Torah Study, Lesson 3

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s obvious, but I mean the parts that are actually written. No, so as I said, obviously there are things—so that’s why I said, “an eye for an eye”; I brought that example precisely because of this, because there is a simple meaning to “an eye for an eye.” So I’m saying: even there we don’t go with the simple meaning. But it’s obvious that there is no such thing as a text that closes off all possibilities. Nothing will help, even if you write everything. And so we know that even after he wrote—what did he write? He wrote the Mishnah, something extremely concise. It’s like Maimonides’ introduction. Maimonides writes that he composed the Mishneh Torah in order to save us time, so that we wouldn’t waste time on Abaye and Rava and could occupy ourselves with philosophy, which is what really matters. And what happened in the end? Of course, we spend all our time on Maimonides. Maimonides means the Mishneh Torah. We spend our time resolving contradictions in Maimonides, and how he fits with the Talmud, and how he disputes the Rashba. Thousands of books. Exactly—he only gave us more ways to deal with the very things he was trying to spare us from, because that’s naïve. It’s naïve. There’s no such thing. You’ll never close something like that off. Impossible. On the contrary: usually, the more you write, the more possibilities you open. People try to close everything down, and when you try to close it down, you open even more. We talked about this once, I think—I don’t remember when. There’s an article by Amos Oz called “The Full Wagon and the Empty Wagon,” and there he complains about the ossification of Judaism, of Jewish law or of Judaism in general, Jewish thought and so on. And he describes it as though there was some great explosion at Mount Sinai—which he presumably doesn’t believe in, but never mind. And there was this great explosion, and in his description some kind of room was created, and ever since then we’ve been filling the room with furniture. But we don’t remove any furniture; we only keep bringing in more and more furniture, because you’re not allowed to take anything out. Everything that accumulated is holy. At a certain point you end up in a situation where you can’t do anything in that room. You sit there and you can’t bring anything in, can’t move, can’t do anything. Everything is frozen. The whole space is already occupied; everything closes in on you. I don’t agree with that article. What?

[Speaker D] They still somehow manage to get more in.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They still somehow manage to get more in, but maybe that’s because this room is like the Big Bang—you know, space itself is expanding, meaning the room’s volume is growing. But I think he’s wrong there on many things. One of the things he’s wrong about is what I’d call a mathematical effect, even though it has expressions in the humanities too; but at root it’s mathematical. Say you have a room like a chessboard, okay? Never mind black and white—sixty-four squares, eight by eight. Okay? There’s one chair in it. How many ways are there to arrange the room? Sixty-four.

[Speaker N] The number of squares?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, assuming each chair—

[Speaker G] Occupies one square, otherwise obviously—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then there are sixty-four possibilities. If there are two chairs?

[Speaker N] Sixty-four times sixty-three.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Divided by two if they’re identical, doesn’t matter. And if they’re not, then not. Okay? Much more. If there are three chairs? Much, much more. So the more furniture there is in the room, the more ways there are to arrange it. It opens possibilities much more than it closes them off. Up to the midpoint. Yes—from thirty-three chairs on, that’s already equivalent to thirty-one, right? Arranging the holes instead of the chairs, it’s the same thing.

[Speaker D] No, but that’s only if the chairs are identical.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, if the chairs are identical. And if the chairs are different, then I don’t know if it goes all the way. Let’s think about that.

[Speaker D] Except for the last chair—the last chair already gives you the fewest options.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Do the full calculation including different chairs—I don’t think so. But with identical furniture. It’s not clear, but you can arrange it. You can arrange it.

[Speaker H] And you very—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Often—it’s a metaphor, of course, bringing in and arranging. But we know this when we interpret halakhic sources. In the Talmud certainly; the Talmud is a very open text. But even Maimonides, whose tendency is the opposite—to close things, to fix them, to define them, to rule, and so on—how many ways are there to interpret him? Tons, tons. If Maimonides hadn’t written, there would have been far fewer halakhic possibilities.

[Speaker O] If—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If Maimonides hadn’t tried to close halakhic possibilities, fewer would have been created.

[Speaker O] Why would fewer have been created?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because then there wouldn’t be the view of Maimonides, and you wouldn’t need to reconcile it in ten different ways, so there would be ten fewer positions. I once gave this example, I think, from the Maggid Mishneh in the laws of hiring, in the laws of lender and borrower—hiring, I think. He writes there, Maimonides writes there, that if a guardian hands the item to another guardian, then in a certain situation according to the Mishnah the second guardian is exempt but the first guardian is liable. If he guarded properly, then he is exempt—but the first guardian is liable. That contradicts the Talmud, so it can’t be right. And the Maggid Mishneh reconciles it in various ways—how one could nevertheless say such a thing—and the Kesef Mishneh on the side—the Maggid Mishneh was before him so he didn’t see this—but the Kesef Mishneh on the side brings a responsum of Maimonides, where they asked him about this, or a responsum of Rabbi Abraham, I don’t remember exactly which of the two, and he said: it’s simply a scribal error.

[Speaker P] A scribal—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Error. The first guardian is exempt, not liable; it was a printing mistake. That poor fellow ended up—

[Speaker P] What does it help that they wrote it and now people know better how to behave than if they hadn’t written it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is a certain aspect in which that’s true, and a certain aspect in which it’s the opposite. “An eye for an eye” does fix something, yes, but it opens up all sorts of other possibilities. The more sources we have, those who feel bound by all the sources have to be very creative in order to carve out some path that remains consistent with them. Someone who isn’t bound to anyone or anything doesn’t need to be creative. What’s the problem? He just says what he thinks. We once talked about this too: who was smarter, Rabbi Akiva Eiger or Rabbi Akiva? A gap of what, fifteen hundred years, maybe even more. Who was smarter? I think Rabbi Akiva Eiger. It’s pretty obvious. Rabbi Akiva—big deal—so he composed the Mishnah? What was there to know in his day? The Mishnah. The Mishnah one can know—it’s not a trivial matter, okay, but it’s not beyond the heavens.

