Conditions – Lesson 4
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Desecration of God’s name in the building and the institution
- A condition not formulated according to the laws of stipulations: the condition is void but the act remains valid
- The approach of Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva: empty talk and the difficulties with it
- R. Yitzhak’s approach in Tosafot on Ketubot 56: uprooting, his legal act has run its course, and the Torah’s innovation
- The dispute as a dispute about mechanism: retrospective clarification versus “from now on, retroactively”
- Annulment of vows and Maimonides’ example of twelve months
- Logical determinism, truth value, and causality
- The story of Osmo and Richard Taylor: foreknowledge and fatalism
- Knowledge and free choice: critique of the solutions and the proposal that the Holy One, blessed be He, “does not know”
- Time travel: nonsense, and then a definition through two time axes
- Applying the model to conditions and distinguishing it from retrospective clarification
- Retroactive determination versus condition: the Rosh and Nachmanides on Gittin 25 and the connection to the mechanism of conditions
- Retroactive determination and events that depend on choice: Nachmanides’ approach
- An “if” condition versus an “on condition that” condition in Maimonides, and the question of the laws of stipulations
Summary
General Overview
The text states that there is a desecration of God’s name in the building, along with waste of money and the troubles caused to people, and therefore it does not matter who heads it; what matters is that the institution itself exists, and it should have been closed long ago. After that, an analytical discussion is presented in the laws of conditions: when a person stipulates not in accordance with the laws of stipulations, the Talmud rules that the condition is void but the act remains valid, and the medieval authorities (Rishonim) ask how the act can take effect if the stipulator did not want it without the condition. The text presents two fundamental understandings of the mechanism of a condition—retrospective clarification versus causal uprooting retroactively—and connects this to topics such as annulment of vows, examples in Maimonides, the topic of retroactive determination, and the distinction between an if condition and an on condition that condition. Finally, it adds a philosophical framework about determinism, the truth value of statements about the future, knowledge and free choice, and time travel, in order to sharpen what “from now on, retroactively” means.
Desecration of God’s name in the building and the institution
The desecration of God’s name in the building, the waste of money, and the troubles they cause people mean that it does not matter who stands at the top; what matters is that the institution exists. It should have been closed long ago.
A condition not formulated according to the laws of stipulations: the condition is void but the act remains valid
The Talmud states that when a person stipulates in a way that does not fit the laws of stipulations, the condition is void but the act remains valid. A person who betroths or divorces on a condition, but does not formulate the condition in doubled form, or stipulates against what is written in the Torah, causes the condition to be nullified, and the woman is betrothed or divorced without qualification and without dependence on fulfillment of the condition. The medieval authorities (Rishonim) object that if he stipulated “on condition that she has no claim on me for food, clothing, and marital rights,” then from the Torah’s perspective there cannot be betrothal without food, clothing, and marital rights, and from his own perspective he did not want betrothal with food, clothing, and marital rights either. So it would seem that there should be no betrothal at all. Yet the Talmud validates the betrothal, and therefore the obligation of food, clothing, and marital rights remains.
The approach of Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva: empty talk and the difficulties with it
Rabbeinu Tam, the Ritva, and other medieval authorities (Rishonim) explain that he is just “talking extravagantly,” not seriously intending to make a condition, similar to “on condition that you ascend to the sky.” So in truth he wanted to betroth her, and what he said about food, clothing, and marital rights is not a serious condition. The text notes a sharp difficulty with this approach when he says in front of witnesses that he means it seriously, and it cites the objection of Kovetz Shiurim, which points to a passage distinguishing between “stipulating against what is written in the Torah” and “talking extravagantly,” because the Talmud itself asks why we need the category of “stipulating against what is written in the Torah” if we could simply say, “it follows already that he is just talking extravagantly.” This approach is presented as being driven into a corner by the problem of why “the condition is void but the act remains valid.”
R. Yitzhak’s approach in Tosafot on Ketubot 56: uprooting, his legal act has run its course, and the Torah’s innovation
R. Yitzhak in Tosafot on Ketubot 56 explains that a condition is an attempt to uproot a legal effect, and that runs into two problems: going back in time, and the fact that his legal act has run its course—once the act has been done, you cannot touch it anymore. Likewise, you cannot create a legal effect later on, such as “you are divorced in a month.” The Torah innovated the concept of condition in such a way that the legal effect takes hold in any case, and if the condition is not fulfilled, then the mechanism of condition, when properly created, uproots the effect after it has already taken effect. When a person did not stipulate according to the laws of stipulations, the legal effect takes hold in any case, but the mechanism of uprooting was not created, and therefore the act remains valid and the condition is void. That explains how “the condition is void but the act remains valid” without saying that he was not serious.
The dispute as a dispute about mechanism: retrospective clarification versus “from now on, retroactively”
Embedded in R. Yitzhak’s words is the assumption that a mechanism of retrospective clarification does not exist: there is no future event that “reveals” retroactively; rather there is only uprooting according to the Torah’s definitions. By contrast, Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva are understood as seeing a condition as a mechanism of retrospective clarification, in which the future event is not a cause but a disclosure of information about what had been. The text connects this to the question of how to read the section about the tribes of Gad and Reuben: according to Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva, that section innovated only the formal laws of stipulations, because the very concept of condition is “obvious by logic”; according to R. Yitzhak, the Torah innovated the very possibility of making a condition because of the problems of going back in time and his legal act having run its course. Rabbi Shimon Shkop is described as formulating this as “from now on, retroactively,” and as describing it as retrospective rather than retroactive.
Annulment of vows and Maimonides’ example of twelve months
Annulment of vows is presented as a mechanism in which the vow takes effect and the sage uproots it after it has taken effect, rather than revealing that there never was a vow. Therefore there is a practical difference regarding lashes for violating the vow, even though it was later annulled. An example from Maimonides describes a bill of divorce given “from now if he does not return within twelve months,” so that she not remain an agunah, and if witnesses come and say he died after two months, Maimonides forbids her from remarrying until all twelve months have passed, because the actual fact of non-return brings about the divorce, and mere knowledge that he will not return is not enough. The text raises the implication for the question whether she is a widow or both a widow and a divorcee, and describes a theoretical possibility that before the twelve months she could marry an ordinary priest, but afterward it would become clear that she had been married unlawfully and would have to leave, while comparing this to the fact that a religious court would not want to put her into that predicament even if “strictly speaking” that would be the law.
Logical determinism, truth value, and causality
“Logical determinism” is presented through Aristotle and Łukasiewicz and three-valued logic, and the text argues that Aristotle is wrong, because if “tomorrow there will be a sea battle” and in fact there was a sea battle, then the statement was already true today, even “from the creation of the world”; we simply did not know it. The logical determinist is said to infer from this that the future is necessary because the truth value is already fixed, and the text rejects that, because truth value is a logical label, not an event and not causal information. The connection between the future event and the truth value of the sentence is a logical relation that is indifferent to the time axis, not a relation of cause and effect, and therefore this does not imply that the event is predetermined.
The story of Osmo and Richard Taylor: foreknowledge and fatalism
Richard Taylor, in his book Metaphysics, is cited with an invented story about Osmo, who finds in a library a book called The Story of Osmo that describes his past exactly and also his future, including his death in three weeks in a plane crash on the way to New York. In his struggle to prevent it, he in fact causes the crash on the way to New York. The question raised is whether the problem is created by reading the book or by the very existence of such a book, and the text argues that, simply speaking, it is enough that the book exists in order to fix the future. From that it argues that if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, then everything is deterministic, and the knowledge itself imposes necessity, regardless of whether the person “read” the information.
Knowledge and free choice: critique of the solutions and the proposal that the Holy One, blessed be He, “does not know”
The text presents the problem of knowledge and free choice as a contradiction among three elements: God’s knowledge, the time axis, and the freedom with which a person acts. It rejects the answer of “above time” as irrelevant, because at most it explains how the information was obtained, not how freedom is preserved once the information exists. It cites Maimonides in Laws of Repentance chapter 5, who says this is a question “broader than the sea” and cannot be known, and criticizes the explanation “not like our knowledge” if it still remains actual knowledge that precedes the choice. The Raavad is brought as saying something like “like the knowledge of astrologers,” in a movie-watching style, but the text rejects this with the help of Nozick’s Newcomb paradox and concludes that if there is free choice, then the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know what will be chosen before the choice. In the name of the Shelah, in Beit HaBechirah and in the introduction to the Shelah, it is said that the Holy One, blessed be He, simply does not know—and then there is no difficulty at all.
Time travel: nonsense, and then a definition through two time axes
The text argues that the concept of “going back in time” is not logically defined and is like a “round triangle,” and that a physical discussion of whether it is possible misses the question of what the concept means. It distinguishes between causal influence on the past and “being on Wednesday after Thursday,” and argues that the latter is meaningless. Therefore even the Holy One, blessed be He, is not “above logic” and cannot do logical contradictions, similar to “a stone He cannot lift.” It then proposes a way of defining time travel by using two time axes, t and tau, such that the experienced flow occurs along an additional axis. It also describes physics in five dimensions with two time dimensions in the work of Nadav Shnerb, Arie Uri, and Larry Horwitz, including the note that in relativity tau appears as an interval. Within this framework, time travel is defined as moving backward along t while continuing to move forward along tau, and the text uses this model to conceptualize “from now on, retroactively,” where legal status depends not only on t but on both t and tau.
Applying the model to conditions and distinguishing it from retrospective clarification
The text illustrates a divorce condition, “on condition that she not drink wine,” as a graph in which, if the drinking occurs later, it uproots the divorce retroactively, so that the question of status on Tuesday depends on the point of view of tau. By contrast, in retrospective clarification there is no need for two time axes, because no change occurs in the past; there is only added information, as in the example of someone who was in Australia and had a child born to him, but does not know whether it is a girl until he arrives in the country. The text argues that a legal system cannot include logical contradictions, because from a contradictory system one can derive any conclusion, and therefore even in the legal world “going back in time” must be coherently defined in order for us to speak about it.
