Division Within the Nation, Pro-Palestinians, and Returning to Religion – Rabbi Michael Abraham – Life Insights
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The crisis of listening and public discourse in Israel
- The reform as an example of implicit agreement and a war over identity
- Students in the United States, post-colonialism, and information bias
- Fear of losing identity and the connection between psychology and philosophy
- Education, questions of faith, and the insistence on answering substantively
- Personal conversation versus media discourse, and the goal of changing habits of thought
- The hostage deal, “What if he were your son,” and the struggle against emotionalism
- Postmodernism, despair of reason, and the ideology of the “heart” and the “gut”
- The view of religion as rational and the image of secularity as “intellectual”
- Right and left, emotionalism, and the gap between image and reality
- His personal path: almost secular, Haredi, and the Talmudic text as the source of his return to religion
- The “middle” between Haredi society and Religious Zionism, Independence Day, and providence
- “Heretic,” authority, and Maimonides
- “Infidel” as an identity marker and a way of shutting people up
Summary
General overview
The conversation presents Rabbi Michael Abraham as someone who identifies the crisis of discourse as the central problem in Israel and in the world, more than real gaps in positions, and argues that hostility increases precisely when positions are close and identities feel threatened. He explains that people look for sacred values in order to ground identity and meaning, and therefore turn small differences into articles of faith, recoil from listening out of fear of losing themselves, and emotionally justify positions with arguments after the fact. He insists there is no magic solution, only persistence in substantive discourse aimed more at changing habits of thought and attention than at immediate persuasion, and places all this within the decline of trust in reason in the postmodern age, to the point of turning acting “from the heart” or “from the gut” into an ideology. Along the way he describes his personal journey between near-secularity, Haredi life, and finally a Religious Zionist position without a hyphen, and rejects the use of categories like “infidel” as a kind of silencing in place of dealing with arguments.
The crisis of listening and public discourse in Israel
Rabbi Michael Abraham says the problem of problems is the discourse, not the positions, and that the substantive distances between most parts of the public have narrowed even though tension, hatred, and unwillingness to listen have increased. He argues that sometimes hostility grows precisely because of closeness, such as more hostile attitudes toward Reform Jews than toward secular Jews, because a nearby figure “who does the opposite” is perceived as threatening and as confusing representation. He adds that people need something “to die for,” and therefore a small difference becomes a sacred principle that justifies great fire and extreme interpretations of the other side’s actions as the destruction of democracy or the destruction of Judaism.
The reform as an example of implicit agreement and a war over identity
Rabbi Michael Abraham describes how, in the dispute over the reform, many supporters say, “They went too far, but reform is needed,” and many opponents say, “Maybe reform is needed, but they went too far,” so in many cases they are almost saying the same thing. He maintains that the real gaps are relatively small aside from a few extremes, but the fire is great because closeness creates nervousness and because the need for sacred identity magnifies differences. He emphasizes that this is not inventing a dispute out of nothing, but turning an existing difference into an article of faith that organizes identity.
Students in the United States, post-colonialism, and information bias
Rabbi Michael Abraham explains that student opposition to Israel arises from a combination of a moral vacuum that creates a new sacred value of “nothing is sacred,” together with post-colonialist guilt feelings that automatically tilt in favor of the “Oriental” against the “Western.” He adds that media power and biased information join this, and that many students do not invest in learning the issue in depth, and so act out of a sense of injustice built from partial and exaggerated images. He says that “we’re not innocent of this either,” and that on the Israeli side too there are biased worldviews and forms of education without doctoral-level work checking every detail, and therefore the practical alternative is to listen seriously to arguments from both sides.
Fear of losing identity and the connection between psychology and philosophy
Rabbi Michael Abraham says people do not weigh arguments because they fear that arguments will collapse the foundations of identity and holiness for them, and he illustrates this with a religious Jew who is presented with arguments against faith and “doesn’t listen” out of fear. He suggests seeing that every step in life includes both a psychological explanation and a philosophical justification, and gives the example that return to religion gets a psychological interpretation among secular people and a philosophical one among religious people, while leaving religion gets the opposite interpretation. He argues that one should focus on philosophy rather than mock psychology, but also not use “it’s only psychological” as a way of avoiding answers when there is no substantive response.
Education, questions of faith, and the insistence on answering substantively
Rabbi Michael Abraham opposes the rabbinic approach that says, “Forget all these questions—they’re answers,” and that “warmth and love” are enough without a response, and argues that there are people with genuine substantive claims. He says that even someone driven by psychology asks because he needs philosophical justification, and so a good answer can undermine that justification and prevent a step even in the face of an emotional impulse. He defines himself as someone who devotes almost all his life to fighting the phenomena of emotionalism and lack of dialogue, and yet still believes that substantive speech affects people who are not screaming in comment sections, even if the influence accumulates slowly.
Personal conversation versus media discourse, and the goal of changing habits of thought
Rabbi Michael Abraham says that in public panels there is no expectation of persuading the person you are speaking with, but rather of voicing arguments for the viewers, in whom something may gradually shift. He emphasizes that attentiveness is more important than politeness, and that it is hard for a person to admit publicly that he has been persuaded even if he is honest. He presents a double goal for discourse: one is to change a specific position when the other side is mistaken, but the more important goal is to accustom people to weigh arguments before forming a position, and to recognize that the other side is not necessarily stupid or evil and that its position has some basis.
The hostage deal, “What if he were your son,” and the struggle against emotionalism
Rabbi Michael Abraham says he opposes a deal “completely,” and any deal that Hamas would agree to, even though in principle he supports bringing the hostages back, and he is frustrated by the absence of substantive discourse around the issue. He argues that support for a deal “fits the gut,” while opposition to it means going against the gut, and so in his view there is an emotional asymmetry in this case, even if emotionality is not proof of error. He rejects slogans like “What if he were your son?” as an argument that lowers the discussion to psychology, and argues that if the hostage were the decision-maker’s son, then that person should step away from the decision, not the reverse.
Postmodernism, despair of reason, and the ideology of the “heart” and the “gut”
Rabbi Michael Abraham cites a joke in the name of Dov Sadan about Jewish revolutions moving from the head to the heart to the belly to “below the belt,” and concludes that the world is increasingly despairing of reason. He says people are not becoming more stupid, but their trust in reason is declining, and morality is perceived as something located “in the heart” and not “in the head.” He argues that the reaction was born from a crisis in which it became clear that reason succeeds in technology and science but does not solve moral and social problems, and that the “social sciences” are not science in that sense, and therefore postmodernism is despair of reason in the realm of values. He describes a cultural symptom in which it is enough for someone to say, “My head tells me one thing but my heart…” for everyone to understand that the heart decides, and he defines this as a new ideology in which acting from the gut is not a failure but a duty.
The view of religion as rational and the image of secularity as “intellectual”
Rabbi Michael Abraham argues that the image according to which secular people are rational and religious people are emotional is a success of atheist discourse that even religious people have internalized, and he denies it on the level of ideology. He says religious principles require cold and rational conduct even when “the heart” does not identify with details such as pork or redeeming a firstborn donkey, and therefore secular people find it hard to understand how one lives by values that do not “speak to you.” He explains that secularization began as a rational rebellion against uncritical tradition and therefore acquired an intellectual image, but later secularity itself became a “religion” seeking sacred values and identity, and progressivism is an extreme expression of that process.
