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Table of Contents
- Introduction and getting to know Rabbi Michael Abraham
- Biography, studies, and life path
- Science and faith, the creation of the world, and relating to the Torah as facts
- The army, discovering a love of learning, and the move to academia
- Academic track: engineering and physics
- A “Rabbi” without ordination and the entry into Torah study and teaching
- The Haredi attitude toward science and modernity, and being labeled an “apikoros”
- The World to Come, principles of faith, and the revelation at Sinai
- Miracles, the witness argument, and the debate over the plausibility of revelation
- The authority of the Sages: formal authority versus essential authority
- Haredi society, Zionism, modernity, and Chabad
- Haredi pragmatism, relations with the state, and examples from the High Court of Justice
- Separation of religion and state, and the connection to secular Jewish identity
- Political positions and an assessment of the coalition
- The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, history, and the absence of a single representative leadership
- Audience questions: proofs for the existence of God and the connection to the religious God
- Free will
- Writing on the internet and the impact of information on religious education
- Religious identity, veganism, and animal suffering
- Morality without God
- Who is more “disturbing”: a moral secular person or an anti-science religious person
- Family, open argument, and blessings under the wedding canopy
- Events in Lod, Jewish terrorism, and a “carrot and stick” policy
- Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Isaiah 53, and the Messiah
- End of the episode and a personal eulogy for Ray Liotta and Mody Bar-On
Summary
General overview
Doron Nir hosts Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham and introduces him as a rabbi without formal ordination and as a doctor of physics who teaches Torah and has been conducting dialogues with students for many years, within a lively Jewish-Israeli conversation about the place of faith in the lives of Jews in Israel. Abraham describes a natural integration, for him, between science and faith; recounts a personal development that led him both to academic studies and to Torah study and teaching in yeshivot; and sharpens his positions on the authority of the Sages, the World to Come and the Messiah, Haredi society and the state, and the separation of religion and state. Later, audience questions come up about proofs for the existence of God, morality without God, free will, and political and social disputes, after which Doron closes with a personal eulogy for Ray Liotta and Mody Bar-On.
Introduction and getting to know Rabbi Michael Abraham
Doron Nir opens the episode as episode 560 of Geekonomy and says that Uriel Ofir directed him to Michael Abraham following previous episodes in which Doron defined himself as a cultural Jew or a Reform Jew. Doron describes being surprised by the volume of responses in the “Life Itself” forum ahead of Abraham’s appearance, and places this within an intense dialogue among believing Jews in the religious and Haredi sectors about what place faith should occupy in the lives of Israelis and of Jews in Israel in particular. The conversation also opens with an anecdote about watching an NBA game and the fact that there is a television in Abraham’s home.
Biography, studies, and life path
Abraham says that he is neither a “rabbi” nor a “scholar” in the institutional sense, and says he was born in Haifa in 1960 on Mount Carmel, studied in elementary school and middle school in religious schools in Haifa, and in high school studied at the Midrashiyah in Pardes Hanna. He describes a Religious Zionist home with parents who immigrated from Hungary and gradually settled into Religious Zionism, and growing up in Bnei Akiva and later in a hesder yeshiva in Gush Etzion. He says that his father was an electrical engineer who loved science and Talmudic text, and that in his home there was no tension between science and religion.
Science and faith, the creation of the world, and relating to the Torah as facts
Abraham says he never thought there was tension between science and faith, and describes an outlook similar to the one attributed to Leibowitz: living in two worlds without being troubled by the gaps. He explains that in the religious education he received, they did not teach evolution or the contemporary age of the universe, and so he was not exposed early on to conflicts; later he formulated a position according to which facts are learned from science, not from the Torah, and if the Torah’s descriptions do not align with facts, then they are not accepted literally or are interpreted differently. He argues that many modern religious people in practice live with such a model even if they do not articulate it, and distinguishes between the relatively limited Jewish tension and the much broader Christian tension around contradictions between science and faith, adding that the religion-science polemic is “imported” in the era of the global village.
The army, discovering a love of learning, and the move to academia
Abraham says his parents opposed a hesder yeshiva because they wanted him to get to university quickly, and that they tried to steer him toward the academic reserve track, but he did not want that and, by his own account, was not a good enough student for it. He says that during high school he felt he did not want to study, left the hesder yeshiva, continued to regular army service in the armored corps, and almost went to officers’ training but was prevented by hepatitis. Toward the end of his service he discovers that he very much wants to study, and realizes in retrospect that he had always loved reading, describing how already in sixth grade he got permission to borrow adult books from the Roth Library in Haifa and finished almost the entire library, even though in those years he thought he “hated studying” because of the system and the teachers.
Academic track: engineering and physics
Abraham says that after the army he studied electronics engineering at Tel Aviv University, out of a combination of an inclination toward science and livelihood considerations, and then found himself drawn to theoretical courses and suffering through practical ones. He describes moving into physics, taking supplementary studies and many courses in various fields including philosophy, and then completing a master’s degree and doctorate at Bar-Ilan, followed later by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Weizmann Institute.
A “Rabbi” without ordination and the entry into Torah study and teaching
Abraham emphasizes that he does not have rabbinic ordination and explains that the title “Rabbi” is not necessarily connected to exams of the Chief Rabbinate, but rather to teaching Torah or to the public recognizing someone as a rabbi, and he argues that many of the great rabbis never had ordination. He describes the institutionalization of ordination as connected to the State of Israel and the Chief Rabbinate and to a desire to give weight to Torah education similar to academic education, but says that anyone who understands the matter “dies laughing” at the demand for paperwork. He says that he began studying half a day in a yeshiva in Bnei Brak for returnees to Judaism while doing his master’s degree, started teaching in a Haredi kollel in Netanya already in the middle of his doctorate, and after the postdoc looked for Torah teaching rather than academia because he felt there was too much involvement in “little technicalities and petty nuisances,” and that is how he came, through a friend’s connection, to the hesder yeshiva in Yeruham as a senior lecturer.
The Haredi attitude toward science and modernity, and being labeled an “apikoros”
Abraham says that ordinary Haredi institutions would not invite someone involved in academia because of social closedness and a desire not to present students with alternative models, and adds that his views have “deteriorated” over the years to become more “heretical.” He says that the label “apikoros” began appearing a few years ago, and attributes one of the first cases to Avishai Grinzaig, who had been his student in the kollel and is now a journalist. Abraham says the labeling does not interest him and that what matters is what is true, adding that whether there is Gehenna or not is the decision of the Holy One, blessed be He, not of Grinzaig.
The World to Come, principles of faith, and the revelation at Sinai
Abraham says children are not taught systematically about the World to Come, heaven, and hell, and that it remains in the background partly because nobody really knows, despite dogmas such as Maimonides’ thirteen principles. He distinguishes between Haredi education, which is focused on the World to Come as a central vision, and Religious Zionism, which sees this world as a goal and not merely a corridor, and therefore gives the World to Come less emphasis. He says to his grandchildren and students that he has no idea what happens after death, suspects it is an invention with motivations behind it, and notes that the idea resolves the experience of “the righteous person who suffers and the wicked person who prospers,” but does not see it as a solid fact even if it is a principle of faith. He says he believes there was a revelation at Sinai—“something happened there”—and describes it as a foundational event he finds hard to give up, citing Rabbi Amit Kula’s book “Did It Happen or Not,” and saying that if Sinai is only an “educational myth,” then “I’m going to the beach this coming Sabbath.” He quotes Amos Oz on “the big bang of Judaism” and adds that in his view there are indications of some sort of encounter there, and that even a priori he would expect a transmission of divine will if God exists.
Miracles, the witness argument, and the debate over the plausibility of revelation
Doron challenges Abraham’s choice to grant Sinai a more plausible status, and raises the possibility of an extraterrestrial explanation in the style of Erich von Däniken. Abraham rejects reliance on Occam’s razor in this context, mentions the Christian polemic around David Hume’s “witness argument,” and brings an example from a story by Amnon Levav about a workshop in an American town where no Black person was asked to summarize, in order to show that people do not always choose the “invented as a myth” explanation even when statistically it is easier. The conversation also rolls on to Bertrand Russell’s “teapot” example and the question of what to do with claims that cannot be falsified.
The authority of the Sages: formal authority versus essential authority
Doron asks how full halakhic / of Jewish law obligation unfolds from Sinai all the way to customs and practices, and Abraham presents the standard religious ethos according to which “everything came down from Sinai” and the Sages, endowed with divine inspiration, do not err. Abraham says he does not accept that, and proposes a distinction between essential authority of “all-knowing people” and formal authority, like the authority of the Knesset, where one obeys the law even without thinking the lawmakers are always right. He says that the Torah itself commands a mechanism of authority like the Sanhedrin and “do not deviate,” because a system cannot function without interpretation and decisions, but emphasizes that formal authority does not obligate him to accept every aggadic or moral idea of the Sages as an absolute value, only primarily within the halakhic / of Jewish law mandate where the law is set.
Haredi society, Zionism, modernity, and Chabad
Abraham separates two axes within Haredi society: opposition to modernity and opposition to Zionism, and argues that they are not the same thing, citing the Hardalim as an example of Zionists with a Haredi attitude toward modernity. He argues that Chabad is extremely anti-Zionist, and cites testimony from the introduction to the book “Eim HaBanim Semeichah,” where the Lubavitcher Rebbe asks that people not say the author was a Zionist, because that would be “slander.” He explains that Haredi opposition to the state is not opposition to sovereignty as such, but to a modern and secular state that does not function according to Jewish law, and adds a psychological analysis of envy and frustration in the face of the success of the Zionist project, which advances religious values such as settling the Land, mainly through secular people.
Haredi pragmatism, relations with the state, and examples from the High Court of Justice
Abraham argues that the core Haredi world is very pragmatic and not ideological in the way it is portrayed, and that “for them nothing is in the category of be killed rather than transgress,” and therefore “a heavy hand will work.” He gives the example that in the past deputy ministers were appointed without ministers, for ideological reasons connected to governmental responsibility, and then, following a High Court ruling, Haredi ministers were in fact appointed. He also mentions the Leah Shakdiel High Court case on women serving on religious councils, and says that after the ruling, Haredim began running women for religious councils and at times even supported secular female candidates for strategic reasons. He explains that the Haredim “go up on the barricades” only when there is no price for their public, and that their struggles are usually triggered by internal dynamics within Haredi society rather than by confrontation with the outside.
Separation of religion and state, and the connection to secular Jewish identity
Doron asks about the separation of religion and state, and Abraham says he supports separation but argues that secular people do not really agree to it, because many of them are looking for a connection to their Jewish identity, and separation would blur what it means to “be Jewish” in this country if the state were Jewish only culturally and not “in a hard sense.” He links the avoidance of separation to secular reluctance to let go of the connection with the religious and Haredi world.
Political positions and an assessment of the coalition
Abraham says that sometimes he does not vote because “there’s no one to vote for,” notes that he once voted for Kahlon and once for Bennett, and expresses happiness at the formation of a coalition that breaks political dichotomies, but says that in its current state it should have “returned the keys,” because one cannot pay any price to rebellious members of Knesset and use the state treasury for survival needs. He says he is mainly in a state of “gevalt” over Ben-Gvir and opposes giving him positions of power, and supports including Ra’am as part of bringing twenty percent of the residents into the political field, but opposes including the Joint List because he does not trust it, illustrating this by referring to Ahmad Tibi and his connection to Arafat.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, history, and the absence of a single representative leadership
Abraham says one must not leave history behind, and mentions the partition proposal in which the Jews accepted and the Arabs did not, arguing that the pattern repeats itself around proposed arrangements. He describes the difficulty posed by the absence of a single representation for the entire Palestinian public, and cites an expression of a friend of his about the “fallen battalions of officers’ school” as a force that sabotages every agreement. He agrees that before the establishment of the state the Jews had the Haganah, the Irgun, and Lehi, and adds that the historical stroke of luck was the existence of Ben-Gurion on the Jewish side as against Palestinian leadership figures like Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, while debating with Doron over the degree of similarity and the uniqueness of Rabin versus Ehud Barak.
Audience questions: proofs for the existence of God and the connection to the religious God
Doron describes a storm of questions from listeners and quotes one listener who says he is in the process of leaving religion and is waiting for answers. Tovel Rosenwasser asks about the kind of God for whom proofs are presented, the meaning of a philosophical God for life, choosing a religion, and historical proofs for Sinai. Abraham answers that the proofs are for the philosophical God, and that one cannot expect a philosophical proof for the religious God, but he argues that there is a connection between the questions, because accepting the existence of a transcendent being takes you “halfway” toward the possibility of a revelatory tradition. He explains that every proof assumes a different aspect of divinity and that this is not a multiplicity of beings but one being with different aspects, comparing it to the point that once the existence of a being has already been established, an additional claim about it is no longer a “celestial teapot” with the same force.
Free will
Abraham says he wrote a book in which he argues that there is no scientific indication either against or in favor of free will, and therefore the question remains philosophical. He says that he believes in free will and presents criticism of Libet’s experiments and of “split-brain” arguments as non-decisive.
Writing on the internet and the impact of information on religious education
Abraham says he has no algorithm for choosing writing topics and writes according to what comes up from the news, learning, or ideas. He argues that the internet opens the religious world to options that did not exist before, explains Haredi opposition to the internet as a kind of reaction, and states that even in places trying to preserve closedness, it is no longer what it once was, and he welcomes the openness.
Religious identity, veganism, and animal suffering
Abraham says he has not defined himself as Haredi even though he lived in a Haredi environment and raised a “more or less” Haredi family, and he refuses to place himself on a religious map because group labeling obligates ready-made answers. He says he is vegetarian and not vegan, explaining this as a response to the “horrific animal suffering in the industry,” and notes that there is both a dog and a cat at home.