Retroactive determination versus condition: the Rosh and Nachmanides on Gittin 25 and the connection to the mechanism of conditions
The text presents the topic of retroactive determination through the case of a barrel of untithed produce on the Sabbath and the declaration that the last log left will retroactively be terumah and tithe, and also through Sabbath boundary eruvs with two eruvs depending on the place to which the sage will come. It cites that the Rosh, Nachmanides, and other commentators on Gittin 25 discuss the relationship between retroactive determination and condition, and explains that retroactive determination is a choice between two positive possibilities, not between legal effect and no legal effect. It argues that one can construct retroactive determination as the sum of two conditions when two separate legal effects are created, but retroactive determination in one bill of divorce for two women does not work according to Jewish law, because “in Torah-level law there is no retroactive determination.” The explanation offered is that according to R. Yitzhak, a condition requires that the legal effect first take hold and then be uprooted, and here it is impossible to apply divorce to two women with one bill of divorce in order later to uproot one of them. It suggests that the view holding “there is retroactive determination” fits the mechanism of retrospective clarification, in which it becomes clear retroactively for whom the bill of divorce was written, whereas according to the mechanism of retroactive uprooting no such possibility exists.
Retroactive determination and events that depend on choice: Nachmanides’ approach
Nachmanides on Gittin 25 is presented as arguing that for events that depend on choice, the law of retroactive determination is not applied, because information about a choice does not exist before the choice is made, and therefore one cannot say there is retrospective clarification. The text distinguishes between “an act of a person” and “a person’s decision made through deliberation,” such as “on condition that father approves.” It illustrates that according to the view “there is retroactive determination,” the woman is already today defined as “the one who will go out tomorrow through the doorway first,” and the future serves as a definition rather than causality, similar to Aristotle’s sea battle.
An “if” condition versus an “on condition that” condition in Maimonides, and the question of the laws of stipulations
The text concludes with a distinction brought by Maimonides between an if condition, as a prospective condition in which the legal effect takes place only from the moment the condition is fulfilled, and an on condition that condition, where “whoever says ‘on condition that’ is as though he said ‘from now.’” That is a condition of “from now.” It notes that Maimonides claims that all the laws of stipulations are needed only for a prospective if condition, not for a retrospective one, and this is presented as strange if the laws of stipulations are meant to allow causal return backward in time. An explanation is cited in the name of Beit Yishai, placing the need for the laws of stipulations in the problem that his legal act has run its course in an if condition, in order “to keep the deal alive” until the decision point. The possibility is raised that Maimonides understands an on condition that condition as retrospective clarification, although it is said that there are places in Maimonides implying that he adopts “from now on, retroactively.” The text notes a possible resolution in the section of the tribes of Gad and Reuben, namely that it is an if condition and not an on condition that condition, and concludes that they are nearing the end of the discussion of conditions. Next he will move on to “stipulating against what is written in the Torah,” then to monetary matters, and then to stipulations on the Torah or not on the Torah, and finally he says “more power to you” several times.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The desecration of God’s name in that building, and the waste of money, and the troubles they cause people—so it doesn’t matter who stands at the top. What matters is that the institution exists. It should have been closed a long time ago already. Okay, so we’re in the middle of the topic of conditions. We saw last time, and the two times before that, the discussion of what happens when the laws of stipulations are not fulfilled. If a person stipulates in a way that doesn’t fit the laws of stipulations, then the Talmud says the condition is void but the act remains valid. Meaning, let’s say someone betrothed or divorced a woman with some condition, and he didn’t formulate the condition in doubled form, or he stipulated against what is written in the Torah, then that goes against the laws of stipulations, so the condition is void but the act remains valid. Which means the woman is betrothed or divorced, period. Without qualification and without dependence on any fulfillment of the condition. And on this the medieval authorities (Rishonim) ask: why? Suppose he betroths the woman on condition that she has no claim on him for food, clothing, and marital rights, and he didn’t formulate the condition in doubled form, or he stipulated against what is written in the Torah. Then that goes against the laws of stipulations, so the condition is void but the act remains valid. Meaning that the woman is betrothed to him and he owes her food, clothing, and marital rights. The medieval authorities (Rishonim) ask: but on the side where he would be obligated to give her food, clothing, and marital rights, he never wanted to betroth her in the first place. So I understand why he can’t create betrothal without food, clothing, and marital rights, but the outcome should have been that there is no betrothal at all—not with and not without food, clothing, and marital rights. Betrothal without food, clothing, and marital rights can’t be, because the Torah doesn’t allow it; that is stipulating against what is written in the Torah. And betrothal with food, clothing, and marital rights can’t be either, because he didn’t want it. So really the result should have been that there is no betrothal in any case. But the Talmud says no—the result is that there is betrothal in every case. Meaning, regardless of the question whether there is an obligation of food, clothing, and marital rights, there is betrothal, and therefore since the Torah requires food, clothing, and marital rights, there will indeed be such an obligation. So why? How can that be? So we saw two directions among the medieval authorities (Rishonim). One direction, that of Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva and other medieval authorities (Rishonim), says that basically he is just talking extravagantly. He didn’t seriously mean to make a condition. Meaning it’s like someone who says, “on condition that you go up to the sky.” Right—if he says “on condition that you go up to the sky,” then he doesn’t really seriously mean to make that a condition; he’s just trying to hassle her. And since that’s the case, the truth is he wanted to betroth her; he was just talking nonsense when he said, “on condition that you have no claim on me for food, clothing, and marital rights.” Now of course this is very difficult, especially if the person says in front of two witnesses, “No, no, I mean it seriously.” Then what? Then he would be able to stipulate against what is written in the Torah? And we saw that Kovetz Shiurim objects that there is an explicit passage showing that stipulating against what is written in the Torah and talking extravagantly are not the same thing. The Talmud says: why do we need the category of stipulating against what is written in the Torah? It should follow already that he is talking extravagantly. But if stipulating against what is written in the Torah just is talking extravagantly, then they are the same thing. Clearly they are not the same thing. In short, this approach of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) is difficult. What forces them into this corner? That’s obvious—there’s a hard question here: why is the condition void but the act remains valid? But still, it’s a corner; it’s difficult. So we saw R. Yitzhak’s approach. He argues the following, in Tosafot on Ketubot 56. He says: basically, when a person makes a condition—wait, before stipulating against what is written in the Torah—when a person makes a condition, he is basically trying to uproot a legal effect. Meaning: I betroth or divorce a woman, and if something does or does not happen, I want to uproot what I did. Now, uprooting what I did suffers from two problems. One problem is that this means going back in time. There can’t be a future cause that uproots something in the present. Meaning, the cause appears after the effect. And second, his legal act has run its course. Meaning, once the act has already been done, you can’t touch it anymore—you can’t nullify it and you can’t do anything to it; his legal act has run its course. By the same token, you also can’t create a legal effect after time has passed. Suppose I give a woman a bill of divorce and say, “You are divorced in a month,” or “betrothed in a month”—there’s no such thing. Once I performed the action now, then either the legal effect takes place now when I perform the action, and if it doesn’t take place, then that’s it, it’s lost; the act was done, the legal effect didn’t take place, and in a month it can’t suddenly pop into existence out of nowhere. His legal act has run its course. Meaning, the action he performed has already ended; it no longer exists in the world, so it can’t bring about any legal result. So those are the two problems that the mechanism of condition is trying to deal with. And to that R. Yitzhak says: therefore the Torah had to innovate the concept of condition, because without the Torah’s innovation of the concept of condition, we would not know that such a thing is even possible. And what did the Torah innovate? It innovated that what you need to do is actually let the legal effect take hold in any case, whether the condition is fulfilled or not fulfilled, except that if the condition is not fulfilled, then the mechanism of the condition that you created when you stipulated properly will uproot the legal effect. Not that it was never there—it uproots it. And that’s how it has to work, because without this you cannot have conditions. If you want to create a qualified legal effect, that is the only possible mechanism. There is no other way to do it, and not merely to clarify retroactively that it was never there. In a moment I’ll sharpen that more. If so, then when the person made the condition, what he really meant was to betroth the woman in any case, whether there is food, clothing, and marital rights or whether there isn’t. If there is food, clothing, and marital rights, he wants to uproot it. And that can be done if you created the mechanism of uprooting according to the way the Torah defined it—that is, if you stipulated according to the laws of stipulations. So now what happens when you don’t stipulate according to the laws of stipulations? Then it comes out that you applied the legal effect in any case, and the mechanism that uproots it if the condition is not fulfilled was not created, because you didn’t apply it the way the Torah established. Therefore it remains: behold, you are betrothed to me in any case. And therefore the condition is void but the act remains valid. That’s basically how R. Yitzhak explains it. There are several assumptions built into R. Yitzhak’s words. One assumption is that a mechanism of retrospective clarification does not exist. There is no such thing as a future event revealing what happened now. If you want, we are talking about uprooting backward. But uprooting backward works only according to the Torah’s definitions, because otherwise it cannot be carried out. That’s one assumption. As opposed, say, to Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva, who apparently understand the mechanism of condition as a mechanism of retrospective clarification—something that reveals what was; it doesn’t turn the past into something else. It is not causal production; it only opens our eyes. Suddenly we understand what was in the past, what we didn’t know or understand until now. This is a basic dispute between Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva on the one hand and R. Yitzhak on the other. Because they say that he didn’t mean it seriously—which implies that if he had meant it seriously, it would have worked. They understand that the Torah did not innovate the concept of condition. The concept of condition certainly exists: if you didn’t intend it, the legal effect cannot take hold. Right, only the laws of stipulations—yes, that really is the subtext of the dispute I just described. The question is how they read the section about the tribes of Gad and Reuben. Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva understood that that section innovated the laws of stipulations; the concept of condition itself is obvious by logic, even without the Torah’s innovation. The Torah innovated only the formal laws of stipulations. By contrast, according to R. Yitzhak, the Torah innovated the very possibility of making a condition, because of the issue that his legal act has run its course and the issue of going backward in time. Without the Torah’s innovation, you cannot make a condition. Consequently, what happens? You have to stipulate in the manner the Torah defined, because only then can you uproot the act that you performed. If you did not stipulate the way the Torah defined it, then the act is not uprooted. And therefore the condition is void but the act remains valid. According to R. Yitzhak and according to Rabbeinu Tam, in principle if the person really meant it seriously, then the condition should take effect even if it’s against what is written in the Torah, and even if all—because if he doesn’t mean it, there is no legal effect. Meaning they do not accept what R. Yitzhak says, that condition is something the Torah innovated and that without it you cannot do it. In their view, it’s simple logic: even without any Torah innovation, there is such a thing as a condition. Therefore they are forced to say that if you stipulate against what is written in the Torah, or not according to the laws of stipulations, then you simply did not intend to stipulate. But if you really had intended to stipulate—so fine, what difference does it make in what formula you phrased it? Meaning they assume that the concept of condition is something grounded in logic. You don’t need to follow the rules of the laws of stipulations according to the Torah’s formal rules. It’s logic: if you didn’t intend it, there’s no legal effect. Only here, he simply did want it; he didn’t really mean to make a condition, he wasn’t serious. So really their dispute is about how to read the section of the tribes of Gad and Reuben, and what the innovation of that section is. Is the innovation the very possibility of making a condition, as R. Yitzhak understands, or do Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva say no—the very possibility of making a condition is obvious by logic; the innovation is that one must stipulate according to the laws of stipulations. As a result, according to R. Yitzhak, “the condition is void but the act remains valid” because you really intended to apply the act in any case. According to Rabbeinu Tam, it is simply because you did not intend to stipulate. Had you intended to stipulate, then really the act would not remain valid; it’s just that you didn’t intend it. I said that the difference between them is in the question of how they understand the mechanism of condition—not what the Torah innovated, but how the mechanism of condition itself works. Meaning, according to Rabbeinu Tam and the Ritva, the Torah did not innovate the mechanism of condition. So they hold that the mechanism is retrospective clarification. What does that mean? I divorce a woman on condition that she not drink wine for thirty days. In principle, that means the fulfillment of the condition does not causally bring about anything happening now. It only reveals to me what happened. It opens my eyes and reveals information I did not have. By contrast, according to R. Yitzhak, the future occurrence is a cause that brings about the current result—either applying the legal effect or uprooting the legal effect. Meaning the future event stands in a causal relationship to what is happening now, not merely a retroactive disclosure. What is the Torah’s innovation?
[Speaker A] What is the Torah’s innovation? Isn’t the disclosure itself a Torah innovation? Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Someone who says it is retrospective clarification doesn’t need any Torah innovation. It’s obvious that if it turns out I didn’t intend to apply it, then the legal effect didn’t take hold. What Torah innovation do I need for that? But if you say it is “from now on, retroactively,” then you are basically saying no—there is causality backward in time here. Without the Torah’s innovation I would never have known that such a thing can happen at all. So that is an additional innovation, and in the end the claim is… I forgot what I wanted to say… yes. So we went on, we saw the further meaning of R. Yitzhak’s mechanism. The claim is basically what Rabbi Shimon Shkop calls “from now on, retroactively.” What? Retrospective? Yes, exactly. Meaning this is not really retroactive; it is retrospective. Meaning when I look at the past from the standpoint of now, it turns out to me that the past was like this, and not what I thought. We saw this in connection with annulment of vows, and we saw that basically the vow really takes effect, and when the sage annuls it, he uproots the vow after it has already taken effect. It is not that he reveals that there was never a vow; rather, he uproots the vow. A practical difference would be if we want to give lashes to someone who violated the vow—we can give him lashes. If afterward he goes to a sage who annuls the vow, and it turns out that the vow never existed, then how can it be that he was lashed? He didn’t violate a vow. No—he did violate a vow, the vow existed, and afterward, at some future time, it was uprooted—uprooted retroactively, but uprooted. We saw several examples that Rabbi Shimon Shkop brings to show that this is also the mechanism of condition, just like in annulment of vows. For example, the words of Maimonides about a person who divorces his wife if he does not return within twelve months. Right, so that she not remain an agunah: a man goes out to war and divorces his wife from now if he does not return within twelve months. Okay? Now the question is: we know that he died. Two witnesses come and say the man died after two months. So there are still ten months left before the twelve months are up. Maimonides says she may not remarry until the full twelve months have passed; she has to wait ten more months. Now, if this were retrospective clarification, then we already know he’s not coming back. We don’t need to wait another ten months to know the reality. The reality is that he won’t come back, and therefore the reality is that she is divorced. So what’s the problem? Why shouldn’t she remarry? But if we understand that his not returning for twelve months actually brings about the divorce, and does not merely reveal to us that there was a divorce, then in order for that to generate the divorce it has to happen in practice. His not returning has to happen in practice. Therefore you have to wait another ten months before she remarries.
[Speaker A] Maybe he’ll come back to life?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not because maybe he’ll come back to life. We know he won’t come back to life; that’s irrelevant. But you need the factual non-return for twelve months in order for that to generate the divorce. It isn’t enough that I know he won’t come. It’s like if I say, for example, “I know that tomorrow you’re going to buy this field from me.” Does that mean it’s already mine today? No. I know—but when you buy it, then you’ll buy it. What? A widow? She’s a widow—no, if he died, then she is a widow and not a divorcee. A divorcee? No, widow is obvious, but she’s not a divorcee. She can marry an ordinary priest, not a High Priest. Right.
[Speaker A] Ah—what’s the significance if she’s both a widow and a divorcee? If you say it’s retrospective clarification, then she is both a widow and a divorcee.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. And if not, then she is a widow. Now after the twelve months, what happens? After the twelve months it turns out that she is also divorced, right? And then even an ordinary priest may not marry her.
[Speaker A] Ah, so there’s a… both a widow and a divorcee? What? Both a widow and a divorcee.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What happens in the middle period—that’s a topic we’ll get to later.
[Speaker A] So here she became both a widow and a divorcee?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. After twelve months she is divorced. That’s it. She was divorced, after all, two months before the husband died.
[Speaker E] Can she marry a priest before the twelve months are over? What? Can she marry a priest before the twelve months?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, only afterward it would turn out that she was married to him unlawfully and she would have to leave. I assume they wouldn’t let her marry from the rabbinic standpoint; the religious court would not want her to get into that trouble. But yes, strictly speaking, that is what should have been. Exactly like I don’t think a religious court would give lashes to someone who violated a vow if it knows he is going to go have the vow annulled by a sage, even though in principle according to the law it could lash him. So this is basically the alternative mechanism—the mechanism of R. Yitzhak—how conditions really work. I want to make a few philosophical remarks, to sharpen a bit the meaning of what we’ve just seen. Look, there is the question of determinism. Determinism means: is everything that is going to happen dictated by the current circumstances? Or can there be several different possible futures stemming from the same circumstances? One of the arguments brought in favor of determinism is what is called logical determinism. What does logical determinism mean? It goes like this. Aristotle once argued that if I ask today whether there will be a sea battle in a week, the answer yes is not true, and the answer no is also not true, and in fact you can’t even say yes-or-no about the future, because you cannot speak about the future—the future hasn’t happened yet. And as a result of that, there is three-valued logic. Łukasiewicz was a well-known Polish logician; he created three-valued logic. About statements concerning the future, you cannot say only yes or no; there are more options. For example, “not yet determined” is another option. True, false, or not yet determined. Okay? That’s three-valued logic. But for our purposes, what does this really mean? In the end Aristotle is not right, because when I say, “Will there be a sea battle tomorrow?” then assuming there will be one, that is already true today. I just don’t know it. If I said, “Tomorrow there will be a sea battle”—is that a true statement or not? We don’t know. Let’s wait until tomorrow. We see there was a sea battle. Now I ask: was the sentence I said yesterday true? Certainly. What is a true statement? A true statement is a statement whose content matches the state of affairs it describes. Right? Now let’s check: is the state of affairs it describes correct? Yes—tomorrow there was a sea battle. I’m not asking about probabilities, not probabilities—he said, “Tomorrow there will be a sea battle,” not percentages.