Right and left, emotionalism, and the gap between image and reality
Rabbi Michael Abraham says that “the right is much more rational than the left,” contrary to its image, and that the left’s mode of conduct is very emotional even when it is sometimes right. He criticizes the use of descriptions of misery as leverage for changing political positions, and argues that misery obligates treatment and reduction of suffering but is not in itself an argument for an agreement or territorial concession. He ties the gap in image to the historical inertia of early secularization and to the fact that the emotional-intellectual division has changed over time.
His personal path: almost secular, Haredi, and the Talmudic text as the source of his return to religion
Rabbi Michael Abraham recounts that during his army period, after reading philosophy and logic, he concluded that every argument rests on axioms and therefore “there is no truth at all,” or at least no way to reach it, and the path looked like abandoning the religious world. He describes going to an Arachim seminar out of anthropological curiosity, meeting his wife there, and from there arriving at the Haredi-Lithuanian yeshiva Netivot Olam in Bnei Brak, but he was not impressed by ideological arguments; rather, “I simply studied Talmudic text,” and felt that this world was real for him. He formulates it as, “As far as I’m concerned, the Talmudic text brought me back to religion, not philosophy. Philosophy came afterward,” and he describes a period of Haredi life and Haredi education for his children, alongside a non-standard identity and constant movement in his views.
The “middle” between Haredi society and Religious Zionism, Independence Day, and providence
Rabbi Michael Abraham says he was never “Religious-Zionist with a hyphen,” but rather “always Zionist and always religious,” with no necessary connection between the two, and that he “does not see the State of Israel as a religious value” and also “does not see it as a transgression.” He tells the joke about the Rabbi of Ponevezh, who did not recite Hallel and did not recite Tachanun on Independence Day, and interprets it as a serious position of secular Zionism that is happy about the existence of the state without turning it into a religious value. He says that he himself does recite Hallel because something joyful happened, and adds that he rejects the claim that “everything is under providence” in the sense in which “almost everything happens according to the ordinary course of the world.”
“Heretic,” authority, and Maimonides
Rabbi Michael Abraham says that when people call him a heretic it does not trouble him, and that he “does not recognize the existence of that concept” in the sense of being bound to Maimonides’ 13 principles simply because “he said so.” He argues that there is no authority regarding facts, and that factual questions are not accepted by force of authority, distinguishing between essential authority, like a doctor, and formal authority, like a legislative institution. He says he does not accept the essential authority of Maimonides in these areas and therefore is not obligated to accept his determinations as facts.
“Infidel” as an identity marker and a way of shutting people up
Rabbi Michael Abraham says that the use of the term “infidel” is both what the speaker really thinks and also a mechanism for shutting people up, because it takes arguments “outside the game” instead of dealing with them. He says that when someone says “infidel,” what he is really saying is, “I’m not discussing this with you,” and he offers no reasons against the claims, whereas he himself prefers to say of a person that he is “mistaken” and to give reasons. He compares this to identity categories like “leftist” or “right-winger,” which replace thought and make listening unnecessary, and concludes with the view that the discussion should be about the argument and not about the person.
Full Transcript
[Speaker A] Everyone’s a fanatic.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Think about a religious Jew who’s presented with arguments against faith. He doesn’t listen. He doesn’t listen. But maybe they’re right? You grew up in a Jewish home, you were born there. Who says you’re right? Someone else was born in a pagan home. I devote almost my whole life to fighting these annoying phenomena. A lot of times we see other people’s flaws, but we don’t listen either. It’s not only others who don’t listen, and it’s not only others who are always wrong; sometimes we’re not right either.
[Speaker A] People aren’t becoming more stupid.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Their trust in reason is declining. Did you ever think of becoming secular? Yes, of course. As far as I’m concerned, the Talmudic text brought me back to religion, not philosophy. Philosophy came afterward.
[Speaker A] Hello everyone. Today I’m being hosted by Rabbi Michael Abraham. Rabbi Michael Abraham is a lecturer at the Midrasha for Advanced Torah Studies at Bar-Ilan University, he has a doctorate in theoretical physics, and in my opinion he’s written dozens of books on all kinds of topics related to Judaism and philosophy. Hello, Rabbi. Hello, hello.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How are you? Thank God, absolutely fine.
[Speaker A] I want to start with something, with a personal remark, and say that when I was younger and I was in a stage of clarifying things in life, searching, not knowing, hesitating, I found you speaking about all kinds of philosophical issues, about what is right and what is not right, and you stood out in the landscape because most of the people I heard speaking always made me feel that their arguments were very emotional. It wasn’t as if they were speaking and had an opinion, but mainly they were coming to defend their opinion and not really to seek the truth. And anything related to current events, anything related to politics—whether around the reform, or around a hostage deal, or anything else—it doesn’t matter whether I have this opinion or that one, it always somehow feels to me that the other side doesn’t really know what my opinion is. It happened to me many times that I got into a conversation with someone who thinks differently from me, and then I present my view and he’s kind of surprised by it, and I say, wait, you’ve never heard this before? You’ve never had a conversation with someone who thinks something similar? I didn’t just invent this now. Somehow the situation ends up being that if you think differently from me, then let’s say very simply, you’re on the side that hates me. And precisely with you I always felt that even if someone criticizes, you’re in favor of that criticism being voiced—correct me if I’m wrong.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Completely.
[Speaker A] So I’m interested whether you identify with what I’m saying. Is it really like that in the public? And if so, why? How does that happen?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, I completely identify with what you’re saying. I think the problem of problems for us—not only in Israel, but we’re focusing on Israel because it’s the area closest to us and more familiar to us—the problem of problems is the discourse. Not the positions, not the distance between the positions; on the contrary. My feeling is that over the years the positions have actually come closer together, and today there really aren’t big distances between parts of the public in terms of the content of their positions. There are extreme fringes, but the overwhelming majority of the public is, all in all, in the same area.
[Speaker A] So how do you explain all the fights about everything?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And despite the substantive closeness, the tension and even sometimes the hatred, the lack of willingness to listen, rises dramatically. And sometimes my feeling is that it’s not despite that, but because of that. Meaning, think for example about how religious Jews—certainly Haredim, but religious Jews in general—relate to Reform Jews as opposed to secular Jews. Very often the hostility toward Reform Jews is much stronger than toward secular Jews, even though ostensibly Reform Jews are closer.
[Speaker A] No, that’s not true. From the conversations I’ve had with Haredim, they’ll tell you that Reform Jews come to incite, while secular Jews just don’t know.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, “come to incite”? There are secular Jews who come to incite too.
[Speaker A] The Reform position and the secular position—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Leaving aside the question of whether some particular person comes to incite or not, what’s the attitude toward the positions? The Reform position gets more hostility than the secular position, even though in terms of content they’re closer than secular people are. They’re somewhat religious in some sense; the secular aren’t in the game at all.
[Speaker A] But in a certain sense it’s all one and the same—the thought that it’s worse because they’re closer to us and doing the opposite. If there are Chinese people who think totally differently, they don’t threaten me. Fine, nobody thinks that’s— but if there’s someone who’s, say, a Haredi rabbi and dresses like a Haredi rabbi and looks like me and talks like me and basically says terrible things, then he scares me much more because people will hear him and think he represents me badly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You really used the expression, “That’s much scarier.” That expression is a psychological one, not a philosophical one. And so my claim is: of course the phenomenon is a natural phenomenon, I’m just trying to point out that there is such a psychological phenomenon in general—that the smaller the distance is in certain respects, the more hostility can increase.
