Matters of Repentance, Lecture 3
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Table of Contents
- Greater repentance and lesser repentance
- The grace of repentance according to the Ramchal and Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman
- Complete repentance in Maimonides and the distinction through reconstructing the conditions
- Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner: the depth of comparison and the depth of distinction
- The Sefat Emet: indication or part of the act of repentance
- Weakness of will and Donald Davidson
- The paradox of greater repentance: changing the value system and the “self”
- The “self,” impulses, and Rabbi Wolbe
- Hashem’s help, Our Father Our King, and the Leshem
- Free choice, evil in the world, and the location of the discussion in Maimonides
- The continuum of repentance and the practical path from the lesser to the greater
Summary
General Overview
The text presents a distinction between essential, greater repentance and technical, lesser repentance, and grounds the difference between them in the depth of the change within the person and the scope of the sins to which the repentance applies. It attributes to the Maharal a linkage between the two forms of repentance and two attributes within the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, and develops, following the Ramchal, Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, and Maimonides, a view according to which in greater repentance forgiveness is a matter of justice, because the person is no longer the same person who sinned, while the grace lies in the very possibility of reaching such a change. Through a long discussion of weakness of will, free choice, the identity of the “self,” and one’s value system, it is argued that greater repentance seems logically impossible if it is only “from within” or only “from without,” and therefore an inner divine aid is required that makes choice and repentance possible. In the end, it is argued that the two forms of repentance are not separate poles but a continuum, and that precisely the lesser repentance is the practical path that gradually leads to the depth of the greater repentance.
Greater Repentance and Lesser Repentance
Greater repentance is an essential inner reversal in which a person truly changes all the way through, and therefore everything is cleansed and atoned for all at once, for all sins. Lesser repentance is done for one sin or for some of the sins, and it is more technical and does not necessarily include an all-encompassing change of personality. The Maharal links the two forms of repentance to two attributes out of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy: “Hashem, Hashem” as greater repentance, and “and He clears” as lesser repentance. The text presents the two descriptions as polar archetypes that are not usually found in their full form in most people, and places the actual work of repentance on a continuum between those two poles.
The Grace of Repentance According to the Ramchal and Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman
The Ramchal describes a special grace that the Holy One, blessed be He, bestowed in giving the possibility of repentance. Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman raises a difficulty from the case of a righteous person who rebelled at the end and lost his merits, which seems to reflect justice rather than grace. The text resolves this by distinguishing between two types of grace: in lesser repentance, the grace is that the Holy One, blessed be He, accepts the repentance and erases the sin, whereas in greater repentance, acceptance of the repentance is not grace but justice, because when a person has truly changed there is no place to punish him for sins that are no longer in him. The text defines the grace of greater repentance as the very possibility of making such a change in the first place, and not as an act of forgiveness beyond the letter of the law after the change has been made.
Complete Repentance in Maimonides and the Distinction Through Reconstructing the Conditions
At the beginning of chapter 2 of the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides defines complete repentance as a situation in which the same matter in which a person sinned comes before him, and he is able to do it, but he refrains because of repentance and not out of fear and not because his strength has failed him. Maimonides illustrates this with a person who had forbidden relations with a woman and later was secluded with her again under the same conditions of love, physical strength, and place, and nevertheless refrained and did not sin. The text interprets Maimonides as offering a way for a person to diagnose himself—whether he has truly changed—by returning to the same conditions, which removes external excuses and isolates the parameter of choice. The text identifies Maimonides’ repentance here as a description of the greater repentance under discussion, because it proves self-transformation and not merely accidental avoidance.
Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner: The Depth of Comparison and the Depth of Distinction
Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, in Pachad Yitzchak, explains the requirement that on Yom Kippur the two goats must be similar in height, weight, and value, so that the difference between them not be attributed to technical details but to the lot. He formulates this as “according to the depth of the comparison, so is the depth of the distinction,” meaning that the more one blurs the external differences, the sharper the true difference becomes. The text applies this principle to Purim as well, through “a person is obligated to become intoxicated until he does not know the difference between ‘cursed is Haman’ and ‘blessed is Mordechai,’” in order to sharpen the point that the difference is not innate or external, but the product of choice. It connects Purim and Yom Kippur as days of extremity, in which the work is to recognize that the decisive distinctions depend on choice and not on given traits.
The Sefat Emet: Indication or Part of the Act of Repentance
The text brings a possibility raised by the Sefat Emet: that Maimonides’ standing firm in the test is not merely a retrospective sign of complete repentance, but part of the process of repentance itself. It presents a conceptual dispute as to whether the test “reveals” that the person has already changed or “effects” the completion of the change. It compares this to the dispute over the three goring incidents of an ox—whether they clarify that it is a forewarned ox or make it into a forewarned ox—and transfers the question to the realm of repentance. According to this reading, complete repentance is also defined as the endpoint of the process, where a person proves in practice that his choice has changed.
Weakness of Will and Donald Davidson
The text presents the problem of weakness of will in analytic philosophy through Donald Davidson: if a person thinks it is more proper to do A, then he wants A more; and if he wants A more and is not coerced, he will do A. From this it would seem, apparently, that it is impossible for a person to do what he does not regard as the most proper thing. It illustrates this through dieting and eating chocolate, and argues in Davidson’s name that when a person says “I was weak,” he is deceiving himself, because in practice the desire to eat was stronger than the desire to refrain. Against this, the text emphasizes the familiar experience of sin as a case where a person knows the act is wrong and nevertheless fails, and tries to formulate a model in which choice is not binary but a continuum of strengths between zero and one. It distinguishes between drives and impulses on the one hand and conscious decision on the other, and the thrust of the discussion is how a sin can be neither coercion and yet also not a full choice of good or evil.
The Paradox of Greater Repentance: Changing the Value System and the “Self”
The text formulates a logical difficulty in conscious repentance: if the value system is the given that decides, then how does a person persuade himself to change his value system, and in the name of which values? And who is the “changer,” if he himself is defined by that very system? It presents a thought experiment of a person who operates only by maximizing reward and minimizing punishment, and argues that there is no way to persuade him from within without introducing a new value from outside, in which case it was not he who performed repentance. From this it is argued that the process of greater repentance appears impossible: from within there is no mechanism that explains a deliberate change of values, and from without such a change does not count as the person’s own repentance. The text ties this to the midrash about Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya, who calls on heaven and earth and on sun and moon to seek mercy for him until he reaches the conclusion, “The matter depends on none but me,” as a way of expressing both helplessness and the need for the act to be the person’s own.
The “Self,” Impulses, and Rabbi Wolbe
The text distinguishes between the “self” and personality, impulses, drives, and environment, and defines the “self” as the master of the house that chooses, and not as one of the components in the psychological map. It criticizes attempts to identify the “self” with one of the parts, such as the superego and the like, and argues that this mistakes the whole for a part. From the introduction to Alei Shur by Rabbi Wolbe it brings the image of a person as a house with more central and less central rooms, but raises the question: who was it that took the person from room to room? It sharpens the distinction and argues that even the good inclination and the evil inclination are inclinations and are not the “self,” and that even doing a commandment merely out of impulse is not choice—to the point of arguing that the “self” must decide even whether to listen to the good inclination. It adds that there are cases where the “good inclination” leads in practice to the wrong act, such as “he who is merciful to the cruel,” and therefore the decision must belong to the “self.”
Hashem’s Help, Our Father Our King, and the Leshem
The text presents the prayer “Our Father, our King, bring us back in complete repentance before You” as expressing the idea that greater repentance is not possible without divine help, but also cannot be done by the Holy One, blessed be He, from the outside, because then it would not be the person’s repentance. It proposes giving up the assumption that the Holy One, blessed be He, stands only outside, and seeing the help as internal, so that the change is both from within and from without in one and the same act. It cites, in the name of the author of Leshem in the book Hakdamot U’shearim, Gate 3, a distinction between nefesh and ruach as created entities, and neshamah, chayah, and yechidah as “complete divinity,” and presents this as an explanation for how there is a divine point within the human being that makes choice and repentance possible. The text identifies here the deep grace of greater repentance: the possibility of choosing and creating change that is not subject to the determinism of cause and effect—and this possibility necessarily also entails the capacity to choose evil.
Free Choice, Evil in the World, and the Location of the Discussion in Maimonides
The text argues that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not “allow evil,” but rather allows choice, and choice requires two alternatives and therefore includes the possibility of choosing good or evil. It defines the great grace as the granting of the very power of choice, and describes the ordinary world as deterministic, while choice is the production of a result without a prior cause, but rather by the force of purpose. It explains why Maimonides places the discussions of choice in the Laws of Repentance rather than in the laws of other commandments, because repentance is not merely the choice whether or not to act, but a return to being a chooser—to gaining control over one’s actions and deciding consciously. It links greater repentance to forgiveness as a matter of justice, on the basis of the claim “I am not that same person,” and presents the possibility of reaching that point as grace.