[Speaker A] There will be a sea battle, not percentages.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course it’s a true statement. I just don’t know that until I wait till tomorrow and see. Aristotle claimed that regarding the future you can’t even say that it will happen or that it won’t happen. You can’t speak about the future—it is not yet determined. But clearly that’s not right. Meaning, if I say, I don’t know, “In two years so-and-so will die.” Fine? If he really does die in two years, then that sentence is true already today. More than that: it was true from the creation of the world. We just don’t know it. We human beings don’t know it until we reach that moment and see that he really died then. That’s all, and that is only our lack of information. So now what does this mean, basically? This means—yes, exactly, what does this mean? It means, say the sentence “Tomorrow there will be a sea battle” is already true today. But if it is true already today, then tomorrow it cannot be that there will not be a sea battle, because that sentence is already true today. So tomorrow there cannot really be two options—that there will be or there won’t be a sea battle—because the truth value of the sentence “Tomorrow there will be a sea battle” is already fixed today. If it is fixed as true, then it is necessarily true; if it is fixed as false, then it is necessarily false. No, we’re not talking about probability. I’m talking about a sentence that states the proposition, not probabilistically. Therefore the logical determinist claims that because of this consideration, what happened happened necessarily. Everything that happened happened necessarily because already at the prior time there was a sentence declaring that it would happen, and that sentence was true. So it cannot fail to happen. This reminds me—there’s a book called Metaphysics by Richard Taylor. It’s an introduction to philosophical issues in metaphysics. In one of the chapters he talks about fatalism, I think, and he brings a story there about an American teacher in the Midwest—not a true story, he invented it—named Osmo. That was his name. One fine day he goes into the town library, walks among the shelves, and suddenly sees some book that says The Story of Osmo. Interesting. He opens the book, and it says: Osmo was born in 1973 in such-and-such a place—which is exactly him. To parents Yocheved and Yaakov, who lived at such-and-such address. Exactly. It’s simply him. The book continues—a thick volume—and describes everything that happened to Osmo in kindergarten and in school and that teacher and this teacher and matriculation exams, everything is correct, exactly his story. Then it continues: he went to university and became a teacher. And then one day he entered the town library and saw a book with the title The Story of Osmo. So he opened the book and began reading it—and all this is written in the book itself. Now Osmo starts vibrating internally because the book doesn’t end, it’s only halfway through, there are still pages left. Basically it also describes what is going to happen to him in the future. That’s it. So he doesn’t know whether to open or not open the book—what, continue flipping through? It’s going to tell him what will happen tomorrow? That’s insane. He couldn’t resist; he flipped ahead, and it said there that in the end Osmo would die in three weeks in a plane crash on the way to New York. That’s what was written there. Fine. So three weeks later, Osmo boarded a plane to Idaho—I don’t know, somewhere else—because he had to get there for something. Then a storm started, and the pilot announces: friends, a storm is beginning; I have no choice, I have to divert toward New York. Osmo completely lost it, his fuse blew, he ran to the cockpit, starts fighting with the pilot: “You are not diverting to New York under any circumstances!” And that fight caused the plane to crash on the way to New York. The question Richard Taylor asks there in the book is: what would have happened if Osmo had not read this book? Was there some problem anyway? Was the problem created only because he encountered this book, or does the problem exist simply because the book exists there, even if no one read it? Simply speaking, it’s the same thing. It’s enough that the book exists—assuming it knows everything—to dictate everything that will happen. The fact that Osmo reads the book only creates another tangle, but the determinism is dictated by the very fact that such a book exists. Suppose the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance. If He knows everything in advance, then He could write such a book. So He didn’t write it, but the information exists. And if the information exists, everything is deterministic. What difference does it make whether I read the book or not? That is basically his claim. Therefore he says that if you think that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything that is going to happen, then you are a determinist. Meaning, you cannot be a libertarian and think that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance.
[Speaker A] That’s not right in terms of the theory—time, the speed of light—no, that doesn’t help.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Inside the light cone maybe—inside the light cone, never backward. It still doesn’t help. You can’t—if you know something that is going to happen, that means it is fixed. The claim of the logical determinist is very similar. Basically, if the sentence “Tomorrow,” or “In a week, there will be a sea battle” is true today—true, I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it is either true or not true, one of those possibilities obtains, I just don’t know which one—then I didn’t read the book, but the book exists. And if the book exists, that means that when the sea battle happens, it happens necessarily; it cannot fail to happen. Why is that not correct? Because the truth value of a sentence is a logical label. It is not an event, it is not information. What is a true statement? A true statement means a statement that corresponds to what happened—to what it describes. When I say that a statement is true, I have not made any factual claim; I have attached a truth value to the statement. Okay. Now, if I say that the sea battle that will take place in a week causes the sentence today to be true, is there causality backward in time here? The occurrence of the sea battle is basically determining that already today the sentence is true—is that an influence backward in time? The answer is no, it is not an influence backward in time. Why? Because saying that the sentence is true is not an event, it is not a happening, it is not something that occurs. Causality is when one event causes another event, and there the cause has to precede the effect. But when I talk about the truth value of a sentence, to say that a sentence is true is not an event, so it can be caused by the future—what’s the problem? The future caused it to be the case that already today the sentence can be true. And if in the future there is no sea battle, then that will make it the case that already today the sentence is not true. But that does not dictate what will happen. What will happen will cause backward in time the sentence to be either true or not true from all eternity. But there is no problem in that. It doesn’t mean that what happens, happens necessarily. Do you understand what I’m saying? Meaning, when you talk about events—events can happen; event A causes event B and is the cause of event B—then event A has to happen before event B. It cannot be that relations of cause and effect move backward in time; the effect cannot be before the cause. But here this is not a relation of cause and effect. The relation between the occurrence of the sea battle and the truth of that sentence is not a relation of cause and effect. It is a logical determination. If the battle occurred, then the sentence is true. But the “if-then” here is not causal; it is logical. If the battle occurred, then logically that sentence is true. Okay, logic is indifferent to the time axis. Right—logic, logical relations can hold backward in time, forward in time, simultaneously—it makes no difference. Logic is completely indifferent to the time axis. Okay? That is basically the claim. Exactly. So in a certain sense retrospective clarification basically
[Speaker A] basically
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] says yes, it was always that way; I just didn’t know it. Once I know it now, okay, now I know. Nothing here happened backward in time. But if I understand it like R. Yitzhak and I say that the future event brings about the current state, rather than reveals that this was the current state, that can’t be—because that is a cause appearing after the time, after the effect, later in time. And a causal relation cannot work that way. The Torah innovates that unlike in physics, in the legal world this can happen. That is the innovation of the section of conditions according to R. Yitzhak. Okay?
[Speaker A] The future determines the past? What? What happens now decides the past retroactively?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, but it doesn’t decide the past; it generates the past. Yes. Look, I’ll give you the other side of the coin, because this is a very subtle point. There’s the question of knowledge and free choice. Right? If the Holy One knows everything in advance, then how can we have free choice? Maimonides, in chapter 5 of the Laws of Repentance, says this is a question broader than the sea, and so on and so on, and it can’t be known. In any case, Maimonides argues that on the one hand the Holy One is supposed to know everything in advance, all-powerful,
[Speaker F] and on the
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] other hand, everything is foreseen yet permission is given, right? On the other hand, we have free choice. But there is a logical contradiction between those two things. If He knows in advance, then in what sense is our choice free?
[Speaker F] If
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Suppose, maybe let’s formulate it differently. That’s the problem. For this problem, three solutions have been proposed, because the problem has three components. One component is that the Holy One knows. A second component is the time axis. And when I acted, I acted freely. Those are the three assumptions. These three assumptions don’t fit together; that is, you can’t adopt all three at once. The proposed solutions to this problem divide up according to those components. Some tamper with the knowledge of the Holy One, some tamper with the time axis, and some tamper with human freedom. The simplest is to say: right, a human being has no freedom, the world is deterministic, and therefore there is no problem. The Holy One knows in advance, and in fact we have no choice, and everything is fine. That’s the natural way out. Some want to argue no, the time axis is the problem here, because the Holy One is above time, or all sorts of statements of that kind, okay? And therefore the time axis doesn’t play the relevant role here. But that’s nonsense. Why is it nonsense? Because what difference does it make if the Holy One is above the time axis? If, as we said in Osmo’s story, the information exists today, then tomorrow I can’t act differently. What difference does it make to me that the Holy One is above the time axis? That the Holy One is above the time axis can at most answer the question of how He obtained the information. How did He obtain the information when it hasn’t happened yet? I can’t obtain that information. No no no, He can reach forward in time and bring the information to Himself. Fine, He is above the time axis. But I’m asking a completely different question—not how He can obtain the information, but assuming He already has the information, could I have acted differently? What does that have to do with His being above the time axis? It doesn’t answer the right question. It answers the question of how He got the information, not the question of once the information exists, how I act freely. And that is the question of knowledge and free choice, not the first question. Therefore that answer is irrelevant. And if you are not a determinist, the only thing left is to deal with the third component: the knowledge of the Holy One. And the conclusion is that He does not know. He does not know, because if He did know, then we would not have free choice.
[Speaker A] But in the Torah Maimonides says, not like our knowledge,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now the question is what Maimonides means. If “His knowledge is not like our knowledge” means that He has knowledge but we are incapable of understanding how He obtained it, then once again he is dealing with the question of how He obtained the knowledge—but that doesn’t interest me. If He currently knows, then tomorrow I cannot act differently. Let’s see, a matter of
[Speaker A] As if He sees everything like a movie machine—you pay, you go in, you watch.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s the Raavad’s claim there on the spot, like the knowledge of astrologers. The Raavad says it is like the knowledge of astrologers: I watch a film, and someone acts in the film completely freely, and the fact that I see him does not dictate what he will do. So the Holy One knows how to watch films about the future too. So He sees what we will do. We act freely, and He sees that film in advance. I think that also doesn’t hold water. What? Yes, that’s the claim—that He does not know, that’s the third solution.