[Speaker A] So you’re saying that the fighting and the disputes in Israeli society growing over the years are a result of the fact that we’re getting closer?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not a result—that’s too strong a statement. First of all, it doesn’t contradict the fact that we’re getting closer, and it even gets a bit of reinforcement from that fact. This is not the whole picture; it’s not that all the quarrels are created only because we’re getting closer. But I claim that the fact that we’re getting closer definitely contributes. It contributes to this issue. Think for example about the reform, okay? That’s the example I often use. The argument over the reform—we don’t really remember it so much today, although it’s coming back a bit lately. But for more than a year we didn’t hear about it. Still, if you remember, there were, say, newspaper ads by supporters of the reform and newspaper ads by opponents of the reform. There were radio interviews with supporters and opponents, yes? Mostly the opponents. And you ask yourself what people’s positions actually are. When you try to listen a bit more carefully, when the person talks a little more than just on a placard or in a slogan or declaration, then you hear that the supporters of the reform basically say: “Look, they really did go too far, but we need reform.” It may be that Yariv Levin went too far. But reform is needed. And the opponents of the reform say: “Look, maybe reform is needed, but he really went too far.” Now do you understand that they’re saying the same thing? That they’re saying the same thing. They’re basically saying the same thing. The whole question is whether you’re looking at the half-full glass or the half-empty glass. Now, they’re not saying exactly the same thing. Usually, those who support the reform probably want more reform, or a more far-reaching reform, than those who oppose it. But the distance is a very small distance. Meaning, there are very few points in the reform on which there is a genuine disagreement between people who are really thinking substantively, not the people out in the streets demonstrating.
[Speaker A] Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When you look at the arguments, you see that overall people pretty much agreed about what should be done, aside again from small extremist minorities. So how do you explain all the fire that shot up to the heavens?
[Speaker A] Right. So how do you—so the fire is so sky-high precisely because they think so similarly?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Also because they think similarly. Part of it, as you said earlier, is that someone who is closer to me annoys me more when he says things that don’t fit what I think. And second, my feeling is that people are all fanatics. First of all, secular people are fanatics too, religious people are fanatics too. And you need sacred principles to fight over. Otherwise, you know, without anything to die for, as the song says, you’re already dead anyway. In other words, life isn’t worth living. And life is worth living only if you have something to die for. And if you don’t have something to die for, you’ll invent it. You’ll invent principles that you’re willing to die for and sacrifice yourself for, even though the distance is so small that it really doesn’t justify all these emotions.
[Speaker A] Here you’re saying something else. Here you’re saying it’s not a matter of a rational, logical claim that is very, very close, and then if I listen deeply to the discourse I hear that they actually agree. You’re saying most people don’t listen deeply to the discourse at all, because it’s not relevant. I need to fight about something. So I found something to fight about.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, that’s too dichotomous. Meaning, there are some differences at the root.
[Speaker A] The question is what’s driving me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When you’re looking for something sacred from your perspective, you take the small difference that exists—you don’t invent it. A certain difference exists, and that difference you turn into an article of faith.
[Speaker A] I understand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now, anything someone from the other side does, in your eyes that’s the destruction of democracy on one side, yes? On the other side, the destruction of the Jewish people or the destruction of Judaism. Because you must have sacred things. Now, once everyone is the same, then in what sense are you—where is your identity? Meaning, in what way are you unique? In what way are you different from others? What are you fighting for? What is worth dying for? A person must have something to die for.
[Speaker A] I always ask myself with things like this whether it’s really first of all an understanding of the disagreement that causes me to fight over something, or whether I first come to fight and then because of that I— I mean, there are a lot of people, say around the reform, which is a convenient example, who in my feeling came to fight. It worked out very well for them that there was also some difference in opinions, but bottom line, if I were really to ask them what their opinion is—just as an example, what’s happening now in the United States, where a lot of students are against Israel. Ask them where Israel is, or ask them about “from the river to the sea,” all those things—it became very public that they don’t really know how to answer.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because they don’t know how to answer. They don’t know what it is.
[Speaker A] They first of all want to fight, so to speak. First of all it’s important for me to argue, and only afterward if someone comes to them with an argument that’s on their side, that will be very convenient for them. But it doesn’t come from there at all. Meaning, it’s not the intellectual claim that leads the emotional reaction; rather it starts here in emotion, and that leads them afterward to try to formulate some kind of intellectual worldview as a result of it. But that’s not the story at all. And if I argue with them intellectually until tomorrow, it won’t change anything because that’s not where it started. It started here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have several comments on what you’re saying. Again, it’s too dichotomous the way you describe it. I think, for example, that the students in the United States who oppose us are a combination of several things. First of all, in a world of vacuum, you need sacred principles, as I said earlier. And they live in a vacuum. They live in a moral vacuum in many respects. I’m speaking theoretically right now, not judgmentally. Meaning, they have no sacred values. In a world where everything is permitted and everyone can do whatever they want, you have nothing sacred. You’re left with nothing but fighting. Fighting over the fact that everyone can do whatever they want and that nothing is sacred. And that itself becomes the sacred value over which you go to war, over which you go on crusades. That’s point number one. But there’s something else mixed into it. There are, for example, post-colonialist frustrations. Yes, some kind of frustrations or guilt feelings of the West over what it did during the colonial period to all sorts of Eastern places. It conquered them and preached to them and subjugated them and imposed our culture on them and so on. And in today’s world, because of those guilt feelings, the automatic tendency is always in favor of the East, in favor of the Eastern side, against the West. The Westerner is always the villain by definition because of those guilt feelings. Yes, but that’s reality.
[Speaker A] You’re describing reality to me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—that’s psychology, because it isn’t true that the Westerner is the villain.
[Speaker A] No, that’s what I’m saying. You’re describing to me that people are against the West, but that’s what I’m trying to say: a lot of these claims are really easy to refute. A lot of them don’t hold water, even for people who don’t have to be the most rational people in the world. If you look at it and you’re not emotionally affiliated with it, then you know those claims are foolish. A lot of the claims against Israel, it’s very easy for us to see that—it’s like, you see it: Hamas came, raped, murdered, okay, it’s hard to justify. But they justify it. Same thing with certain arguments around slavery, where suddenly you say, wait a second, but black people also had slaves, they also traded in slaves, and suddenly it’s not black-and-white in those things. Or all kinds of claims like that where it’s relatively easy to use them to refute what they’re saying, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but I’m saying that’s already the next stage. I’m describing it from the bottom up.
[Speaker A] There’s the—meaning, first of all it’s a psychological tendency.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The first issue is the need for sacred values. Identity.
[Speaker A] Got it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The second thing is the post-colonialist frustrations. All of those are psychological phenomena, not substantive arguments. Okay. Now on top of that there is layered the difference in media power. Meaning, there are a lot of Muslims in the world. Media outlets are funded by Muslims. The media, in principle, for the earlier reasons, are against Israel—many of them. Okay. Now, as a result, the information that reaches the average student in the United States is biased, partial information. And even if it were complete information, he doesn’t invest the time to really learn the issue all the way through. Who’s going to go now and learn exactly where the Land of Israel is, and what the river is, and what the sea is?