The Continuum of Repentance and the Practical Path from the Lesser to the Greater
The text concludes that the two forms of repentance are poles on a continuum, and that in practice one begins with lesser repentance for a particular sin, with remorse and resolution for the future, and from there advances to ever greater depth. It presents the scope of the sins to which repentance applies as an indication of the depth of the change, so that the more inward a person goes, the more the repentance expands to broader circles. It argues that the grace in accepting lesser repentance encourages a person to begin the process even if it is still limited, and that through confession and repeated deepening one can knead the heart through actions, in accordance with the Sefer HaChinukh’s principle that “hearts are drawn after actions.” It ends with a prayer that “the Holy One, blessed be He, bring us back in complete repentance” and with the blessing “May your final sealing be for good,” and afterwards returns to a concluding discussion of Davidson’s question with a proposal about “second-order choice” and “there is a choice whether to choose” as a way to explain fluctuations in the strength of choice without necessarily changing the set of values.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A person has to truly repent, period. He has to go through these four stages, and then he is forgiven. There is the greater repentance—this is the essential repentance, the inner reversal that basically tells us that if we have truly changed, genuinely, all the way through, then it’s all cleaned away, all of it is atoned for. The greater repentance is a repentance done for all sins at once, while the lesser repentance is done for one or for some of the sins and not all of them, or at least not necessarily all of them. Those are the differences between them. We saw that the Maharal connects this to two attributes out of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy. “Hashem, Hashem” is the greater repentance, and “and He clears” is the lesser repentance. After that we spoke about the special grace that the Ramchal writes about—that there is a special grace the Holy One, blessed be He, showed us in giving us this whole matter of repentance. We saw Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman there, with the case of the righteous person who rebelled at the end and lost his merits—so how can that be grace? Apparently that’s justice. We discussed the fact that this is repentance—there is a difference between the greater repentance and the lesser repentance. And it seems to me that we ended at the close of the second session, with the point that there are two kinds of grace in the two kinds of repentance. In both there is grace. In the lesser, technical repentance, the grace is that the repentance is accepted. Meaning, if we repent, the Holy One, blessed be He, is willing to accept it and erase the sin that we committed. In the essential, greater repentance, that is not grace—it is justice. Exactly the way that if a righteous person truly regretted it, then by justice he lost his merits, the same of course applies to a penitent. So that is justice. What is the grace there? The grace there is not that the repentance is accepted, but the very fact that it is even possible to do it. The fact that this kind of repentance is possible at all—that is the grace, not that if we do it then it is accepted. If we do it, it is accepted by justice. If I am already someone who is clean, then I am clean; you do not need to go beyond the letter of the law to forgive me. What are they going to punish me for? For sins that are no longer in me? That’s no longer me; that’s someone else, metaphorically speaking—I changed. So by justice I deserve forgiveness, unlike the lesser repentance. Only here too, of course, there is grace—the very fact that I can perform such an act at all. So that is the grace in the greater repentance. Maybe at this point I want to sharpen this point more—the grace that exists in the greater repentance—before I come back and close the circle from where we started. Maimonides, at the beginning of chapter 2 of the Laws of Repentance, writes as follows: “What is complete repentance? It is when a matter in which he sinned comes before him again, and it is in his power to do it, yet he refrains and does not do it because of repentance—not out of fear, and not because of weakness of strength.” That is complete repentance. How so? “For example, if he had forbidden relations with a woman, and after some time he is secluded with her, and he still stands in his love for her, and in physical strength, and in the same land in which he sinned”—all the conditions are the same—“and he refrains and does not transgress, that is a complete penitent.” That’s what Maimonides writes. So basically, what is written here? “Until the Knower of hidden things testifies concerning him,” and so on. What is really written here in Maimonides? What is written here is that we want to diagnose the penitent. How do we diagnose ourselves, of course—not necessarily other people. How do we know that we are truly penitents? So Maimonides says: if we are in exactly the same situation as when we committed the sin, and nevertheless we do not sin—with all the little details, some of which may be technical and not really relevant to the sin—if everything is the same and yet we do not sin, that is a sign we changed, a sign that this is true repentance. That is why it is called complete repentance, when he means the greater repentance I have been talking about. What is the meaning of this? So to understand it a bit—first of all I’ll explain why all the technical conditions have to return exactly as they were when he committed the sin. Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner writes in Pachad Yitzchak, where he explains why one has to drink on Purim until he does not know the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai.” He says, on the contrary—after all, all the work of Purim is to distinguish between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai.” So why get drunk in order to blur the differences between Haman and Mordechai? So he says: it is written that the two goats of Yom Kippur—also part of the theme of the day—the Mishnah says the two goats of Yom Kippur have to be similar: in height, in weight, in value—they have to be identical. Why do they have to be identical? It is not indispensable, but ideally they should be identical. Why should they be identical? Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner explains: because if they are not identical—say one is superior and the other inferior—then we will attribute the difference between the goat that goes inward, into the innermost place, and the goat that goes to Azazel, all the way outside, all the way out—then we will attribute that difference to technical matters. Maybe because this one is more select he goes inside, and because that one is less select he goes to Azazel. The purpose of the Mishnah, when it tells us that they need to be completely alike in all parameters, is to sharpen the difference. In Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner’s words: according to the depth of the comparison, so is the depth of the distinction. Meaning, the more we succeed in making all the parameters completely equal, the sharper becomes the plane on which there is nevertheless a difference. Regarding the goats of Yom Kippur, what is the difference between them? The lot, right? One was designated for inside and one for Azazel—that’s the whole difference. So Hazal are very careful, very careful, that we not attribute that difference to anything technical—not to one being better, not to one being, I don’t know, taller or shorter, this color or that color—it doesn’t matter. None of those things matter. What matters? This arbitrary thing, the lot. Why? Because of course it comes to express something that relates to us. The difference between a righteous person and a wicked person—it’s like all those children’s books that draw Esau in such a disgusting way that just looking at him gives you a fever, right? That is an educational mistake. It’s an educational mistake because the child reading the book—or the adult reading it—thinks that the difference between Jacob and Esau is an innate difference. And that’s not true. The opposite is true. You can see consistently that Hazal—this is a topic for another lecture—Hazal consistently, in a large portion of the midrashim, though there are contradictory midrashim, in a large portion they insist on saying: no, they were born the same. Jacob chose this, and Esau chose that. That is why there is a difference. The difference is in what you choose—not who you are, not how you were born, not this trait or that trait. The question is what you chose. And with the goats, that is expressed, of course, by the fact that the goats do not choose anything—the expression of that, with the goats, is the lot. The lot describes choice. And that is the difference between the goat that goes into the innermost place and the goat that goes to Azazel. And in order for us to understand clearly, or sharpen for ourselves clearly, that that is the difference and nothing else, we need to blur the other differences and make the two goats equal, in order to sharpen the true difference. The same is true of Mordechai and Haman—yes, “a person is obligated to become intoxicated until he does not know the difference between ‘cursed is Haman’ and ‘blessed is Mordechai.’” Why? In order to understand that there is really no inherent difference between Haman and Mordechai. The difference is what each of them chose. One chose to be wicked and one chose to be righteous—that is the difference. Don’t attribute it to the fact that he was born here and he was born there, or that he is tall, short, handsome, unattractive, kindhearted or not kindhearted—all that is irrelevant. Those are not relevant differences. What? Not even Jew and gentile? Not even Jew and gentile—rather the fact that he chose good and he chose evil. A gentile too can choose good. Yes.
[Speaker C] Why specifically on Purim do they emphasize this and not on Hanukkah, between the Maccabees and the Greeks? I don’t know why specifically on Purim they emphasize the issue of free choice between the wicked person and the righteous person. I don’t know.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Purim, Yom Kippur. I don’t know, I don’t know. But yes, the context is already—if I remember correctly—Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner talks about it: Yom Kippur is the two goats, and Purim is Haman and Mordechai. Meaning, on these two occasions it is the same kind of work. Why exactly? I can try to suggest answers that maybe aren’t…
[Speaker D] Maybe on Hanukkah it’s much more general—it’s, say, the Hasmoneans and the Greeks, maybe.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Purim is two people, two types. I don’t know. I think these are the two most extreme festivals. Yom Kippur and Purim are the two most extreme festivals. And in extreme places, there it’s better to notice the difference. The extremity is of course opposite. On Yom Kippur there is a kind of distinction between the innermost inside—into the Holy of Holies the High Priest enters all the way inside—and the goat to Azazel is a sacrifice to the satyrs, something you can’t even grasp; it’s all the way outside. Meaning, this is a very strong extremity in the relation between the Temple, between holiness, and what lies outside it, right? And on Purim the extremity is the opposite kind of extremity. That is, the mundane and the holy—there is no holy there, basically. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not appear there; there is nothing. Meaning, the normal, ordinary conduct of the world—the hiddenness, as in the Scroll of Esther—that is really the focus. There is no distinction at all. Meaning, there it is the peak of distinction, and here the extremity goes in the other direction—there is no distinction at all. Holy and mundane get mixed together; there is no difference between them. And therefore specifically in those two places, in the place where there is complete distinction on Yom Kippur, you need to understand that this distinction does not depend on external details. On the lot—on what you chose. That is what determines the difference between whether you go into the innermost place or to Azazel. On Purim, where there is no distinction at all, one has to remember: there are distinctions. The distinctions are not just the result of what we were born as, and so on, but again, of what we choose. So maybe in both situations—maybe you could say, maybe it’s just a nice homiletic idea, I don’t know. In any case, if I now return to Maimonides in our context, what Maimonides is saying is that when a person does complete repentance, he has to reconstruct all the conditions under which he sinned. Why? Because we are looking here for who is a complete penitent. With regard to ourselves—not, Heaven forbid, judging anyone else—a person has to judge himself: have I in fact repented? Am I in fact a true penitent? How will I know? If I am in exactly the same situation—the same height, weight, and value, yes, by analogy to the comparisons made there. There is no parameter—the same land—don’t attribute it to anything else. No, there’s nothing else. Like in a laboratory, right? You eliminate all the things that could interfere with the experiment in order to isolate the parameter that you want to test. You want to test whether you are a penitent or not, so eliminate everything else—all the other things have to be the same. If now you did not sin, and then you did sin, that means you changed. It means you chose differently. Okay? Now, that really is the indication. By the way, there is a very interesting dispute here: the Sefat Emet raises the possibility that this is not only an indication—that if this happened, then I have an indication that I am a true penitent. The Sefat Emet raises the possibility that perhaps one is obligated to go and do this as part of the repentance process. There is some kind of permission—a special permission for a penitent—to enter a situation in which he may sin, to place himself in a test, which ordinarily we are not supposed to do, in order to complete the act of repentance. Because then it means that this action itself brings about the repentance in us, and not merely sharpens it for us or serves as an indication that we are penitents. Yes?