Morality without God
Abraham states explicitly that in his view, without belief in God, “there is no valid morality,” but clarifies that he is not claiming that non-believers are less moral behaviorally. He argues that the morality of non-believers is “inconsistent” without a philosophically valid grounding, and therefore either they are inconsistent or they are “covert believers” in some transcendent being that gives validity to moral principles, and he refers to a column he wrote and to a panel with Professor David Enoch.
Who is more “disturbing”: a moral secular person or an anti-science religious person
Abraham says he has no value problem with “stupidity” even if it is annoying, and therefore a religious person who holds unscientific views is not, in his eyes, morally flawed. He says that a secular person is, in his view, “a flawed person” in the sense of not fulfilling religious obligations, but he distinguishes between a secular person who chose his path and an inert religious person who remains religious only because that is how he was raised, and concludes that the inert religious person bothers him more because, in his eyes, he is “a sheep” and not a person who chose.
Family, open argument, and blessings under the wedding canopy
Abraham says he has secular children and that in the family “everything is on the table” and they argue about everything without anger. He says that under his daughter’s wedding canopy he agreed that everyone could recite blessings, including women, but conditioned it on the person reciting the blessing actually believing in God, because otherwise saying “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe” is, in his view, “moving one’s lips with no meaning whatsoever.”
Events in Lod, Jewish terrorism, and a “carrot and stick” policy
Abraham refers to the events in the mixed cities and says he understands the sources of Arab frustration but does not accept the form of the response and does not accept symmetry between Arabs and Jews, except for Jewish groups who came “to inflame things.” He says there are a few Jewish terrorists and they must be dealt with harshly, and stresses the need for a policy of harsh response to riots alongside real treatment of the sources that produce them, with the hope that broad political integration could have enabled a “carrot and stick” approach.
Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Isaiah 53, and the Messiah
Abraham says he does not study Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) because it bores him and he does not deal with it, and therefore he does not respond to the question about Isaiah 53 and the Messiah. He says he has no position on eschatological questions like the Messiah and the World to Come, and that “when he comes we’ll probably know,” but also raises the possibility that if it is something one could miss, then perhaps we will miss it, and perhaps it already happened.
End of the episode and a personal eulogy for Ray Liotta and Mody Bar-On
Doron ends with a personal impression of Abraham and says he will attach links to the website, YouTube channel, and Zoom lectures. He then shifts to a monologue on the deaths of Ray Liotta and Mody Bar-On, describing Liotta through Goodfellas and through a 2018 Marc Maron episode in which he spoke about being adopted and about his breakthrough with the encouragement of Melanie Griffith, and stressing that even if he was not the most electrifying presence in the film, he is irreplaceable in it. He describes Mody Bar-On as a Haifa native who studied at Ironi Heh High School on Mount Carmel, as a modest, pleasant, and intellectual person who connected soccer with Israeli culture, and emphasizes the sense of orphanhood and loss that is created when there is no replacement for them. He ends by saying that the world is more beautiful and better when they are walking around in it, and says goodbye to them and to “the rant” until the next episode.
Full Transcript
[Speaker A] Hello everyone, you’re listening to Geekonomy, I’m Doron Nir. Our episode today is with Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham. Michael Abraham grew up in Haifa, he has a doctorate in physics, and he’s a rabbi not by virtue of some formal rabbinic ordination but by virtue of being a teacher and a person who has been conducting dialogues with students for many years. He’s a fascinating person, and I would never have known he existed if not for Uriel Ofir, one of our regular listeners, who told me about him after hearing my long riff about how I had decided to define myself as a cultural Jew or a Reform Jew in one of the previous episodes. And he told me, listen, this is a person with fascinating views and it would be worth doing an episode with him. And when I came to do an episode with him and posted about it in Geekonomy’s “Life Itself” forum, I was very surprised by the number of responses to the fact that he was coming. That was lovely too, because I knew nothing about him before the episode, and also because there’s a strong and vibrant dialogue going on among believing Jews, both in the religious sector and in the Haredi sector, about what place faith should have in the lives of Israelis and of Jews in Israel in particular. And Michael has very firm views on the matter, and it was really a pleasure to hear them. Without adding many more words, episode five hundred and sixty with Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham—let’s begin.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Today I actually started early altogether—there was the Eastern Conference finals game in the NBA.
[Speaker A] Right, so you got up to watch NBA.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not in real time, but almost in real time. I join in because I watch it faster. So I joined at five to six, and I had basically already seen the game—I skip all the breaks.
[Speaker A] Where do you watch? At home?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, on… what is it? Right, got it.
[Speaker A] Okay, so that means there’s a television in the house. Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By the way, we’re already recording.
[Speaker A] So thank you very much for coming. And now I’d be happy if—because I didn’t know you, I didn’t know your work, and from the moment Uriel Ofir told me about you, I started to be exposed more and more and consumed more of the many things you’ve published, both on your blog and on your YouTube channel and so on and so on. But I’d imagine that, like me, most secular Israelis hardly know you at all, and I’d be happy if you’d tell me a bit about your biography and how it happens that you were first a rabbi or first a researcher at the Weizmann Institute.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The truth is, neither one nor the other. To this day I’m neither one nor the other. Okay, so let’s start.
[Speaker A] Where were you born?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I was born in Haifa, in 1960, on Mount Carmel. Where exactly? I—
[Speaker A] Shimshon Street. Where did you grow up?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Oh! Nice. Corner of Shimshon, Moriah and Shimshon.
[Speaker A] No way, okay, in the end maybe we were neighbors. What high school did you go to?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For high school I studied in Pardes Hanna at the Midrashiyah, a yeshiva high school. Okay. But in elementary school I studied in Haifa—I studied at Carmel Lama’alah, and after that at Yavne middle school, those are religious schools. Sure, sure.
[Speaker A] Man, I know it—I had religious neighbors, the Yaroslavsky family in the same building, you probably even knew them because they had older kids.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be. There’s something about that name that sounds familiar.
[Speaker A] So anyway, you grew up in Haifa like Bennett—Bennett also grew up in Haifa.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, he’s younger than I am, but yes.
[Speaker A] Yeah. And what kind of home did you grow up in? Religious Zionist?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What was the home like? A Religious Zionist home. My parents were immigrants from Hungary. From Hungary?
[Speaker A] So did they love Kishon in the house?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They immigrated in the fifties. But you know, as immigrants from Hungary, you’re not yet positioned on the religious map, because you’re not immersed in all the Israeli nuances. Yes. But over the years they settled into Religious Zionism. And I grew up in Bnei Akiva, you know, standard Religious Zionism. After that I studied in Pardes Hanna at the Midrashiyah, which is a yeshiva high school. After that I went to a hesder yeshiva in Gush Etzion.
[Speaker A] Wait, I want to go back with you for a second to your high school years. After all, you have a doctorate in physics? Yes. And a doctorate in physics is not something that happens overnight. You don’t suddenly discover at twenty-five that you like physics and become a doctoral student. That’s something that exists from earlier years. When did the connection to science begin for you?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In my case, it really does begin in early years. My parents… my parents told me—I obviously can’t remember this—that the first sentence I learned to say was “divergence D equals rho.” That’s from my father—Maxwell’s equations in electromagnetism. My father was a science freak—his training was in electrical engineering—but he was a freak for science and philosophy of science.
[Speaker A] Was he an electrical engineer from the Technion, or did he study in Hungary and then immigrate to Israel?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He studied in Hungary and finished at the Technion, and also did a master’s degree at the Technion.
[Speaker A] Okay, nice.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I think he obviously had some part in it. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly how, but he had some part in it.
[Speaker A] Tell me—inside a religious home, you know, I think most secular people see religion as contradicting science, even though today there’s already a somewhat more advanced view of it. People like Professor Aumann taught the religious public that you can be a very believing person and still be a rationalist and a renowned scientist. But what was it like at home? I mean, how did a religious worldview—going to synagogue on Friday night and so on—sit at the same time with a passion for science and engineering?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, first of all, maybe just a small correction: I think Aumann taught the secular public, not the religious one.
[Speaker A] The secular public—that’s what I meant.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, because in part of the religious public it’s actually quite natural—not all of it, but part of it. Let’s say the more modern religiosity, what here in Israel is called Religious Zionism. I think in the U.S. they have a more accurate term—it’s called Modern Orthodoxy. It’s not connected to Zionism, it’s connected to modernization.
[Speaker A] The modernization of Orthodox religion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Here in Israel, for some reason, they identify those two things. I’m actually right now in the middle of writing a series of posts about that. But in our home it was completely natural—there was no such tension at all. I never in my life thought there was any tension, not just contradiction, between those two poles. My father loved studying Talmudic text and loved science.
[Speaker A] Yes, but you know, the tension for secular people begins when they teach them about the creation of the world in elementary school. I mean, if I’m not mistaken, it’s first or second grade that they teach Genesis chapter 1. How do you, as a religious person, read the weekly Torah portion every year, the portion of Genesis? You go to synagogue, they talk about the story of the creation of the world, seven days, all that. You don’t come home and ask your father, “Dad, what’s going on here?”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Honestly, I don’t remember asking that. It was somehow obvious to me—you know, like Leibowitz’s well-known statements—that as a religious Jew the world was created six thousand years ago in seven days, and as a person living in this age I know it has existed for fourteen billion years, and it doesn’t bother me one bit. Now, that doesn’t necessarily come from some kind of intellectual superiority—on the contrary. In a certain sense, both sides were just very natural, and I never thought there was actually anything here that needed solving. That came to me very late. I mean, later on I dealt with it a lot, but very late. A long time after I had already finished even the doctorate—maybe during the doctorate or even after it—that I even started trying to sit down and think through how those two things fit together. Before that I simply went down both tracks, and it never even occurred to me that there was any problem.
[Speaker A] What a strange thing that is. The conflict—I don’t know, for me, you know, I grew up in a home that wasn’t religious or Religious Zionist, but my grandfather definitely went to synagogue, and every time I stayed over with them on the Sabbath, he insisted I come with him to synagogue. And the text is the text—you read something that stands in contradiction to everything you know about the world. Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So look, first of all, in high school—and also in elementary school—I didn’t study evolution and the current scientific age of the world. They didn’t teach us that. I personally wasn’t in a biology track, but it seems to me that even in biology tracks, at least in most of them, in religious education—at least then—they didn’t teach evolution.
[Speaker A] Meaning they avoided teaching things that would contradict the biblical text.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think so. Even today in a large part of the institutions it’s still like that, though today it’s a bit better. It may be that this is part of the matter, because I wasn’t really aware of the contemporary scientific picture. I don’t think—as I said earlier—that even if I had been aware, it would have produced some terrible conflict. At the margins, maybe I would have wondered a little what to do with those two things. At a later stage I tried a bit to conceptualize it for myself, and I think that—even today, when I already have a more consolidated position on these things—my feeling is that I don’t learn facts from the Torah. Facts I learn from science, from observing the world, the way any normal person is supposed to learn facts. And if there are descriptions in the Torah that don’t fit that, then they don’t fit. Either I don’t accept them, or I interpret them differently.
[Speaker A] So what you’re basically saying here—if I can maybe not interpret, but still—you’re basically saying the Torah is not history. I don’t relate to this text as a historical text. And yet, I assume you’re aware that there are many people in this country, and Jews generally, who to some extent over the generations or even today do relate to the Torah as a historical text, and in your eyes they’re simply mistaken. Meaning, this is the point where you say, okay guys, I can’t control everything, but you’re wrong.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. I’ll say even more than that. I think that deep down, at least when I’m talking about modern religious people—not Haredim and so on, who maybe also aren’t really exposed to these tensions, though today more than before—I think that deep down everyone basically lives the picture I’m describing to you here. Not everyone would tell you that, not because they’re dishonest, but because they don’t even tell it to themselves. Because you have to be ready for pretty complex thinking in order to live peacefully with those two things and say, okay, I’m completely committed to both and that’s perfectly fine for me—and then you have to sew it together. Saying it is free, but you also have to do the stitching. There are points that need clarification, and not everyone is willing to invest the effort in that, maybe not everyone is capable enough for it, whatever. So people leave it at an intuitive level—they live in both worlds. If you pushed them into a corner and asked, maybe they wouldn’t have answers, but the fact is that most people live peacefully with both. Among Christians, this is very troubling. Christians are very troubled by these contradictions between science and faith, and an enormous literature has been written there, and a lot of people deal with it, and there are major tensions there—the whole monkey trials and the like that have been around for decades. Among Jews, there isn’t really that. Only at the margins. It doesn’t bother people.
[Speaker A] Look, first of all, among Jews it existed less mainly because Jews weren’t required to run a nation, to run a kingdom. I mean, these conflicts grow stronger over time as the State of Israel advances, because these conflicts lie at the basis of what the State of Israel is going to look like, what children are taught, what they are not taught, what Israeli law will establish.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you’re talking about contradictions between modernity or statehood or democracy and Judaism, you’re right. But if you’re talking about contradictions between science and faith, that’s not necessarily connected to the question of the existence of a state. A person who studies these things—even if he lives in his own state or in some other state—can still wrestle between the two and see a contradiction between them. And I think this great tension exists much more among Christians than among Jews. It’s a bit imported. In our global-village era, and as the religious world too opens up more and more, this religion-science tension is imported from Christianity into Judaism, and Jewish polemical literature is a phenomenon that used to be very rare, and today a bit less rare, but still—it doesn’t compare to the Christian scale, and by the way not to the level either. What Christians have forgotten, we won’t achieve in the next hundred years. That’s actually a very big compliment to Christianity.