[Speaker A] You would expect that from someone who’s going to demonstrate about it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but the fact is that people don’t go and study the issue, and as a result they live with some sense that there’s a terrible injustice here, which is often backed up by an image presented to them, which may contain something true, but is of course very exaggerated. And then that gets layered onto all the earlier needs—that you must have sacred things and you go to war over them. You don’t then go back afterward and do some sort of doctoral dissertation to see whether this is really true or not. Now if we examine ourselves, we’re not innocent of this either. Meaning, we too have some very, very clear world-pictures about many things. In the distant world certainly, but also in our own world, and we too are not always fed the full picture. Meaning, say in our conflict with the Palestinians, there were the post-Zionists who exposed all kinds of things, some false, it doesn’t matter, but some not. And we didn’t grow up on them and we didn’t study them in school. Now it was obvious to us that we held the correct picture, and the Palestinians were brainwashed—which I think is true to a large extent, but not entirely. Meaning, there was also some bias in our education. And none of us went to do a doctoral dissertation to see exactly what happened in ’48 or what happened before or after. And so in that sense I think the post-Zionists made a certain positive contribution, because they exposed us to something that they may have presented in a biased way, but they exposed us to something we wouldn’t have reached on our own, because we don’t do doctoral dissertations. A person can’t do doctoral dissertations on his own. The alternative is to try to listen to the sides in the argument. My mother always says that if you want to buy a washing machine, go to the person who sells it and hear its advantages, go to the person who doesn’t sell it and hear its disadvantages, and then you can decide—because after all, you’re not a technician, you won’t be able to really check it yourself. The same thing in the media context and in the context of these issues. Instead of doing doctoral dissertations, which is impractical—most of us won’t do that, certainly not on every issue—listen very carefully to the arguments from both sides. And that doesn’t happen so much.
[Speaker A] Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t happen so much. Now here we already get to the next layer of the discussion: why doesn’t it happen? Meaning, why are people not willing to seriously weigh arguments? Even if they won’t work themselves and check, do doctoral work—just hear the arguments. Someone argues with you, listen. So here again, it’s a combination of many things. Part of it comes from everything we said earlier. You’re afraid of those arguments, because those arguments can topple what you think, and then you’ll lose—
[Speaker A] Your identity.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Your identity, your holiness, the values that you’re looking for and for which you go to war.
[Speaker A] And it doesn’t matter to me whether those values are true?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying: all of that matters if you ask the person quietly, calmly, on the side. It all matters to him. The question is how he actually behaves. In practice, all of us are also driven by psychology. And our psychology says: I don’t want to lose the basic markers of my identity. Think about a religious Jew who is presented with arguments against faith. He doesn’t listen. He doesn’t listen—or against what he thinks faith includes. It’s not always really against faith. He doesn’t listen. Why doesn’t he listen? Because he’s afraid it’ll knock down things that are very important to him on the psychological level. Ah, but maybe they’re right? You grew up in a Jewish home, you were born there. Who says you’re right? Someone else was born in a pagan home—who says he’s right?
[Speaker A] I completely agree. That’s an excellent argument. So how do you deal with things like that? I now come to talk to someone and he thinks differently from me, and I want to explain my opinion to him. But according to how you describe it, there’s no way for me to do that, because from the outset I come threatening him. It’s like a war. There’s no attempt here to clarify the truth. So I’m stuck.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. So first of all, first of all you have to recognize the problem. Diagnosis is stage one. And the diagnosis says that there is no substantive discourse, for all kinds of reasons. Maybe there are other reasons too, maybe only the ones I listed, and so on. Beyond that, one more remark before I go on. We often present the two possibilities in a dichotomous way: are you driven by psychological motives or by philosophical motives? The example I like to use in this context is the example of someone returning to religion and someone leaving religion. Okay? When someone returns to religion, his secular friends attribute it to some crisis he went through. Something—who knows—something happened at home, his grandmother died, he broke up with his girlfriend, I don’t know exactly what. Okay? Now his religious friends say, no, he finally discovered the truth, yes? He understood the truth. So the secular people are psychological and the religious people are philosophical, right? What happens with someone who leaves religion? The opposite. Meaning, regarding someone who leaves religion, the religious people say he wanted to permit sexual immorality to himself—they become psychological. And the secular people say, ah, he finally understood that it’s all nonsense and that the truth is really here—or not there. So they become philosophical. Now, who’s right? Both are right. Meaning, every step we take has an explanation on the psychological plane—almost every step—and it has an explanation on the philosophical plane. A person, in order to change a worldview—that’s how we are built—for a person to change a worldview, it’s not enough for someone to come and give me a good argument. Usually that won’t be enough. It has to fall on some psychologically fertile ground. And if I’ve gone through a crisis, I’m more willing to hear other things that I hadn’t thought before, things that don’t fit what I thought until now. But in the final analysis, if I adopt it, it will also have to persuade me. Therefore ultimately, when I take a step, whoever wants to focus on psychology will find an explanation there. Whoever wants to focus on philosophy will also find an explanation, like the two examples I gave earlier. I only claim that what one should do—not what actually happens, but what one should do—is always focus on philosophy and not on psychology. What usually happens is exactly the opposite. Meaning, when I analyze a step that fits what I think, I’m a philosopher. When someone makes a step contrary to what I think, I’m a psychologist. And that is true on every side, in every direction. Okay? Because we’re not straight; we’re tendentious. But that’s how we are, we’re human beings. And one of the important things is to recognize that itself. First of all to tell a person: look, psychology exists. It’s not just some bias, some nonsense that I don’t know who invented. You’re not the only idiot in the world—we’re all human beings. And human beings have this tendency, and we operate also on the basis of psychological motives or explanations. But there is also a need for philosophical justification, and you usually try to do that. Not always successfully, but you’re a human being. You don’t function like a robot. A person does, on some level, try to justify his views to himself. All those fanatics you described earlier, from every direction, will also give you arguments. Never mind that if you check them again, they may not exactly hold water. But they do raise arguments; they’re not just shouting and saying, “It hurts,” right? Meaning, they do make the effort to present a justification, even to themselves, and also to others. And therefore I’m saying—that’s what one should try to leverage.