[Speaker E] Meaning, does he commit transgressions on the way? It’s not just bringing himself into a trial. A person is secluded with a woman…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, I don’t know whether it really means seclusion there in the halakhic sense of a prohibition. Maybe. By the way, he talks there even about actual prohibitions. That within the process of repentance it could be—he’s a Hasidic thinker—that within the process of repentance it may even be permitted for you to commit transgressions. Yes, that’s the “I will sin and repent” of the Hasidic thinkers. The “I will sin and repent” of the Hasidic thinkers is that I will sin in order to repent and thereby reach a level higher than that of the perfectly righteous person; a penitent is on a higher level than the perfectly righteous person. So how can the perfectly righteous person rise to that level? Only if he sins and repents. And the initial thought of sinning and repenting is in order to scale a level that without sinning you cannot reach. So here too I think there is some sort of Hasidic conception, but the idea is a real one. Meaning, there is something here—the action is not merely an indication. Yes, it’s like Rabbenu Peretz and the Maharam of Rothenburg with the three gorings of the ox. Meaning, this dispute over whether the gorings clarify that I am a forewarned ox or make me into one. There there’s a practical difference regarding “Give dew and rain.” So the same thing here: the question is whether this experiment is an experiment that serves as an indication that I am a complete penitent, or no—this experiment is part of the action, it isn’t an experiment; it is part of the act of repentance. It is the completion of repentance. “What is complete repentance?” When is it completed? When do you know that you finished the process? If you performed this act and withstood the test. Meaning, this is…
[Speaker C] Because if repentance was a choice, then if the choice changed, the person changed.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You never really know. Choice is the sort of thing where—how do you know whether you chose or not? After all, we’re always wavering—did we really change? Did we really choose? Or are these just surface feelings? So Maimonides tells you: come and see. Put it to the test—either in order to bring it about or in order to check it, it doesn’t matter, two possible ways to understand it. Because a person doesn’t always know where he stands. It’s hard for us, when we look inside ourselves, really to know how much this is a real change and how much it is just some passing mood or another. So here there is an indication that is almost scientific. That is, eliminate all the other differences, put yourself to an actual test. If I had to propose a scientific experiment, that is exactly the point: eliminate all the irrelevant parameters, repeat the experiment, and if the result comes out different that means the parameter that changed is what caused it. Meaning, this is… Anyway, what basically comes out here? What comes out is that repentance is some sort of change in the person’s very selfhood. Meaning, all the external parameters that we eliminate are precisely the parameters that are not important for this issue. So what remains? What is it that we are not supposed to eliminate? To understand this, I’ll explain it maybe from another direction. And that will bring us back to the question: what is the special grace in the greater repentance? I said that the special grace in the greater repentance is the very fact that it is possible at all, so I’m on the way there—just let’s keep the framework in mind. Usually, when something happens in the world, it has a cause. Everything is cause and effect. Okay? When a person performs some act, the simple conception is that this too is an act that happens in the world, and it too has a cause. Okay? Now, on the basis of that perspective, analytic philosophy formulates the problem called weakness of will. Weakness of the will, as it’s called in English. There’s a respectable shelf about this in the philosophy library. One of the well-known articles is by Donald Davidson, a very famous American analytic philosopher, and he basically formulates it like this. He says: let’s assume two premises. The first premise is that what a person thinks is proper to do—say I am standing at a fork in the road, and there are two options before me, option A and option B—if I think it is more proper to do option A, then I want more to do option A. Right? That’s a reasonable premise. The second premise: if I want more to do option A, and I am not coerced—meaning both options are available to me, I can do either one—then I will also do option A. That too is a reasonable premise. Now, these two reasonable premises together lead to the conclusion that there cannot be a situation in which I do something that I do not think is the most proper thing. Right? That is what is called weakness of will. But when a person sins, what does sin mean? Sin means that I basically know that I should serve God—that is what is proper—and I fell, I failed. So how do I always explain that to myself? I had weakness of will. Meaning, I was weak. I didn’t manage to realize what I really wanted. It’s not that I didn’t want it—I did want it. It’s not that suddenly some other desire arose in me—that’s not what’s happening. It’s not that I repented now because I just changed my outlook. No—I wanted that earlier too, I just fell then, I was weak. And now I want to repent. Right? By the way, the concept of weakness of will doesn’t apply only to sins in the religious sense; it also applies to sins in the moral sense and even to dietary violations. A person who ate something unhealthy or fattening—it cannot be that he wanted—he did not want to eat it, because if he didn’t want it, he wouldn’t eat it. That is basically what Donald Davidson says. Meaning, there is no such thing as a person doing something and explaining to himself: I was weak. Basically I wanted to do the opposite, but I was weak and I did this. No such thing. If you did it, apparently that is also what you wanted to do. That is the claim. Now, that claim is not correct. Explaining why is complicated, and I’m not even sure my own explanation is completely right, but one thing is clear: it is not correct. Meaning, each of us feels—each of us feels—that it isn’t right. So without getting into why it isn’t right, it isn’t right. There is something here. The fact is that a person who sins is a person who knows he is doing something that in his own eyes is not right to do, and he doesn’t succeed, he is weak, he did not choose. Basically he was not choosing completely—that was his sin. If he were completely choosing, he would do what… But we have some kind of interesting structure in the personality, this kind of complexity in the personality, such that we do not always choose one hundred percent. It’s not that either we choose or we don’t choose. We choose with continuous intensities between zero and one. If we choose completely, then of course we will always choose what we think is right. It’s just that a person is not always in a state where he has full control over what he does. That does not mean he is blameless. He is blameworthy. But he sins not because he chose evil, but because he didn’t choose all that much. Okay?
[Speaker F] Like the captive women with Rav Amram? Yes. On the one hand he wants not to, so basically when he…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Climbs the ladder he shouts, “Fire!” Yes, yes. So that is the state of weakness of will. What is the assumption of this argument about weakness of will? That basically if a person really wants something, then that is what he will do. If he didn’t do it, then apparently he didn’t really want it. For example, how would Donald Davidson explain a dietary “sin”? Let’s talk about dieting, to see that this is not specifically about sins in the religious sense. Right? How would he explain it? He would say: listen, you’re fooling yourself. You want not to eat chocolate because it isn’t healthy. But on the other hand, you want to eat chocolate because it tastes good. Right? It’s simply that the desire to eat what tastes good overcomes the desire not to eat what isn’t healthy, that’s all. So in the bottom line, you did what you wanted—don’t sell me stories. That’s what you wanted. There are sometimes conflicting desires; that’s not contradictory, there’s no logical contradiction here. I can want chocolate because it tastes good and not want it because it isn’t healthy—there’s no problem. These are Rabbi Chaim’s “two dinim”; no problem, there’s no logical contradiction here. Okay? From one perspective I want the chocolate, and from another perspective I don’t want the chocolate. Now the only question is which one wins. So in my case apparently the desire for the taste won, because the fact is I ate it. That is what Donald Davidson says. When you say you wanted not to eat it, you didn’t want to eat it because it was unhealthy, but you failed—you are lying. Fooling yourself, I don’t know. It’s not true. You didn’t want it. The opposite desire was simply stronger than this desire, that’s all. So in the bottom line, what you really wanted was to eat the chocolate. Now if this argument is really correct, that means a person always does what he wants. When a person sins, he always has the same feeling again—weakness of will, I failed, I was too weak. You’re fooling yourself. You weren’t too weak. You wanted the immediate pleasure more. You did have a desire to serve God—it’s not that you didn’t—but the desire for immediate pleasure was stronger than the desire to serve God. That’s all. So you wanted the sin—why are you confusing me? What are you going to say, that I did it even though I didn’t want to? Why? Because I was coerced? I couldn’t? That’s not a sin—so am I under coercion?
[Speaker D] Yes, because there are layers in desire. That’s why I don’t understand Donald Davidson’s approach—that there are layers in desire. An inner desire—after all, we assume that the inner desire is the real desire, I think, if we start from…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s talk only about that. Forget external desire. Let’s talk about inner desire. What did you want in your inner desire? Not to sin.
[Speaker D] A person’s inner desire, assuming he didn’t want to sin. So why did he sin? There’s the evil inclination.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But if so, let the evil inclination sin. Why did you sin? I’m asking not why it sinned. The evil inclination has its place.
[Speaker D] Why did you sin? No, the evil inclination is inside the person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s inside him. So what? Why is it inside him? The question is what you did. So what if it’s inside you? It’s inside you, but I asked why you sinned, not why it sinned. Because that person didn’t overcome it, exactly.