[Speaker G] Certainly things that depend on choice,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, things that depend on choice. The rest is only a matter of calculation. Why don’t I accept this argument of the film or the astrologers either? There is Nozick’s paradox, as it’s called. Robert Nozick, a philosopher of law—a philosopher generally, an American Jewish philosopher—spoke about the prophet, what’s it called, Newcomb’s paradox. Newcomb published it, but it’s Nozick’s. He says like this: suppose there is a prophet who knows in advance what you will do. All right? Now he offers you a game. He says, look, there are two boxes here, a closed box and an open box. In the box I put something, either a thousand dollars—wait, how does it go there? No, I put a thousand dollars in the open box. In the closed box I put another sum, or don’t put it—either a million dollars or zero. And now you have to decide: either you take only the open box—wait, no, only the closed box. Or you take both. Either the closed one alone or both. And now I tell you: in the closed box, my plan is this. After all, I know what you are going to do, right? So if you take only the closed box, there will be a million dollars inside. I put a million dollars in there. If you decide to take both, because you’re greedy, then the closed box will be empty and you’ll get the thousand dollars from the open box. I know in advance what you are going to do, after all. I am a perfect prophet, I am the Holy One, and this is the offer I am making you. And I tell you in advance what my strategy is. If you take both things, then the closed box will be empty. If you take only the closed one, then inside the closed one there will be a million dollars. Meaning, if you take both, you will have a thousand dollars; if you take the closed one, you will have a million dollars. What do you do? The million dollars, obviously—just the closed one. But if what is inside the closed one is already there, then why not take the additional thousand dollars too, get another thousand dollars? After all, whatever is in the closed box is already there. He prepared it yesterday, right? Now you take the closed box, okay? So you assume there’s a million dollars there, okay, now take the additional thousand dollars too. So what is the strategy in such a case? One of two things: the strategy is obviously to take both. Because whatever is in the closed box is there, and you also take the open one. But if you take both, then the closed one has to be empty. But if it’s empty, then in any case it’s still worth taking both, because if it’s empty then in any case it’s worth taking both. But then that can’t be, because the prophet did not discover in advance what you would do. Suppose there is a million dollars there, and you took both, you take the closed box, you say, all right, let’s also take the open box, so there’s another thousand dollars there. You get into a tangle. In short, there is no way—if there is such a prophet, there is no strategy. If there is a strategy, there is no such prophet. And in fact, if you assume there is a strategy, the conclusion is that there is no such prophet. There isn’t. There cannot be someone, including the Holy One—it doesn’t matter who it is—there cannot be someone who plays such a game with you and knows in advance what you will do. And therefore I think the film theory cannot work, because in principle there cannot be someone who knows what I will choose. Even in a film. Because otherwise he can play this Newcomb game with me, and then we enter a paradox. So I think that is not an option. And then what remains is that indeed even the Holy One does not know. If I have free choice, then the Holy One cannot know what I will do before I choose. If He could know, that means it isn’t free choice, but rather the result of a calculation that can already be known today.
[Speaker A] So what
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] does Maimonides mean when he says His knowledge is not like our knowledge? Well, whichever way you take it: if he means to say that His knowledge is a different kind of knowledge, not our kind of knowledge—fine, then basically, okay, then the question never really arises. So the kind of knowledge we mean, He doesn’t have. Then He doesn’t have it, so He doesn’t know. Then say He doesn’t know. Say that He doesn’t know. And the fact that we say He knows while meaning something else—fine, that means that what we call knowledge, He doesn’t have. That’s odd; that’s not how you say it. Then say, right, you’re correct, the Holy One does not know. That’s really what Maimonides should have said. To say that His knowledge is like our knowledge in the sense that He obtains future information somehow—that does not answer the question, as I said earlier. Fine, so He obtains it—but the question is how I can still be free after He has obtained the information. In short, I don’t know what Maimonides means to answer there, but it seems quite clear to me that the conclusion here has to be that the Holy One does not know. The Shelah, in Beit HaBechirah, in the introduction to the Shelah, that’s basically what he writes: that the Holy One does not know, and that’s that, and then there is no difficulty at all. So this basically says that even the Holy One is not above the time axis. Even the Holy One really cannot know today a future event if that future event depends on choice. If the future event is deterministic, then there is no problem; you just need to do the calculation. In principle I too can know what will happen in a deterministic process. If I have a strong enough computer, I do the calculation and I know what will happen. There is no problem here. But to know something that is an event of choice that will happen in the future—even the Holy One cannot know that. That is basically the claim. But that does not mean that the Holy One cannot, say, obtain information from the future. In principle He can, it just means I will not have free choice. But when people say the Holy One is above the time axis, that does not mean that this statement is false. Maybe He is above the time axis and can do all sorts of things with the time axis that we cannot do, but still, once He has done it and the information is with Him, then I have no possibility of acting differently. And that is really the claim. Okay? What about going backward in time? Here we spoke about forward. What about going backward in time? Exactly—the condition, what we said according to Ri at least, is going backward in time. The future event acts causally, causally generates something that happens now. Okay? So there is backward movement in time here. And that brings to mind a philosophical-scientific question—I don’t know, some say otherwise—about going back in time. Yakir Aharonov from Tel Aviv University very much enjoys playing with these things. He’s a Nobel Prize candidate; I wouldn’t dismiss him. His adviser got the Nobel Prize, David Bohm I think, his adviser from England. In any case, so he talks about going back in time. Now the concept of going back in time is dealt with in many science-fiction books and all kinds of things of that sort, and also not long ago I saw an article by someone from the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya—today Reichman University in Herzliya—saying he solved the problem of going back in time, I don’t know, computer science, something. He simply doesn’t understand what he’s talking about at all. He doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. What is going back in time? The concept of going back in time is not defined at all. It’s not a question of whether you can do it or can’t do it. Explain to me what exactly you want an answer to—whether it’s possible or impossible. What is the meaning of the concept of going back in time? What is going back in time?
[Speaker A] To be what was just now, what was a moment ago?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—to influence. Let’s speak about going back, before the causal influence. That is not called going back in time. I’m talking about going back in time. To be on Tuesday and afterward return to Monday. Before the question of influences. And with influences there are already paradoxes—what happens if I kill my grandfather? If I kill my grandfather, then I won’t be born. If I won’t be born, then who went back in time? That can create paradoxes. So I’m saying, leave that aside. I’m not even intervening yet, I’m not doing actions in the past after I’ve gone back. First of all I want to clarify what it means to go back. But that concept is not defined. What does it mean to go back in time? Suppose today—what day is it? Thursday. Tomorrow is Friday. Right? So they tell me, let’s discuss whether I can now go back to Wednesday. Right? That is basically going back in time. Of course I can. What’s the problem? Yesterday I was on Wednesday. No no no no, not yesterday—today be on Wednesday. What do you mean? But today is Thursday. What does it mean for today to be Wednesday? If I am on Wednesday, then it is Wednesday; it is not Thursday. So no, I cannot be on Wednesday on Thursday—be on Wednesday. If I am on Wednesday, then it’s Wednesday, not Thursday. And being on Wednesday is no problem, because yesterday I was there. So what does it mean to go back in time? Wait, wait. Again, influencing is something else. Influencing is an easier problem than going back in time. Because you can say that what I do today generates something that happened yesterday. All of causality says that’s impossible, but there is no logical problem here. Fine, maybe an act I do today generates something that happened yesterday. That is not called going back in time. Going back in time means not influencing—that has nothing to do with causality. It means that after Thursday I arrive at Wednesday. But—but that is not after Thursday being day—if I am on Wednesday, then it is before Thursday, not after. What does it mean to be on Wednesday after Thursday? To be before Thursday after Thursday? Meaning, to be a square circle. It’s just words. It means nothing. So what does it mean to go back in time? Physicists discuss whether it is possible or impossible to do it. I expect the question to be what exactly are you discussing—not whether it’s permitted or whether it’s possible or impossible. What are you discussing? What does it mean to go back in time? It is not defined—not conceptually, not logically. These are meaningless statements. It’s like discussing whether it is possible to make a square circle. Can you make a square circle? Neither possible nor impossible—there is no such thing as a square circle. Is virtue triangular? Yes or no? What do you mean? Exactly. Virtues, compassion—it’s just nonsense, a collection of words, it’s nonsense. The answer is neither yes nor no. It simply isn’t—it isn’t a statement, it isn’t a question. Okay? Yes, what is the difference between a rabbit, as children always say, right? What is the difference between a rabbit? That both its ears are longer than each other by the same amount. Meaning, yes, all kinds of such childish nonsense. It says nothing. Going back in time is the same thing. Just word games. I’ll put it more… maybe before I put it in a more fundamental way. When I say it is possible to go back in time, I have actually said a kind of oxymoron. Logically, it is not logically defined; it is a logical contradiction. If it is back, then you did not return back; you simply are not returning back, but rather you are back, you are located back there. Right? To return to Wednesday means to be on Wednesday, not to return. What does return mean? Return means to be on Wednesday after Thursday, but when you are on Wednesday that means before Thursday and not after. And this is just just a word game. You can say, well, the Holy One is above logic and therefore He can do anything and I don’t know what, all kinds of things like that, can do time travel. The Holy One is not above logic. Just as He cannot know future events and leave us free choice, He also cannot make a square circle, and He cannot create a shell that penetrates every wall and a wall that stops every shell, because that is a contradiction. One of the two—either it stops it or it doesn’t stop it, and then one of the two is not as it is defined. Right? There are things the Holy One cannot do: things that are a logical contradiction. The Holy One also cannot go back in time. Also to know the future when in the future I choose freely—this too the Holy One cannot do. Because to know the future when I choose it freely is like making a square circle. If it is chosen freely, then it cannot be known. To lift a stone that He cannot lift—the same thing. Exactly the same thing. Right? Someone asks me whether the Holy One can create a stone that He cannot lift. That’s the, yes, the problem of omnipotence, all-powerfulness. What then? If I say He can, then there is a stone He cannot lift, so He is not all-powerful. If I say He cannot, then once again He is not all-powerful, because He cannot make such a stone. So either way He is not all-powerful. That is the problem of omnipotence, and by the way it has nothing