[Speaker Q] By that logic, every physics student is smarter than Einstein.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right—not smarter, but holding more knowledge. Smarter is already a question of inferential ability and interpretive ability, but I mean at the level of how much knowledge you have. Maybe I didn’t phrase it correctly. Not smarter—smarter I don’t know how to measure—but who possessed more knowledge? Obviously Rabbi Akiva Eiger possessed more knowledge, no question. It doesn’t even come close; there’s no comparison at all. The question of interpretive and inferential ability—I also have my suspicions about that, but that’s another discussion.

[Speaker L] Again, it could be that for Rabbi Akiva all these things were in his head; they were just obvious so he didn’t write them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Anything is possible, all those considerations.

[Speaker L] In the end—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the end, when you’re interpreting a great many sources to which you’re committed, you usually need much more creative and brilliant arguments than someone who simply says what he thinks. That’s what Rabbi Akiva did—he basically said what he thought, or what he had received from his teachers, he said it; they asked him, he said forbidden. We already talked about how the responsa of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) are much shorter than those of the later authorities (Acharonim). The medieval authorities—when you ask them what the law is—they say forbidden, permitted, maybe they bring a Mishnah or Talmudic text or something, that’s it, no big production. The later authorities say, wait a second, but that contradicts that Talmud, and the Rashba understood it this way, and Maimonides that way—you build an entire structure, something that can be brilliant intellectually, something Rabbi Akiva never even needed to reach. What was the problem? So at the intellectual level that’s much more brilliant, certainly what they wrote. What he had in his head, I don’t know—that’s speculation. But what they wrote—there’s no comparison at all. When you try to follow a line of argument by Rabbi Akiva Eiger in homiletics and novellae, you faint. Now there was a brilliant man. You don’t see intellectual power like that among the medieval authorities, the amoraim, and the tannaim—not at all. A halakhic ruling this way or that way—what exactly was there. I just want to—

[Speaker R] To think things through in advance? To think things through a thousand years ahead—that’s—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, but the gap—I don’t see there, okay, you can say there was some spirit there, maybe sometimes you think ahead, sometimes it doesn’t seem to me they thought ahead. I don’t see brilliant things there. I’m not awed by the Talmud, say, by its ideas or by the structure of a sugya, as though there’s something brilliant there. On the contrary, there are places where I wonder whether this really holds water, and whether I’m doing interpretive gymnastics to save it—did they really mean this, or were they simply not speaking coherently? I don’t know.

[Speaker I] But we’re talking about the whole body, aren’t we?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying: what I really do admire, and we talked about this, it connects to something else, is producing the Talmud. To produce a text of this kind, which is very non-intuitive—that’s not how you produce a canonical text. A canonical text is Maimonides, or even a book even better than Maimonides from the standpoint of more modern thinking. But to establish the canonical text as the Talmud, with an open-ended give-and-take text like that, without conclusions—almost nowhere is there a conclusion. The interpretive freedom there is very great. Certainly if we did not have in our hands the tradition of the medieval authorities, which we also feel committed to. In the Talmud you can really do whatever you want. Anything. Whatever you want is in the Talmud. Whatever you want.

[Speaker N] Even Satan can quote the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) for certain purposes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not only can he—he does. In any case, let me get back to our topic. There is something in the Oral Torah that cannot be written, even if one wants to. It can’t be done, nothing will help. And it’s not just a policy that one may not write it; it can’t be written. Even when you try to write, what?

[Speaker I] If it can’t be written, then why is it needed?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, one is forbidden to write what one knows, but I’m saying: even if you wrote it and violated that prohibition, you still wouldn’t really succeed in writing it. Who wrote? Let’s do the math. Who wrote? Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi wrote, right? The Mishnah. Deliberately? One second, is this authoritative or not authoritative, this baraita contradicts the Mishnah. They wrote. Now the Talmud too has been written—Rav Ashi, Ravina, never mind who edited it, it too was written. So now everything is fine already? The medieval authorities dispute a thousand times more than the amoraim did—far more disputes. The more canonical sources we have, the more interpretive options there are. Like the chairs in the room. There are phenomena in life that have a very simple mathematical explanation. That really is the explanation. Once you’re not bound, once you have no sources you’re bound to, there are no combinations. Say what you think and that’s that. In other words, there’s not much to do there. Once you’re facing a hard problem and you need to resolve a contradiction, you have to be creative. All sorts of possibilities arise that you would never have thought of. So I mentioned that Maggid Mishneh who reconciles Maimonides on the case of one guardian handing to another, and later authorities too—Rabbi Chaim on that Maimonides and all the rest. Now Rabbi Chaim had presumably seen the Kesef Mishneh already, at least. What happened there? There’s some assumption that there is holiness to the mind of Maimonides.

[Speaker C] But what did Amos Oz mean? That Amos Oz you mentioned in the article, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what did he mean?

[Speaker C] He’s not stupid.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He thought it really does fix things. He feels—

[Speaker C] No, I don’t think you’re right that everything is open. There are so many—there are things—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you think I’m right, fine; that has nothing to do with Amos Oz. Leave aside the ad hominem. You think I’m not right? No, fine. What Amos Oz meant is not—

[Speaker C] That absolutely everything is open.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say that everything is open. I said that when people try to close things down, very often they open more than they close. I agree that obviously if you write “an eye for an eye,” you have closed something to a certain extent. But the fact is that you opened all sorts of possibilities that perhaps wouldn’t have arisen before. So the attempt to close things down doesn’t really succeed, and I think that’s also a historical fact, not only a logical fact. A historical fact. Maimonides tried to close things down, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi tried to close things down, Rav Ashi tried to close things down—none of them succeeded; they only opened things up. Because did disputes increase or decrease over the years? Do we have more halakhic approaches than there were in the time of the tannaim or the amoraim, or fewer? Many more.

