in moving the stone—there’s effort there, serious effort. Now this Jew, after all, is a man. This little three-year-old girl comes: “Sit there, I’ll draw, I’ll water, I’ll do everything.” That too is crazy; it’s not something right to do. It is a benefit out of all proportion.

So he said these are expressions of a person who comes from the foundation of kindness. After all, Abraham is kindness, Isaac is might, Abraham is kindness, and Jacob is beauty. So Abraham and Rebecca in that sense are not models for imitation. We are not supposed to behave like that. Even someone who wants to be righteous should not behave like that. That’s just—being absurd. Meaning, there are rules. But Abraham was not the father of the attribute of kindness in the way we usually understand it. He taught us to do kindness; he was an object of kindness. That is the claim. Meaning, the attribute of kindness is Abraham. It’s not that he behaved like a person who performs kind acts. That is, in the kabbalistic language, this two-legged creature called our forefather Abraham is not a human being at all—he is a sefirah. He is a sefirah, the sefirah of kindness. Fine? The sefirah of kindness doesn’t calculate; it does whatever it…

Now of course we are supposed to—as the Holy One, blessed be He, says that He thought to create the world with the attribute of judgment, saw that it could not endure, and therefore joined to it the attribute of mercy. In the end, we cannot act according to pure judgment, but also not according to pure kindness. We are supposed to act according to judgment with deviations of kindness. One has to give some balance between these two things. This is the yin and yang, or the kindness and judgment, and this tension that there always is in all mystical teachings between judgment and kindness, or between rules and deviation from the rules. The right and left sides of the brain—usually people also connect these things to that.

So Abraham and—Abraham and Rebecca in that sense do not serve as exemplary figures that we are supposed to imitate, but rather as some sort of theoretical pole. The attribute of kindness—Abraham, translated into Kabbalah, is the attribute of kindness; that is the meaning. And the attribute of kindness goes wild—that’s true. What am I supposed to do? I’m not supposed to be the attribute of kindness; I’m a human being. I’m supposed to behave according to judgment with touches of kindness. Meaning, to know not to take judgment too harshly. But the world cannot behave according to judgment; therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, joined to it the attribute of mercy. Judgment alone cannot be; kindness alone also cannot be. There have to be rules, there has to be judgment, only you have to remember that the rules are not the thing itself. The rules are an approximation, and within them you also need sometimes to deviate from them. We have spoken quite a bit already about rules in many contexts.

I think that on the political plane, for example—I spoke about this once—on the political plane, for example, I think a very interesting expression of this tension is communism. After all, when we give charity to someone, kindness exists only in a capitalist world, contrary to what people think, but it’s true. Kindness is a capitalist concept, because capitalists talk about charity. Socialists talk about justice. After all, all the demonstrations are about justice, not charity, right? What are their demonstrations? Why? Because justice for them means to distribute equally according to need—not equally, but according to needs and not according to goodwill. So they don’t need kindness. Everyone simply deserves what he needs. Only in a capitalist world, where it is mine, do you say: listen, the fellow is miserable, give him charity. Meaning, charity or kindness exists in a capitalist world.

Now what did the Soviet Union or communism do? They tried to eliminate charity from the world—to establish the world solely on the attribute of judgment, without kindness. With positive intentions. Meaning, they basically wanted us not to need kindness. “Do not make me dependent on the gifts of flesh and blood,” yes? Rather what? The state will determine—not that the state will determine, but in their eyes this really is right, this is the just distribution. It’s not that the state forcibly takes charity. Communists don’t see it that way. Communists see it as the state simply carrying out what is right, not as forcibly taking charity because people don’t give charity and then the poor die. That can still be a capitalist conception—a temporary capitalist conception. If you are not a predatory capitalist, then sometimes the state will take taxes and give to the poor so people don’t die here. But not out of a conception that they deserve it. Rather out of the conception that if a person doesn’t give charity, we aren’t willing to let people die. But among communists that is not the conception. Among communists, you give to the poor because it is theirs. Not because otherwise they’ll die; the conception is that they deserve it. So this is a conception that is all judgment.