to do with the Holy One. It only says that the concept of omnipotence is a self-contradictory concept. All right? What is the problem here? The problem here is that if I, suppose I think the Holy One is all-powerful, and now someone comes and attacks me, he has to attack me according to my assumptions; he cannot attack me according to his assumptions. Right? He has to show me that according to my assumptions I am led to a contradiction. So attack me according to my assumptions—you won’t succeed. He asks me whether the Holy One can create a stone He cannot lift. What do you mean, a stone that the all-powerful cannot lift? After all, I assume that the Holy One is all-powerful. So explain the concept to me—I’ll answer the question in a moment, just explain the concepts that appear in this question. The concept that appears in this question is a stone that the all-powerful cannot lift. That’s my translation, because I think the Holy One is all-powerful. How is that any different from asking me whether the Holy One can create a square circle? It’s just moving your lips; it’s nonsense. You are assuming your own assumption that He is not all-powerful, so there is a stone He cannot lift. According to your assumption everything is fine. But when you come to attack me, you have to attack me according to my assumptions, not yours. And according to my assumptions, what you are asking is meaningless. All right? Therefore this question is simply misleading. So let me return to our matter. This basically means that going back in time is something undefined; even the Holy One cannot do going back in time. But… what? Why not? I can’t hear. It’s nonsense. It’s all nonsense. Unless one adopts what I’m about to say now. There is another question. Once I had some radio program where they interviewed me about the concept of time on Friday evening. So among other things I talked about this. I said there is some kind of feeling that time and space do not operate in the same way. Time has something dynamic about it—it is constantly flowing, right? And space is something static. And if you try to think for a moment, you’ll see that time cannot be flowing. Flowing across what? Everything that flows flows across the time axis. Suppose a car is driving. So what happens to that car? At one moment it is here and at the next moment it is there. So it changes distance, it flows through space, but the flow is defined over the time axis. But when I say that the time axis itself is flowing—flowing across what? Across what? It is just nonsense. Right? But we do have the feeling that the time axis flows, don’t we? So you can say that we flow across it, not that it flows. It is always there; we flow across it. But we really do have some kind of feeling that the time axis flows. And my claim is that, right, there are two time axes. There is one time axis that is static, universal, fixed, and there is another time axis, which is the axis we feel in our consciousness, which flows across the fixed axis. Hence the feeling of flow with regard to the time axis. That is, if I claim that the time axis flows, there must be some time axis underneath it over which it flows. Now why did I think about this? I have a friend here, now Professor of Physics Nadav Shnerb, who did his doctorate with Aryeh Uri, who was a professor at Tel Aviv University and also here, a very very nice Jew. And for many years now he has been working on physics in five dimensions: three dimensions of space and two dimensions of time. T and Tau, X, Y, and Z—five variables. And one day I said to him, I came to my friend and said, listen, I have an excellent philosophical argument why there must be another time axis, and I told him this argument. He said to me, good morning, Elijah—this appears in the article that opened up that whole line of thought. Right, this was actually their motivation for producing physics with five dimensions, and their claim is that it solves many problems that exist in current relativity theory. Because we are not—we describe everything on the basis of one time axis, but there are two. In any case, for our purposes, what does that actually mean? It basically means that… look, maybe I’ll do this here… where do I need… markers… here… yes. I’m talking about going back in time. You can’t see it in the video. I’m talking about going back in time, and that basically means this. There is some time axis that I denote by Tau, it’s a Greek letter, doesn’t matter. And a time axis T—T is time, right? That’s our regular time axis. When going back in time occurs, the meaning is that time, say here is one, one, two, three, four, and so on. One… everything is measured in seconds, for the sake of argument. And I say this: normally time flows, and when Tau equals one, T also equals one; that is, both times flow together with one another. All right? What is going back in time? Going back in time means that when I reach Tau equals three, right, then there is a drop down here, and then time continues to flow, to climb back up again. That is called going back in time. When I say going back in time, it means that time flows, it flows over this axis. Right? If it flows…
[Speaker C] A fifth axis, not a fourth axis?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Yes, exactly. Meaning, I am now flowing, I reach Thursday. Fine? Now I go back to day zero, three days backward, if these are days now—we’re talking about days. I go back three days and start flowing again from Monday—now Thursday, say from Monday I begin to flow again. That is called going back in time. But now it is well defined, because now I actually can say that I was on Monday after I had been on Thursday. Because here I was on Thursday, one second passed on the Tau axis and I arrived at Monday. So it is after. Even though relative to Thursday I am on Monday, it is still after—it is after in Tau, it is before in T. All right? Are you with me? A graph is a clear concept, right? Graphs… So I’m saying: if the time axis—think of there being some inner time axis that is fixed. I call this axis Tau. Now I run across this axis: on Sunday I am on Sunday, Monday I am on Monday, Tuesday on Tuesday, Wednesday on Wednesday, Thursday on Thursday, and then hop, I jumped back to Monday. Now what does it mean that I jumped back to Monday? It’s not going back—that was exactly what I asked earlier. After all, I cannot be on Monday after Thursday, because Monday by definition is before Thursday. But in order to speak about going back in time, I need to speak about my being on Monday after Thursday. What I want to claim is: I am on Monday after Thursday—after in terms of the Tau axis. There is some internal axis that continues constantly to move forward. Meaning, the next day, on the internal axis, will already be Friday. But in my experiences I will be living on Tuesday. Because I went back.
[Speaker A] The Tau from that time is right here exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] While the regular time T flows over it.
[Speaker A] And here the internal T, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The one that I experience from within, yes. The one I experience inside. So it flows over it. But there too you can also go back. And without this, you cannot speak about going back in time. All right? Without this, what is going back in time? Going back in time without this is one, two, three, to be at one after three. But if I am at one, then I am before three. So what does after three mean? How do I make that transition? It just—it has no meaning at all. Okay? You have to speak about two time axes. Now why is this important? Let’s return for a moment to conditions. What happens in conditions? In conditions what happens is exactly this. Look. What basically happens in conditions is this: I divorce the woman here and I tell her that it is on condition that for three days she not drink wine. Okay? Now I say she drank—at this stage she got here, drank wine. If she drank wine, that uprooted the divorce that took place on Monday. Suppose this is Monday and here is Thursday. All right? It uprooted the divorce that took place on Monday. Okay? So what does that actually mean? I went back, I am starting history again. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—but the woman is no longer divorced. So now what does this thing actually mean? It means that if now you ask me what the woman’s status was on Tuesday—I’m asking you. It depends from which point of view you are looking, right? Tuesday is this day. This is Tuesday, right? That was Monday, so this is Tuesday. What is the woman’s status on Tuesday? Well, it depends. If you are standing here, she was divorced, because I applied the divorce in any case. If you are standing here, from this point of view, after the non-fulfillment of the condition, then the woman is not divorced. All right? Or in other words, whether the woman is divorced or not divorced is not a function of T alone but a function of T and Tau.
[Speaker A] Tau is like a truth position. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because as far as I’m concerned, T and Tau are both time axes—it doesn’t matter at the moment. And then my claim is: I don’t know whether the woman is divorced on Monday. Right? I say this is T equals Monday. Is she divorced? There is no answer. Tell me at what Tau. If you are at the original Tau, where Tau itself is also Monday—divorced. If you are at the Tau that is on Wednesday, then she is not divorced. But this function does not depend only on T; it depends on T and Tau. Okay, that is basically the meaning. Only this way can you define going back in time. Now you have to understand that even if, say, physically it is impossible to go back in time and influence backward in time, as we just saw legally it is possible. But if this were not defined on the logical-conceptual level, then legally too you couldn’t speak about it. That is, in order to speak about something legally, it has to be defined coherently. I’m not speaking now about the question whether it can be done—that is a physical limitation. Whether it can or cannot be done—in the legal world there is no such limitation, you can do it. But if it is not defined on the logical level, then even in the legal world you cannot speak about such a thing. It is not defined. If you speak about something contradictory, you can derive from it any conclusion you want. Right? That is a basic property of logic. That is, if you hold a system in which one of the assumptions—two of the assumptions—contradict one another, meaning the system contains a contradiction, then you can derive from it any conclusion you like. And that system says nothing. A contradictory system says nothing. Okay? Therefore the fact that in the legal world there are no physical limitations is true. Even if physics forbids going back in time, perhaps in law it is possible. But that is only if you understand that going back in time is conceptually or logically defined. Because if it is not defined, you cannot speak about it—not only can’t do it, even in the legal world you cannot speak about it. A legal system that allows a logical contradiction—one can derive from it that stealing is permitted or murder is permitted, because it says nothing; you can derive any conclusion you want from it. Therefore logical contradictions cannot exist even within a legal system.
[Speaker A] And also there, when it is defined, T is in practice the real clock time, and there is an artificial time that I track, like a panel, and then actually
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can go back in time. But you won’t go back in time in Tau, only in T. And T can move backward in time, but Tau keeps flowing forward all the time.
[Speaker A] Exactly. Now, I want to add one more note. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Say what before time. Again? What?
[Speaker F] Was the time axis created all at once?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think the Tau axis always existed. When people talk about the coming into being of the time axis, that is the T axis. The Big Bang? What was created in the Big Bang was time and space as we experience them. But the objective Tau always existed. By the way, in relativity, Tau is the length of the space-time vector. That is, Tau is the square root of T squared plus X squared plus Y squared plus Z squared. Larry Horowitz’s claim is that Tau too is actually a time axis. This quantity is defined in relativity; everyone uses it, it’s called the interval. But Larry Horowitz claims that it is simply another time axis. And that is the claim—a claim of interpretation. He did not invent this quantity; this quantity is something people use. Why do you think they fit together? I think they do, because otherwise they are simply talking about a contradiction. It’s the principle of charity, you know—when you interpret what someone says, you interpret it in a way that avoids contradictions. I don’t know what exactly he meant, but… who is
[Speaker D] Larry Horowitz?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who is Larry? He was a professor of physics, I don’t know if he still is, at Bar-Ilan and in Tel Aviv.