[Speaker D] What does it mean that he didn’t overcome it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does it mean he didn’t overcome it? Was he coerced? Did the inclination force him? To some degree, yes. If it forced him, then it’s not… then he isn’t sinning. Then he’s coerced. He can also overcome it, yes, we do blame him. He can overcome it? Then why didn’t he overcome it? So why didn’t he overcome it?
[Speaker D] He didn’t exert all the required strength.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Why? Because of the inclination? Now you’re bringing the inclination in squared. The inclination is both what pulls me and also what causes me not to want enough to overcome it. So now I’m asking…
[Speaker D] These are two things that Maimonides said that are roughly the same.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not at all the same. These are two completely different things. There is a difference between the things that attract me or push me and what I decide to do with that. I have lots of impulses, for good and for bad. The question of what I decide to do with them is a totally different question. The inclinations are the impulses. Fine, and impulses push me to do good, to do bad, whatever you want. The question is what I decide to do with them.
[Speaker D] A person doesn’t always decide. A person who is addicted, addicted to alcohol or drugs…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then he is coerced. Then he is coerced. For coercion you don’t need to repent. You’re exempt. I hereby exempt you now from all transgressions. Like they’ll say over your grave after a hundred and twenty: we hereby exempt you from all the obligations and all the… nothing. Anyone under coercion doesn’t need to repent for anything. I’m asking how there can be a sin where you are not coerced. The proof—the premise of Donald Davidson, after all, was that I have both options available, I can do either of the two things. If I have the option of doing either thing, and I want to do A, I think it is proper and therefore I want to do A, then if I can do both I will do that too. You are only saying, fine, I just couldn’t. If you couldn’t, that isn’t weakness of will—you were simply coerced. Someone coerced is not sinning. No, I’m saying the same thing.
[Speaker D] A sin too—meaning a person has an evil inclination that makes things hard for him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The fact is still… makes things hard? But I’m asking why didn’t you overcome it? Because you didn’t want enough to overcome it. Right, the person didn’t want enough, but it’s not that it wasn’t weakness of will.
[Speaker D] It’s not that if, say, he decided to follow his immediate craving, then it’s not the same thing. Why? What does “didn’t want enough” mean?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Didn’t want enough” means: I very much wanted to diet, but I wanted even more to eat the chocolate. Meaning, I didn’t want enough to diet. That is what weakness of will means. A person inwardly wanted much more, but he didn’t stand up to the test.
[Speaker D] What does it mean he didn’t stand up to the test?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] These are just words. What does it mean he didn’t stand up to the test? Did he want what he did or not? In his inner desire—leave aside all the shells, inner and outer and so on. Yes, in desire—what I call desire. He did not do what he wanted. Why? Was he…
[Speaker D] coerced?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not in the full sense of coercion, but close to it. Then what? So why? “Close to it”? Then why? What does “close” mean? Why didn’t he do it? That’s just dodging. Why didn’t he do it? “Close to it.” What does that mean? Why? Why? He wasn’t coerced? He wasn’t coerced, he could have overcome it, he says. He could have. Why didn’t he overcome it? Because he didn’t make the maximum effort.
[Speaker D] Why didn’t he make the maximum effort?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It was hard for him and he didn’t invest enough. Why didn’t he… why didn’t he invest enough? You’re repeating the same words. Why didn’t he? I’m asking why. Because he didn’t want enough. Because he didn’t want enough. That’s all. Because he wanted the immediate pleasure more than the long-term goal, the spiritual achievement or whatever it is, or the dieting achievement in the other case—the long term. That’s all. That is what Donald Davidson says. He says that all this excuse of weakness of will is just an excuse we give ourselves. It isn’t true. We simply didn’t want it. Not that our desire was weak. We didn’t want it enough. It’s not that we didn’t want it—we did want it—but the opposing desire was stronger. That is what sin is. So now, Donald Davidson… in a second I’ll maybe comment on that. So now the question is, okay, then how do we explain to ourselves that experience we undergo, where we feel there is weakness of will here and we want to repent? What does it mean to repent in this scheme? To increase the desire on the right side.
[Speaker G] But to increase the desire, that’s…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I don’t have that desire. What do you mean?
[Speaker G] To do something I don’t want?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t understand. After all, I want to eat chocolate with intensity five, and I want not to eat chocolate with intensity three. Those are my values. That’s my value system, right? That’s how I acted. Now I want to repent. What does it mean, I want to repent? I want to change my value system? Why would I want that? Those are my values. What does it mean that I want to change my value system? From which value does the desire to change my value system emerge? Does that value already exist within me? If so, then that was already my value system from the start. What does that mean? It’s self-contradictory. It’s something impossible to understand.
[Speaker D] Not necessarily. It could be that a person had a value system that he… it happened to him once or twice, and he’s taking it back.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But what does it mean to take it back? You want… understand. The fact that you take it back, that’s random. Suddenly I changed—it can happen. I’m talking about a conscious, deliberate process of repentance. A conscious, deliberate process of repentance means that I review my system of values. I’m continuing Donald Davidson. Everything is just a value system and the relative intensities of those values, right? That’s what determines things. Forget inclinations and all that, that’s nonsense. In the end, only desires determine things. If you want enough, you’ll overcome any inclination. If it’s an inclination you can’t overcome, then you’re coerced—there’s no problem at all. So basically, forget inclination; inclination is nonsense.
[Speaker D] King Solomon determined that “there is no righteous person on earth who does good and does not sin.” It’s a fact. It’s a fact that every person has—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —an evil inclination, and nobody is perfect. Of course that’s a fact. The question is what the explanation of that fact is. We all know that that’s the fact. The question is what the explanation of that fact is.
[Speaker D] No, before you said there are no inclinations, there’s nothing, a hundred percent.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Inclinations—I didn’t say there are no inclinations. I said inclinations are not a relevant explanation. Of course there are inclinations, but inclinations are not a relevant explanation because I’m not asking why you have an inclination; I’m asking why you didn’t overcome it. It’s like the difference regarding homosexual transgressions. There’s some feeling that having homosexual tendencies means being a criminal. That’s not true. If he was born that way, then he was born that way. Being a criminal means not overcoming that inclination, not having an inclination. Having the inclination isn’t criminality; that’s how he was born—what do you want from him?
[Speaker D] But he uses that inclination.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course there’s an inclination, but the inclination is not an explanation for the sin.
[Speaker D] Also in prayers of repentance, in all kinds of prayers of repentance, this thing is mentioned a lot.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why do I care that it’s mentioned? I’m asking now—explain it to me. I want you to explain it to me. Sources won’t help me. If Moses our teacher stood here and screamed at me, I still wouldn’t accept it. Explain to me what’s going on here, that’s all.
[Speaker D] Exactly what I said before,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the matter of logic.
[Speaker D] Let’s say a person is addicted, coerced. A person got to a level where he’s not completely addicted, but got there in a somewhat lesser dose.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Just words. He’s not addicted. Go on.
[Speaker D] Not addicted—a somewhat lesser dose, more or less—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s not addicted. Go on.
[Speaker D] He’s not addicted? Fine. But then it’s harder for him to stop.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Harder for him, true. Go on. So it’s hard for him. What’s the reason?
[Speaker D] Let’s say a person knows something.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not a reason. If he wants to do it and it’s hard, then he’ll do it—of course. Rather, he doesn’t want it enough to overcome the difficulty, right? Right. The intensity of his desire isn’t enough, right? So that means he doesn’t want it. That’s all.
[Speaker D] Wait, and what causes it not to—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —be enough? And what causes it not to be enough? I don’t know—because that’s his value,
[Speaker D] That’s—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] his value,
[Speaker D] not because not what.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t understand. There’s a high mountain here, right? I need to climb it. It’s hard to climb it, right? If I decide to climb it I’ll succeed, assuming I can, because otherwise it’s just coercion that I can’t, right? Now I say: I didn’t climb it. “Oh, you know, it’s because it’s high that I didn’t climb it.” Sir, don’t give me nonsense. If you had wanted enough, you would have climbed it. So what does it mean? You didn’t want enough. So I ask, fine, why didn’t I want enough? Then you tell me: because there was a mountain, I didn’t want enough. What kind of nonsense is that? There was a mountain, therefore it requires a certain intensity of desire. Fine. But now I’m asking: why didn’t I have that necessary intensity? Why didn’t I have it because of the mountain? What does that have to do with it? I didn’t have it because I don’t want it, that’s all, because I really didn’t want it. That’s why I didn’t have it, because that’s what I want.
[Speaker D] No, that’s obvious, but it’s not a matter of values, it’s not something random that every time…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s the same thing. There’s a mountain in the topographical map of values that makes a certain action hard to do, so it’s a metaphorical mountain. It’s a mountain; it’s hard to do it—that’s the inclination. The inclination puts trials before me that I call a mountain, yes, like the Talmud says about the righteous, yes exactly. So it puts trials before me that are like a mountain. But I’m not asking why there are mountains here. The One who created mountains created the mountains. I’m asking why I didn’t climb the mountain. So I say: because I didn’t want enough. You say: why didn’t I want enough? Because of the inclination. No. The inclination is the mountain. The mountain only says that you have to want enough in order to succeed. I agree. Now the only question is: why didn’t I want enough? Is that also the inclination? Then it sinned, not me. So what do you want from me? I’m talking about why I sinned. I sinned because I didn’t want enough, and the question is why. Because those are my values. Because in my eyes the importance of serving God is at intensity three and not intensity five.