And that is what Rashi there at the beginning—Rashi at the beginning of Genesis—Rashi says that the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to create the world with the attribute of judgment, saw that the world could not stand with the attribute of judgment, and therefore joined to it the attribute of mercy. Now in the kabbalistic view, and only in the kabbalistic view, communism is basically—whereas in the revealed view communism is supposedly the peak of kindness—in the kabbalistic view that is not true. Because they wanted to turn giving into law. Not that I give it as charity, as kindness; they wanted to establish the world on the attribute of judgment. The world cannot stand on the attribute of judgment. The world does not function. In a communist world the economy collapses, and in the end the state also collapsed in the Soviet Union. It doesn’t work; it can’t work. You must have some combination, some mixture.

Again, predatory capitalism is the other pole, and predatory capitalism means that the conception is capitalist, but you also don’t make people—in places where it is needed, you don’t cause them to give, you don’t take taxes at all, let’s say hypothetically. You don’t take taxes at all, nothing. The invisible hand will arrange everything. That’s hopeless. That’s pure kindness, and that too won’t work, because people do not always give kindness; sometimes you have to force them to give kindness. That’s what taxes are for. And this balance—what is called social democracy—is something in the middle. And that is what it means that the Holy One, blessed be He, joined the attribute of judgment with the attribute of mercy, because only that way can the whole thing work.

Pure judgment—say, the United States versus the Soviet Union at the ideological level—then the United States is pure kindness, contrary to the revealed conception, just the opposite. And the Soviet Union is pure judgment. And these two models cannot work. So the Soviet Union collapsed, and the United States is not absolute capitalism, because otherwise it wouldn’t work. There is some kind of ethos there, but they are not really there; there is some social system there, there is something. Of course they try to minimize it as much as possible, and you can argue about the proportions, but say the American ethos cannot work. The American ethos—that is why in practice it really does not happen—they cannot run absolute capitalism, okay? Because then you suddenly see that the person who wants to do good is actually the man of judgment, not the man of kindness. And the capitalist who only worries about himself and is unwilling for anyone to take anything from him is the man of— And judgment is taking. Exactly. And in the kabbalistic conception it is exactly the opposite. Because if you operate with rules alone, then you are a man of judgment. It doesn’t matter whether the rules come to do good; that is irrelevant. The question is whether it is according to rules, or whether you ask a person to deviate from the rules, to give beyond what he owes. So capitalism demands of a person to give beyond what he owes, and communism wants to obligate him to give. Obligated, everything will be by rules, everything according to laws.

In general, trying to solve all our problems by laws is a conception of judgment. And it can never work. Therefore in the Knesset, every time they legislate a law that comes to solve a problem, it creates three others. Meaning, you can hardly ever solve problems through laws. It’s pretty rare. There is some legal framework that is needed, that’s obvious. But I always say: every specific problem they tried to solve, they didn’t succeed through legislation—almost never. The Book Law, we spoke about it. The law on bank fees. Whatever you want. They rejoiced and exulted—we have saved the world. The direct election of the prime minister—I’m not even talking about that. The 200 percent wage for working on Sabbaths caused Jewish workers in the Beged factory to go to a priest to get documentation that they were Christian, because only non-Jews were allowed to operate the factory. In short, it’s… There’s a column on my website where I discuss these phenomena with the menorah. The menorah—yes, it’s wonderful. There are several crazy stories there exactly of this type.

Wasn’t there once the Psychologists Law? No, that’s what I’m saying—what you try to achieve, you always achieve the opposite. Every law. The muezzin law achieved the opposite, right? It achieved the opposite. Meaning, now no one dares touch the muezzins after all the noise over that law. The override clause—no one will ever use it after it passes. It won’t… Every law shoots itself in the foot; that’s the rule. It simply cannot work. You don’t solve problems through laws; it simply doesn’t work. If the public is not with you, or the governing system, depending on who we’re talking about—if you didn’t succeed in bringing them to identify with the issue, it won’t work. And that means that if you try to run things according to judgment, it doesn’t work. Kindness means educating people that this is right—not because you are obligated, but because this is right. Meaning, I expect you to behave like human beings. Then things can change. But a law will not change anything. Sometimes a law can help internalize the idea and the value, but the law in itself will never solve any problem.