[Speaker L] But it still narrows things. What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, that’s why I say there is a certain aspect in which it also— I’m not saying it’s one or zero. Obviously it also closes some things, or closes—“closes” is too strong a word—but yes, it helps a bit to preserve, but obviously it also opens a huge number of other things. You really cannot write the Oral Torah. You can’t. It’s not—you can write it, it will help a bit, you won’t forget a few basic things. But you will never close it off. You can’t close such a thing off. This is also the positivist illusion in the legal world. The positivist illusion that thinks you can write a law code—yes, the Germans thought so, maybe some still do—that you can close the law book in such a way that a computer will be able to produce the legal rulings for every situation, the verdict for every situation. It doesn’t work like that.

[Speaker L] But what you’re saying, that it really expanded—that he’s mistaken in the interpretation because there are many arrangements—the alternative he’s talking about is really the space of opinions that exists in the world. And we came—fact is, there was the Bible or whatever, and we came and narrowed it into something that the Rabbi says is very broad, but the world took it and opened it with Christianity and Islam and whatever you want, a whole space.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure you’re right. First of all, Christianity and Islam—fine, that too came out of it, first of all.

[Speaker L] No, so that’s exactly what he’s saying. He says: look, you narrowed it now into something—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t narrow it; I added more options. Now there is Christianity and Islam, and besides that another ten shades of Judaism.

[Speaker L] But now you yourself are limited to that option—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because I chose that option, but that doesn’t reduce the number of options in the world.

[Speaker L] But what Amos Oz is talking about is the option that you—that we as a people narrowed—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, I understand what he means. I too complain not infrequently about ossification and conservatism and closed-mindedness. But I’m saying there’s something in that logic that I think is wrong. That’s what I want to say. I’m not saying he was talking total nonsense.

[Speaker C] The basis is that you have to pray three times a day. The options are what exactly you say. But the basis is—no, I’m giving an example. The freedom, the freedom is more in the details, basically. I don’t think—but the principles, the axioms, I don’t think you’re right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think you’re right. I don’t agree that it’s only a matter of finer resolution. That’s basically how you’re describing it—that only the resolution gets finer and finer, and therefore the number of options grows, because we’re holding a stronger magnifying glass. But it’s not that the picture itself is really more branched out. I don’t think you’re right. I mean, the way, say, Maimonides saw—

[Speaker C] What are we complaining about? And you too—that Judaism isn’t open? You see today how people are struggling over Kolch and Morasha, all kinds of things that—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other options; it means they aren’t choosing them. Exactly like with Christianity and Islam. If I really thought those were the only options that existed, then what would I have to complain about? I think there are additional options and people ignore them. To me that’s what conservatism means. Not that there are no other options. If there are no other options, then there aren’t; that’s God’s will, what can you do. My claim is that there are other options and people are reluctant to make use of them. And why? Exactly what those who forbade writing the Oral Torah feared has happened. They thought that once the Oral Torah was written, it would fix the matter, and that really did happen. I only think it doesn’t have to happen. I can show you from within— with the fixing of the Oral Torah, with the— they don’t choose them.

[Speaker C] Then that’s no longer Judaism? That’s Abraham Michael.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s already another question. You defined Judaism as only Maimonides. In my view that too is Judaism, but to each his own. I—

[Speaker C] No, okay. Judaism—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I’m not saying that defensively. Fine, everyone chooses his own option, but such options exist. There are many options. And history never removes options. There’s no such thing. History only adds options. By the way, that’s also why stringencies often get added. Because those who understand that all one can add are stringencies—you can’t add leniencies, because adding a leniency means disputing someone who came before. A stringency you can always add. So this is a natural process that emerges from that outlook. There’s a simple mathematical explanation for it: the level of stringency rises across the generations. It has to. It necessarily follows from that outlook. Because you aren’t willing to add more—you don’t choose other options that exist. After all, they exist; there are thousands of other options.

[Speaker D] Maybe that’s what Amos Oz meant? What? Yes, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And in that sense I agree. I’m just saying that the logic he describes—as though we keep adding more furniture—even I don’t throw Maimonides out. On the contrary, I use him to generate options that without him perhaps wouldn’t have existed. In my eyes he adds options, not subtracts them. The fact that there’s more furniture in the room adds options, it doesn’t reduce them. Now, treating the Oral Torah as though it were the Written Torah—which is very widespread in today’s halakhic world—that is what gives rise to Amos Oz’s complaints, complaints with which I sympathize. Because people think there is no room for interpretation and that it has to be read literally. Fine. So I share that criticism.