[Speaker H] The values change when there’s chocolate in front of me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, no. When the chocolate isn’t in front of you, the mountain is lower.
[Speaker H] Simply.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When the chocolate isn’t in front of you, the mountain is simply lower, that’s all. Nothing changes. Your desire remains three; only the mountain you have to climb is intensity two, that’s all.
[Speaker I] So how can it be that suddenly now you do want, and what causes that desire? Your value system changes? Yes, it changes because now the chocolate is in front of you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. So again, if the chocolate isn’t in front of me, that’s not called repentance. Then it changes because something happened, and it happened to me. That’s exactly the point. Understand: the process of repentance is an impossible process. That’s the bottom line. Completely impossible, literally. What I said before, that it’s an act of grace to allow major repentance—here’s your demonstration. It’s impossible to do major repentance, period. Impossible. According to the rules of logic, you can’t do it. It’s not defined. You can’t do it. Think of an example. Let’s try a thought experiment, a Gedankenexperiment, as they call it, okay? Here we have a person—the preacher… what is it in German, with Einstein it’s called Gedankenexperiment. Here we have a person who serves; in his world there is only one value. We’re starting with point matter—physicists know, right? In his world there is only one value. He serves for maximum reward, minimum punishment. That’s all. That’s the only value in his world. Understand: this man wears shtreimels from here to the next world… he serves there day and night. What a completely righteous man. But why? All for the sake of maximum reward, minimum punishment. Okay? This Jew stands before you, and we’re simple Jews, we think one should serve for its own sake. Good. So let’s try to persuade him. Go ahead. Let’s say I’m that person—try to persuade me.
[Speaker E] There is—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have one value in my world, only one value. You can build only on that. Don’t build on your values. You have to persuade me on my terms, otherwise it’s not called persuasion, right? Persuade me to serve for its own sake.
[Speaker E] Isn’t that what you want? Why should we talk to you? Why do you want to serve for its own sake?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning I won’t get enough reward if I serve not for its own sake? Is that what you mean to say? It’s like Adam HaKohen, you know? Adam HaKohen wanted to repent regarding Erez Dvay, one of the Maskilim, just in order to refute the rabbinic saying that “even at the entrance to Gehinnom, the wicked do not repent.” It’s the same principle. So, well, go ahead. Does someone want to try to persuade me? There’s nothing to be done, right? All you can do is build on the value that already exists within me, or hypnotize me, plant some other value into me. But you can’t lead me, by a path that proceeds from what is already in me, to other values. These are my values. So now explain to me—not how you persuade me—how do I persuade myself? After all, I want to repent now, right? That’s just an example. I’m talking about myself, not you. How do I repent? How do I persuade myself that my values are wrong? So who is the persuader? In the name of which values does he come? It’s not defined. You can’t understand such a thing.
[Speaker D] You can. It’s an objective examination.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is an objective examination? It’s very hard.
[Speaker D] Meaning among… no, it’s impossible, not very hard.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s possible—
[Speaker D] —very, it’s very hard. You really need to examine all the religions and all the ideologies in the world.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He checked everything. He already checked everything. He checked, he knows everything, he’s an expert in religions—
[Speaker D] A professor—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —of religions. You can close all the faculties; he already knows everything.
[Speaker D] He labored and did not find, in short.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He found everything. What do you mean, did not find? Maximum reward, minimum punishment. That’s all. He found everything. “He who found a wife found good.”
[Speaker J] In the example of the chocolate, for instance, I have two values. I also have the value that I want to—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. At intensity five and at intensity three. So?
[Speaker J] So change the intensities.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is that? I don’t want to change them. Those are my intensities. What do you mean, change the intensities? Those are my intensities. I want this at intensity five and this—therefore I started with point matter, a person with one value. Now let’s move to the problem of two values. A person with two values, one at intensity five and one at intensity three. Now how will you persuade me? Here too you need to persuade me; it makes no difference. Even a hundred values, at all sorts of levels—it makes no difference. Once my set of values is given, and this is what I have really chosen, then how can a process of repentance even be defined? How do I make a decision to change my system of values? In the name of which values do I make it?
[Speaker B] But if—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If it changes, then I’m not the one doing repentance. Then whoever changed the circumstances that caused it did the repentance. I’m talking about a conscious, directed act of repentance. That’s what’s called repentance.
[Speaker D] Well, a person saw other values and decided to accept them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, decided? According to what?
[Speaker D] Hasn’t it happened that people converted religions and decided?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again—you’re doing the same thing. It’s like answering the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise by saying, “Well, you can see Achilles catches the tortoise.” Which is exactly what had to be proved. Is that how you answer paradoxes? No. The Achilles and the tortoise paradox says: we know Achilles catches the tortoise, but if I have a logical argument here showing you that it cannot be, then you can’t answer it by saying, “Here, you see Achilles catches the tortoise.” I know. That’s why it’s a paradox. I’m asking you now: explain to me why this logical argument is not correct. Don’t explain to me why the second argument leads to the opposite conclusion. I know. That’s why it’s a paradox.
[Speaker K] Couldn’t it be that the self changes? Huh?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the self can change, yes. But not that I change the self. Who is the changer? Who is the changer?
[Speaker K] It’s five—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Three changed for me into seven-five.
[Speaker K] What does changed mean? By itself? There was lightning?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m asking. I’m asking how it became seven-five. Lightning? A bolt came from on high and changed it to seven-five? Then the lightning repented. It will get, it will merit the life of the World to Come, invited to the life of the World to Come.
[Speaker D] And who is the person? I saw in the introduction to Alei Shur, Rabbi Wolbe really writes this question. He writes: how does a person actually change? After all, a person is defined; a person is something. How can Shimon become Reuven? So he says something like this: a person is like a house, a small world. There is a house, there are several rooms. There’s the hall, there’s the living room, there’s the bathroom. Meaning the house is divided into several places, rooms more important and central, and rooms less central. The same with a person: his soul is composed of various things, more shallow parts, more dull parts. So it’s not that, in his words, Shimon becomes Reuven. A person remains the same person; he simply takes himself from the more shallow sides to the higher sides. Who took him?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does that mean? Who took him? Who is it that took him? Those are just words. Who took him? Who is that? Who is the person?
[Speaker D] He is constantly in potential—
[Speaker G] About the opposite, that’s not—
[Speaker F] How will he take the person?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Once there was an article in Badad, I think. There was an article by some psychologist, Rabinowitz I think his name was, Aharon Rabinowitz, if I remember correctly. Right. He tried to locate who the “I” is. In terms of, yes, superego and alter ego and all those pastries. Who is the I in the terms of the author of the Tanya, in the terms of Nefesh HaChaim? Which part in our psychoanalytic map is the I? And that article is nonsense. It’s nonsense because the I is none of the parts in our psychoanalytic map. It’s the owner of that map—that’s the I. The I is that one who acts within that map. That’s the I. To identify the I as one of the parts is simply to identify the whole with one of its parts. And it’s not even one of its parts—it’s a part floating around it, not even a part of it. It’s just some part of the environment within which it acts. There is only one I; you can’t divide it. It doesn’t work that way. There is an I, and that I wants something and chooses. All the parts and the rooms and all that—that’s words.
[Speaker D] Of course you can divide it, of course you can. A person—every person, I think—there is almost no person who has certain sides in his personality that are good and sides—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Personality is not the I. Personality is not the I. Personality is the drives within which I operate. Personality is not the I at all. Okay,
[Speaker D] So we interpret the concept differently.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Those are inclinations. Good inclination, evil inclination—that’s all inclinations.
[Speaker D] Exactly. So what is the I?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The I is that abstract thing that is the owner of all those and decides what to do with them. That’s the I.
[Speaker D] Well exactly, that’s exactly what Rabbi Wolbe said.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But there is only one such thing. No rooms and no rooms—one such thing. There is Reuven, that’s it. Reuven is this abstract thing, and he has an environment.
[Speaker D] But the environment includes all kinds of things.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it includes nothing. No. Good inclination and evil inclination are not Reuven at all. They are the load he carries on his back. That’s not him. They try to pull him here, they try to pull him there, and he has to decide what he does with it.
[Speaker D] It seems to me this is already pointing with a finger. We see if a person… no, I mean about a person—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Pointing with a finger—that’s not us, you know.
[Speaker D] No, I’m saying in the end there is no such thing as an I at all.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, every person will say this, meaning it’s an obvious concept, an axiom: a person is influenced by those around him.
[Speaker D] Of course there is. It’s abstract. Why, does everything have to have mass or coordinate location? Yes, because there is almost no such thing as empty space. A person, from the standpoint of—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not talking about empty space. I’m talking about an entity that has no mass and no coordinates. There’s no such thing? Go ask—there are physicists here, they’ll tell you.
[Speaker D] I’m not a physicist.
[Speaker B] So there you go, so—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then receive information: there is such a thing. Even in the physical world, certainly in the spiritual world. What the Sages say, “the soul fills the whole body.” What does that mean, fills the whole body? Is it here? Here? Throughout the body? It is not here, not here, and not throughout the body. It is nowhere. The soul has no coordinates. It is not a physical body. It is connected in some way, influences this body in some way, that’s all. The way the Sages say this is to say it fills the whole body, just as the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the whole world. What does “fills the whole world” mean? That He is here, here, here, and here? He is nowhere, because His existence is not a geographical existence. It has no coordinates. That’s what it means that He is in the whole world. He is present, He influences the whole world, that’s all. So therefore it’s not that there are no such entities; it’s just that you can’t point to them, that’s all. So what? You also can’t point to the I, right? It’s a spiritual thing.