[Speaker A] So maybe I want to sharpen that point. You’re saying there are two things here that play a role: one of them is the rational, logical, philosophical plane—they need to have an argument. And the second thing is that it has to work for them psychologically, emotionally. And if something has both psychological possibility and intellectual logic, then it can happen. And you’re saying as an example, even a person who is very agitated, teaching me and arguing with me, say about the reform, with fire in his eyes and all that, and his arguments aren’t that good—still, he has arguments. Because even for himself he can’t believe in something without having arguments. But.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So here I don’t agree with that claim; it’s too deterministic. Okay. I do agree that a lot of the time that’s how it is, in most cases that’s how it is, in public discourse that’s certainly how it is. But I don’t agree—on a personal level it’s often like that too, but more often it isn’t. I mean more often than in public discourse. In other words, in a personal conversation, if you discuss things with someone substantively, you have a better chance of succeeding. Now I’ll tell you—I’ll give you another example from the scenario I described earlier. I was once at some gathering of rabbis, where they were discussing what to do with children, teenagers, students who have questions and so on. So some of them said—and this is a very typical statement, I’ve heard it more than once—forget all these questions, they’re answers. Give them warmth and attention and love and so on, forget all the philosophizing, they’re not looking for answers, their questions are answers. They’re looking for a way out, because psychology is driving them and the questions are just post facto justifications. And I claim that even—first of all, I don’t agree that this argument is always correct. There are people who have real substantive claims. And a lot of times the rabbis who say this do so only because they have no answers to the substantive claims, so it’s convenient for them to say it’s all psychological. But true, sometimes a person really is driven by psychology. And even so I argue that you still have to address his arguments substantively. And why? Because after all, why is he asking the question? If he’s driven by psychology, then why ask the question at all—let him just do whatever he feels like psychologically. He asks the question because he also needs philosophical justification. Even if psychology is trying to pull him in a certain direction, a person isn’t a robot. Meaning, he is still trying, at least, to anchor it in some kind of philosophical justification. And if you manage to give him an answer that undermines that philosophical justification, it could be that despite the psychology he won’t take that step. Because the fact is, he needs the philosophical justification. And therefore I say: despite the great despair you’re conveying—and I very much identify with it; I’ve fought this all my life, I’ve devoted almost my whole life to fighting these irritating phenomena of lack of dialogue and emotionalism and lack of attentiveness to arguments from both sides—I still do believe in substantive discussion. And many times, you know, I’m not an internet creature, meaning I don’t exactly know, but from time to time I’ve gotten feedback from people—you know, I sometimes write things that are hard for my readers to hear, and I hear these emotional reactions and you don’t even know what to do with them. And the feeling is somehow that that’s it, nothing—you achieved nothing. You just did absolutely nothing, you only made people angry, you changed nothing. And then I hear from various people: the ones who speak are the ones who are angry. For every one who comments there are another ten who read and wrote nothing. There were no talkbacks from them. And so your words do have an effect in the end. Meaning, the people who shout aren’t influenced—very often that’s true. But if you speak substantively, there will be all sorts of other people on the side for whom some coin may indeed drop. And it’s not one or zero, but there will be some. An empty barrel makes the most noise. Exactly. And so I say, look, there’s no point talking to the demonstrators at Kaplan. Certainly not at a demonstration. Even if they make a dialogue tent and everyone sits there politely listening to one another, it’s a waste of time; not worth spending one second on it. But if you meet one of them in some other situation—not in Kaplan and not in a dialogue tent and not in any of that—come, let’s try for a moment to think, substantively, calmly. And you’re also willing to listen to what he says. Because as in water, face answers to face, and many times we see other people’s flaws but we also don’t listen. It’s not only that others don’t listen. And we also aren’t always right; it’s not only that the others are always wrong. And so I’m saying: if you listen to him, there’s a chance he’ll listen to you too. Now it’s not certain that he’ll be persuaded, but many times it’s a matter of cast your bread upon the waters. Meaning, suddenly he’ll understand at least that there is another side. That too is an achievement. Meaning, even if he won’t be persuaded. After some time he’ll hear someone else from some other angle, and in the end maybe something will happen with him too. And therefore I say, despair doesn’t get you to the grocery store. Meaning, despair is the easiest thing here, and also quite logical to a large extent because it really does look… So not despair—so what is the solution?
[Speaker A] To keep speaking substantively without despairing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To speak substantively all the time.
[Speaker A] One person at a time, because you said, for example, that on a personal level it’s easier to persuade people, but in public discourse—say, I assume you mean the media or things like that—it’s much harder there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. Public discourse can persuade people, but it won’t persuade your interlocutor. If you’re on a panel, I’m not talking about persuading the person opposite me. When I go to a panel like that, I’m not going for my interlocutor. I’m looking at the viewers. I’m not dismissive of him; I know there’s no chance of persuading him. But I do think that out of that discussion there will be a certain portion of the viewers who may hear something new. Not everyone will be convinced and not a large group will be convinced, but there will be a few for whom something moves anyway. That’s why I go. In other words, my interlocutor on a panel or in a debate—for me he is just a way to present the positions, and I also try, at least, truly to listen to what he says, but in the end I’m there to convey my arguments so that the people listening will hear them. And the more the conversation is with someone I disagree with, the greater the chances that there will also be listeners from the side that disagrees with me. Because if I speak to the general public, then usually the people who hear me are people who agree with me, and that is an added value of the discussion. And so specifically taking someone who won’t be convinced and whom you have no chance of persuading, and maybe he isn’t even listening—maybe he is listening, doesn’t matter, he can be polite and not listening. Politeness has nothing to do with listening; those are two completely different things. You can be completely impolite and a great listener, and you can be wonderfully polite and not listening at all. And so for me what matters is attentiveness, not politeness. Another confusion people often make. But many times the people opposite you in the media aren’t listening, and certainly won’t allow themselves to be persuaded. Overall I identify that in myself too. It’s very hard to say to someone in front of all Israel in the media, you convinced me, you silenced me. That’s hard. Meaning, you have to be honest and do it, but listen, we’re all human, it’s hard. In the end what I want is for the listeners to hear some argument and give it some thought. It may be that in another month, two months from now, they’ll hear someone else, someone else, and there will be some who change their minds. Or at least there will be some who think that not everyone on the other side is stupid or wicked or whatever it may be. For me, that’s the required lesson and achievement.
[Speaker A] Has it ever happened to you? It’s happened to me many times. That you changed your mind? Or that you listened during a discussion, even a panel, and in the middle of a panel you understood that maybe you’d missed something?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s happened to me many times. In a great majority of those cases—again, it happened not a few times—in the great majority of them, the change didn’t happen as in, I understood, the coin dropped, but rather things accumulated in me. And at some stage I found myself in a different place from where I had once been. And I think that over the course of my life I’ve undergone a great many changes of direction, and to this day I think I’m still undergoing changes of direction. And I attribute that, among other things, to the fact that I meet many people. By the way, most of the people I meet are very young, and I’m much more skilled than they are in thinking. Meaning, I’ll always manage to beat them in an argument, almost always I’ll manage to beat them in an argument. That doesn’t matter. And it could be that I also have an urge—no, not could be, I do also have an urge—to win in an argument. But when I do try to listen to their arguments, in the end, the fact is that it changed me. Meaning, the fact is that I underwent many changes in life, and those changes didn’t happen because of some prophetic revelation. They happened precisely because I meet so many people who have questions and who have positions different from mine, younger and older, of all kinds and types, and that itself in the end caused me to change. Let me perhaps give you another point connected to that gathering of rabbis I described earlier. Usually when a rabbi comes to such a conversation, he’s looking for what answers he can provide that will give the questioner a response. In other words, he tries to marshal the answers. And if he doesn’t succeed, then he gives him warmth and love because he has no answer. That’s what I said earlier.
[Speaker A] I—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I try, at least—not always successfully—but I try, at least, to come with a different approach. I’m not looking for answers. I’m looking at the question: is he right or not? Meaning, if he’s right, then I’ll change my own position. And if people call me a heretic—they’ve called me that more than once or twice—then they’ll call me that; it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. If I have an answer and I think he’s wrong, I’ll try to give him the answer, and I like winning arguments, I’m also human. And it’s also fairly easy for me to win arguments, so my task is harder, my work is harder. I’m simply more skilled; I do this a lot. And nevertheless I do try to listen to people. And even if I don’t say right now that the coin dropped for me, because maybe in truth it didn’t drop right now, or because of my evil inclination, I think that it does do something in the long run. And the changes I keep undergoing are mainly the result of these encounters. And therefore I actually think there is no other magic solution. We need to keep trying and speaking substantively, not holding organized dialogue ceremonies in the square in memory of Rabin and all kinds of nonsense like that—I don’t believe in those things. It’s just empty. It’s organized talk in which everyone is terribly polite and listening; in my opinion it won’t change anything, at least from what I can tell. Real conversations, all kinds of conversations with someone—certainly someone close to you who values you—it’s easier to get attentiveness from him. He doesn’t see you as a poster, the right-winger or the left-winger or this or that. He knows you, gives you a certain regard, and you have a chance to talk with him. And most changes will happen one on one, in between, and slowly.