[Speaker M] And still, people try to do harmonization, and not, say, interpretive re-readings of the type that a translator— the sort of interpretation you get in the Talmud. Re-readings where an amora interprets the Mishnah in a way that seems very far from the original text.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. No, obviously. That’s part of the same—

[Speaker M] And that happens less?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Certainly. On the contrary—that’s the conservatism Amos Oz is right about when he talks. Again, I don’t think one should interpret things dishonestly. That’s not right. There are straightforward interpretations that people don’t adopt because of conservatism, because of the need to cling to precedents. We already talked about what I wrote in Makor Rishon more than once about first-order halakhic rulings and second-order halakhic rulings. Yes—the first time I mentioned it was over some ruling by the rabbis of Beit Hillel about an orphan girl saying Kaddish. Okay? I think we talked about this, right? About an orphan girl saying Kaddish, where they began with the questioner in the responsa of Havot Yair saying that his grandmother said Kaddish in the synagogue—I don’t know who, what, and all sorts of things. It was absurd. It was absurd. When you begin a halakhic responsum, how should it begin? What are the headings? What is being discussed? Meaning, which prohibitions, commandments, rabbinic laws, Torah-level laws are relevant to the matter. In the next stage, you need to clarify each of them—what each one says, the definition of each one from the sources, medieval authorities, later authorities, reasoning, everything—clarify it. In the third stage, make a synthesis of all that and decide what you think. Nobody there even pointed out what the issue was. There was no question of what the problem is with an orphan girl saying Kaddish. It wasn’t mentioned. What—is there some prohibition here, some commandment? What are we discussing? Why do I need the questioner in the responsa of Havot Yair who tells about his grandmother? And if his grandmother hadn’t, then what? What’s the problem with an orphan girl saying Kaddish? I mean, do you think there’s a problem? Put it on the table, say what the problems are and discuss them. But there was nothing. They started immediately with so-and-so said this and so-and-so said that and so-and-so said this. It’s absurd. But that is the same conservative outlook I’m talking about: you don’t lay out all the possibilities that exist, you don’t even examine the issue at its roots; you just teach—collect precedents, and you view those precedents as if they were Written Torah. And if his grandmother hadn’t said Kaddish in the synagogue, then what? She also didn’t drive a car. What does that have to do with anything? Huh? Maybe there’s also grandmother Kaddish. Could be. So those are ultra-ultra-Orthodox.

[Speaker C] But in the Talmud too they often bring—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Proofs: we see that this person behaved this way.

[Speaker C] No problem,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] After you’ve told me there’s a problem. You tell me “a woman’s voice is nakedness,” so it’s forbidden for a woman to say Kaddish, fine? Now bring me Havot Yair’s grandmother—just as an example, I don’t know if he actually brings her. There’s something with Havot Yair there; I don’t remember anymore. But bring me Havot Yair’s grandmother who said it. And if Havot Yair agreed, then he presumably didn’t think there was a problem in a woman doing this. There is a place for precedents; I also don’t want to exaggerate their importance, in my opinion. That can be debated. But that has to come in stage two or three. Meaning: first of all explain what the discussion is about. A halakhic responsum begins first of all with: anything not forbidden is permitted. There are people who assume that anything not explicitly permitted is forbidden.

[Speaker D] Maybe the discussion is about custom?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then let them say that. I have no problem; they can say that too. Is the custom such-and-such? But then I would expect some discussion of whether custom really means whatever people once did, even if it arose from circumstances that are obviously different today. Fine, maybe you think yes—say so. Then that’s the discussion. But you have to put the headings of the issues under discussion in the responsum and then begin to discuss them. That’s how a halakhic responsum ought to be structured. So I’m bringing this only as an example; I won’t go into it here now. But I bring it only as an example of the fact that people treat the Oral Torah as some kind of Written Torah. If they bring some view from some responsa or I don’t know exactly what, somebody said something—then that’s a verse. That’s it, now everything is fine, the discussion is closed. Closed? I can also write you a responsum; in mine it will say that my grandmother didn’t say Kaddish. Now my responsum says one doesn’t say Kaddish, so there, now you have that written too. This attitude toward something written as something sacred is of course natural to a tradition based on a Written Torah, but it isn’t correct, because it’s an artifact, yes—a man-made product of writing down the Oral Torah. And even after the Oral Torah was written, we are not supposed to view it as Written Torah. It was written so it wouldn’t be forgotten, but not so that we should cling to it in the same sense in which we cling to it now—much more than we cling to the Written Torah. We cling much less—much more. Much more, right. Than to the Written Torah.

[Speaker I] When a question is asked, a rabbi is asked a question, he opens books.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I said: of course you may open books; certainly you should open books—in stage two.

[Speaker I] It’s not a matter of may.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In stage two. First organize for yourself what’s on the table. I’m saying it’s a disease.

[Speaker I] Someone asks a question, he opens books.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s perfectly fine; it’s good to open books.

[Speaker I] I’m saying, it’s already become like—I don’t know—let’s see.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, that’s already something else. You can open books without that kind of mindset. You can open books in order to understand what people said, what the custom is, what the various positions are concerning different prohibitions. If Maimonides said something, or the Mishnah Berurah, or the Shulchan Arukh, I don’t know—that carries weight; I’m not dismissing that. Again, there’s no need to exaggerate that weight; I too have criticism of that. But certainly one should open books in stage two, after deciding what the issues under discussion are. That’s how a responsum should be structured. Meaning: first what are the issues under discussion; now clarify each one, and then open books and do everything. At the bottom line, say what you think. Yes, regarding annulment of marriage, kiddushin, that I once dealt with there, which also stirred up a bit of a commotion. So the first thing I thought needed to be written—and with this we’ll more or less finish—was to write three sentences: women today are not willing to be betrothed, meaning under those conditions, and therefore it is a mistaken transaction; on those terms she did not become betrothed, and that’s all. Why do I need to bring medieval authorities and later authorities and sources and Talmudic passages? I may need to bring from the Talmud that this is a relevant argument, meaning that there is such a thing as mistaken transaction even in the context of kiddushin, and there is such a Talmudic text, I can bring that Talmudic text, fine? But from that point on, I also see the discussions in the rabbinical courts, that even those who dare to examine the possibility of taking such a step, the examination is always second-order. Always: what does that responsum say, and is that a sufficient reason? Is a husband afflicted with boils such-and-such? Is an apostate husband—