[Speaker D] No, the way the Rabbi is defining it right now, there is no such thing as an I, after all—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is such a thing as an I. No—and the person… only that exists. Everything else is illusions. Only that exists. The I exists, as the Hasidim say.
[Speaker D] Who knew he’d end up a Hasid? No, but a person is influenced; every person, I think, would say this. Meaning, it’s an obvious notion, an axiom: a person is influenced by those around him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does influenced mean? I’ll ask you the same question: why is he influenced? It won’t help me that it’s a first principle; I’m asking you why it’s so. Why is he influenced? Because he decided to be influenced. If they screwed it into him without his control, then he isn’t influenced—they simply hypnotized him. I’m talking about actions a person does, which he decides on.
[Speaker D] Then there is no such thing as a decision—
[Speaker G] Absolutely, just as the Rabbi said.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is “absolutely”? There is repentance: you decide and you change. That’s what’s defined as repentance. I don’t know what a hundred percent means or not a hundred percent.
[Speaker G] What’s the difference between I A and I B? What? Between the I of so-and-so and the I of someone else?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, what’s the difference? Just chance, right? That this is so-and-so and that is someone else? What do you mean chance? It’s not chance at all. Two different things. That’s the most essential difference there is—that they are different.
[Speaker G] Right, but—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This thing is not chosen. It is circumst… not true. No, I’m getting to that now. Okay. Leibniz said there is a principle of the identity of indiscernibles: if there are two entities all of whose properties are identical, then it is the very same entity. Complete nonsense, of course. Because the entity is not the collection of its properties. The entity is the owner for whom the properties are properties. That is the entity. It’s exactly the same point—that he refuses to accept the existence of an abstract thing. It has to be something you can point to. Exactly the same as the I. The I is the entity, and the properties are the inclinations, the drives, the education, the influences, everything. That’s all around it. In the end, I have to decide what I do with all this mess around me here. That’s all. The mess around me is also the good inclination and the evil inclination—they too are around me. They are around me on the inside, but they are certainly around me. I have to decide what to do with them, and only I do. No excuses—not evil inclination, not good inclination. The good inclination is also an inclination. If the good inclination takes you to perform commandments, you’re worth nothing. You’re a nobody. Because the good inclination did the commandments, not you. You have to decide that you listen to the good inclination and perform commandments; then it’s your commandment. Inclinations are inclinations, that’s not you. Inclinations are drives. You’re pushed—well, that’s not a conscious act, it’s not something you decide on, it’s something that… There are many people who are pushed to do good, all of us. Every one of us has inclinations to do good; it’s very pleasant. To do good from that is not choosing the good. Only choosing to do good is called choosing the good. If the good inclination does good, then it did it, not me.
[Speaker C] So how should we explain good inclination and evil inclination? I mean, after all, ostensibly the reality exists.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Good inclination and evil inclination, in the language of the Sages, in many places at least in my opinion, good inclination and evil inclination are in the sense of the author of the Tanya. It’s a divine soul and an animal soul, not good inclination and evil inclination.
[Speaker C] The good inclination here is the “I.” Exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The “I” versus all the inclinations, good and bad. To give rule to the “I” and not be influenced and led by my environment. In the writings of the Ari it says that both the good inclination and kelipat nogah—there are four kelipot in Kabbalah, three kelipot are completely evil and kelipat nogah is a mixture of evil and good. So why is it a kelipah?
[Speaker D] Because it also has good in it!
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, because even its good is a shell. Shells are what is around me; they are not me. Around me there is a good inclination and around me there is an evil inclination; both are inclinations. If I act on the basis of inclinations, even if I do good, I’m not a person. It’s just some inclination operating, not me. I have to decide what to do. Incidentally, many times the good inclination leads us to do things that are not right, and that is a good inclination, not an evil one. A person has compassion on the cruel—that’s a good inclination, it’s just not correct in this case to use the good inclination. To have compassion on people is a good inclination; it’s just not correct in this case to use the good inclination. The “I” has to decide: here I am not acting according to the good inclination. That’s all. And that’s the correct decision. Okay? In the end the decision is always ours. Nothing in our environment replaces us. That’s exactly the point. And therefore, if I now get to the bottom line, in the end there is here some impossible act. So how does it happen? Either way: if something else changes me from outside—after all, this is what I am, this is my value system, this is what I believe in, and this is what I chose—if something changes me from outside, then it did the repentance. Rather, I change; it doesn’t change from outside. But who is the “I” that changes it? After all, the “I” is this same set of values. So how does it get to the point that it now wants to do something else? It cannot be. It doesn’t happen from within and not from without; it can’t happen. So I think that truly the only possible way out here, on a completely logical level, without doing empirical and psychological research, on a completely a priori level—as it emerges from logical analysis—must be that the set of values is also not the “I.” There is something even more primordial, even more abstract than the collection of my most basic desires. And that something decides what its desires are. Let’s call it the will—that power called will—not the particular desires, but that power that enables me to want, that human faculty, faculty with an f, yes, that we have, the ability to want things, to choose things. Of course by wanting I mean choosing, not wanting chocolate, but choosing. When I choose, I adopt a set of values. When I repent, I don’t evaluate those values according to other values and change them. I simply adopt a different set of values. Meaning that even the values apparently are not the self; they too are kind of peripheral, like inclinations. And actually I’ll formulate it in slightly different language; I’ll say this: basically the question is this either way. Either someone from outside does it, as I said before—but then he repented, not I. He acted on me like a sculptor; he sculpted me. That isn’t repentance. Repentance is something I do. But I, from within, can’t do it. So as if we return to the Holy One, blessed be He—yes? So we say: there’s a problem here. Someone from outside is supposed to do it, because I can’t do the major repentance, this inner upheaval; I can’t do it. Someone from outside has to help me. Does that remind you of something? The midrash about Elazar ben Dordia? What happened there? He sits and cries, and what does he say there? “Heaven and earth…” What is this heaven? Is he a little child? “Mountains and hills, ask mercy for me”? They said to him, “Before we ask for you…” etc. “Heaven and earth, ask mercy for me; sun and moon…” Is he an idol worshiper? What is this “ask mercy for me”? What he means to express here is: I can’t. After all, Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia is the father of major repentance—we’ve already seen that, right? He is coming to say here: I can’t do it. It can’t be done from within. This is what I am—how do you do it from within? Someone from outside has to help me. But what is the conclusion? “The matter depends on me alone.” There is nobody outside who can do it, because if someone outside does it, that’s not repentance. You have to do it. How does it happen? On the logical level it is hard to understand. I think the closest explanation I can reach on the logical level is the following. And again—Hasidism. I’m really overdoing this today, don’t suspect me; I don’t have a shred of it in me. But basically, we stand before the Holy One, blessed be He, and we say to Him—what? “Our Father, our King,” the only line that is exceptional in all of Avinu Malkeinu, you know? “Our Father, our King, bring us back in full repentance before You.” All the rest is forgive us, do us favors, give us livelihood, heal us. What is “bring us back in full repentance before You”? You have to repent, not the Holy One, blessed be He. “Our Father, our King, forget it, I have no energy—do the repentance for me, I’m going to rest for a moment now.” What is the meaning of this? The intention is that truly this contradiction, this impossibility of doing major repentance, stems from some hidden assumption that we haven’t put on the table. And here comes the Hasidism. The hidden assumption is that we stand opposite the Holy One, blessed be He, and there are only two possibilities: either we do it or He does it—but then it’s from outside. And both possibilities are impossible. There is no escape, then, except to give up the assumption that leads us into this mess. Which means: the Holy One, blessed be He, is not standing outside; He is standing inside. Meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, and we are some kind of continuum. We are not standing opposite each other. Basically, in some sense, something of the Holy One, blessed be He, is inside us. And when we make a change, it is that abstract something, prior even to the values, and when we make a change, it is both from within and from without. Meaning, it is done not entirely from within, but also not entirely from without. That is “Our Father, our King, bring us back in full repentance before You.” Meaning we are saying to the Holy One, blessed be He: help us do this act, because we alone cannot do it—it’s simply impossible—and if You do it, it’s worthless. You have to help us do this act. Meaning, You—there is some inner point within us that comes from You, and only that makes repentance possible. Without it, it would simply be impossible. From the same paradox I mentioned before: from within it’s impossible, from without it’s worthless. Okay? Rather, this distinction between inside and outside is the assumption that leads to the problem, and we have to give it up. The Leshem writes—I have it here too, I brought… we’ll find it—he writes in the book Hakdamot U’Shearim, in Gate 3, as follows: “However, know that although we said that the parts of the form clothed in the body”—form meaning spirituality—“are three, namely nefesh, ruach, and neshamah. And we said that there are founded for them three vessels in the body, namely brain, heart, and liver, and they are the place and dwelling for the nefesh, ruach, and neshamah: the brain for the neshamah, the heart for the nefesh, and the liver for the body. The truth, however, is that the principal aspects of the form that are actually clothed in the body are only two: nefesh and ruach alone. Nefesh and ruach alone. And the nefesh and ruach are what are clothed in the brain, heart, and liver. But the general neshamah is not clothed in the brain except only at its lowermost extremity. For the principal level of a human being is only nefesh and ruach, but the neshamah has no equivalence with the body at all except only at its lowest edge, and only in that is it clothed. And in order to elevate and grow by means of them above his level, and by means of that general neshamah a person is connected upward, upward…” He continues there afterward: “And behold, the general ruach and nefesh are created, formed, and made, and are not divinity at all. But the general neshamah, chayah, and yechidah—these three are all complete divinity.” Do you understand this idolatry? Meaning, the innermost part of the person is complete divinity. Why? It’s a part from above, a spiritual part, fine, the Holy One, blessed be He, emanated it into me, but it’s not Him, it’s me. No, no—it’s Him. Meaning, there is something—somehow some continuum that we are always accustomed to cutting in a dichotomous way: we are up to here, the Holy One, blessed be He, is from here, and we stand opposite Him. But that’s not true. That’s a mistake. Meaning, His lowest edge, in some sense, is us. There is some sort of continuous metamorphosis here. That is the only thing that makes repentance possible. Without it, it would simply be impossible. Without there being something of divinity inside, on a purely logical level, not mysticism, it’s just impossible—we saw that before. It is simply impossible to repent without this. Therefore only a human being who has this divine point belongs to choice and belongs to repentance, and therefore the discussion of free choice appears in Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance. Because here that is what is required of me: to return to being a chooser. Simply to choose. To use that point which is as if from the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, which is within me—somehow it is the two of us together in some sense—and to make this revolution, to suddenly move from adopting a certain set of values to adopting another set of values, in some sort of quantum leap.