[Speaker A] And it will always be—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Changes that you will manage to produce in three percent of people on three percent of their opinions. First of all, I try to change his mind because I think he’s wrong in those cases where he is wrong. But the more important change isn’t there. The more important change is that he gets used to weighing arguments before he forms a position.
[Speaker A] I see, so there’s the specific position and there’s the approach. Exactly. And you’re working on the approach.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That first of all he should hear, he should understand, that the person opposite him is not necessarily stupid and/or an idiot. That’s one thing. Sometimes he is. Very often he is. But not always. And the position on the other side is generally not merely stupid and wicked. The people maybe yes, but the position—so many people hold it, some of them are neither stupid nor wicked. So there’s something in it. Listen—there’s something there that is different. Now, in the end you can still hold a different position, but that itself in my view is a more important lesson.
[Speaker A] Don’t hate the other side, because you’ll understand that at least it’s legitimate. Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Interesting. And you’ll be willing to listen. And maybe in the end you’ll even be persuaded, but that’s a byproduct, that’s already a distant outcome, and one that happens less often. And in my view that’s right. I think that at least in the short term it’s less important. I’m very much in favor of truth, and I very much want to persuade people that I’m right and they’re wrong. Yes. But I think our more serious problem is not that people are wrong. Our more serious problem is that people don’t think. They don’t weigh arguments; they operate from the gut. Not long ago I wrote some column on my site—I wouldn’t say angry, rather frustrated—about the discourse surrounding the hostage deal. Now there are arguments on both sides. I’m totally opposed to the deal. Opposed to any deal whatsoever, of any kind. Opposed; I simply think we must not talk with them about anything. Again, anything they would agree to—obviously in principle I am in favor of making some sort of deal to return the hostages, but any deal that Hamas would agree to, I would not agree to. Therefore I don’t even get into the details of the deal. I think that is a mistake in itself. But it’s clear to me that there are considerations in favor of the deal. What bothered me was not that someone favored the deal—that’s fine, it’s a legitimate dispute and it has to be discussed; there’s nothing to do, we have to make decisions somehow. What bothered me was that there was no discourse. What bothered me was that people were talking from the gut. And in this case, by the way, in my view mainly the side that supported the deal was speaking from the gut, naturally, because supporting a deal fits the gut much more, while opposing a deal means going against your gut. And so here too I think I’m right about this asymmetry: those who disagree with me are more emotional than I am. In other situations I could say maybe I’m biased and maybe someone else would look at me and say maybe he’s emotional and I’m not. In this case it’s very clear what fits emotions and what doesn’t. Now, the fact that something fits emotions doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It could be that there are also good considerations in its favor even though it fits emotions. But it is more suspect. Meaning, once it fits emotions, you need to check very carefully whether you are really applying logical considerations.
[Speaker A] And it’ll be even harder for you to know whether you’re right or wrong, because there won’t be anyone to give you the counterargument, since he’s driven by emotion and from your point of view he can’t possibly be wrong.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s hard for him and it’s hard for me, yes, right, but I’m saying: you have to raise substantive arguments and try somehow to get people to listen.
[Speaker A] Like there used to be those posters saying, what if he were your father, what if he were your son, which is a slogan that doesn’t add or subtract anything.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Someone asked me on the site, and I said that if he were my son, then I should stay away from the discourse and certainly not make decisions on this matter if he were my son. Meaning, it’s an argument that’s simply the exact opposite—not only is it not true, after all if it were my son then my decision would not be correct. Right. That’s the starting point.
[Speaker A] And that argument too—what if he were your son—sort of contains the claim that I need to act, or the prime minister needs to decide, based on the psychological consideration.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Which is entirely taking—
[Speaker A] You’re saying here, you’re saying that every argument a person has is made up of both the philosophical consideration and the psychological one, and you’re trying to elevate it to the philosophical level. And I’m saying that this slogan, in a certain place, is an attempt to drag it down to the purely psychological level. As if logic doesn’t matter—what if he were your son? You’d choose, you’d be sad.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s a major problem in our personality structure. I once heard a nice joke from Shlomo Nitzan on the radio. He told a joke in the name of Dov Sadan, who was a literature scholar at the Hebrew University, and he said that the next person who will make a revolution in the world will be a Jewish orthopedist. Why Jewish? Because everyone who makes a revolution in the world is Jewish. But why an orthopedist? So he said: because the first Jew who made a revolution in the world was Abraham our forefather, or Moses our teacher, doesn’t matter—use your heads, lift up your eyes on high and see who created these—yes, use your heads, this didn’t happen by itself. Okay. The second Jew who made a revolution in the world was Jesus, who said to you: use your heart. We started with the head and went down to the heart. The next Jew who made a revolution in the world was Marx, who said everything is in the belly: capital, interests, economics. So we started with the head, moved to the heart, descended to the belly, below the belt—the next one will probably be an orthopedist. Now, this joke, like every good joke, more than it is funny, it puts its finger on a real point. And the real point is that the world is moving in despair away from intellect; part of postmodernity, after all, is despair of intellect. And as a result, making decisions by the heart or by the gut has become an ideology. It’s no longer a failure. Failures like these always existed. People always acted emotionally. In the postmodern era, emotionality became an ideology. And you’re supposed to act from the gut and not from the head. On the contrary, there is despair in the head. The head can take you anywhere. The head is alienated, it’s cold. You need to act from the gut. Now, the gut is very strong. Our vital feelings—that’s why in the Tanya it’s called the vital soul. The gut, because the gut is very strong. Much stronger than the head. The head is cold; it can’t give you the drive for real action. The gut takes you very strongly. Emotions take you very strongly, and interests of course. That’s the gut and the heart. Okay? And it’s very hard to overcome this. It’s very hard to make the head rule over the heart and the gut. And so people, first of all, act from the gut—but that was always the case. In the modern era, because of postmodern despair, because of despair of intellect, acting from the gut is no longer perceived as a failure. It’s an ideology: you’re supposed to act according to what you feel.
[Speaker A] So you’re describing a decline, as it were, in the quality of discourse in the world.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Meaning, the point is that people are not becoming more stupid. On the contrary, I think people are becoming smarter. But their trust in intellect is declining. It’s not that their intellect has become less intelligent, but their trust in intellect is going down and they prefer—ask people where morality resides. In the heart, not in the head.
[Speaker A] That runs against—if you were an alien arriving on Earth right now, I would look at history and expect it to be the opposite. Because precisely now we’re in an age in which intellect is succeeding. Look, technology, look, science—there’s a flowering now of all philosophy, as if it finally has something to say and there’s a lot of intellect in the world. Precisely now trust in intellect goes down?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, precisely because of that. Trust in intellect—that’s a reaction. Trust in intellect increased greatly in the modern era. In the modern era, and then the early modern period, after the sixteenth century and onward, science began to develop, modern science began to develop, people thought that intellect would solve all problems. At a certain stage a crisis occurred. In the twentieth century, around the world wars—they attribute it to that, it doesn’t matter, there are various explanations. But a crisis happened. You can see it on the philosophical plane, on the historical plane, on the psychological plane. We won’t get into all that, but a crisis happened. And what is the content of that crisis, in my view? The focal point of this crisis is that suddenly people discovered that intellect does not solve the real problems of life. Right. Meaning, it gets us to the moon, intellect brings us computing, intellect does many things—medicine, everything, physics, all excellent. It doesn’t solve our problems of values, our social problems, what are called legal studies, social sciences—that’s nonsense. Neither science nor anything of the sort. Why is it called that? It’s called that because people still, out of inertia, think that intellect will solve those problems too, and it does not solve those problems. So what happens? Despair of intellect becomes much stronger and much less justified. Because we have far more intellectual tools, but this frustrates us so much that we say, okay, so if that’s the case then intellect is useless in these areas, and that’s how postmodernism was born. In other words, that’s how the great despair of intellect was born. You know, once there was some singing reality show—I don’t remember whether it was A Star Is Born or one of those, or The Singer, I don’t remember which, one of the two. I watched it with my children. We followed almost the whole season there. It was one of the real seasons of A Star Is Born, I think. So one of the judges there was Shlomi Shabbat. I don’t remember exactly, but he was one of the judges there. So some woman sang there, and he said, look, my head says this, but the heart, the heart. And there he stopped. And then I ask: everyone of course gave thunderous applause there on television—so what did you decide? My kids were dying laughing, they were literally on the floor laughing. We were sitting there watching it together. Because it was obvious from the context, and also obvious to the TV audience and to them, that if the intellect says one thing and the heart says another, you don’t need to add anything. Obviously—you go with the heart, what’s the question? And I say, wait a second, what do you mean? If the intellect says one thing and the heart says another, then what do you decide? I would decide with the intellect, not with the heart.