[Speaker I] That’s because of a political assumption—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I understand. Again, I’m not getting now into current or political explanations. I’m pointing to the phenomenon as it is. And the phenomenon as it is, is that people do second-order work. Meaning, they look for precedents. If Rabbi Moshe Feinstein or Maharam of Rothenburg— the earlier the better—said that such a thing is grounds, that an apostate husband is grounds, then fine. Ah, today people—why should women care whether their husband is an apostate? For some women that’s not what bothers them. Doesn’t matter; Maharam of Rothenburg said that if the husband is an apostate then “it is not good to dwell with him,” and therefore the woman would not agree to kiddushin on those terms, so it’s a mistake, a mistaken transaction. Check whether that is relevant today. What is this—what, is what Maharam of Rothenburg wrote now Written Torah? Even with the Written Torah we don’t do this. There’s some attitude toward writing as something sacred. Something from which one must not deviate. And that’s what they were afraid of.

[Speaker O] So then it isn’t connected to writing; it’s connected to the tradition of halakhic rulings. Because Maharam of Rothenburg ruled that way, not because he wrote that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If it weren’t—no, no—but I think that if it hadn’t been written, the attitude would have been different. Because if it hadn’t been written, then the tradition of halakhic ruling would have been transmitted orally. And a tradition of halakhic ruling that is transmitted orally does not pass through the particulars at all. And I return to what I started with: the ox that gored a cow. What is apprenticeship under Torah scholars? What does it mean? Say that before someone issues rulings there’s a kind of custom that he should apprentice himself to a well-known, skilled halakhic decisor, yes, that he should receive authorization to rule from him. What do you do in that apprenticeship? After all, all the sources you can read on your own, you can be tested and know them, everything is fine. What is the apprenticeship? The apprenticeship is trying to understand how to apply this to practical situations, how to apply this to our world. Now once we move to ruling out of books, then the element of apprenticeship disappears. Okay? Even people who do apprenticeship—depends with whom—but even people who do apprenticeship understand it only as how to read the sources correctly, not as a supplement to or continuation of yeshiva learning. Meaning, they don’t understand that it’s something entirely different. It’s not that at all. It’s the question of what to do with the sources, not how to interpret them. What to do with them at all. Which sources are relevant here and which aren’t. That is what apprenticeship is supposed to give.

[Speaker S] Isn’t apprenticeship the tradition—to serve Torah scholars and see how, to understand how he relates—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I told the guys in the kollel, in the class on water I think, I told them that it says a person does not fully grasp his rabbi’s mind until age forty. So until age forty, a person thinks that “grasping his rabbi’s mind” means understanding what his rabbi meant. By age forty, when he’s already standing on his own feet, he’s mature, then he understands that “grasping his rabbi’s mind” means saying what he himself thinks, what his rabbi would have thought—what he thinks. In other words, that’s what it means to grasp his rabbi’s mind. I’m saying this seriously; it’s not just a homily. In my opinion it’s true. No, it’s a homily in the sense of explaining what the Sages meant, but the principle itself is a correct principle. Likewise, what Rabbi Kook writes about Rabbi Eliezer, who “said things no ear had ever heard, yet said nothing he had not heard from his rabbi”—he says that he heard from his rabbi things that no ear had ever heard before, including his rabbi’s ear, I would add. In other words, what does that mean? And it’s completely true. Completely true. It’s not fanciful at all. It’s entirely correct. Anyone who knows, anyone who has already experienced this—I know, I had a maggid shiur from Bnei Brak who was really my main rabbi, not a rabbi in the sense of “your rabbi” in the submissive sense, okay? And my whole relationship to him was that I consulted with him about all sorts of things, life problems too, not just learning problems, but I came to consult. Meaning, I wasn’t receiving instructions, and he knew that. That was the relationship. So I would come ask a question, and we’d talk it through, and he’d say something, I thought something else, he corrected me, helped me think, and in the end I’m supposed to decide what I think. Right? I think that really is the correct relationship, certainly today, between student and rabbi, in my opinion. Not that the rabbi just tells you.

Yes, we’ve already talked a few times about the two kinds of Hazon Ish people. The Hazon Ish people who do everything written in the books of the Hazon Ish, and the Hazon Ish people who do what they think, the way the Hazon Ish did what he thought. And those are the real Hazon Ish people, of course, because that’s really what the Hazon Ish educated people toward. So yes, Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel—we talked about him last year, so I probably mentioned him there. Gedaliah Nadel was a real Hazon Ish person. Those Hazon Ish people who are strict about all the water and blood and blood—what exactly is the connection between them and the Hazon Ish? The Hazon Ish did what he thought, and to be a Hazon Ish person means that. And therefore it seems to me that there is something in the way tradition is conceived—I’m returning to our discussion—there is something in the conception of tradition that is not right. People think tradition means passing along pieces of information. That’s not true. Tradition means passing along a way of looking.

Now, you can’t pass along a way of looking in isolation. A way of looking is always rooted in halakhic details. You say: in this situation I think the law is such-and-such, and the considerations are these and those. If there were no situations, if it were floating in the air, you couldn’t pass along a way of looking. So how do you pass along ways of looking? I don’t know. You look—quite simply, you look together. You see a halakhic situation, begin to clarify it, think about it, bring sources, discuss it. You pass something on, but what you’re passing on is not the halakhic ruling for this case. What you’re passing on is how to look. The case is just the practical setup.