[Speaker A] You mean theological-philosophical thought?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. And also the confrontation with science, most of which I actually don’t like—the Christian confrontation with science. But there’s no doubt that the energies and seriousness invested in it, and faith in that serious sense—they’re not joking around the way Jews do: okay, I live this and I live that and it’s all fine. Like the referee’s whistle. Exactly. And among Christians, at least the fundamentalist part of them, there’s something very serious about their faith. They’re not playing games.
[Speaker A] I agree with you, and it really does get to matters of life and death. I’ll just take as an example what’s happening right now in the United States with Roe v. Wade—the conservative forces who genuinely believe that a fertilized egg is a human being in every respect really do go all the way with that belief. I want to go back to your biography, if I may. So you’re saying there wasn’t that conflict at home, and therefore for you going to study science was completely natural, not in tension with faith and not contradicting faith.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When I wanted to go to a hesder yeshiva at age eighteen, my parents opposed it. Why? A hesder yeshiva is a longer service track—it’s army and yeshiva, altogether four and a half years. They wanted me to get to university as quickly as possible.
[Speaker A] I see. And what about the academic reserve track? Didn’t they try to steer you there? They did.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But first of all, I didn’t really want it, and second, I wasn’t such a good student, so I don’t think I would have been accepted anyway.
[Speaker A] So at what age, in the end, did something click? Because the fact is you eventually got into the Weizmann Institute.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I always loved learning, but I never knew that I loved learning. Okay, when did you discover it? I discovered it after high school. In high school it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to study anything. Enough already, up till now I hadn’t studied anything in high school either, but until now they’d been pestering me, and once I was of age, after eighteen, I thought, leave me alone already, for heaven’s sake. I assume you went to the army. I first went to a hesder yeshiva, left it, and continued in regular army service, in the armored corps. What, officers’ training? No, I didn’t do officers’ training in the end. I had hepatitis at the wrong time, but I came pretty close to officers’ course and in the end I didn’t go. Okay. And in the army, toward the end, when discharge was already on the horizon, I suddenly discovered how badly I wanted to study. It was an amazing discovery for me, because I had finished entire libraries. In this library, I had permission to read the adult books in sixth grade—they didn’t let you take out adult books from the library in Haifa, Roth Library, if you know it.
[Speaker A] Of course, absolutely, I borrowed books there too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. So I got permission to read adult books in sixth grade because I had finished all the children’s and youth books. I finished pretty much the whole library. Were you a science fiction fan? No, actually I don’t like science fiction.
[Speaker A] So what did you like to read?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Books—novels, history, also non-fiction. It’s amazing. And all the while I supposedly hate studying. I mean, I never stopped to give myself an account and say, wait a second, so what exactly are you doing all the time with all these books?
[Speaker A] In retrospect, was the problem just the teachers?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The teachers, the system, yes. I’m a very anti-establishment, anti-system type.
[Speaker A] Says the rabbi and researcher from the Weizmann Institute.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So somehow, when they try to force me to do something, I don’t do it. Okay. And at the library I went on my own initiative, of course with my parents’ encouragement, and there I never stopped reading—I was a total bookworm. Amazing. And I never connected it to a love of learning and a desire to study until the army. In the army, I suddenly saw how much I was waiting to get to university, and then I discovered that I actually love learning. That was a very surprising discovery for me.
[Speaker A] Nice. And what did you do after the army?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I went to Tel Aviv University and did a bachelor’s degree in engineering, electronics engineering.
[Speaker A] So your father would be happy.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. My father—and his father was a simple Jew who sold shirts at fairs. Yes. My father wanted to study Semitic languages. Oh. His father, back in Hungary, told him “hot air.” His father said to him, you can study whatever you want, as long as it’s in engineering. His father was very pluralistic. And somehow that passed on to me as well, even though I leaned more toward the sciences. But I had friends who told me, look, electronics engineering has the most math and physics, but there’s also something practical to do with it—it opens up a path to making a living. So I went in that direction, but I saw that I wanted more theoretical, more abstract directions. Every theoretical course, I licked my fingers over; in the practical courses I suffered. Completely orthogonal to all the people around me. Okay. Just the opposite. Then I understood that I needed to continue in more theoretical directions, so I switched to physics and did a master’s and a doctorate.
[Speaker A] Also at Tel Aviv University?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, at Bar-Ilan. I did supplementary studies at Tel Aviv University. I just took some physics courses there in my final year, and I also took all kinds of philosophy courses and so on—every open slot I had, I filled with university courses from all sorts of fields.
[Speaker A] And at what point did you start working toward rabbinic ordination?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t have rabbinic ordination, which is why I told you I’m neither this nor that. Okay, okay. Rabbi—look, “rabbi” is a very confusing title, because it’s true that nowadays there are these tracks of rabbinic ordination and exams through the Chief Rabbinate and so on, but nobody really cares about that. I taught guys in those tracks. Okay? I taught in those tracks, and I don’t have ordination. Okay? Someone who’s called a rabbi today isn’t necessarily someone who went through ordination, but rather someone who teaches Torah, or is a community rabbi, or someone the public in some way recognizes as a rabbi, or something like that. There are no criteria. By the way, all the great rabbis—even the ones whose names you know—almost none of them have rabbinic ordination. Okay.
[Speaker A] And when did this whole thing of formal rabbinic ordination begin?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the State of Israel, basically, they wanted to institutionalize it. Part of it was because of the Chief Rabbinate’s lust for power—they wanted to take control of this area too—and part of it was to give weight to Torah scholarship the way academic education gets weight. So you need to prove it with some kind of paper. So they made exams. And slowly all kinds of people got swept up in it, and suddenly they started demanding certificates showing you passed the Chief Rabbinate’s ordination exams, but anybody who really understands the matter dies laughing.
[Speaker A] But was there a moment when, you know, a person knows himself—being a doctor, there’s a certificate that defines it, and I assume that from that moment, if someone called you “doctor,” you wouldn’t object to it. Was there some point when someone started calling you “rabbi” and you said okay? When I started teaching.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When I started teaching.
[Speaker A] I see, okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When I started teaching in a yeshiva or something like that, then right away they call you “rabbi,” because that’s…
[Speaker A] And how did it happen that you were invited to teach in a yeshiva?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Parallel to my master’s degree, I started studying half a day in a yeshiva in Bnei Brak for newly religious returnees, and half a day I was at the university. And that’s how it went throughout the master’s and the doctorate. And there—there, basically—that’s how I got more and more into serious Torah study, because until then I hadn’t really studied anything seriously, but not that either. And then right after the… actually in the middle of my doctorate I already started teaching in some kollel, a Haredi kollel in Netanya. I started there and saw that it was good—I enjoyed it, and I saw that it also advanced my own learning, because when I teach it also advances my own learning. And after I finished the postdoc at the Weizmann Institute… postdoc in what?
[Speaker A] A postdoc at the Weizmann Institute?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So then I started looking—I saw I didn’t want to go in an academic direction. I got the impression they deal too much with little technicalities and irrelevant nitpicking, and so I thought I’d look for something teaching in a yeshiva or teaching Torah, but I didn’t know how you get to that and all that. I happened to have a mutual friend with a yeshiva head in Yeruham. He told me the yeshiva head there was looking for a teacher. Yes, that’s someone who teaches in a yeshiva. I told him to ask, and that’s how the connection was made, and I got to Yeruham and started teaching at the hesder yeshiva there.
[Speaker A] “Teacher” is an acronym for “teaching rabbi”?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In Hebrew that’s what people say, but originally it’s reish metivta, which in Aramaic means head of the academy, head of the yeshiva. I see. But it’s not that every teacher is a yeshiva head, that’s just what it’s called.
[Speaker A] You said earlier that you started teaching in some Haredi kollel, and I—you know, I assume I’m not the only one who looks at you and says this is a unique personality, or even an odd bird. Your scientific background and your passion for science and non-Jewish knowledge, non-Haredi knowledge—doesn’t that make people nervous when they invite you to teach?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There it was a more open place, and the person who ran it was also a more open-minded Jew. Obviously they wouldn’t invite me to teach in an ordinary Haredi yeshiva unless, you know, I defined myself as a baal teshuva—meaning, abandoning the… the academic direction and focusing on study.
[Speaker A] Meaning it would be unthinkable for a Haredi yeshiva to have someone teaching who… who accepts science more than the biblical creation story?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not “accepts.” “Accepts” is already a worldview. Right. We’re not there yet. I’m talking about someone who engages in science regardless of what he accepts or what his worldview is. Because he’s not one of “our people,” right? One of our crowd. Meaning he’s not… you only accept someone who comes from your own milieu. They’re very strict about the social closedness, let’s call it that. They don’t want to present students with other models. So beyond my views—which over the years have deteriorated into becoming more and more heretical—yes. But even when my views were still completely… almost completely, let’s say, in the mainstream. Polite. Yes, there was still no chance, because someone who spends half a day at the university or… there’s no chance he’ll teach in a Haredi yeshiva. It won’t happen.
[Speaker A] You know, in one of the comments on a Q&A that came up on your website, I saw someone literally define you as a heretic. I grew up thinking the word “heretic” was a total insult—I mean, for religious people, a heretic is an unbeliever, someone whose soul is going to burn in hell. At what point did someone first call you a heretic, and what do you do with that at that moment?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Listen, I don’t know exactly when they started calling me a heretic. It was a few years ago, I think.
[Speaker A] Meaning it’s relatively new.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but my views really are undergoing changes, and they’re moving more and more in what we might call liberal directions, or something like that, broadly speaking. And so there are a lot of people who aren’t at peace with that, and according to definitions accepted by part of the public, I really do deserve that label. Now from my point of view, I have no problem at all with people calling me that, because I deal with questions, I deal with issues on their merits. Meaning, if I have a particular question, I examine the answer being given—whether it’s correct or not. Whether that answer is heretical or not heretical doesn’t interest me, because if it’s correct and heretical, then I accept it, and if it’s incorrect and pious, then I don’t accept it. In other words, the label doesn’t interest me; the question is what’s true. That’s also why I wrote in one of the columns on the site, in response to being called a heretic—that was about when it started. I even know who it was who started it; it was some student of ours in the kollel. Today he’s a fairly well-known journalist.
[Speaker A] Avishai Grinzaig.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, Avishai Grinzaig.
[Speaker A] A friend of the podcast, I should say. I read him in a lot of places and I really love his writing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s very talented, he—
[Speaker A] Very talented.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We spoke, and he raised substantial arguments, and fine.
[Speaker A] When I saw that text and saw him calling you a heretic, I said, listen, if Avishai Grinzaig calls you a heretic, maybe that’s actually a compliment. It’s not at all clear that it’s an insult.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t relate to labels at all, not as compliments and not as insults. It doesn’t interest me at all. I mean, if a person thinks I fit into the category called “heretic,” that’s perfectly fine, because that’s his conception, so what’s the problem? So he calls me a heretic, and that’s fine. I fully respect that. It’s a label—that just doesn’t hurt me at all. I see it as a kind of classification that results from a person’s worldview. He has the right to hold it, I don’t agree with him, and everything’s fine.
[Speaker A] Yes, yes, meaning you don’t derive insult from it, you just derive from it a labeling of your worldview.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Absolutely not. After all, in the end, whether they fry me in hell or not—that’s a decision of the Holy One, blessed be He, not of Avishai Grinzaig.
[Speaker A] Let’s actually talk about that for a moment, because you know, in the Religious Zionist education you grew up in, what do they teach children about the afterlife? Is there an afterlife? I mean, I know various conceptions in the Haredi world, and I’m less familiar with ideas of heaven and hell. I’m more familiar with ideas of the end of days and resurrection of the dead, but I don’t really know who teaches what to children. So what is the accepted Jewish view about what happens after we die?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, they don’t teach these things to children. It’s some kind of discourse that’s always there in the background. There aren’t classes devoted to the coming of the messiah, heaven, hell, I don’t know what, the world to come. There’s no such thing—not in Haredi education and not in Religious Zionist education.
[Speaker A] What happens if a child asks in class?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If a child asks in class, then they’ll answer with one answer or another. There are no systematic lessons on this subject, and not only because really nobody knows, if we’re being honest. And I think people inwardly also understand that they themselves don’t know anything either. But you know, there are certain dogmas we’re supposed to be committed to, so there are Maimonides’ thirteen principles, and people repeat various dogmas of one kind or another that I gradually enjoy sticking pins into a little bit—but it’s not taught systematically. And more than that: in Religious Zionist education, unlike Haredi education, it also doesn’t occupy a central place. Because in Haredi education you live in the world to come. This world is some kind of corridor that you’re supposed—exactly—you’re supposed somehow to protect yourself from or get through safely, and in the end the goal is to earn your eternal portion in the world to come. One of the great innovations of Religious Zionism is that there are actual goals here, and this world isn’t only a means. You live in this world. And the price—I don’t know if “price” is the right word, but the side effect of that kind of education—is that the world to come doesn’t play a significant part in education or in discourse. We talk about what should be done here, what the goals are, what’s right and wrong here, and what will happen in the next world—everybody believes in the world to come, but it’s in the background. Almost nobody does things for the sake of the world to come. You do things because they’re right or wrong. In other words, the considerations are considerations of this world.
[Speaker A] You say that’s an innovation of Religious Zionism. Was that already an innovation in your parents’ time, or were your parents already born into it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] My parents weren’t great ideologues, so it’s hard for me to draw conclusions.