We spoke about dividing a cake, yes—I have several canonical examples of this idea. Dividing the cake, which of course destroys what it tries to build. Everything. In short, every time people try some formal solution, it doesn’t solve the problem, unless it is a truly trivial problem. Only trivial problems. In general, game theory is useful for nothing except trivial problems whose solutions we know even without game theory. Whenever you need mathematics in order to solve it, it doesn’t work. Life is resistant.

According to this, can taxes that go to social services be included in charity and tithing of money? Or are you saying that because… The decisors rule that way. Rabbi Ovadia argues that everything can be given from the tithe. But one could say that according to what you said, the attribute of judgment is what collects taxes from you, and what you give beyond judgment counts as charity? Meaning as kindness? No, that is exactly the difference. If you’re a communist, then what you’re saying is right. Because then what they take from me really belongs to him anyway. It’s not that I gave it to him; it belongs to him; I just didn’t want to give it to him, I’m a thief, so the state took it from me. But in the capitalist conception, even when the state takes from me, it doesn’t take from me because it belongs to him. It takes from me as charity. It is the one that forces me to give charity. It is mine, but it is taking care of him, and therefore it is charity—just charity under compulsion. And by the way, in Jewish law one compels charity. Charity collectors compel charity; therefore there need to be three. Because the Torah is distinctly capitalist. This has to be understood. The Torah is purely capitalist in its conception. Everyone is searching for what the model is and socialism—nonsense. The Torah is purely capitalist in its conception. Of course, charity and kindness, all of that is within the capitalist world. It’s the same conception that it’s mine. The idea is that you have to care for them. That is something entirely different. It’s a capitalist conception. But not predatory capitalism; compassionate capitalism. Capitalism that says that if someone can’t manage, then with all due respect to the invisible hand, you sometimes need to help the invisible hand a little. Meaning, and make sure the fellow doesn’t die. Okay? But not because he deserves it. He deserves nothing.

That’s why I once spoke about the demonstrations by the disabled and so on. I also wrote it in a column. They demand what they deserve, that their rights are being harmed. They have no rights; they deserve nothing. It is true that one has to give them, because I think people should be enabled to live—not to live at a reasonable level, say, for those who need it. All labor laws in the Torah—meaning all the benefits and time off and so on—this is not charity. Whoa, whoa. He deserves a stipend, and still the benefits… Money is not benefits; money is wages. I’m not talking about that. Of course wages are complete law. A person who worked—you have a contract, you have to pay him. No question. What’s the question? But in places, say, in labor law in the State of Israel there are clauses that are—what’s it called—non-waivable? No, not obli—what is it called, that you can’t stipulate against them. Yes, contingent? No, cogent. No, no, there’s some term, well, I forgot the term.

Say I don’t want to contribute pension payments for a worker and he agrees, we make an agreement between us with no pension—you can’t. It doesn’t apply. There are clauses you cannot contract around even with the consent of both sides. Now there is some term; I forgot the legal term for those clauses. Never mind. Here it’s really an interesting question, because apparently if we agreed between us, then why are you getting into our guts, do you understand? What? So basically the worker doesn’t really deserve it, because he waived it. And you say the waiver came from weakness. Fine, it came from weakness. Fine. But I don’t want to give it to him, and if he doesn’t want it then let him not come work. What do you mean? That is exactly the point. Rather, the system intervenes and says that it is taking care of the worker—but not because he deserves it. He doesn’t deserve it; this isn’t communism, this is capitalism. That’s what I’m saying: it’s a very big difference in conception, even though it looks similar in practice. Because I am not taking it because it belongs to the worker. It doesn’t belong to the worker in any way. I take it because he waived it out of weakness, whatever the reason, and then I as the state take the charity from the employer instead of the worker. The state takes the charity, yes, but it is charity. Fine? Like in the Torah, like severance gifts for a slave who goes free. That too is not something required as wages. Therefore I say: the conception is capitalist with all the benefits you will find in the Torah. That in no way harms the capitalist character of Jewish law.