[Speaker A] So if that’s the case, when they say “it became clear retroactively,” then I… Tau only goes forward and T I can…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, with “it became clear retroactively,” you don’t need any of this. Because with “it became clear retroactively” there is one time axis, only my information is not always complete, and at some point I reach a situation where my information becomes complete, including information about the past. I gave the example: what happens when I was in Australia and a child was born to me and I don’t know whether it’s a boy or a girl? I arrived in Israel and it turned out to be a girl. But obviously she was already a girl back then; I just didn’t know. It’s not that my knowledge now changed something about the past, even though what I know now, this information, is also true about the past. That is called “it became clear retroactively.” Meaning, nothing happens on the time axis; rather, my eyes are simply opened and information is added for me. But when you speak about from now on retroactively, you are basically saying: until I came to the sage, it was like the teeth of a saw—it’s a sawtooth graph, right? Until I came to the sage, the vow was in force. Say I vowed on Sunday, I came to the sage on Thursday, okay? So until Thursday the vow was in force. The sage released me from the vow on Thursday, right? And then he says the vow never was. What do you mean it never was? It was uprooted, not that it never was. So from the point of view of Friday, on Monday there was no vow. Not that on Friday there is no vow—that is obvious—but that from Friday’s point of view, even on Monday there was no vow. But from Monday’s point of view, on Monday there was a vow. I think I mentioned Rabbi Shem Tov Gafen—didn’t I mention this? On another occasion—who looked at the creation of the world, right? Can the world exist before the existence of man? If the time axis is only a mode of perception of man, then before there was man there was no time, so how can one speak about how old the world is? His claim is that if you now have the spectacles of time, you can also look at the past and ask yourself when my grandfather was born, even though that is a time when I did not exist at all. But time is a pair of glasses that I am putting on now, and with them I can also look backward, so it’s not… Okay, so now I want to make one more remark. There are parallel topics—this is basically what I wanted to say until now about the concept of condition; from now on these are a few remarks. There are parallel topics that look very similar to conditions, and the medieval authorities (Rishonim) already deal with the question of what the relation is between them and conditions, and that is the topic of retroactive clarification—whether there is or is not retroactive clarification. What does that mean? For example, if someone is looking at a barrel of wine, all right? And it is the Sabbath, and on the Sabbath one may not separate priestly dues and tithes, because you are fixing untithed produce. And this is untithed wine. So he says: there are a hundred logs in the barrel, and he says, the last log that remains—I will drink the wine—the last log that remains will be priestly dues and tithe for all the wine I have already drunk, from now, retroactively. Meaning, I say this now: the last log that remains is actually the tithe. And now I begin to drink until one log remains, and that log will be the tithe. Is it permitted for me to do such a thing? Did I drink untithed produce, or did I drink ordinary wine that was properly corrected? So this is a dispute whether there is or is not retroactive clarification, a dispute in the Talmud. Or a dispute in another context: suppose someone wants to establish an eruv for travel limits. And he knows that some sage is supposed to arrive to give a lecture that he very much wants to hear. So he says: it depends on which side the sage arrives from. He places two eruvs, one in the east and one in the west. If the sage comes to the west, then the western eruv takes effect. If the sage comes to the east, the eastern eruv takes effect, and that gives me four thousand cubits in the direction I want, and that way I can reach the sage. You can’t acquire an eruv for both directions; that is, you have to decide on two thousand cubits to one side. Eruvin. Yes. So the Talmud says this depends on the topic of retroactive clarification. Because in fact I place the two eruvs and I say: which one of them will take effect? We will decide that when the sage arrives. If the sage arrives here, this one takes effect; if the sage arrives there, that one takes effect. Okay? Same thing with the wine. If this log remains, then that is the tithe; if that log remains, then that will be the tithe. Right? You see the similarity. Is this mechanism basically the mechanism of a condition? After all, it is like a condition, isn’t it? That is, in the end, if the sage comes west, then the eruv takes effect. And if the sage does not come west, then the eruv does not take effect. So it is exactly a condition, no? How can it be that in the topic of retroactive clarification we found a dispute whether there is or is not retroactive clarification, while in the topic of condition everyone agrees that conditions exist? If it is the same law, then I would expect that the same dispute that exists regarding the tithe should also exist regarding conditions.
[Speaker A] With the descendants of Gad and the descendants of Reuben it is an explicit condition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in retroactive clarification too he says it explicitly. So the Rosh and Nachmanides and other commentators on tractate Gittin 25—there is a long discussion there about retroactive clarification—they deal with the question of the relation between retroactive clarification and condition. Look, what is the question really? In principle, you can build the concept of retroactive clarification by means of two conditions. I can place two eruvs, and on each of them stipulate a condition. This time it is a condition, not retroactive clarification. I place the western eruv and I say: if the sage arrives in the west, this is an eruv; if the sage does not arrive in the west, this is not an eruv. Fine? That is a condition, not retroactive clarification. Okay? But together with that I also place an eastern eruv, and there too I say the same thing: if the sage arrives in the east, this is an eruv, and if he does not arrive in the east, this is not an eruv. And I do this according to all the rules of conditions. You understand that what I have done here is basically to construct the mechanism of retroactive clarification by means of the sum of two mechanisms of condition. Right? So if so, what is the problem with retroactive clarification? Why is there an opinion that there is no retroactive clarification—and that is also the Jewish law ruling: on a Torah-level there is no retroactive clarification, on a rabbinic level there is retroactive clarification, and on a Torah level there is no retroactive clarification—while with conditions there is no dispute at all? After all, if a condition is valid, and someone says retroactive clarification is not valid, then do it as a double set of conditions. What is the problem? The answer is that you really can. If you do a double set of conditions, that is fine. But if you do it in the form of retroactive clarification, it will not work. What does that mean? What is the difference between retroactive clarification and condition? Look, with retroactive clarification—why, in order to build the mechanism, the framework of retroactive clarification, do I need to sum two mechanisms of condition? Because there is a difference between retroactive clarification and condition. In a condition, the two possibilities are either that the legal effect takes hold or that it does not take hold. In retroactive clarification, it is a choice between two positive possibilities: either the eruv will be here or the eruv will be here. Not whether there will be an eruv or not be an eruv. Rather, it is a choice between two positive possibilities. Same thing with the wine: either this log of wine will be the tithe, or that log of wine will be the tithe. But that is a choice between two positive possibilities. A choice between two positive possibilities is the dispute, the question whether there is or is not retroactive clarification. A condition—what was newly introduced in the passage of the descendants of Gad and the descendants of Reuben—is that a condition is a real mechanism. Everyone agrees that a condition is a real mechanism. Meaning, when you choose between two positive possibilities there is a dispute whether it is effective or not. But when you choose between a possibility and an absence—whether there will be divorce or there will not be divorce, not whether I will divorce this one or divorce that one. Right? Maybe that is a better example. The Talmud in Gittin there on 25 begins with a case of divorce. He says: he has two wives, and he says: I divorce whichever one goes out through the door first. I don’t have money to support two wives; it’s too expensive. Whichever one goes out first tomorrow through the door is divorced. And he gives a bill of divorce to two witnesses, in front of two witnesses, that they should acquire it on behalf of whichever one goes out through the door first tomorrow. Okay, so that is the concept of retroactive clarification. Now you see that this too is divorce. What is the difference between divorcing the woman on condition that she goes out through the door first—giving her a bill of divorce on condition that she goes out through the door first, and if she does not go out then not? Now I also give the second one a bill of divorce on condition that she goes out through the door first, and if not, then not. You understand that the second mechanism poses no problem at all. It is simply divorce on condition twice. Divorce on condition is valid. The entire Talmud is full of divorce on condition. But the sum of those two mechanisms is impossible according to the view that there is no retroactive clarification. And that is how Jewish law is ruled. Why? What is the difference? The difference is that here I am not applying—I cannot apply. After all, I gave only one bill of divorce to the witnesses. That one bill of divorce cannot divorce two women. Think according to Ri. If it is a condition, that basically means I carry out both sides, only if the condition is not fulfilled will I uproot the act. If she drank wine or does not go out the door first, it will be uprooted. But here I am not talking about that. I am talking about giving one bill of divorce that will divorce either Rachel or Leah, not that it will either divorce Rachel or not divorce. Now, I cannot divorce both Rachel and Leah with one bill of divorce. Therefore the concept of retroactive clarification is not possible. Can he?