[Speaker C] Why does the fact that, if I detach the I from my value system and say that even my value system is part of the properties, obligate me to say that the I is basically a divine part from above?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, here I’m not sure that it obligates that.
[Speaker C] I’m not sure it obligates that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I think it’s a translation of that claim. I think. You can separate the two. True. I also said you have to beware of excessive Hasidism. But I think that is also what he means. It doesn’t matter right now whether you accept him all the way. He means to say that something there has to be abstract, detached from me, but it is not detached from me—it is myself, on the contrary. That is basically the grace of major repentance. The grace of major repentance is that one can choose, that such a thing is possible at all. Or in other words, in this language: that there is some point in divinity, a divine point, that is within us. There is no sharp distinction: up to here is us, from here is the Holy One, blessed be He. There is some kind of… this value system is not an isolated system. It exists in some relation with things outside it, and therefore it is not correct to look at it as I described before: I have a set of values, and now they themselves are supposed to change themselves. They are not isolated. It is not an isolated system. There is interaction here with what is outside, with the Holy One, blessed be He, in this case, and that is what enables it, as it were, to change itself. It’s a kind of paradoxical sentence—what does it mean to change, then who is the changer and who is the changed? What does it mean that I change myself? If I already no longer want this set of values, because the fact is that I now want to change it, then why did I adopt this set of values in the first place? Then I wasn’t I—then there was a different I.
[Speaker K] There’s something here that is—but it’s not a one-point thing, a person sins.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. There’s something very problematic here.
[Speaker L] Why what the Rabbi presented, and not to separate it the way before the Rabbi separated and said there is some more primordial, more basic thing prior to the value system?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that primordial thing—what did it want beforehand? Why did it previously adopt the bad value system?
[Speaker L] And that’s not simple, because—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because that’s what it wanted, right? Not because it’s not perfect. What does “not perfect” mean? Environmental influence? That’s influence. The question is why it is influenced. Every time we return to the same point. The environment doesn’t interest me. Why should the environment interest me? Make a theory about the environment too. We already said this morning about a few other theories; now you can add the environment as well, yes.
[Speaker B] It’s not in nature itself; it’s the Holy One, blessed be He, instead of someone else.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. So now once you look—and in physics too—when you look at a system that is not isolated as though it were an isolated part, suddenly you see that it as if changes itself. Even though that is supposedly impossible. It doesn’t change itself; the bath around it, or the environment interacting with it, changes it. There is something here that is a metamorphosis. It is not right to distinguish dichotomously between me and the Holy One, blessed be He. This conceptual framework is what leads us to the problem. There is some kind of continuum here.
[Speaker M] It chose the openness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This connection created the—exactly. It also enables the change. More than that, it was also what originally chose evil, incidentally. There’s no coercion. And because of that we deserve to get hit, because we used that power and also chose evil. But now, through that same power, we can also choose good. When we say there is a grace that the Holy One, blessed be He, granted in major repentance—if you remember, regarding major repentance I compared the righteous person who rebelled with the penitent. We said that the righteous person who rebelled parallels major repentance, not minor repentance, right? Because he truly regrets; it’s not because he is afraid of something, he truly regrets, right? So then too it wasn’t grace beyond the letter of the law—that’s what Rabbi Elchanan asked. Did they do him a favor in order to ruin him? The Holy One, blessed be He, does justice in the direction of bad and grace in the direction of good. The point is that clearly they did him a kindness. The kindness is not that they allow him to choose evil, nor to me that they allow me to choose good. The kindness is that they allow me to choose at all, that I am possible as a chooser at all. The whole world around me is a deterministic world. There is no choice in the ordinary world. Everything is cause and effect, a physical system translated into chemistry, into biology, into whatever you want—it’s all deterministic. Nothing there chooses. And suddenly here there is some point in the midst of creation—points, yes, in the midst of creation—that somehow are not subject to the laws of physics. They produce results without causes. To choose is to create something without a cause, right? Meaning, not subject to the law of causality. If there were a cause, then the cause produced the result. Free choice means that what produced the result is not a cause. There is no cause. There is an end, where I want to get to. There is no cause that produces this result.
[Speaker G] What determines the initial conditions of every creature, of every power, if it chooses like this in every person? Also random, like?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know if random. What the Holy One, blessed be He, decided. Each one has different initial conditions, I think.
[Speaker G] Also in this thing?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I think so. I don’t know.
[Speaker G] Not random in the periphery and in the inclinations?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It seems to me yes. I don’t know. Moses our teacher was born with “the skin of his face radiant.” I, sometimes, according to the accepted reports, am not aware of any such phenomenon in myself. So apparently there was something innate in Moses our teacher that I did not have. There is something different in him. Fine. He is judged accordingly, and I am judged accordingly as well. Fine.
[Speaker G] Is this thing located there, is this thing located at that point or in the periphery?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think it’s there too. That’s Moses our teacher. The peripheries—the peripheries can shine all they want. Why does Moses our teacher shine? That’s the real Moses our teacher. The peripheries aren’t really so interesting. So the true grace is that the Holy One, blessed be He—many times people ask why there is evil in the world, how the Holy One, blessed be He, allows evil in the world. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not allow evil in the world. The Holy One, blessed be He, allows us choice. But if—
[Speaker E] One second, but—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —if that choice only allowed us good and not evil, then what kind of choice is that? Choice always has to be between two alternatives. So in order to allow us choice, which is something good in the ultimate sense, there is no choice but to allow us to choose good and choose evil. Or evil. You cannot allow us choice and always neutralize the ability to choose evil; then we have no choice. The ability to give us choice is ultimately good; no evil descends from above. Evil is a result of what is below. What descended from above was the potential to choose. If we choose evil, then we will choose evil; we created the evil. But the fact that we were given a choice in which one can choose either good or evil is absolute grace, entirely beneficence. And that is the great grace given to us in complete repentance.
[Speaker N] Not only repentance is grace, but basically the whole system of free choice.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s the same thing. In my opinion they are synonymous.
[Speaker N] No, repentance is part of choice.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I said before. In Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance he places these discussions about free choice. Why not in the laws of redeeming a firstborn donkey? You have free choice to redeem a firstborn donkey—don’t yield to your inclination, there, redeem a firstborn donkey. Why not there? What, there is no choice there? No inclinations?