[Speaker A] When they grew up in Hungary, did they grow up with a religious Jewish education?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They grew up with a religious Jewish education—my mother in Haredi education and my father in non-Haredi religious education, Orthodox but not Haredi, just ordinary, his father came from a simple home. They weren’t ideological types. And in general, by the way, the period was less ideological, and there weren’t organized doctrines of “this is what we think about this and that and that.” Rather, people simply lived it. Like I told you earlier about Torah and science—you just lived both worlds, that’s all. You didn’t bother defining for yourself how you reconcile them; you just flowed along.
[Speaker A] What do you do today when your grandchildren ask you about the afterlife?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I tell them I have no idea. When students ask me too, I tell them I have no idea. If I knew this was a tradition from the Holy One, blessed be He, or from Mount Sinai, I’d accept it. But I have no idea whether it isn’t an invention that somehow arose over the generations, and it even seems to me there are not bad motivations for inventing such things. In other words, I can think of why it would be convenient for people to invent something like that, so I’m a bit suspicious. There are certain arguments that strengthen the matter, because otherwise it comes out that the Holy One, blessed be He, isn’t just. Because the way life is here in the world—it isn’t just. It’s not “the righteous suffers and the wicked prospers.” So the hope is that there’s some later stage where the whole thing is offset, or rebalanced. So these are maybe arguments in favor of there being something afterward, but arguments are arguments, and there may be answers I haven’t thought of and maybe have thought of—it’s not a solid fact for me, far from it. Even though it’s a principle of faith; someone who doesn’t believe it is a heretic.
[Speaker A] Is there anything among the principles of faith that is a solid fact for you?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, I think—let’s say—I believe there was a revelation at Sinai. Something happened there. What exactly?
[Speaker A] When you say “revelation at Sinai,” do you mean a point in time at which a person went up the mountain and there was an encounter with a divine being that, for you, is the Creator of the world?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that gave us Torah. These are very general words, because I don’t know what this encounter means, what exactly it was, how exactly it unfolded.
[Speaker A] Why specifically that event? I mean, why revelation at Sinai yes, but the ten plagues of Egypt maybe not?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With the ten plagues of Egypt—I think there are parts of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) where, at least my concern is, we’re dealing with some kind of educational myths and not historical facts. Now with revelation at Sinai it’s almost the—there’s a friend of mine, Rabbi Amit Kula, also an interesting person by the way, if you ever want to interview him—but never mind.
[Speaker A] I’m already telling you I do, and I already want you to connect me with him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, okay. In any case, he’s an interesting person. He wrote a book called Was Being or Was Not. Was Being or Was Not? Was Being or Was Not, yes. He’s the rabbi of Kibbutz Alumim, and in that book he tries to completely detach religious faith from the factual dimension. Meaning, he wants to argue that religious faith makes no claim whatsoever on the factual plane—not historical, not physical, not scientific, nothing. There is nothing factual in—actually, that’s quite fashionable in academic circles, to make that separation. In any case, he wrote a book in which he tried—I told him in response, when I wrote some kind of review of the book, that I’m willing to accept almost everything except revelation at Sinai. First of all, because if revelation at Sinai too is only an educational myth, then I’m going to the beach this coming Sabbath. Meaning, I’m not devoting my life to educational myths. Educational myths can be educational tools when the system exists on some real foundation, and then I can say okay, within that I use stories; every educational system uses stories. So that too is perfectly fine, I have no problem with it. But if the whole story is an educational myth, then what? Then where does that leave me—what exactly obligates me to engage with these ridiculous myths? So I feel that… since in my view there are various indications—and I’ve written about them—that there was some kind of encounter there. Again, I say, I’m not committed to all the pyrotechnics around it and all the legendary descriptions that accompany it. It’s clear that a large part of that is only literary and pictorial additions. But there was some kind of interaction there, maybe through some sort of prophecy, I don’t know exactly what, in which somehow what Amos Oz once called the Big Bang of Judaism took place. Meaning, the Jewish space was created there, and within it this whole enterprise was built—but the space itself was created there. I think that’s a very beautiful metaphor for the matter. Very much so. And I think there are indications that even if I hadn’t heard there was a revelation at Sinai, since there are philosophical proofs for the existence of God that in my opinion do exist—good proofs; again, nothing is absolute and certain, but there are very good proofs—then I would also expect Him to convey to us in some way what He wants from us, because if He made us, I assume He wants something from us too. And therefore I think that even a priori I would expect there to be some kind of encounter like that. And if a tradition reaches me saying that indeed there was such an encounter, then it dovetails for me with the a priori expectation of its existence. In short, a lot could be said about this; never mind, I’ve written about it too, why I think this thing really did happen.
[Speaker A] That sounds a little arbitrary to me, sorry to say. But you know, in the end I know all kinds of theories about revelation at Sinai, including one theory that it was actually an encounter with an external civilization. Erich von Däniken wrote about Chariots of the Gods and all sorts of things like that. I don’t know whether you know it, but in my house when my mother introduced me to Erich von Däniken she was really excited to tell me about it, because suddenly you get an explanation that’s totally scientific, rational, and basically, you know, according to Occam’s razor it’s far more likely that this was an encounter with an external civilization than that some Creator-being met with human beings.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On this matter of Occam’s razor I actually don’t agree. And by the way, Erich von Däniken—at the end of the day a large part of what he says is forgery.
[Speaker A] Absolutely. Like many from that genre of extraterrestrial encounters. But I have to ask: if you already accept the fact—let’s for a moment not deal with the question of who was at that encounter on the non-human side, and just accept that there was some kind of encounter, there was an event as you say—to think that it was the Creator of the world is one of the least likely and most far-fetched possibilities. I’m trying to understand how, within the whole range of things you accept as educational stories, this one thing suddenly seems plausible to you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, I’ll tell you—the question you’re asking is basically what in thought, mainly Christian thought actually, is called the argument from testimony. There’s a huge polemic around it. It starts with David Hume. David Hume basically argued more or less what you’re arguing, and he even framed it in a statistical framework. Meaning, he basically said: look, there are two possibilities. One possibility—and he’s talking about miracles in general, not specifically revelation at Sinai, but miracles in general—say some testimony reaches you about a miracle, okay? You have two options. One option is to assume people invented it, some tradition came in, I don’t know, somehow culturally such a report was formed and passed on to later generations. It can happen overall; you can estimate the probability this way or that way, but in principle it’s not impossible. It can happen. In contrast, a miracle is something that in ordinary rational thinking is impossible. So if you now compare these two options as two hypotheses, like H0 and H1, and want to assess statistically which is more likely, obviously the first is more likely. Right? Now I say no. And the reason for that is a bit long, but I wrote about this too. I’ll say it briefly. You know, I have a very good friend, completely secular, who once told me a story. He consults for various companies on—he works in systematic inventive thinking, another person worth interviewing by the way, but never mind. Who is it? His name is Amnon Levav. Okay. He works in systematic inventive thinking, founded a company, SIT, and he says that among other things he once provided services to a town in the American Midwest where there were huge tensions among LGBT people, Blacks, Whites, various groups, and they decided to gather a group of, I think, 16—I don’t remember exactly—representatives from all the communities in that town, and he gave them a two-day workshop. Now he said to me, listen, I spoke there one day, and the next morning, on the second day, he asked the people for one person to summarize some part—I think, I no longer remember exactly—something from what had happened the day before, and then invite someone else from the audience to continue, and each one would invite someone else. Fine. So one got up, the second invited the second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on, and they finished, and okay, now what next? So Amnon is about to move on to the next stage, and then, he tells me, some Black participant got up—I don’t remember whether it was a man or woman—and said: did you notice that nobody called on any Black person? Meaning, one called the next, the next called the third, and all the Black participants were left aside. Meaning, everybody spoke except—there were, I don’t know, three, four, five, I don’t remember how many—Black people, and those didn’t speak, the whole group. Now Amnon, who is an exemplary liberal, was stunned by the fact that he hadn’t noticed—not only that it happened, but how did he not notice it? Nobody noticed it. It’s unbelievable, in a seminar talking about, yes, integration, pluralism, openness, inclusion, and so on. So I told him—this was many years after he told me that story—I remembered David Hume’s argument from testimony. I said to him: look, I have two options. One option is to decide that you invented this story as a liberal myth. Meaning, because you want to promote your values. To show us that basically—
[Speaker A] We’re all racists.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In disguise and subconsciously, and how we need to improve—which on that point I completely identify with. Second possibility is to say it really happened—which is simply beyond belief. What do you think I’m supposed to conclude now? Now you understand that according to Humean logic, or what you yourself said earlier, same thing, right?—the conclusion is that he invented the story. After all, a story like that can’t have happened. It almost can’t happen.
[Speaker A] Let’s say the probability of that incident is higher than the probability that the Creator of the world spoke to a flesh-and-blood human at Mount Sinai. No, no, obviously, I’m not comparing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not comparing, but let’s focus on the two possibilities in his story. Leave the moral aside from the story of revelation at Sinai. In his story you have two interpretive options. Right. Which one do you choose? Do you choose that he invented it? I don’t.
[Speaker A] I don’t either. Why not?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s much more likely.
[Speaker A] I think the story contains a certain—even not insignificant—degree of logic, based on my familiarity with social frameworks like that which try to cultivate what’s called inclusiveness. It doesn’t seem to me completely far-fetched. Yes, it can happen.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, not far-fetched? I’m asking you to compare probabilities, not whether it’s totally far-fetched. Fine, it’s not totally far-fetched. But what’s the probability? After all, the fact that people create educational myths to convey their values—that’s a phenomenon that happens quite a lot.
[Speaker A] Absolutely, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right? So if I now compare probabilities—it’s not far-fetched, but is it more far-fetched than the second possibility? Why don’t you choose the second?
[Speaker A] Because he described that he was there, and it isn’t completely implausible. Look—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s part of the invention, isn’t it?
[Speaker A] Fine, he could say that—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That he experienced it himself.
[Speaker A] I understand what you’re saying, and I’m only saying that the statistical probability that an event could happen does stand on some scale against the argument from testimony. Meaning, if a person comes to me and says, listen, I saw a wave 50 meters high rising opposite the coast of Israel last Friday when I was at the beach, okay? And then the wave subsided, it didn’t wash over the shore—I literally have a movie scene stuck in my head where a wave 50 meters high rises opposite Earth’s coast and then subsides. So I’d say to him: listen, this is so scientifically improbable that I’m willing to have a dialogue with you about what maybe did happen there, and maybe it was only a four-meter wave, and we’ll take it from there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but I’m saying these are attempts to conduct a discussion. Right, but you don’t reject such a story out of hand. Now why not? After all, the probability of the second option is higher. What I’m trying to illustrate here is that these are clearly not clear cases. Meaning, it’s not totally absurd and not totally plausible. And when you compare probabilities, you don’t—you don’t actually make decisions through probability comparisons in cases like these. Like Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot, which is maybe the canonical example here. Do you know that story?
[Speaker A] I don’t. Do you want to tell it briefly?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Bertrand Russell is a philosopher.
[Speaker A] I know Bertrand Russell, but I didn’t know the celestial teapot.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So it’s a classic story, it’s a concept—there are probably even Wikipedia entries on it. He tells of someone who came to him and said God had revealed Himself to him. Say someone came to me and said God revealed Himself to me, then he would say to him: well, Tinker Bell appeared to me and told me, I don’t know what, stand on one leg three times a day. Or in other words, let’s say someone came and told me there’s a small teapot orbiting the planet Jupiter. So I’d say to him: listen, I’ve never seen such a teapot. He says of course not, because it’s small, so you can’t see it. So Russell says: what am I supposed to do with such a story? Is it fifty-fifty? Either there is a teapot or there isn’t, and I don’t know.
[Speaker A] I want to take that one step further. We can really argue about whether revelation at Sinai happened or didn’t happen, but what happens at revelation at Sinai is that a certain set of do’s and don’ts, both toward that being that was revealed at Sinai and between one person and another, starts there and continues afterward and is expanded by people we agree are flesh and blood. Meaning, they weren’t at Sinai and they didn’t speak with God in so direct a way. And that leads us to the Shulchan Arukh, to the 613 commandments. You know, you take these things, and I also look at you—your appearance is the appearance of a rabbi. You grow a beard, you wear a kippah. What is the connection between the divine revelation at Sinai, which maybe indeed happened, and the whole human chain that follows from there and leads to the fact that today you grow a thick beard and wear a kippah? In other words, explain to me how this sits with you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so here that’s a good question, and it comes up quite a bit within the religious world, not only from outside. People are very, very troubled by the fact that Torah is a human creation, and the question is why—so what do I owe them? Right. Now the accepted religious ethos, the Haredi one but also the mainstream religious one—and again, on this issue I’m a heretic—but the accepted ethos is that first of all everything that reached us was given to Moses at Mount Sinai, full stop.
[Speaker A] The beard too and the kippah too and the caftan and the shtreimel. Yes, exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] My uncle, for example, used to say that Abaye and Rava studied in Yiddish. Yes, fourth-century Iraqis—they studied in Yiddish, because after all anyone who knows how to learn learns in Yiddish; someone who doesn’t know Yiddish doesn’t know how to learn. Now he knows they didn’t study in Yiddish, but there’s a—it’s a serious statement because, again, like these double lives. He knows they didn’t study in Yiddish, but the ethos he grew up in is an ethos according to which everything basically comes down through tradition; we didn’t invent anything. We continue what our forefathers did. Alongside the fact that as a clear-eyed person he understands they didn’t speak Yiddish, okay—but the essential things, those they did exactly like us. The Yiddish is just an extreme example to sharpen the point. So that ethos basically says this: first of all, everything came down from Sinai. Second, all the sages throughout the generations simply possessed divine inspiration.