[Speaker A] If they had the same name.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One name. No, they have the same name. That’s what the Talmud says there. Yes. The point is that when you give a bill of divorce, if this woman’s name is written in it, then she is divorced; if that woman’s name is written in it, then she is divorced. But you can’t divorce two women with one bill of divorce. Now, if you give two bills of divorce, one to each, and make a stipulation, that’s perfectly fine, no problem. And for that you need two bills of divorce, one for each, and to stipulate a condition. If she goes out first, this is the bill of divorce; if she doesn’t go out, then it’s not a bill of divorce. And the same for the second one. That’s perfectly fine, there’s no problem at all. If you want to do it with one bill of divorce, you can’t. Because according to Ri, think about how this is supposed to work: the bill of divorce is actually divorcing both of them, and whichever one goes out through the doorway first, it will become clear retroactively that the bill of divorce for the second one was uprooted. But I can’t divorce both of them with one bill of divorce. If I intended this one, then regarding the second one it wasn’t written for her sake, and vice versa. I can’t write it for both of them. If I did it with two women, then I carried out two conditional divorces—there’s no problem. There is a problem, but the Torah introduced a novelty that it’s possible. But when I divorced two women, I can’t do such a thing with one bill of divorce. Yes. By the way, the one who claims there is retroactive clarification is the one who claims there is no retroactive clarification. The one who says there is no retroactive clarification does agree that a stipulation is valid; he just doesn’t accept retroactive clarification. I just explained why. And the one who says there is retroactive clarification apparently understands, like Ri and Rabbenu Tam—no, from the Ritva, sorry—that what is it? It’s just a revelation of an already existing fact. And then he is basically saying this: when there are two women and I give the bill of divorce to two women, the bill of divorce is only for one of them. Only one of them. Which one? The one who will go out first through the doorway. When she goes out, it will become clear retroactively that the bill of divorce was given to her. No problem, you can do that. So someone who says that a stipulation is a revelation of an already existing fact retroactively, then he also says that this is obvious logically; you don’t need the Torah’s special novelty for it. Therefore he says: with retroactive clarification too, you can do it. What’s the problem? With retroactive clarification too it will become clear retroactively which of the two I wrote the bill of divorce for. But someone who says, like Ri, that a stipulation means to uproot the legal effect retroactively—then with stipulations the Torah introduced a novelty that this is possible, fine, I understand. But with retroactive clarification, first, there is no Torah novelty, and second, without the Torah novelty it is obvious that this is impossible. You can’t divorce two women with the same bill of divorce. According to Ri, after all, you have to divorce both of them, and only the future event will uproot one of the divorces. There’s no such thing; you can’t divorce both of them. Apparently the dispute over whether there is or is not retroactive clarification is the dispute between Ri and Rabbenu Tam and the Ritva on one side, and Ri on the other. Though of course they disagree only regarding the practical Jewish law ruling. So according to the one who says there is retroactive clarification, everyone will agree that he probably holds that it is a revelation of an already existing fact retroactively. But in practical Jewish law there is no retroactive clarification. And since in practical Jewish law there is no retroactive clarification, that opens the possibility for Ri to say: fine, retroactive clarification no, but stipulation yes. Okay? That is basically the claim. Therefore, for example, Nachmanides in Gittin there on page 25 says that for events that depend on a person’s choice, we do not apply the law of retroactive clarification. Events that depend on a human decision are not subject to retroactive clarification. You’ll ask: what do you mean? After all, the decision about which wine to drink and which wine to leave is also a human decision. Or the decision of the sage to come to the west or to the east—that too is a human decision. The claim is no, that is not a decision in the sense of judgment; it is a human act. A human decision is only when he makes a decision based on deliberation. For example, on condition that father approves—that is a human decision. If the father agrees to his daughter’s betrothal or does not agree—that’s deliberation. Something that depends on a person’s choice, Nachmanides says, retroactive clarification does not apply to that. Why not? Because with something that depends on a person’s choice, you cannot say that it becomes clear retroactively that that is how it was, because the information about the person’s choice did not exist beforehand. Events that do not depend on a person’s choice are events about which you can say that the information really exists now, I just didn’t know it; the future event reveals to me that this is the information. But events that depend on a person’s choice—the information about them does not exist before the choice is made, and therefore there you can’t do it. You can’t talk about a revelation of an already existing fact retroactively. You can’t talk about retroactive clarification in the context of events that depend on choice. That is basically what Nachmanides claims. That sharpens even more what I said here: that the whole mechanism of there being retroactive clarification is built on the idea that retroactive clarification is a revelation of an already existing fact retroactively. Think, for example—I’ll maybe illustrate this more. Suppose I have two wives with the same name. Okay? One is tall and one is short. Fine? And I give a bill of divorce through a process of retroactive clarification to the one who will go out through the doorway first. What does the one who says there is retroactive clarification say? He says something very simple. You actually gave a bill of divorce to a very specifically defined woman. Who? The one who will go out tomorrow through the doorway first. True, when she goes out through the doorway that will only be tomorrow, and today I still don’t know who she is, but once she does go out through the doorway first, it becomes clear that she is the woman to whom the bill of divorce was given. If I didn’t know the woman’s name, and afterward it became clear to me that her name was Leah, and I wrote a bill of divorce for Leah—that’s perfectly fine. What difference does it make that I didn’t know that she was Leah? The bill of divorce was written for her sake; everything is fine. The information became clear to me later, but if it already existed beforehand and only reached my knowledge later, that shouldn’t interfere. I can define the woman for whose sake I’m writing the bill of divorce, right? I can define her by her name, I can define her by her height, and I can define her by a certain characteristic—that she will go out through the doorway first tomorrow. So what if that characteristic will only become clear to me tomorrow? So what? But the woman for whose sake the bill of divorce is written is already well defined today. Remember Aristotle’s sea battle? I can already say today which woman I am writing for: that one who will go out tomorrow through the doorway first. That is a definition based on the future, but it is only a definition. Nothing future is causing anything in the present. The way I choose to single out the woman, to define the woman, is on the basis of something she will do tomorrow. Fine, so what happened? Why can’t I define her, as long as it’s a good and unambiguous definition? And it is a good and unambiguous definition. After I see who goes out tomorrow through the doorway first, when I see that tomorrow I will know for whom the bill of divorce was written today. That is basically the view of the one who says there is retroactive clarification. So how can one say there is no retroactive clarification? Now suddenly it’s very simple. And in practical Jewish law we rule that there is no retroactive clarification. And the answer is only according to Ri. Because according to Ri, you are not clarifying which woman you wrote it for. The future event creates what you did, or uproots the second woman. And you cannot divorce two women with the same bill of divorce, as I said before. Okay? And the different ways of understanding the mechanism of stipulation project onto the question of whether there is or is not retroactive clarification, explaining the dispute over whether there is or is not retroactive clarification and the difference between stipulation and retroactive clarification. If it is a revelation of an already existing fact retroactively, then in principle there really is no difference between stipulation and retroactive clarification. And therefore that is probably indeed the view of the one who says there is retroactive clarification. Maybe one final remark. We talked about how we saw in Maimonides that there is a difference between an “if” condition and an “on condition that” condition. An “if” condition is a prospective condition, right? It is a condition that takes effect from the moment the condition is fulfilled; the legal effect begins from the moment the condition is fulfilled and onward. And a prospective—or retrospective or retroactive, depending whether it is Rabbenu Tam or Ri—is a condition of “from now.” For example, I give a woman a bill of divorce on condition that she does not drink wine for thirty days. “On condition that”—whenever one says “on condition that,” it is as though one said “from now.” So that means I am giving the woman the bill of divorce from now, it’s just conditional on her not drinking for thirty days. That is a condition of “from now.” In contrast, if I say to a woman: you are divorced if you do not drink wine for thirty days—this is basically a divorce that will begin in another thirty days. After the woman does not drink wine, then she becomes divorced. It is not from now; it is from then. It is prospective. Okay? Maimonides claims that all the formal laws of stipulations are needed only for a prospective condition, not for a retroactive condition. Now this is very strange, because we explained that all the formal laws of stipulations are required in order to allow me to create backward causality in time. And backward causality in time is done דווקא in a retrospective condition, in a “from now” condition. I want the future event, according to Ri, to uproot the current situation. Okay? So how can that be? The Torah introduces a novelty that this is possible if you made the stipulation. So that means you need to stipulate according to the formal laws of stipulations, because only then did the Torah introduce that novelty. So specifically with a “from now” condition I would have expected the formal laws of stipulations to be required. So why does Maimonides say the opposite? Only with an “if” condition do you need the formal laws of stipulations, not with an “on condition that” condition. I think the explanation is—if you read Beit Yishai, Beit Yishai basically explains this. He talks about the acquisition having expired. He says the reason I need the formal laws of stipulations is not because of going backward in time, but because the acquisition has expired. If I gave a bill of divorce now and in thirty days… you need to create a mechanism, with all its bells and whistles, you need some mechanism that keeps the business alive. His act of acquisition has not expired; he continues all the time to give her the bill of divorce until she has not drunk wine, and then it becomes finalized, yes, and then she becomes divorced. Therefore you need the formal laws of stipulations in an “if” condition. And why with an “on condition that” condition do you not need it? So true, there is no problem there of the acquisition expiring, but there is the problem of going backward in time. It may be that Maimonides understands it as a revelation of an already existing fact retroactively, and not as from-now-and-on retroactively. And if so, then you do not need the formal laws of stipulations, because you do not need the Torah’s novelty; it is something trivial. That he not reach twelve months—I think I noted that. In Maimonides himself it really does not sound that way. At least there are several places in Maimonides where you can see that Maimonides understood the concept of stipulation in the mode of from-now-and-on retroactively, and not a revelation of an already existing fact retroactively. And then the question really is why you don’t need the formal laws of stipulations in a “from now” condition. I don’t know. Good question. More than that, after all we also saw in the episode of Gad and the children of Reuven—the condition there was a “from now” condition. After all, Moses gave them the cities now, and then expected them to go to war together with the Jewish people. But he gave the transfer now. So there I said that one can resolve it. Why? It could be that this is an “if” condition and not an “on condition that” condition. He gave them the… also here, to the woman too he gives the bill of divorce now, only if she does not drink wine will the legal effect occur. So too there, he gave them the cities now, but that does not mean they became theirs. The act of giving was done now, and the condition says that his acquisition has not expired. Meaning, if they fulfill the condition and cross over to war with the Jewish people, then the cities will become theirs. But the act of acquisition was done now, not that the legal effect happened now. And therefore it is an “if” condition and not an “on condition that” condition. So that I can resolve according to Maimonides. But why in fact you don’t need the formal laws of stipulations for a “from now” condition without Maimonides saying that it is a revelation of an already existing fact retroactively—I don’t know. Good question.
[Speaker I] Maybe there is some giving here, some kind of—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What exactly did he give them? Yes, basically maybe he never gave them anything at all. Yes. Well, let’s stop here. We are more or less approaching the end of the discussion about stipulations. This is the first stage of the series. After that I’ll move on to making a stipulation against what is written in the Torah, then in monetary matters, and then stipulations regarding the Torah or not regarding the Torah. Okay?
[Speaker A] More power to you, more power to you, more power to you.