[Speaker D] There are plenty, right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not there? Because with redeeming a firstborn donkey, and with every other commandment, there’s always a choice whether to do it or not do it, and inclinations and all that. With repentance, it’s not that there’s a choice whether to repent or not. To repent is to be choosing. That’s what repentance means. Redeeming a firstborn donkey—you can choose to redeem a firstborn donkey; you can do it simply because your good inclination caused you to redeem a firstborn donkey. That’s without choosing. But repentance you can’t do without choosing. To repent means to be choosing. That’s what repentance means. To repent means to return to being one who chooses. To return to taking control over my actions and deciding what I really want, and of course also acting accordingly. So that’s why, in fact, in the laws of repentance this discussion of free choice is placed there. Okay, I just want to close the circle. So really, I think I used the question of why there is a special kindness here not because I wanted to resolve difficulties about why there is kindness here too, and not only in the small repentance. Rather, it helped me clarify what the great repentance is at all. To what depth the change reaches. Therefore we said that the change of the great repentance is a total change; there’s no such thing as doing it regarding one commandment. That doesn’t belong. You simply choose a new value system, and that’s it. Once you’ve done that, strictly speaking you deserve to be forgiven. That’s not beyond the letter of the law. It’s something else. What—are they going to punish your former self? As Maimonides says, I am no longer that same person—there in halakha 4 later on. I am not the same person who sinned. Such a person could summon the Holy One, blessed be He, to a Torah court if He does not forgive him. That is from the law itself; it’s not piety. It’s like that righteous person, yes, who rebelled at the end—strictly speaking he gets that. The fact that he can do it, that is a special kindness. The fact that he has the ability to choose. And to choose always includes both good and evil; there’s no way around it. So true, here it looks like a kindness for evil, but it’s not a kindness for evil. The kindness is not that he will do evil. The kindness is that he can choose. It’s just that if he can choose, that means a person can really choose evil. What can you do? You can’t give a person choice without giving him the possibility of doing evil. Okay. Now, when we summarize, basically, I’ll return to the starting point. We have two processes of repentance: small repentance and the great repentance. These descriptions are archetypal descriptions. Neither one really exists. I don’t know whether Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya ever existed, but if not, he should have been invented. Meaning, this is some kind of model that we need to place before our eyes, to understand the pole, the depth of the pole. A person who already comes to the recognition that the heavens—someone from outside—has to change him, because from within he can’t do it, that means the change he wanted to make was apparently a total change. Meaning, it’s something where there’s no more internal point that can make the change. It’s something from outside that has to do it. That means it’s repentance all the way to the end. Therefore it happens in one hour, without all the stages of repentance, everything we discussed in previous times. But none of us is there or here; these are two abstract types. Even someone who does the small repentance also has to regret. In every regret there is something of this. Maybe not all the way, maybe not to change the entire value system completely, but to renovate it a little, or the quantities—to raise it from three to four. Fine? But there is something of this also in the small repentance, otherwise it simply isn’t defined. One of the stages of the small repentance is regret and acceptance for the future. Acceptance for the future is no less important in terms of the inner change. It is the inner change—acceptance for the future. Yes? To adopt a different value system. Okay? So therefore it’s clear that something of the great repentance is also present in the small repentance. On the other hand, the complete great repentance, like Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya sitting there with his helplessness—every one of us knows that well even without being Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya. How do you begin? Meaning, how do I change myself? What does it mean to change myself? I’m this way right now, so what—okay, I understand, I want to be better, but what now? What do I do? Where is the screwdriver? Where—where is the toolbox? What do I do it with? There is a certain helplessness here. And therefore I think it’s not for nothing that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us these two channels. It’s not really two. It’s a continuum; I said I’d get to that at the end. We begin with small repentance. We take one sin and regret it. We didn’t really want it, at least that’s our feeling. There is weakness of will here. So when you begin to examine that and dig, and then another sin and another sin and examine further, slowly you move from this pole of the continuum to the other pole of the continuum, to the great repentance. Little by little you start kneading a bit more inward and more inward, until perhaps—I don’t know if one reaches the very end, that sounds a bit utopian to me—but you get closer and closer in wider and wider circles. The deeper it is, the more sins it applies to. Right? The small repentance applies to one isolated sin. Repentance all the way to the end applies to all sins. In between are circles that keep expanding, but the number of sins is only an indication of the depth. The depth is what matters. And when we keep descending, we are simply advancing from this side of the process to that side. The kindness given to us, that they gave us the small repentance, is also necessary so that we can realize the great repentance. These are not two independent kindnesses. The fact that such repentance is accepted encourages us to do it, even though it isn’t worth much—but still to do it. To start from there, and then we’ll start with another sin and another sin and another sin. Maybe we’ll manage to deepen it a bit more, understand a bit more, dig inside. How can it be? How did these foolish things take hold of me against what I truly understand to be the right thing? And so, little by little, that is the toolbox. With that we gradually manage to re-knead that inner point that has no shape—I don’t even know how to describe it at all. Because there’s no direct way to treat it. Therefore “hearts are drawn after actions,” as the Sefer HaChinukh writes, because really, how do you deal directly with the heart? I don’t know how to shape a heart. A heart in its spiritual sense, of course. How do you shape a heart? You have to go through the symptoms, through the actions, and through that it probably enters somewhere inside. So the small repentance is not the antithesis of the great repentance; it is the path. It is the path from which we begin, and with regret and acceptance for the future—which are two very important aspects of the small repentance—little by little, and confession is of course the way to internalize it and sharpen it more, you penetrate deeper and deeper, and in fact we gradually become more and more penitents of the type of the great repentance, of Elazar ben Dordaya. And then perhaps the Holy One, blessed be He, will bring us back in complete repentance, with God’s help. May we be sealed for a good year. Simply regarding the question
[Speaker G] of weakness of will. When did we talk about this with Donald Davidson? Many, many, many, many times. And still, his claim—which is already more than eight years now—seems right to me. Meaning, a person does things because he wants to. So true, sometimes he’s foolish and he doesn’t know what he’s doing, but now he regrets it. The moment you regret it, then stop for a second—when you regret it now, then clarify for yourself what you really want, and don’t do it again. But then—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t think. So if I didn’t know what I wanted, then it’s not like Donald Davidson. No, Donald Davidson claims that what you did is what you wanted, period.
[Speaker G] For a person who is conscious all the time. Fine.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, if he isn’t conscious, that’s not interesting. Again, either he is coerced, or he chose not to be conscious.
[Speaker G] The claim that Aryeh presented to me all the time is a sweeping claim. He does accept this claim, that in principle when a person performs a certain action, it’s because on his particular value scale at that juncture, that’s what he wanted to do. Okay. Or he really was coerced in the sense that he just didn’t think, he went with the flow.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think the only place where one can challenge that picture, I think, is that there is second-order choice. There is a choice whether to choose. That’s what I said earlier—that choice is a continuum between zero and one. And then what happens is, I actually chose the correct set of values and nevertheless I sinned. Why? Because I did not choose to be one who chooses.
[Speaker G] There is—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Some kind of switch, you know, in the control circuit, not in the power circuit. The control circuit says whether the power circuit will operate or not. Meaning, it’s a rheostat, not a switch. Meaning, there is a continuum of levels. Okay? And there I think there can be a situation where the same given set of values that I have can appear in different intensities and lead to different behaviors. I can be weak and not be enough of a chooser, and I can be strong and be fully choosing. But the set of values I chose is the same correct set of values. So according to this, a person has two channels of repentance, if I return now to the Rabbi’s lesson.
[Speaker G] He can repent in his willpower, in that rheostat. Right. And basically make sure that he is always at one hundred. Also in the lower values—the correct values are one thing, and the intensity of the choosing is another. But if I accept that I can work on the rheostat, that there is such a rheostat and I can work on it, then I don’t need to arrive at everything the Rabbi arrived at. If the values really are correct. There are sometimes situations where the values really are weak.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, the Rabbi arrived at the fact that I can change the—it doesn’t have to be so, but it can be. And now I’m saying: there can be a situation where you need to change your set of values, and there can be a situation where you don’t. By the way, if you really do need to change your set of values, then you really are coerced—that’s called being coerced in opinions. Because that’s really what—it’s kind of what I asked during the lesson. I don’t understand the difference between me and the Rabbi. Our starting conditions are different, yes; the Rabbi’s intensity is different, my intensity is different, lots of things on the periphery. But the self is different, not the periphery.
[Speaker G] But the self—that’s not fair. Why did He put me there as if—what do you mean, not fair?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re also judged accordingly. It’s like what I said about Moses our teacher. Everyone has a different mission, and therefore he receives a different soul.
[Speaker G] No, but according to what the Rabbi is saying now, it seems to me as though my world of values, the Rabbi’s, and every person’s is given. The Torah is given.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What are you talking about? It’s not given. But didn’t you choose the Torah?
[Speaker G] Fine, the rheostat.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not the rheostat—you need to choose at all to be subject to the Torah. The fact that the Torah was given does not mean those are your values. It means perhaps those are the correct values if you believe in the Torah.
[Speaker G] But if you don’t accept that, then you simply didn’t choose those values.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not related.
[Speaker G] It’s a question of what—you can’t choose what is good and what is bad, that’s obvious, that’s given. Murder is bad; not murdering is good. That’s obvious. But in your set of values you can choose to be a murderer. Not to fail—to choose to be a murderer, to choose evil.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And you can fail. Here I disagree with Davidson, because you can fail to be fully choosing. The feeling, of course, is that it’s true—my feeling, I can say. I say, therefore I say this is only a feeling, I don’t know. But I know a Jew who doesn’t feel that way. Ariel Dov doesn’t feel that way? Well, what can you do. That’s all my discussions with him; I simply didn’t manage to answer him. I really didn’t manage to answer him. In the third book I discuss this at length. I didn’t manage to answer him, and he tells me that yes, he tells me that it’s simply not true, because it’s like free choice. All these paradoxes of free choice stem from the fact that people try to map the act of choosing onto one of two mechanisms: either determinism or indeterminism. What is indeterminism? Indeterminism is complete randomness. And choice is neither this nor that. Therefore, whenever you try to explain to someone what choice is, you’ll always get stuck, and he’ll always trip you up. Because he’ll always show you that if it’s determinism, it’s not right, and if it’s indeterminism, that’s also not right. Which means there is no choice. And the answer is that that’s not true, because there is a third concept. Why are you forcing me to be either here or there? Choice is a third concept. How do I know? I don’t know how to define it, because I experience it directly. That’s all. That’s the only answer I can give. So here too, I think it’s the same thing. If you have that feeling, then that’s your feeling. Even if you don’t manage to convey it to someone else, then you didn’t manage. But if that’s your feeling, that’s what you think.
[Speaker G] There are other places in the world that say the feelings we have are not correct.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Such as? Fine, if you become convinced that they’re not correct, then give it up. But as long as you haven’t become convinced, why should I give it up?
[Speaker G] All right, we’re done with the discussions.