[Speaker A] Wait, I just want to pause, because I’m talking to you, Michael. Do you really believe that everything came down at Sinai?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, of course not. In a moment I’ll explain why I’m a heretic on this issue too. I’m only telling you—I’m showing you why your question is very troubling even inside the religious world, because people developed piles and piles of theories about how everything came down from Sinai and all our sages throughout the generations had divine inspiration and couldn’t make mistakes and were all prophets in one way or another, on one level or another.
[Speaker A] I assume there are people who still think today that rabbis—Kanievsky and the Baba Sali and various other kabbalists—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] An overwhelming majority of the religious world thinks that about the Tannaim and Amoraim, the sages of the Talmud, about medieval authorities (Rishonim) to a large extent, and even about the great later rabbis down to our own day. Yes, this is not some esoteric opinion at all, quite the opposite—it’s the accepted opinion. And here I really want to argue against that. Again, this is one of the points on which… Grinzaig will probably get angry with me. I want to argue that there are also concepts of authority that are formal authority and not substantive authority. When I obey the laws of the Knesset, I don’t do so because the Knesset is always right, or Congress or the American Senate, because they’re always right, because they’re the wisest, but because that’s the law. Those are the rules of the game. We belong to this society, and for that purpose we chose a Knesset to determine the law. Unfortunately it looks the way it looks, but it decides—what can you do. And I recognize that. As long as I don’t want to dismantle the system, I recognize that there’s no choice, the law has to be followed. Even within certain limits if I don’t agree with it. Now this is a concept many people find very hard to live with: the concept of formal authority. Not because they know everything, not because they can’t err, but because that’s the law. Now the Torah itself says a Sanhedrin must be appointed and that they have authority—“do not deviate from all that they instruct you.” And why? It’s very logical too, because a system can’t function without institutions like courts or legislatures, without a system that manages it, interprets it, establishes precedents, establishes halakhic definitions of what’s permitted and forbidden, and so on. Therefore the Torah itself establishes that the sages will have authority going forward. But an adult, unlike a child, needs to understand that authority doesn’t have to stem from some prophetic spiritual charisma, some a priori inability to err, or anything like that. They were flesh-and-blood people like me and like you, but that’s the law. And within that law I struggle with it, I fight with it, I bend it a little, I interpret it—but I do recognize its validity. In that sense, that really is the framework within which the discussion takes place. But as a result of that I also say: you have to pay close attention to what the formal authority actually determined. Because if it’s only formal authority, then it’s not that they really know everything, so let’s see why they were given formal authority. There are things I won’t accept even if they’re written in the Talmud, because we gave the Talmud—the sages of the Talmud—formal authority in, say, the halakhic sphere. They determined the law, and we determined that this is the framework within which we conduct ourselves. Fine, like appointing a parliament. But every conceptual, value-based, moral, aggadic idea of one kind or another that appears in the Talmud—is that automatically binding on me? If you understand this as substantive authority, authority of experts, of those who cannot err, then you accept everything they said. But if you understand it as formal authority, then with formal authority I don’t accept stories the Knesset tells me, nor values the Knesset dictates to me. I accept the law the Knesset legislates because that’s its mandate, the mandate it received. My relation to the sages is the same.
[Speaker A] Do you think—let’s talk for a moment about the State of Israel. In the State of Israel there’s a very, very broad range on this scale of state and faith. I assume that almost all the people who define themselves as Jews who believe in Israel in one way or another accept the laws of the state upon themselves, except perhaps super-extreme factions like Neturei Karta and so on. But within the range of those who do accept Israeli law upon themselves, there are Zionists and non-Zionists, lawbreakers and non-lawbreakers, a very, very wide variety. And my question is how this works—meaning, how this conflict that you describe yourself as having lived inside all these years, how is it experienced in places like Haredi Judaism or hesder yeshivot? What do they do with it? Do they accept the rabbinate as divine authority, as authority closer to God or holiness than they are?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, you have to separate the state and the rabbinate. Nobody accepts the rabbinate except secular people.
[Speaker A] No, I didn’t mean the Chief Rabbinate, I meant their rabbis, that is—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning the heads of their own community.
[Speaker A] Ah, okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So look, I think the question needs to be divided into a few parts. What’s called Haredi Judaism includes within it two basic ideas, actually independent of one another. And I’m writing a series of posts about this now too. One idea is opposition to modernity, and the second is opposition to Zionism—which is not the same thing. It’s not the same thing, and I’d need a little time to explain why, but it’s not the same thing. Now as against Haredi Judaism there is non-Haredi Judaism, but it too is divided over the question of in what sense it is non-Haredi. Is it non-Haredi in its attitude toward Zionism, or non-Haredi in its attitude toward modernity? Because for example there are what are called Hardalim. Hardalim means Haredi-nationalist. Yes. An acronym, right? Yes, yes. So Hardalim are Zionist, unlike the Haredim. But there really isn’t much difference between them and the Haredim. Their attitude toward modernity is very similar to that of the Haredim. Okay. With boundaries—there are shades among Haredim too—but of course I’m painting here with very broad brushstrokes.
[Speaker A] Haredi today also includes Chabad, and Chabad, as far as I know, are fully Zionist.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, Chabad are extreme anti-Zionists, and that’s one of the things people don’t really understand in Chabad thought.
[Speaker A] Then where does the whole affinity between Chabad and IDF camps come from, the encounter with—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, simply from the same affinity they have for Jews backpacking in South America.
[Speaker A] Meaning, a Jew wherever he is.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To bring all Jews back to repentance. Yes, okay. The biggest missionizing force—the biggest Jewish missionizing force—is Chabad. Okay? Missionizing toward Jews, not toward non-Jews.
[Speaker A] Yes, yes, of course, of course.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So as missionizing, they go everywhere with seemingly amazing openness relative to a Haredi, Hasidic, religious society.
[Speaker A] So you’re saying this is basically a hidden agenda—all those Chabad people who come to do candle-lighting in IDF camps are anti-Zionists and they won’t say it at any point.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Lubavitcher Rebbe wrote in the introduction to a book called A Joyful Mother of Children—it’s a book written by a Satmar rabbi who had been an extreme anti-Zionist, and during the Holocaust he became Zionist again. Yes. A great Torah scholar, and he wrote that book in a cellar in Budapest during the Holocaust. Okay. When a new edition of that book came out, the introduction says that the Lubavitcher Rebbe asked the author not to let people say, heaven forbid, that the author was a Zionist—make that clear. He was a Zionist, no matter, but they shouldn’t say it, heaven forbid, because that’s the greatest slander imaginable. I’m talking about the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
[Speaker A] Tell me, in your understanding what’s the big story of the Haredim against the Zionist state? Why not, basically? I mean, the Jewish people—I assume if they know the history of the Jewish people, the Jewish people were sovereign in their land for certain periods, so why not?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They have no problem with sovereignty as such. Sovereignty as such—when the messiah comes and there’s a Davidic king here, I don’t know exactly what—then they have no problem at all. On the contrary, it’s part of the redemptive vision that Haredim also share.
[Speaker A] So the problem is that it’s a modern state?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The problem is that it’s a modern secular state that doesn’t conduct itself according to Jewish law, and the question is whether you can cooperate with such a thing. If you ask me on the psychological level—and this really is armchair psychology—but I think there’s also a lot of, let’s call it, jealousy and frustration here. Because Haredi Judaism, or traditional religious Judaism before there was Religious Zionism and all the newer streams, was a Judaism that did nothing. It succeeded at nothing, was persecuted all the time, and sat in its tent dealing with survival. Survival in a way that was at times inspiring—meaning preserving tradition, paying heavy prices—but surviving, not creating anything, not advancing any idea. All the Jews who advanced ideas were never Haredi Jews. Right. Meaning they were always Jews who had gone either all the way out or partially out, but Haredim did nothing. Yes. Now when they suddenly see that there is a movement, a Jewish movement, advancing a value that also has religious value even by their own standards—settling the Land of Israel, redemption, and so on—and succeeding, that puts a very unflattering mirror in front of their eyes.
[Speaker A] What’s their explanation for that? I mean, why does God do that? Is this some kind of test for Haredi Judaism?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They’re in a dilemma. I think God doesn’t do this, so I don’t have a problem. Okay. I think God isn’t doing anything here—we’re doing things here. Okay. But truly, in the Haredi conception this is not a simple theological tension. Because a great many prophets—yes, Haredi ones—predicted that this state wouldn’t last more than a few years, that it was a passing episode. It couldn’t be that the Holy One, blessed be He, would lend His hand to such a blatant rebellion against faith and against Judaism and against religiosity and so on. And to their surprise—or not to their surprise, never mind—it blew up in their faces: it is succeeding. For now it survives, and it even has achievements and successes, and these things, by the way, come mainly through secular people, and that’s very frustrating. So on that level, leave ideology aside, but on the psychological level this can very, very much lead…
[Speaker A] How do rabbis… you know, after all, today the Haredi public is becoming more and more involved and significant in the State of Israel— involved in the economy, wanting state resources for themselves and for their communities, so they’re also present in parliament, they have opinions in a wide range of circles, there’s everything connected to Shas, which basically started as a Haredi society and split off from it and is fully Zionist. How do Haredi rabbis talk about this? Meaning, what basically…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, yes, look—the Haredi world, contrary to what people may think, is a very non-ideological world. Very pragmatic, very pragmatic, very. Meaning, the Religious Zionist world for example, which is considered more compromising on the level of commandment observance and devotion and all that—overall, as a generalization, I think—it’s much more ideological. Meaning, there they examine things according to ideology: is it right or not right. Sometimes it’s terribly heavy, it really annoys me, and I also think it’s terribly childish, but that’s how it is. Among Haredim there’s pragmatism. I’m not talking about the very extreme factions, the anti-Zionist ideological avant-garde—Satmar and Neturei Karta and the crazies over there. I’m talking about the Haredi core, members of Knesset, the people you know and so on. It’s a very pragmatic group. They try to present themselves as if these are matters of martyrdom, absolute red lines—there are no absolute red lines for them on anything. On anything. Meaning, in the end, that’s why for example I think people don’t deal with them correctly— a firm hand would work. A firm hand would work because this is a pragmatic society. I’m not talking about the majority, yes? I mean about confronting them head-on, and don’t be afraid, don’t worry, they’re not like that. They’re not Muslims blowing themselves up together with you. Yes, yes. This is not that kind of society, it’s a terribly pragmatic society. By the way, in my view that’s somewhat to their credit. I think an adult person should be pragmatic, and ideologies are for children. So this pragmatism has taken them to all kinds of places that their ideology explicitly forbids. In the previous government there were Haredi ministers. Right. This is the first principle of faith, even before Maimonides’ thirteen principles—that a minister from a Haredi party is forbidden. Why?
[Speaker A] Because that’s full cooperation with the Zionist project.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What had they done until then? They appointed a deputy minister in a ministry and demanded that there be no minister above him. Right, right. And then what happens? Because in Haredi ideology—not only in Haredi ideology, according to the law too—the government is responsible for every decision, it’s not divided up by ministers. Okay. Now, the Haredim are not willing to bear responsibility for decisions that contradict their worldview, and therefore they’re unwilling to take part in the government. Yes. But they do want influence and power and budgets and so on, so a deputy minister in a government ministry with no minister above him—that was the ideological solution they found. Then the High Court comes and says there’s no such thing, it’s not acceptable. A ministry has to have a minister in charge. Yes. So what happened? They appointed a Haredi minister. And that’s the pragmatism.
[Speaker A] If I remember correctly, Yair Lapid petitioned the High Court on this matter because he said, guys, cut the bullshit, you’re either in or you’re not in.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. And Litzman became a minister. Right. The same thing happened with Leah Shakdiel—you know who that is, from Yeruham, we know her from Yeruham. Yes, yes, of course. There was a High Court case about women serving on religious councils. Right. She ran for the religious council in Yeruham and they wouldn’t agree because she was a woman, and it went all the way to the High Court. And there was complete consensus, by the way—not only among Haredim, also among Religious Zionist rabbis—complete consensus, I still remember it, that under no circumstances was this allowed, it was terrible and awful. Now on the High Court panel sat, I think, even two, but certainly one—Menachem Elon, I think there were even two religious judges out of the three—and they ruled unequivocally that there was absolutely no problem, a woman could serve. And lo and behold, a day or two later all the Haredim were running women for the religious councils. Yes. We were in Yeruham—there was a religious woman running for the council, sorry, there was a religious man running for the religious council, and the Haredim supported a secular woman. Because she was somehow connected to them and she would advance their interests.
[Speaker A] Yes, yes, I think there was also that case where the Haredim supported Yael German in Herzliya back in the day. Whatever works. I don’t know. In general, very practical. By the way, that gives them a bad name among the secular public, because a lot of times people don’t understand this pragmatism, and it stands in such total contradiction to issues like public Sabbath desecration and leavened food and all kinds of things like that, where you say okay, what’s going on? Here you’re super pragmatic, and here you’re manning the barricades and making life miserable for people who want to bring food to their loved ones.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wherever manning the barricades doesn’t require a price, that’s where he mans the barricades.
[Speaker A] A price for their public. Okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s it. That’s the rule, that’s all. And again, in a certain sense I appreciate this lack of ideology, this pragmatism. In another sense I share the criticism, because there’s something here where you’re kind of making a mockery of the whole thing. Don’t present things as absolute martyrdom-level red lines, and then…
[Speaker A] This duality can exist only within a population group that really doesn’t relate to the state as something that has to be taken into account. Meaning, you know, Abba Eban once said—I think it was Abba Eban, I’m not sure—that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy.
[Speaker C] Kissinger said it.