And here I come back to the beginning of what I was saying: what the author of the Tanya writes there, that the ox and the cow are not interesting because they never were and never will be—that’s not important at all. What you learn there is: if there is an ox and there is a cow and there is a Mishnah that says such-and-such must be paid, what happens now in this situation? What do we do? How? And is a car the same thing? You begin now to look—not because a car belongs to our world and therefore we need to know what to do, but because it belongs to our world and therefore we know how to think about it better. So we plant that way of looking in our world. And that clarifies the way of looking much better for us.

Rav Tzadok writes this in more than one place, I think: Torah is a way of looking, not a collection of details. It’s how you look at things. But understand that if Torah is a way of looking, then it cannot escape a certain degree of subjectivity. By subjectivity I mean in the sense that I will not reproduce my rabbi’s way of looking; rather, he will help me build a Torah way of looking of my own, which is the correct way of looking at least for me. And I think that is the rabbi’s role vis-à-vis a student.

And therefore tradition does not mean passing something from rabbi to student onward and onward and trying not to forget and not to lose it, as very often one gets that feeling—and there is some basis for it. You can also see conceptions like that in the Talmud; never mind. There is something in tradition—at least I’m saying this based on what we see throughout history, I’m not now talking about sources and proving my words from the Talmud and so on. De facto, that’s what tradition is. Tradition is something alive, something developing, something that changes form every time. Every person sees it differently. It may be the same thing that you see, but you dress it in your own colors, your own ways of looking, the circumstances in which you operate. Someone who copies norms from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Germany into the Meah Shearim neighborhood today has no idea what he’s talking about. That’s not tradition; that’s idiocy.

And from the Talmud of two thousand years ago? What? That too—not really. What chance do we have, really, of extracting in a reliable way a way of looking from a text written two thousand years ago? I think that is the task of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim). That is the role of tradition: to mediate between us and texts that really do seem far from us. It is genuinely difficult in many cases to be convinced what exactly they meant there, because it seems somewhat foreign. So part of the role of the generations in between is to help us make that leap through them, by way of all of them. But in the end, not in order to cling to what they said, but because that is the way to create within us what we are supposed to do with these things. And that may be completely different from what was done in previous generations. There is no need to panic about that at all. It also happens. Yes, it happens.

Is it only happening now because reality has really changed from then until today? No, it always happened. Of course, reality now is much wilder, so obviously you have to cope at a much faster pace. The whole world’s pace is accelerating, so Jewish law responds to that. But it always happened. Is Maimonides’ Torah really a simple translation of what existed before him? What a joke—what’s the connection? Maimonides certainly relies on sources, completely relies on them, but he relies on them in the sense I just described. I wrote a book about Maimonides’ roots, and consistently I can show that Maimonides and Nachmanides have two different conceptions of the Sages. Nachmanides clings to the Sages, in the simple way we usually understand it. He constantly attacks Maimonides for this. Maimonides, on the other hand, first decides what is correct, and then decides that the Sages said that too. Truly—that is his method. If it’s correct, then the Sages could not have said otherwise.

In other words, if Maimonides says that a law derived from an interpretive derivation is rabbinic, or that a law given to Moses at Sinai is rabbinic in his view—why? Because it is clear to him that this is what it ought to be: rabbinic. Since that is so, then he will reinterpret all the Talmudic passages—not all of them, but many of them—and explain and interpret them as saying that this too is what the Sages meant, and so on. And Nachmanides cries out: listen, the Talmudic passages are shouting that you are wrong. The Talmud is against you in hundreds of places. It’s terribly hard to force his positions into the Talmud. I don’t care right now—I’m not getting into the question of what justifies doing that and what doesn’t—but there are two forms of relating to sources here.

For Maimonides, sources are, in a certain sense—I’m exaggerating a bit—but more a source of inspiration than a source of authority. For Maimonides, first and foremost there is reasoning: what is correct, what is logical, what is plausible. Both at the interpretive level—what is plausible—and at the substantive level—what is plausible. Both. But I’m saying: first of all, what seems plausible to him; afterward we’ll see. Now Nachmanides keeps telling him, but this doesn’t fit with this Talmudic passage and that Talmudic passage. He brings hundreds of passages there, in Nachmanides’ glosses on the roots—it’s really an experience to read. He sails all over the Talmud; it’s amazing. But consistently every time he says: this doesn’t work. Here it says this, and here it says that. You can’t just decide what seems logical to you and force the whole Talmud into those categories.

So if even the medieval authorities (Rishonim) extracted two contradictory ways of looking from the same sources, then how can we claim that there is one binding way of looking? You bring it out yourself. What does “binding” mean? You think for yourself, arrive at your own conclusion, and the other person will arrive at a different conclusion. If among the medieval authorities there were two, among us there will certainly be ten. That each person can also do it without connection to the whole tradition? No—not think all by yourself. We have to be careful, because in hermeneutics there is the same confusion, and I think people mix this up too. What leads people to the view in hermeneutics—the theory of interpretation—what leads people to the approach called deconstruction, that is, to a kind of nihilistic conception that says you can do whatever you want with the text, that what matters is what the text does to me—meaning, there is no commitment to interpretive considerations, meaning to test your theses against the text, because the assumption is: in any case, look how many interpretations there are, and therefore there is really no such thing as a true interpretation of a text, or of the author’s intention, or anything like that, like those naive conceptions called naive realism. And that is a mistake.

It is a mistake because it is true that there is a multiplicity of interpretations, but I do not think that necessarily means there is no true interpretation of the text. You have to understand what the text really says from your perspective, and be honest. Not to try to do whatever you want, to force the text—that’s deconstruction—but rather: what does it really say from your point of view? Living with that double consciousness is a bit difficult. But even if you understand exactly what the text says, there’s the public discourse where they tell you there shouldn’t be separate factions, and then you’re not allowed to say anything at all, and there are ridiculous things like asking for rain only from Cheshvan, or, I don’t know, the second day of the holiday observed in the Diaspora, all kinds of things where you see no one dares do anything against it. Some of them I also would not dare do anything about, and with some of them I share the criticism. There are also mechanisms in Jewish law about what you can do and what you can’t, and that too is part of Jewish law. Fine—I at least partially share that criticism, certainly.