[Speaker A] But there he—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He didn’t even say, I’m going with the heart. Rather, the moment you say that the intellect says this and the heart says that, you don’t need to add a word. The conclusion is obvious. And it was such a beautiful symptom of this generation’s disease. And the big problem is that it became an ideology. Meaning, a person says, I go with my heart, and for him that’s it. It’s not a failure; he doesn’t hide it, on the contrary. One of the things that is difficult for a secular person to understand in religious thinking is why almost everyone religious opposes the deal. Almost everyone. And religious people are used to working with the head, in total contrast to the image out there in the world as though secular people are rational and religious people are emotional—utter nonsense. One of the things that is very hard for secular people to understand in religious thought is its excessive rationality. That you operate with your head, according to values that don’t really speak to you—they’re not simple moral values. Simple moral values everyone identifies with. But pork, and redeeming a firstborn donkey, and giving up your life, and not eating in this restaurant or that restaurant—what do you care, who does it bother? Meaning, the heart has nothing to say about this. And secular people can’t understand how you devote your life and your efforts and your resources and your struggles to things that the heart does not speak to. And my own heart doesn’t say anything either, not only the secular person’s heart. Mine too—no, I have no emotional identification with this. And for a secular person it’s very hard to understand such a thing. Because he lives inside a world—even if he doesn’t define himself as postmodern—he lives inside a postmodern world. And in a postmodern world, what leads you is the heart; it’s an ideology, not a failure. Once this was also true, but it was perceived as a failure. I need to overcome it. Today, no. Today if the head leads you, that’s the failure. The heart is supposed to lead you. And therefore you can’t even tell people, listen, notice how emotional you are. Obviously, because I go with what I connect to, with what speaks to me. And this difficulty becomes a philosophical difficulty. Once it was a psychological difficulty, and it still existed. Today it’s already a philosophical difficulty.
[Speaker A] What strikes me is that in the public it’s perceived as the opposite. Why? Because it seems like being secular is usually the more rational position, and being religious is the more emotional position. Because why do you believe? You believe because you feel connected, because of this, fine—but if you’re really an intellectual person. And I know this from my own searching when I was a kid. It seemed to me that if you want to be a logical, scientific person, then you choose science. And science doesn’t go together with Torah. If you want to be a smart person, then you need to be an atheist. And if you want to be a believing person, be religious, no problem, but it doesn’t go together. So being secular is actually perceived as smarter than being religious.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, that’s one of the successes of atheist discourse—that image that religious people also internalized. It’s that picture according to which rationality is on the atheist-secular side, and emotionality belongs to the religious side. I deny that. Now, that doesn’t mean religious people are all pure active intellect. No, no. Many of them talk nonsense, many of them operate from the gut—you know, we’re all human. And still, the discourse itself—I’m not talking about the man in the street. The discourse, the principles according to which you conduct yourself, the religious principles are a thousand times more rational, more rationalistic, than the secular ones. I’m not talking about whether they are more correct, but the mode of conduct is much colder, more intellectual and rational than the secular mode of conduct. And I’m not talking about the person, I’m talking about the ideology.
[Speaker A] How do you explain the fact that it’s perceived as exactly the opposite? It’s perceived as if being religious is being emotional and being secular is being logical.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a good question. I think part of it may perhaps be inertia from the early stages of the secularization process. There was a big rebellion against traditional religiosity. Non-rational religiosity, religiosity that imposes things on you by force of tradition and doesn’t allow—doesn’t allow you to criticize.
[Speaker A] And then—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The one who rebelled against that really was the intelligent person, the rational person, the person who seeks justifications and isn’t just willing to do what his parents told him. That was the revolt of the Enlightenment, of secularization, of the Reformation—it started in the Reformation but eventually moved into the Jewish Enlightenment and the Enlightenment and secularization. And then what happens is that, as in the phenomenon I started with, people are actually looking for sacred values for their identity in order to sustain the meaning of their lives, secularization itself became a religion. It lost its rationality. And therefore, in my view, on the conceptual level—again, without getting into the question of how many rationalists and how many emotional people there are on each side—the mode of thinking: rabbis operate in a much colder and more rational way and a much less emotional way than the intellectual, media, and so on leaders of the secular world. And likewise right versus left. The right is much more rational than the left, contrary to the prevailing image in the world; in my opinion reality has simply reversed. Reality has reversed. The left is such an emotional world. Sometimes it’s right, but it’s terribly emotional in the way it conducts itself. Look at how Gideon Levy describes for you the miserable Palestinians—about some of whom he is right, sometimes he lies. But sometimes he’s right. There really are miserable Palestinians. Now I ask: so what? Does that mean I should therefore make an agreement with them and compromise with them territorially? Maybe I should, but not because of that. Maybe I should, but not because there are miserable people. Miserable people need to be helped, and we need to try to see how we can make people less miserable. But why should the fact that he describes to me some miserable Palestinian turn me from a right-winger into a left-winger?
[Speaker A] So sharpen the point for me again—why being left-wing, you’re claiming that the left is actually more emotional but is perceived as more intellectual. Why? Why that gap?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So again, I’m saying—I’ve never thought about this in an orderly way, it’s a very interesting question. I think maybe it’s inertia from the point where it began.
[Speaker A] What the Rabbi said earlier about the religious people—so I understood that once, basically—again, tell me if I understood you correctly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Religious people and right and left and secularity are correlated things. Not the same thing, but correlated things. The ones leading the right in Israel today are religious people.
[Speaker A] But not always.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The ones leading the left are secular people.
[Speaker A] But it didn’t start that way. Jabotinsky—they weren’t religious.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m talking about today. If you ask yourself today what the distribution looks like, this is the distribution. I think that once right and left were divided between rational and emotional. I see. The division is today—
[Speaker A] I see. So you’re basically saying that once, being religious really was not so rational; it was mainly emotional. And against that, the Enlightenment began and rebelled, as it were, against the emotional realm that belonged to the religious, and it became intellectual, and that’s why it got an intellectual image.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And then over time it forced—it forced the religious world too, by the way, at least I know for myself—to become intellectual, to try and formulate counterarguments and not just impose bans. And then it suddenly became more rational, sometimes even detached from natural feelings—that’s often how religious thinking is accused. And they became a religion, and in recent years that religion is the progressive religion, what they call it today, which is really a very extreme expression of that left-wing trend which used to be more moderate but is gradually becoming a religion. And that is the peak of the process I described earlier, and I very much hope it is also its end, or at least some crisis that will return it to some sane track. I don’t know. I hope.