[Speaker A] Kissinger, sorry, sorry, Abba Eban was something else, sorry. Kissinger said it, and what he meant was basically that the Jews’ quarrels with themselves are what determine their political conduct, and what other nations will say doesn’t really interest them. What we’re basically seeing is that intra-Haredi politics is what determines how the Haredim behave, and not anything having to do with Israeli society or the state in general.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a very correct idea, what you’re saying now. It’s an expansion of what I said, but you’re completely right. One of the things I try to explain to people is that when you see Haredim manning the barricades and having world wars, the trigger is always inside the Haredi world. It’s never a war with someone outside. They can fight over desecration of graves or I don’t know what, conscription into the army. The war begins when a movement starts inside the Haredi world itself toward army service. It’s not because the secular public wants the Haredim to enlist in the army—that doesn’t bother them. So they tell you, yes, we’ll go to prison, and nobody dares start with them, and everything is fine. The moment a movement begins inside the Haredi world saying we want to enlist in the army, or go to work, or get a general education, or all kinds of things like that—then a world war begins. And then the Haredi core creates an ideology and fights, and suddenly becomes less pragmatic and more—because the wars are always with what’s happening inside you, not outside. The outside is some sort of psychological projection. You project what’s happening inside onto what’s happening outside and fight that guy outside.
[Speaker A] But really I want to ask you—after all, in that sense a big part of the quarrels within every… you know, Reuven Rivlin gave a speech a few years ago known as the Tribes Speech, about the tribes in Israeli society, which I really love. I think it’s one of the most important speeches given in this country in the last decade, and certainly one that maps what’s happening in the country right now. The Haredi tribe—the reason all these things happen, and that there is intra-Haredi politics, is largely connected to the fact that we’re talking about state budgets. Meaning, there’s a money pipeline, that money pipeline comes from politics, flows into the society, and from that moment on there’s something to fight over. So are you—or what is your opinion in that sense—on the issue of separation of religion and state, which secular people are always talking about? They say okay guys, there’s society, there’s a state, the state is a state that needs to support all its citizens, let’s not give money to this whole religion business and let everyone fund it himself with his own money after we stop taxing him for it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ve written more than once that I’m in favor of separating religion and state. The big problem is that the secular public doesn’t agree. Explain. Secular people don’t agree. If that proposal were seriously put forward, the ones who would bring it down are the seculars.
[Speaker A] Why? Which seculars? Likud would bring it down?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A lot of—seculars are large groups, many groups. But a very, very large group within secularity—as a whole, seculars are the majority. If they wanted separation of religion and state, it would happen here. What happens, in my opinion, is that there’s something in the secular world that seeks connection to its Jewish identity. Now in this country, your Jewish identity—especially here—if there were separation of religion and state and this state would basically become perhaps Jewish in some cultural sense but not Jewish in a rigid sense, it would dissolve. It wouldn’t remain Jewish, and I think a great many secular people, even if not consciously, understand that. And therefore in my opinion they are very reluctant to let go of the connection—so loathsome in the eyes of many of them—with the Haredi and religious world.
[Speaker A] I want to ask you just as a continuation of that issue—you know, in light of this worldview, where do you find yourself located on the political map?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Religious politics or general politics?
[Speaker A] Israeli politics. Who do you vote for in elections?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In elections, truthfully, in a large number of elections I don’t go vote at all, because there’s no one to vote for, they’re all the same in my eyes. Okay. But I did go—one time I voted for Kahlon.
[Speaker A] Were you disappointed? There was a whole genre of disappointed Kahlon voters.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I wasn’t terribly disappointed because he wasn’t terrible, but he also didn’t do what I thought he might have a chance to do. But at least he didn’t do damage. And there was one time I voted for Bennett. Believe me, I think in the last election I don’t think I voted.
[Speaker A] There have already been so many. When you look at the performance of the current coalition—the current coalition, which really is a coalition that anyone you’d asked five years earlier would have told you was completely imaginary—do you feel okay? You know, on social networks I see a lot of good people full of a feeling of approaching loss.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. There is— I was very happy that it was formed. Because I think the time has come to break some of the accepted dichotomies in our politics here. And maybe if you want we’ll also talk later about the dichotomies inside the religious world, because those too need to be broken.
[Speaker A] Which dichotomies need to be broken? That interests me even more.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but no—just regarding this, the problem is that right now they’ve reached a point where I think any decent person should have returned the keys and said, guys, that’s it, I tried, it didn’t work. You can’t pay any price to every rogue member of Knesset from every direction. Doesn’t matter Arab, Jew, religious, secular. I’m in favor of cooperation among all these people, I was very happy that this came into being. Yes. But it doesn’t work. They didn’t succeed in doing it, and you need to go back to the public. There’s no choice. There’s a basic honesty—you can’t use the state coffers for survival needs. That’s not reasonable.
[Speaker A] Do you share the cries of alarm over people like the Arab parties on one side and Ben Gvir on the other being members of the coalition or ministers?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s put it this way—I’m mainly crying alarm over Ben Gvir. Meaning, if he had entered, I’d have been very angry. About the Arabs—say, about Ra’am—less so. Okay. No, not only less so, on the contrary, I’m in favor of their being inside. Because I think Ben Gvir represents some small racist and militant group that I very much would not want—I don’t think one should deny them the possibility of being elected, but I wouldn’t bring them into the coalition if it were up to me and I wouldn’t give them positions of power. As for Arabs, in my view that’s the only way to bring twenty percent of the residents here in this country into the political field, into general society. And I was very happy with Mansour Abbas’s pragmatism. Yes. About the Joint List, I’d have been less happy if they joined, because I don’t trust them. Meaning, I think they are the Ben Gvirs on the other side.
[Speaker A] You know, there’s something to be said here that if a person is not in a position where he can realize his nationalist worldview, and all he’s doing is being in charge of a government ministry whose job is to provide better service to the public in one place or another, why should I care whether he has nationalist ambitions or not?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But he does. What do you mean? He also has influence in the direction of advancing his ambitions. Both Ben Gvir and the Joint List, both of them. Meaning, they have influence beyond the ministry he gets and manages one way or another. Even within the ministry, by the way, there are of course different emphases that can depend on ideology. But also beyond the ministry—what do you mean? A government makes decisions in many areas. And I think that’s not—I have a very hard time with someone like Ahmad Tibi, and I really am in favor of Arab inclusion, and Ahmad Tibi always comes across as someone who is overall intelligent, educated, cooperative, supposedly moderate. He was Arafat’s best friend, with a horrifying past that he does not retract. He doesn’t say, look, I made a mistake. If he said I made a mistake, fine, a person should be accepted. But he doesn’t say that.
[Speaker A] You’re saying these people are not moral in your eyes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In my eyes, absolutely not moral. Some of them, not all. Another part of them—I don’t think everyone there is immoral. I think some of them are simply in an ideological position I’m not willing to live with. It’s not connected to immorality. In Ahmad Tibi’s case, for example, it’s unequivocally immorality.
[Speaker A] Do you know—on the left side of the map, and certainly I can tell you among American Jewry, people look from there at the struggle for Palestinian revival in Israel and say, “Guys, this isn’t dramatically different from how Zionist Israelis behaved toward the Arabs in the years before the establishment of the state and in the first twenty or thirty years.” Meaning, did we also have people who did immoral things?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. First of all, of course we did. And still, I think these comparisons miss the truth. And whenever I raise the questions of that truth, people say, “Okay, forget history, we’re talking about what’s happening now.” But that’s exactly the point. I don’t think it’s right to forget history. Historically, in fact, a partition proposal was offered here.
[Speaker A] Okay, meaning you’re going back to forty-eight.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. And the Jews accepted it and the Arabs didn’t. And by the way, this has repeated itself ever since. There are proposals on the table; you can believe in their sincerity or not believe in their sincerity. I believe in their sincerity on our side, though I understand there are people who are more doubtful. The fact is that proposals have been made—proposals that, overall, it seems to me are already pretty close to the maximum that can be offered from our standpoint, of course not the maximum of their aspirations. And there doesn’t seem to be any minimal willingness to cooperate, and even if there is, it always gets stuck. You know, I have a friend who is a razor-sharp columnist—lately he hasn’t been writing for a long time—and he once wrote: why don’t we establish the battalions of the fallen of Officers School? The battalions of the fallen of Officers School means that whenever we agree to something, the battalions of the fallen of Officers School will torpedo it. Meaning, there’s some kind of game within the Palestinian population, between the supposedly moderates and Hamas, that every time you make an agreement with these people, those people sabotage it; then you deal with them, and then these people rise up—what are you doing to our brothers? Yes. The first thing I’d ask of them is: please bring me a representation that represents all of you. Yes. Then I’m prepared to make far-reaching concessions, truly. But I’m not willing to make concessions when tomorrow morning these will torpedo it and then those won’t agree— you can’t conduct a discussion like that.
[Speaker A] The Israeli public also had that in the form of the Haganah, the Irgun, and Lehi.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, before the establishment of the state, of course.
[Speaker A] Yes, yes, definitely. There really wasn’t anyone with whom to close a deal. I think, you know, in that sense, we really had a lot of luck that we had Ben-Gurion and not Yasser Arafat. Because they got stuck with Yasser Arafat and with his successor Mahmoud Abbas.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does it mean, got stuck? But listen, it’s not that they got stuck with this from heaven. There’s something in their culture—I know it’s not politically correct to say this—there’s something in their culture that allows extreme elements to set the tone all the time. You can’t exempt this whole public from responsibility just because there are a few extremists causing trouble. Listen, there is a certain responsibility on a public, even if it doesn’t identify with those who lead it, for the fact that those are the ones leading it. Yes. You can’t exempt them from responsibility for that.
[Speaker A] I’ll say there are events where it really is the individual and not the public, and as proof—I don’t know how you see it, but I, despite the fact that in my economic worldview I’m strongly capitalist and right-wing, still at least when I was growing up, I grew up as an admirer of Rabin, I was at the rally where he was assassinated, and in those years I very, very much supported the Oslo Accords. And really after Rabin was assassinated, no one arose who approached this issue with the same daring. Maybe we should also say it was a combination of Rabin plus Peres, and there was also more, but there are things where the historical constellation really didn’t repeat itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By the way, I won’t agree. Ehud Barak offered fairly far-reaching proposals.
[Speaker A] Yes, but he wasn’t—you understand—he wasn’t Rabin. And in that sense it may be that only because of his personality, because—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He was prime minister and head of the Labor Party. I don’t know—if he had signed an agreement, the State of Israel would have honored it, whatever his standing.
[Speaker A] Right, but he was probably—right—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But they would have honored it.
[Speaker A] My perception of Barak is that while he was a very smart man, he was probably a very bad politician and an annoying person in general, unbearably arrogant.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A bad politician, all true. Yes, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All true. But still, he offered far-reaching proposals that stood on the threshold.