Where do you see the markers of capitalism? Because nowhere, in no place, do you see that anyone deserves something from my property. What suddenly? What I made is mine, completely mine. They say “the law of the kingdom is law,” using the word law to represent its taxes and what I have to obey the kingdom in. But why does it do this? It does this because it takes charity from me. Once it takes, it has the authority to do that, but it doesn’t take from me because it belongs to him. It takes from me because it decided that here I will give charity, like charity collectors. Yes, but it’s a bit different; not exactly, because this is called a law of Yoreh De’ah, not a law of Choshen Mishpat. He has no right to receive it; I have an obligation to give it to him. No, but they don’t force you to give to him. They say, you give to us, and now we’ll do with it what we want, but in principle we give it to them as your representatives. That doesn’t matter. I’m not talking about roads or services that everyone benefits from, but even charity… even charity that they collect and then distribute—it’s not that they force you to give to some other specific person. No matter; that’s the way a state manages a system of charity. Obviously it doesn’t manage it one-to-one; a state can’t function that way.

So how do they manage it? By the way, charity collectors in a community also don’t take from this person and give to that person; they have a charity fund with poor people. Smaller than a state, but it still doesn’t operate one-on-one. But never mind, this is giving charity; it’s a charity fund. Why can’t one see this as the public being the owner of the state and it collects from you? That’s the reason they have the right, but not because he has a right. Again, they have the right to take, but not because the money belongs to that person. Again, no problem—the state is allowed to take money from me. No, it’s not that it doesn’t belong to you. No, it belongs to me, but they have the right to take. Not the same thing. If they don’t take it, then in principle won’t it also not be mine? If they don’t take it, can the poor person come and take it from me? Certainly not. It’s mine. Only the state has the right to collect it from me if it decides, if it decides that this is proper. In the communist world, in principle the state is unnecessary. Basically the poor person could come and take it from me, because it is his. True, that it wouldn’t work without the state backing it up, so the state enforces it. But in principle you don’t need the state for it; the poor person can take it because he is my partner. Here that’s not true. It is entirely mine. The state has authority to take charity—fine, very good, true. That’s what I said. Therefore I say: in idea, at the base, it looks similar in some respects, but at bottom it is pure capitalism. There is no communist conception here.

Now the question is what is called socialism—something in the middle, I don’t know. You can say it is moderate communism; you can say it is moderate capitalism; I don’t know what to call it. But I’m saying if you take two opposite poles, capitalism and socialism, then the Torah of Israel is like the welfare states in Scandinavia. There it’s broader, fine, but it’s still not— There isn’t this idea that the state has some kind of partial ownership of the person because it invested in him, gave him conditions, education, health, infrastructure, and all that. That, again, I’m saying—there is, but there is a portion of his profits that belong by law, not as something that belongs to him—say, all of 30 percent of what he makes belongs to us because we are shareholders too, because we raised him, gave him education, health, infrastructure, and all that—that’s something else. I think the conception is, if that really were the case, then in practice they should take the same amount from the poor and the rich. Right, they take 30 percent. No, no, they take 50 percent from the rich. Yes, yes. Meaning, I’m saying, maybe there is such a dimension, but it’s not—maybe there is such a dimension, but it is not the main thing. The main thing in the end is that the state has authority to take. The welfare state exists because capitalism succeeds so well and everyone has so much money and things are organized so well, that the state allows itself to take a lot of money in order to provide welfare for others. Yes, exactly. If people gave enough charity voluntarily, there would be no need for this, and then everything would be fine. But that usually doesn’t happen, so the state makes a correction.

All right, I didn’t even get to Lag BaOmer. Next time, then. So maybe we’ll talk about Lag BaOmer on Thursday, which is Lag BaOmer.