But I’m saying: the fact that there are several different interpretations does not mean that the text is therefore open and you can do whatever you want with it. Decide what is right and then force the text afterward. Crudely speaking, that is basically what the deconstructionists want to say. And that is not correct. The fact that there is a multiplicity of interpretations only means that because we are built differently, when we approach the very same text each of us extracts from it an interpretation that is different, or can extract an interpretation different from someone else’s. That does not mean the interpretation is not correct. This is what we once talked about regarding Bach’s genius in music; one of the previous times we discussed that. Yes, there is something objective in the matter, but it gets colored by the consciousness of the interpreter. But even if you were looking through my eyes, this would be the correct interpretation and not another one, because if you did something else you would be mistaken. It’s just that, true, you are not looking through my eyes, you are looking through other eyes. What can you do?

Part of interpretation is definitely what we think is correct and plausible; we factor that into the interpretation too. But really, think of it this way: you’re looking at the same thing once through red cellophane and once through green cellophane. So is the thing red or green? If you look through red, then it’s red; if you look through green, then it’s green. And you’re looking at the same thing. It’s just that the form of seeing, or the image reflected to you, is a function of two things: first, the thing itself; and second, the glasses through which you look at the thing. Therefore the images come out different—not because the thing itself does not exist there at all, or because there is no right and wrong.

And therefore “these and those are the words of the living God”—we also talked about that once, I think—“these and those are the words of the living God”: I think the correct conception here is a harmonistic conception. It is not a conception in which one is right and one is wrong, or both are right; rather, each one grasps part of it. And the full picture is the collection of all the perspectives together. Since in truth each person has his own point of view and sees the same thing itself from his own point of view, someone wise enough and able to listen to others may perhaps gain some fuller view of the thing, even if he does not fully identify with it, but he understands that there is such a side that he himself is unable to see in that way. In other words, for him that side is blocked, because he is built in a certain way or because he has gone through one biography or another. And I have no problem with that; I do not think this leads to absolute relativism, to nihilism. It does not lead to nihilism. It leads to greater interpretive freedom than is usually accepted, but not to the nihilism of deconstruction. And that, I think, is simply wrong.

There were those who tried over the years to do this. What? For example, the Shulchan Arukh. It gathered, yes, but I don’t think it built syntheses. I don’t think that’s right. Synthesis, it seems to me, is more modern than what they did. In the yeshivot they try to make syntheses, but I don’t think the older tradition did that. There is a collection of opinions—he collected opinions, yes, he collected opinions. But when you build from that some kind of complete picture—not just collecting the opinions but trying to show that all the opinions together create some fuller way of looking at the topic—did anyone perhaps think that way? Even Maimonides. Even Maimonides, I’m not sure to what extent he did that. He gathered; I don’t think Maimonides made grand syntheses between opposite or different opinions. That was not his method. His method was innovative in many respects, and he followed it. Synthesis is the opposite. Again I return to what I said earlier: it comes דווקא from those who are committed to several houses of study or several ways of looking, and then you say: wait, but they are saying different things, so you have to produce a picture in which each one has his own place, and the overall picture is really the sum of all of them. Sum in the broad sense, not a technical sum but an integration of all of them.

So it all comes back to the same point. I simply see that this has taken me much longer than I thought. I want to finish here this matter of poetry. I began with the fact that the Torah is called poetry. So here, in order to try to explain why the Torah is called poetry, I want to use what I have described up to this point and say that basically the conception of the Torah—Written Torah and all the more so Oral Torah—as a prose text is a complete miss. Because there is an essential difference between a prose text and a poetic text. Everything I said until now, which is true of prose to some extent, is far more true of poetry.

When I try—I spoke about this once, a long time ago, I think I spoke about it once—I once had to speak in Munkatch on the Sabbath of Parashat Beshalach. So now let’s talk a bit about poetry: what is the definition of poetry, what is poetry? I looked in the Hebrew Encyclopedia, and it turns out there is no entry for poetry there. What is the definition? Yes—there’s no entry for poetry. So I said, all right, I need to think a little on my own. And I tried to look for what people say. There’s a book by Shimon Sandbank, I think, which is the only one I saw in Hebrew, as far as I remember, that tries to give a systematic treatment—at least from what I saw; I didn’t do comprehensive research—but that really tries to give a systematic treatment, to define the concept. No wonder there is no encyclopedia entry, because it’s hard work.

And you find all kinds of definitions taken from what is called ars poetica. Meaning, poets try to define in a poetic way what poetry is—not an academic definition, not a systematic treatment. So that’s not enough. Some more systematic work has to be done here. And what deters people from defining the concept of poetry is that the concept of poetry itself has to be interpreted somewhat like poetry. There is a book by Gideon Ofrat called What Is Art? And chapter by chapter he examines a different definition of what art is and rejects each one of them. He rejects them all—a very interesting analytical work—until in the end his conclusion is that art is whatever is displayed in a museum. Duchamp’s urinal, yes, with the urinal and the toilets. So I agree with his whole line of argument except for the conclusion. The conclusion is very postmodern and deconstructionist, if you like—the same thing—and I am willing to go with him all the way except for the conclusion. Because the fact that you fail to fit it into a single definition only means that one has to make some sort of synthesis among all the definitions, and not see it dichotomously: either this definition, or this definition, or this definition. And when you look at it a bit more softly, I think you can move toward a definition of what poetry is.