[Speaker A] Listen, I want to get to the stage of questions from our audience. A very interesting thing happened. This podcast has a Facebook group called “Forum of Life Itself” of Geekonomy, where thousands of our listeners are members, and we publish who the next guest is going to be and invite our listeners to ask questions. I don’t remember the last time we had a guest where the questions really—you know, within twenty-four hours of the moment I published that you were coming on the episode, entire paragraphs, people writing seven questions in one post because they absolutely have to ask you so many things. I’ll give you one quote that completely stunned me. Really. A guy named Ariel Ze’ev wrote: “Please, please make sure to ask the specific question I’m about to ask you, I’m in the process of leaving religion only because he didn’t have convincing answers to the arguments raised against his theology. This could still save me.” Meaning, someone is waiting for an episode like this—small and meager as it is—someone is waiting for us to release this episode in order to decide whether he stays in the religious world or leaves religion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s welcome to contact me, there are hundreds and thousands who contact—
[Speaker A] Me all the time, I don’t know who this is. So in any case, just so you understand what a— you know, it’s not even a following, meaning it’s not even fans or admirers or people who… it’s… apparently what you put out really scratches people in a very, very specific place and they can’t avoid reacting to it emotionally. So, our first question comes from listener and beloved friend of the podcast Tovel Rosenwasser, and he basically wanted—and by the way this question also got 18 likes, meaning a lot of people liked it. In your central book you have proofs for the existence of God, and on that it is fitting to ask the following questions: Which God do you mean? A philosophical God—I’m shortening a bit because it’s really long—or God as presented by the religions? If the proofs are aimed at the first kind of God, then why would such a God—an abstract God about whom we cannot say anything relevant to our lives—how are our lives supposed to change because of the existence of such a God? If the proofs are aimed at a religious God, then which religion is it talking about? Does the proof you present strengthen the existence of the Muslim God and the Hindu gods, for example, or only the Jewish religion? Do you think there is historical proof for the existence of the Jews’ foundational event, the revelation at Sinai? That’s only the first question. And it reminds me that in some movie I really love, someone studies like crazy, gets to the final exam, then sits across from his main enemy, the teacher who wants him to fail, and says, “I have only one question for you—but it comes in 17 parts with 32 sub-sections.” So let’s try to answer Tovel Rosenwasser on how you got to the point where you choose to come and say: I have proofs for the existence of God.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, actually, first of all, that’s not my central book. In my eyes it’s actually a relatively marginal book. I wrote the parts about proofs for the existence of God almost by accident. I didn’t even intend to bring it up. It was as an exercise in philosophical thinking. And I chose the issue of proofs for the existence of God as the issue—if we’re already going to go—
[Speaker C] With a philosophical issue, let’s go straight to the biggest one.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. And there’s meat there that you can sink your philosophical teeth into. But I’ll answer the questions themselves. The philosophical proofs, by their very nature, deal with a philosophical God. There cannot be philosophical proofs for a religious God. That’s almost an oxymoron. After all, there can’t be mathematical proofs for a proposition in physics, or physical proofs for a proposition in mathematics or biology or whatever you want. Therefore it’s clear that one cannot expect the philosophical medium or genre to yield religious conclusions. I think that’s incorrect. What I can say, however, is that the questions are not as independent as many people think. Meaning, after I say—for example—I divide the proofs for the existence of God, it doesn’t matter, into types and species, but every proof assumes a certain image of God. Anselm, yes, Anselm’s ontological proof, proves the existence of the perfect being. The physico-theological proof, in Kant’s terminology, proves the existence of the all-powerful engineer, or the wisest being, or something like that. The cosmological proof, the moral proof—each such proof assumes some image of God, and it’s a different image. But—you mentioned Ockham’s razor earlier—if, for the sake of discussion, I say that I accept all the proofs, and of course one can also reject them all, one can accept none of them, but let’s say I accept even all of them. So have I proved the existence of, say, four beings? That doesn’t necessarily mean there are four beings here. There’s one being who is also perfect, also the creator of the world, also the one who gives validity to the moral command, and also whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be four beings. It’s one being that you identified through four of its aspects, or identified by means of four different aspects. That’s the first point. But still, that’s on the philosophical plane. How do I move from that to religious commitment? Right. So here my claim is—and this takes me back to the testimony argument, what we started to talk about earlier and couldn’t fully develop—that ultimately, if I reach the conclusion that there exists a transcendent entity, something that created the world, us, I don’t know, morality—whatever proof one accepts. Now when a tradition comes and tells me, listen, we met the transcendent entity and it told me to put on tefillin in the morning, then this is no longer Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot. This is already something that says, this is—
[Speaker A] Isn’t that too sharp a logical leap?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s a logical leap, but it’s definitely not as sharp as someone coming and saying God was revealed to me and told me to put on tefillin every morning. Because after all, think for example of Obama. If someone had told me, look, there is a Black president of the United States and his name is Barack Obama—if he had come to me twenty years ago I would have told him, and I just met Tinker Bell. Exactly what Bertrand Russell would have said to someone who told him he met God. Okay. But if I had heard the news—and I heard it in amazement, I still remember that a Black president was elected in the United States. Yes. Okay. And now someone came and said, look, and his name is Barack Obama and he’s a Democrat and he has such and such views. Fine? Okay. Maybe yes, maybe no. But I already know there is a Black president of the United States. In the analogy: if I know that a transcendent entity exists—I reached that on the philosophical level. I still don’t know anything about tefillin, religion, Christianity, Judaism, nothing. But I do know that there exists a transcendent entity that created us and the world. Let’s say I reached that conclusion through philosophical tools. Now someone comes and says, look, I met it, and it tells me to put on tefillin. Fine, okay, so what’s the problem? After all, such an entity already exists. If you tell me, look, you’re inventing entities and then also meeting them—that’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Yes. But I’m saying, if I’ve already reached the conclusion that it exists, then the claim that I met it and it told me it wants such-and-such from me is no longer all that far-fetched.
[Speaker A] But the issue isn’t what it wants from you—the issue is what it wants from you and that it’s going to reward you for doing it. Meaning, you know, there’s— I read your series of essays in preparation for this meeting with you, I read your series of essays on proving the existence of God, and I have to say I felt fairly comfortable with most of it. I said okay, what you’re basically doing there is saying okay, from the fact that a universe exists, from the fact that we need in some way to define the fact that this universe came into being, we create here some conceptual construct that says let’s say that the thing that created—intelligent or not intelligent, we don’t yet know—but the thing that created the universe is the thing we call God. Fine? And from now on you can deal with—this still doesn’t prevent you from continuing to look for better answers to the question of how the universe was created and what preceded it. And you accept this construct that if the universe exists and came into being, then it has some cause before the universe was created, and let’s call that God. But from here to putting on tefillin, I say okay, that’s a huge leap.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In my eyes it isn’t. That’s why I’m saying: if you come to the conclusion—it’s like, listen, if I were to prove to you that the Loch Ness monster exists, okay? In the lake in Scotland, the Loch Ness monster, the well-known Scottish legend. Okay. Yes. I were to prove to you that it exists. Fine? Now someone comes and says, look, I met it and it has three horns. That’s no longer absurd, fine. If it already exists.
[Speaker A] No, but the religious matter takes it to a place where the question is—after all, in the end, most human interest in God is not whether something created the universe and I’m inside it or not, but religion dictates an entire way of life to us, or tries to dictate an entire way of life to us, part of which is connected to human and social morality and part of which is really connected to a relationship that the human being—every human being as such—has with that entity. The relationship—you know, regarding the Obama issue, I accept the comparison to the teapot on the moon. In both the case of the president named Barack Obama and the case of the celestial teapot, it has nothing to do with you and what you need to do in the morning. Wear a kippah, grow a beard—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why, why does that matter? After all, if in the end—say that you reached the conclusion that God was revealed and told you: beard, kippah, and tefillin. Suppose yes, for the sake of discussion. Then would you do it? Let’s assume so, because you can also argue about that—even if He commands, who says I’ll do it. But let’s say I accept that, okay. So what remains? All I’m telling you is: listen, there was a meeting. The content of the meeting is beard, kippah, and tefillin; that’s the content of the meeting. Now the content of the meeting may be true, may not be true. But if I reached the conclusion that such an entity exists, and now someone comes and says, listen, it has three horns—okay, so what? You can believe him or not believe him, but it’s not absurd.
[Speaker A] Wow. I completely understand why to you this seems logical, and it shorts out my brain. That really is the issue. Now I ask myself—could it be that this is because you were simply conditioned toward this much better than I was?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or that you were conditioned in the opposite direction. Because each of us is conditioned. A person is the mold of the landscape of his birthplace, as the poet said, yes. The mold of the landscape of his home. You can’t escape that. But ultimately it seems to me that this argument—at least in my eyes—is a logical argument. Everyone will judge as he judges, you know. I just think one has to understand—this is the important point, and here I answer the question he asked—there is a connection between the question whether God exists on the abstract philosophical plane and the question of the religious God. These are not independent questions. That doesn’t mean the one determines the other, but it does mean that the first one goes half the way toward the second. Meaning, after you answer the first, the second question already looks different. It is no longer such a far-fetched thing when someone comes and says God was revealed to me and told me to do such-and-such commandments, if I already know there is a God. If I don’t know there is a God, then it really sounds like something out of the blue. Okay? That’s my whole claim. Now, how do I move from the first stage to the second? For that you need to read the book, but I can’t elaborate here. I only wanted to point to the connection.
[Speaker A] I just want to ask, to close this angle—where do you stand on the issue of free will?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I wrote a book on that too.
[Speaker A] Give me the short version, sorry, I haven’t read it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. In that book I argue that there is no scientific indication either against or in favor of free will, and therefore the question remains on the philosophical plane. On the philosophical plane, I believe in free will.
[Speaker A] Do you think we’ll get to a point where there will be scientific background for it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] At the moment it doesn’t seem even close to me, but maybe yes, I don’t know, I can’t rule it out. There have been many claims that we’re already there, and in the book I show why not. It’s not Libet’s experiments and split-brain and all the standard arguments—I don’t think they hold water. Therefore the goal of the book is to say that neuroscience has not fundamentally changed the status of this question. It’s still a philosophical question, and you have to decide it using philosophical tools. And in my eyes there are good philosophical arguments in favor of free will.
[Speaker A] Okay. Beni Peretz asks—first of all he says, more power to you for your persistence with your columns. He wants to ask how you decide what to write your columns about, and another question: do you believe that because of the great amount of information available today on the internet and the accessibility of that information, religious education is more open to questions, or is it exactly the opposite? But let’s start with how you decide what to write about.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no algorithm at all. It’s simply whatever comes to mind. I came across some item on the internet or somewhere else, something that happened, an idea that occurred to me, an issue I studied—completely free. I have no algorithm.
[Speaker A] What do you think the internet is doing to religious education?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, first of all, obviously it opens people to options that were not open to them in the past. That’s clear, in the religious world just as in the world in general. There are extreme reactions because of this issue. Meaning, the Haredi wars against the internet and cellphones and all these things are because of that. So, say, in those groups that somehow succeed in preserving Haredi or hardal closure—I don’t know what to call it—from the internet, it may be that they’re still less open, but I still think it’s not what it once was. Once you could shut a person off completely and that was it. Today it depends on his goodwill, and therefore obviously it opens things up more, and I can only welcome that.
[Speaker A] Nice. Avi Moyal asked five questions; we’ve already answered some of them. I’ll ask the ones we haven’t talked about. Why did you enter Haredi society and why did you leave it? Did you leave it? Meaning, what movement is he talking about?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t—I don’t think I ever defined myself as Haredi, even though I lived in a Haredi environment, raised my family more or less in a Haredi way. But my views are never the result of belonging to a group, not then and not now. And that’s why even today I don’t define myself on the religious map—you asked earlier too and I don’t think I answered, where I’m located. I’m not located. I don’t place myself anywhere. There are many questions, and each one has to be answered on its own merits. When you place yourself in a group, you obligate yourself to 50 answers to 50 questions as defined by the group label, and I’m not willing to step into that trap. So these definitions don’t interest me. Nice.
[Speaker A] Why are you vegan?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not vegan, unfortunately—I’m vegetarian. I’d be happy if I were strong enough to be vegan, but unfortunately I’m not strong enough. My daughter scolds me all the time—the daughter and the son who do manage it. We’re overall vegetarians, most of the family, and two vegans. Why? Because I think it’s terrible cruelty to animals in industry. I understand. Not for health reasons and not for eco-ethical reasons or all kinds of new theories like that—simply because I think one shouldn’t abuse animals, and what happens there is awful.
[Speaker A] Do you have a pet at home?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, both a dog and a cat.
[Speaker A] Nice. Avi Moyal’s last question: why do you think there is no possibility of moral obligation without God, and why would a philosophical God obligate anything moral? Quite a question.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, quite a question. Look, I had a panel on this with Professor David Enoch a few months ago, and I wrote a column following that which explains exactly this issue. I think it’ll be hard to answer here because it requires some kind of buildup; it’s a delicate topic. I do claim, very clearly, that without belief in God there is no valid morality. Unequivocally. Really? You think so?
[Speaker A] I see myself as a moral person, and I don’t—my explanation for this is survival and a more just and better human society, and the mechanisms that make it increasingly more just and better, and I don’t need any God for that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s—so for me, since this requires a certain philosophical analysis, I argue that the validity of moral values cannot derive from something that exists in our world, including human beings. But really this requires greater length than we can manage here. I’ll only say, with regard to a person—and I’ll clarify another important point that I clarified there too—I’m not arguing that non-believers are less moral. That’s a completely different claim. I’m arguing that on the behavioral level there is no difference. I think—I don’t see, at any rate, though maybe one could measure it, I don’t know—I don’t see a difference in either direction in moral behavior between secular people, believers, religious people of all kinds, Christians, Jews, whatever. There are good people and bad people everywhere. What I do argue is that the morality according to which a non-believing person conducts himself is an inconsistent morality, because it doesn’t really have a philosophically valid foundation. He behaves excellently, exactly like me. I’m just claiming that he is inconsistent. And therefore it’s one of two things: either he is inconsistent, or he is a hidden believer. Meaning, he believes—without himself being aware—that in the depth of his heart or the depth of his worldview, he is basically a believer. Maybe not in tefillin and all that, but in God as the guarantor of morality, let’s call it that. That doesn’t necessarily require a religious God or certainly not a Jewish God, but it does require some transcendent entity that gives validity to these principles. Without that they have no validity.
[Speaker A] Wow, I could argue with you about that for half an hour right now, but I don’t want to because I’ve enjoyed this so much up to now.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re welcome to read it—there’s a long column, and of course we can also talk—but I laid it out in a way that I think is very, very—
[Speaker A] Another time, on my next visit to Israel maybe we’ll meet for a beer or something. Okay, let’s continue. Eyal Irving asked a question that really made me curious how you’d respond. Which of the following two types of people bothers you more, or would you more want to change his way: morally principled secular people who do not believe in God at all, or devout religious Jews who do not believe in the scientific method—meaning, who believe that the earth was created six thousand years ago, and so on and so on. Which annoys you more?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, well, look, I’d put it this way. I don’t have a problem with stupidity. I don’t like stupidity, it annoys me, but it’s not something defective in a value sense. Fine, the person is stupid—what can you do. So a person who thinks the earth is flat but keeps the commandments, from my perspective he’s fine. I’d be happy if he were smart, but he’s not a defective person. A secular person, in my view, is a defective person. Really? Yes, he’s a defective person—not in the sense that he isn’t a good person; he can be a good person, a moral person, but he doesn’t fulfill his religious obligations, and in my view religious obligations are part of what a person ought to fulfill. So I definitely do care that this should change. It’s an ideological concern. There it’s a matter of stupidity annoying me, or stupidity poking at me, but it’s not—fine, he’s stupid, what can I do. The more important point, I think, is who annoys me more: a secular person who believes in his path and chose it, or a religious person who remains religious out of inertia, just because that’s how he was raised and he has no energy to change. Here, unequivocally, the second.
[Speaker A] Okay, meaning the inert religious person annoys you more than the secular one?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course, because in my view he’s not religious. Meaning, the ideological secular person in my view deserves full respect exactly like an ideological religious person. Because he chose his path. I don’t agree with him, I think he’s mistaken, I think he has flaws because he doesn’t fulfill some of his obligations—the religious part, not the moral part.
[Speaker A] Okay, meaning you prefer the person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Also, if a person is inert, then he’s not a human being—he’s a sheep. Meaning, he’s not… fine, so he goes with the flow. I have secular children, and a lot of times people ask me, attack me—look what comes out of all your heresy and so on. Good Jews come out of me too, things like that. But beyond that, I say that in my eyes this is not necessarily a failure. I think they’re mistaken, I think it’s a shame, but it’s not a failure. In my view, a child who remains religious only because of inertia is a greater failure than a child who chose a path I don’t agree with, because he chose it, and that’s okay. What do your secular children do?
[Speaker A] If I may ask?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One of them works in high-tech, works in high-tech.
[Speaker A] You sound—you sound disappointed. No, no, not at all. Okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And the second? The second is a mathematics student, also a high-tech guy, and does all kinds of things like that.
[Speaker A] Oy oy oy oy, disaster and ruin.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I have no problem at all with what they do, nothing of the sort. Their worldview, in my eyes, is not correct.
[Speaker A] Does it come up at Sabbath meals?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Oh, with us everything is on the table in the family. People aren’t so used to that sort of thing—everything is on the table.
[Speaker A] And does it, heaven forbid, get to unpleasant places, or in the end does everybody always love everybody?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—arguments. On the contrary, we argue at the table about everything, everything is open. Wonderful. And there’s no anger, because if someone thinks differently, that’s perfectly fine—you can argue. You know, this is an interesting anecdote: my daughter got married a year and a bit ago. Mazal tov. Thanks, and she had a grandson through her. Now when she got married, she’s a kind of feminist, a religious feminist. In our family everyone is something else. So before the wedding she asked who could recite blessings under the wedding canopy. She asked me, what about her siblings, girls—so I told her there’s no problem, everyone can recite blessings, girls, boys, everyone, provided they believe in God, because otherwise that blessing has no meaning.
[Speaker A] Why? It could be… you know, I want to tell you something: one of the most beautiful explanations I ever received for belief in God came from a taxi driver, who wasn’t a very sophisticated person or a very learned one, and certainly didn’t have the wonderful systematic logical explanations that you can give. And I said to him, tell me, what is belief in God for you? And he said to me, listen, you know sometimes I have a bad day, or something happens that worries me—my mother is sick, a child didn’t come back from school on time and we don’t know where he is—and I find myself inwardly yearning, yearning for health, yearning for good, and that place toward which I yearn is, for me, God. That is the place toward which my prayers are directed. That’s it, nothing beyond that. Not reward and punishment, not creation of the world, nothing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I also don’t think you need reward and punishment and creation of the world, but I would ask him one more question. I’d ask him whether this is wishful thinking. If so, then in my eyes he’s not a believer. But if, for him, his intuition tells him there is a God without all the philosophies—you don’t need that, nobody has to be a philosopher, it’s a matter of personal inclination—I don’t think everyone has to be philosophers. A person has to choose his path, each one however he chooses, and if he believes in God in his own way, then he’s a believer in every respect, no less than I am. But very often there’s a mix-up. You know there are people for whom there isn’t really a God as some ontic entity, right? He doesn’t exist anywhere, but they have some sort of experience or another—religious experiences—that’s atheism from my point of view. Yes. You understand? So let me just finish the story with my daughter. So our conclusion was that she had to go around among my children and ask them who believes in God; based on that she’d know to whom she could give a blessing to recite. Right. Now this almost never happens in any family because, you know, it’s uncomfortable, after all, to put things on the table. You know, if your father is considered a rabbi then it’s even less accepted. I told her, what’s the problem? It’s perfectly fine—that’s what they chose. I’m only saying that someone who doesn’t believe in God and recites “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe” is moving his lips without any meaning whatsoever. In my eyes, that’s not a blessing. He doesn’t need to keep all the commandments, he doesn’t need to be obligated like I am to Jewish law maybe, and so on. He does need to believe in God and understand that the blessing is directed to Him; otherwise he’s just moving his lips. Yes.
[Speaker A] That’s all. Okay, let’s continue. Dostai Cohen asks: as someone who lives in Lod, I’m interested in how you saw the recent events. I don’t know what exactly he’s referring to.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The events of Operation Guardian of the Walls, apparently, a year ago, and now too it’s come back a bit—the riots in the mixed Arab-Jewish cities. Yes, yes, yes. Very complicated. I try… really, I do try. I think I try to maintain a balanced perspective, and in my eyes there’s no room for comparison. Meaning, I understand the sources of frustration in the Arab public, but I don’t accept the form their response takes. And I don’t think there’s symmetry between Arabs and Jews, except for certain La Familia types who came here just to inflame things. I’m talking about the local Jewish population.
[Speaker A] In your view, are there Jewish terrorists?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are, very few, but there are. Yes. Okay. Terrorists in the sense of people willing to murder, not people who do graffiti or whatever.
[Speaker A] No, the definition of terror—and therefore also the definition of a terrorist—is carrying out acts whose purpose is simply to instill fear in a civilian population, in the name of some political agenda, not in the name of ordinary criminality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that broadens the scope. The question is what it means to instill fear. There are situations sometimes—you know, people walk around here in the street and I hear quite a bit, I also try a bit to talk with Arabs—and people walk around here in the street and every now and then someone has a license for a pistol, he has a pistol in his pocket; from their perspective that’s instilling fear. I see, yes. But am I going to define that person as a terrorist? He’s walking around; I walk around too.
[Speaker A] No, no, no, that’s not a terrorist.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And therefore I’m saying we need to define well what “instilling fear” means. So yes, there are such people, and I think they need to be dealt with harshly. But I absolutely do not accept the symmetrization people make. On the other hand, I understand the sources of the anger, and I think they need to be addressed, not sidestepped. Meaning, they need to be confronted head-on, with stick and carrot. Meaning, react harshly to riots, but try to solve the sources that create the riots—solve them for real. And truly, one of the reasons—again, we talked about this government—the feeling I had was that there was some chance that maybe it would also do something like that. And at the same time it also has a right hand, the government, not only a left hand. And in my view that could have been a wonderful combination of stick and carrot, which is so lacking here. Like you said, our policy is only domestic politics; we have no policy at all, neither domestic nor foreign.
[Speaker A] A final question from Leonid Shoresh—actually two questions. What is your opinion of the Book of Isaiah, chapter 53? And question two: who, in your opinion, is the messiah according to this chapter? For laymen like me, maybe just tell us what the Book of Isaiah chapter 53 is.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Oh, so let’s say that for laymen like me, let him say what the Book of Isaiah chapter 53 is—I have no idea. I can only guess. I don’t study the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) at all; it bores me, it bores me, it doesn’t speak to me, I don’t deal with it at all. But I can guess that this is the chapter dealing with messianism that Christians build Jesus’s messiahship on, I assume. I’m not completely sure, but as I said, I’m not knowledgeable here, so it’s a shame for me to give an unlearned response. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) doesn’t interest me, I don’t deal with it, I don’t think it’s relevant, it doesn’t interest me.
[Speaker A] Okay, so you don’t—there’s no issue for you of who the messiah is?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. When he arrives, we’ll probably know.
[Speaker A] Do you think that—I mean, the messiah in your worldview is something that really is supposed to happen at some point?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea, exactly like the world to come. There is some tradition passed down that a messiah is supposed to come; even in the Prophets here and there there are references. But you know, there are different interpretations you can give to various verses, including those verses. I have no position on all these eschatological, metaphysical questions. If it happens, and when it happens, we’ll see; I don’t know.
[Speaker A] Do you think that if it happens, there’s a chance we won’t recognize it? Because it couldn’t be that it happened?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, if it happens the way people say it will happen, then no, that can’t be, because it will be something impossible to miss. If something happens that can be missed, then maybe we’ll miss it, I don’t know.
[Speaker A] Maybe he already was, maybe we missed him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As the song went at that rally you were at: “The day will come, it will bring the day.”
[Speaker A] Right, right, right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I say the same thing about the messiah. I don’t know what will happen. I only know that we have obligations; we need to do things. What happens in the end, we’ll see.
[Speaker A] About that my grandmother would say: “Messiah, shmessiah—the main thing is to be a mensch.” Rabbi Michael Abraham, thank you so, so, so much. It was truly a pleasure. Of course I’ll publish on the episode page your whole website and your YouTube channel and all the content you regularly put out. By the way, I can tell you that your attitude toward your readers is wonderful in my eyes—there are marvelous quantities of sarcasm there. Someone wrote to you about something he does and doesn’t recognize, and you wrote back to him, “Good thing you’re not really asking whether you recognize the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh).” So I thought, okay, this is already going to be a person after my own heart. So I’ll attach all the links. Is there anything else worth publicizing, that people should follow?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The website has the material. There are Zoom classes, there are WhatsApp groups with Zoom classes, so I don’t know—it’s all on the site. Basically everything that’s needed is there. Whoever is interested can roll on from there.
[Speaker A] Great, thank you so, so much.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, thank you, I enjoyed it too.
[Speaker A] That was the episode with Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham, a dear and fascinating man. I have no idea why, but it didn’t surprise me at all that he’s from Haifa. There’s something about people from Haifa, at least as I remember them—and maybe it’s just stupid local patriotism on my part—but there’s something very relaxed about Haifaites. People from Haifa are less inclined to fight. I think the other cities in the country—Tel Aviv certainly, and Jerusalem—are cities that are more prone to conflict from the outset. Two people I never met in my life and still loved very much passed away over the past week. The first was Ray Liotta, who died at the end of last week. An actor who played psychopaths and criminals in many films, and above all played the lead in Scorsese’s Goodfellas. And the second was Mody Bar-On, who passed away in the last twenty-four hours. And in Ray Liotta’s case, upon his departure from the world, Marc Maron, the podcaster I like listening to, published the episode he recorded with him in 2018, and in it I learned that Ray Liotta was adopted, and that only in his forties did he go back and try to find his biological parents, only to discover how glad he was that he had been adopted, even though he had carried that thing around like a stain on his heart for many years. And he describes in the episode how he got his first significant break in films when none other than Melanie Griffith, who acted with him in Something Wild, a Jonathan Demme film, actually begged the director to give him a chance to audition for the role of her psychopathic boyfriend. And even though the director already had a shortlist of three names, in the end he gave Ray Liotta a chance, and Ray Liotta blew it out of the park and got the part, and that paved his way toward a variety of roles in that category. He had mesmerizing blue eyes and facial features that make no sense for a Hollywood star to have, and he was simply a lovely actor. In his role in Goodfellas, it was clear that he wasn’t the main actor, even though he was the central character in the plot and the one who drove the whole story—he wasn’t the main actor in the film. You had Robert De Niro there and of course Joe Pesci. Each of them gave a much more impressive and electrifying performance than he did. But he was there, and it’s impossible to imagine that film without him. You can’t imagine that film with anyone else besides him. And that’s a very rare thing that happens to an actor in life, that he performs a role in such a way that the film becomes a classic and also cannot be imagined with anyone else but him. And that also kind of locked him into that role of a sort of gangster, a bit of a punk, a bit human, certainly not a psychopath, but also not entirely normal. And that was Ray Liotta. And then when I got up this morning, the very sad news was published about the death of Mody Bar-On. And Mody Bar-On, who was also from Haifa and even studied at the high school I studied at, Ironi Heh on Mount Carmel, grew up in Ahuza like me and like Rabbi Michael Abraham, whom we just spoke with. He was a very, very special person, and the unimaginable outpouring of love that has been poured over him in the past day is only testimony to that. People compared him to Arik Einstein—people talked about the enormous influence he had on them through his documentary work and his accessible language and that immediate, unmediated connection between worlds like soccer and a deeper, more impressive Israeli culture. And he was undoubtedly an intellectual, and he was undoubtedly a very humble and very pleasant person. And very many people loved him, and it’s terribly sad that he died—sad for him and sad for the people who loved him. And in the episode with Michael Abraham just now, I tried to tell him that at certain points in my life, even though we usually think everyone has a replacement, at certain points in my life I encountered situations in which a person had no replacement. And from the moment he disappeared from our world, our world was left orphaned, and there will not be another like him. People who combine such character traits and such pleasantness and such depth and such shallowness and such joy in life—it really is a rare case, and it’s really very sad. And I have nothing positive or nice to say about it. Yes, I will say that these two people, both Mody Bar-On and Ray Liotta, belong to the category of people whose existence I loved. I never felt any particular need to try to reach them—Ray Liotta certainly not—but Mody Bar-On too, we didn’t try to get him for an episode, at least I didn’t, although I’m sure today, in retrospect, that if he had done an episode on Geekenomics it would have been an all-time classic. But it’s one of those things, one of those people where you say to yourself: the world is simply more beautiful and better when they walk around in it, and you don’t devote too much thought to it. I don’t know whether they prepared in advance what’s called a “Havatzelet file,” obituary pieces, and I don’t know whether now there will start to be retrospectives about him at cinematheques or whether they’ll dedicate an evening to his memory, because he was someone whose work was never monolithic. Nobody talked—and I’m talking now of course about Mody Bar-On—nobody talked about him as a creator who would one day receive the Israel Prize or things like that. And he was also a very humble person who did many things with other people and always made sure to give them the credit instead of taking it for himself. But now that he is gone, and that Ray Liotta is gone, the world is a little more depressed and a little emptier of joy in life and beauty and pleasant, nice things that I personally, as a consumer of content, very, very much loved consuming, and I won’t have any more of them—at least not from those people. So rest in peace, Mody Bar-On, and rest in peace, Ray Liotta. You added light to this world, and it’s a shame you’re gone. And that’s enough of my rambling for this time. See you in the next episode.