I’ll do this in two minutes. I once gave a series of lectures about it online following that Beshalach Sabbath. I think that in the end, in order to define a kind of concept like this, one that belongs more to the humanities, you have to do a kind of work that in the natural sciences is done more easily: define some kind of toy model. That is, take two types—the thing itself in its purity—try to look for what pure poetry is and what the most distant antithesis is, say some dry-as-dust encyclopedia, a kind of prose at its most prosaic. Okay? And then try to understand the difference between them, to define well what poetry is. Then suddenly you see that all the things these people refuse to accept—because you define poetry in a certain way, but Bialik’s poem is also poetry and it doesn’t fit your definition—right, it doesn’t fit completely because it lies on the axis somewhere. Roughly speaking, if I locate the axis correctly, I place two poles on either side, call one poetry and the other prose, and I can define a great many intermediate states. Poems, sonnets, plays. Literature too, by the way, is not at the extreme. Literature is not prose in my definition. An encyclopedia is prose. Literature has a poetic dimension in a literary work.

Because when you try to define poetry, you know, you try to define meters, rhymes, melodies, and none of that really works. Poetry does not submit to all those constraints; quite the opposite. I began there online and wrote a passage: “Toward the upcoming Shabbat Shirah, may it come to us for good, I began to wonder what the definition of poetry is as opposed to prose. For example, are there additional categories on this axis? For instance, the Psalms seem to me not to belong to prose, but that isn’t exactly poetry either. So perhaps psalms are a third category,” and then I went on. I spoke about various other things. So one of the people in the forum there took that paragraph, vocalized it, broke it into short lines, and said: there, this is poetry. For example—it was a beautiful exercise. And the question is whether that really is poetry or not. I think not. It doesn’t matter that you break it into lines and add vocalization and so on. And why not?

The bottom line—and I can say this briefly, I spoke about it once—the bottom line is that prose conveys information to you through the meanings of the words. That’s an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia comes to convey information. This country was established in such-and-such a year; it currently has such-and-such a population. Totally dry information. If you understand the meaning of the words, there aren’t many degrees of freedom here. It tells you what he meant. Poetry, in the pure sense—I’m now speaking of a pole that perhaps doesn’t even exist, but never mind—poetry in a completely pure sense is something in which there is no connection whatsoever between what it conveys to you and the meaning of the words. “There was a lone lamp at the edge of a neighborhood.” Fine? Is that trying to tell you that once there was a lone lamp at the edge of a neighborhood? Of course not. Let’s say it’s a beautiful poem, but it isn’t trying at all to say that. It uses some situation familiar to us in order to awaken in us something that is not really connected to lamps and neighborhoods. The lamps and neighborhoods are means through which it awakens something in me—I don’t know exactly what. That is why it is poetry.

Poetry basically means that the meaning of the poetic text is almost not related—or at the extreme pole, not related at all—to the meaning of the words. The words are some sort of medium through which I convey the real thing. Now, if I define it this way—in a terribly simplistic way, this needs much more expansion—but then you see that there are many things. Literature, for example, you understand that it is not entirely prose according to this definition. Because obviously he is not coming to tell me that Raskolnikov went there and killed that person. Obviously not. He is trying to describe some state that draws me into a situation, gives me… But it’s not completely poetry either. It is more connected to the meanings of the words, to the meanings of the sentences. And therefore in poems too you have enormous freedom in how you join the words, because it does not really matter. It does not have to meet standard rules all that much. Because standard rules govern how you convey information through the meaning of words. But that is not what poetry is trying to do.

Now, if you define it this way—I say this just in one sentence to finish—if that is how poetry is defined as against prose, then it becomes very clear why Torah is poetry, if one adopts what I tried to describe just now. Because what Torah conveys is basically a way of looking; it is not information at all. If there are no oxen and no cows and nobody is goring anybody else, it’s not important. We are not talking about oxen or cows at all. And it’s not even about property damages, so that you translate it into cars and so on—not even that. It does say that too, but that is not what it came for. It came to tell you what Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin and the author of the Tanya say: it is simply the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. That’s all.

Now, if that will is not embedded in oxen and cows, there is no way to convey it. What will you say? How can you express abstract wills? You have to plant it in a situation. You have to say it. That is why the experiences a poem conveys also have to be conveyed through words. There is no other way to transmit those experiences to me by meditation. You have to use words, which are only the medium through which the real thing passes. And I think that is why Torah is called poetry.

There is a Talmudic passage in tractate Shabbat about all the holy writings. The Talmud discusses there the sanctity of the blank margins, whether they may be saved from a fire. The Talmud discusses a Torah scroll from which the writing has been erased, and eighty-five letters remain; you save it from the fire, because it still has the sanctity of a scroll. And the Talmud asks: if so, why do you need eighty-five letters? Not eighty-five letters—if you say that even the margins have sanctity, then save it because of the sanctity of the margins even if no letters remain. Why do the letters matter? And the Talmud says that the place of the letters—that’s not what I’m talking about—the place of the letters was sanctified for the sake of the letters. The place of the margins is sanctified in its role and function as margin, not in its function as letters; in the function of what is between the lines. In the language of our discussion, that is the poetic dimension of the matter, and it has sanctity with no connection at all to the letters. In other words, there is sanctity to the parchment. That is very interesting. What does that have to do with anything? And the parchment on which the letters are written—no; if the letters are erased, you can throw it in the trash. Because there is something here… the lines are really just the pegs that carry the margin.

In other words, there is something in this poetry such that looking at it—certainly in the Oral Torah, but even in the Written Torah—as a prose text is to miss the whole point. That is the writing of the Oral Torah.