[Speaker A] Okay, that’s an interesting analysis. You said earlier that in your own path, or in your life, you changed many opinions—that you listen, and because you listen you hear and you understand that you were mistaken, and suddenly you move closer to this opinion, suddenly closer to another, and you go through a process, and you described that you went through many. I’m curious about those many opinions. I can say about myself that when I was in a period of clarification, there were periods when I suddenly moved very close to secularity, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I’d remain Sabbath-observant all my life. And later, as time passed and I got a bit stronger there, sometimes it went a bit in the other direction and I had thoughts of becoming Haredi too, because maybe that’s what’s right. And I really went close to those worlds, and there were periods when I also wasn’t sure and didn’t know where I was headed. Today maybe it’s settling a little more slowly, but even today I’m open to my views changing. I’m curious whether that’s something that happened to you too, how far we’re talking about these changes in opinion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, of course, that happened to me completely.
[Speaker A] You thought about becoming secular? Yes, definitely. You thought about becoming secular?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Absolutely. I was already almost secular for a certain period. I wore a kippah—I didn’t take off the kippah at any stage—but I was in a state where really it was already just a technical matter. Wow. And that was in the period of—mainly during the army. Meaning, it started in Gush when I was there, and afterward in the army I read many books of philosophy and logic, and I understood that basically everything is based on assumptions, and there is no real basis in fact for any argument, because you always start with axioms that are themselves ungrounded, and therefore I basically reached the conclusion that there is no truth at all—not specifically religious truth, that was just a particular case—there is nothing that is true, and especially not religious truth.
[Speaker A] Nothing is true, or I have no way of knowing what is true?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter for our purposes. I cannot arrive at anything true. I understand. And then the path seemed to be heading toward abandoning, abandoning the religious world. At some stage, toward the end of my bachelor’s degree I think, I went to an Arachim seminar. That’s where I met my wife. Wow. I went there out of anthropological and sociological interest, not really to clarify too much, and in fact I wasn’t especially impressed by the arguments I heard there, but as a result someone latched onto me and brought me to a yeshiva in Bnei Brak for people returning to religion, Netivot Olam. Haredi? Yes, Lithuanian. And my wife too—by then we had kind of connected there—she also joined in that direction and definitely contributed her part in that direction, and at some stage I decided that that was my place. I was in Bnei Brak. More or less—you know, not exactly standard, but more or less. Let’s say our eldest son already got to a major Haredi yeshiva in second-year level, meaning age eighteen, nineteen, something like that. The others—each left at a different stage in different directions. And since then I’ve been rolling along. Meaning, I arrived at other religious worldviews, not only in the sense of yes Zionism or no Zionism—that never changed for me. My attitude to Zionism, by the way, in my opinion never changed for me. Meaning, I was never a hyphenated Religious-Zionist. I was always Zionist and always religious, and I still am, and there’s no connection between those two things.
[Speaker A] Okay, but you’re describing a relatively drastic shift—close to secularity, close to being secular, and then on the other side close to being Haredi, all of a sudden. Interesting.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean all of a sudden? It took some time, but yes.
[Speaker A] It was the reaction. Yes. So what was in Bnei Brak?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I studied Talmud. Nothing having to do with worldview was something I was capable of hearing there; it was all kindergarten level.
[Speaker A] Okay, so how?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nothing. I simply studied Talmud and suddenly thought that this world—yes, I thought again about my way and decided that this world really did speak to me, seemed true to me in some sense. For me, the Talmud brought me back to religious observance, not philosophy. Philosophy came afterward. I had already been involved in philosophy since hesder yeshiva, but it only later started building in me a religious worldview—what now crystallized in the trilogy, yes, a few years ago—only afterward, much afterward.
[Speaker A] And why did you stop being Haredi, in a sense?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because look, I was never fully Haredi, but the feeling was that it was easier to make corrections to the left than to make corrections to the right. Meaning, if I raise the children in Haredi education and I want to make leftward corrections for them—meaning to be more open—that’s easier, than raising them in a more open education, Religious Zionist, national-religious, something like that, and making rightward corrections toward fear of Heaven. And why corrections? Because I didn’t identify with either side. In any case I’m in the middle, so the question is where to go and to which side to make the corrections.
[Speaker A] Today you’re in the middle between being Religious Zionist and being Haredi?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I was always in the middle, I never identified with either side.
[Speaker A] What does it mean to be in the middle?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To be in the middle means that I do not see the State of Israel as a religious value, and I also do not see it as a sin. Meaning, I’m neither Haredi nor Religious Zionist in any sense. For me it’s like the joke in Bnei Brak—they really enjoy telling the joke about the Rabbi of Ponevezh, who didn’t say Hallel on Independence Day and also didn’t say Tachanun. So they asked him: what’s the logic? Meaning, if you’re Religious Zionist, then say Hallel, not just omit Tachanun. And if you’re Haredi, then say Tachanun too. Meaning, what is this? So he said: I’m Zionist like Ben-Gurion; Ben-Gurion also doesn’t say Hallel and doesn’t say Tachanun on Independence Day. Now everyone says that’s a joke, and it isn’t a joke. In my opinion it’s a completely serious statement. He was essentially saying that his Zionism was secular Zionism, yes. So that’s why he doesn’t say Tachanun, because it’s a happy day that the state was established, as a Holocaust survivor too and so on, so it’s a very happy day. Am I telling you that he saw it as a religious value and therefore would say Hallel? No. He didn’t see it as a religious value, but he was very happy that the state was established. Now that is my Zionism. And therefore it is not hyphenated Religious Zionism, and it is not Haredism in the anti-Zionist sense, and I think that today I’m finding more and more people who basically think this way—they just need someone to conceptualize it for them.
[Speaker A] So what would you say to the Religious Zionist claim—which I think I maybe hold more of—that says to you: everything that happens in the world is supervised by the Holy One, blessed be He; He causes things to happen, He does them, and in any case there is no such thing, there is no statement like something detached from Him or from religion. Therefore if it’s something joyful, it’s joyful also in the eyes of Torah. So if you don’t say Tachanun you should say Hallel, because you’re thanking God that it happened.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I personally do say Hallel, by the way, because I don’t think that for Hallel to be said it has to be a religious value. I say Hallel because something joyful happened to me.
[Speaker A] It’s just the same thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, it’s not the same thing. First of all, your claim that everything is supervised by the Holy One, blessed be He, in my opinion is certainly not correct.
[Speaker A] It’s not correct?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. There are many things that happen according to the natural course of the world. In my opinion almost all of them happen according to the natural course of the world. And so I don’t accept at all this what’s-the-logic argument you made earlier—meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, brought this about, and now the question is whether He’s on this side or that side.
[Speaker A] Fine, okay, that’s for another episode and there’s no point doing it now, opening a separate topic that I don’t want to get into at the moment. Another point I maybe wanted to touch on, since we’re dealing with this: you said earlier that many people called you a heretic, because you want to say what you think. Are you a heretic?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t recognize the existence of that concept. What is a heretic? Meaning, a heretic—someone who says, what benefit have the rabbis ever given us? I don’t say “what benefit have the rabbis ever given us,” as the Talmud says. But a heretic in the sense of Maimonides’ principles—Maimonides decided on thirteen principles, why am I obligated to that? Meaning, he decided—he said it. The question is what’s true, not what Maimonides wrote. Meaning, so the question is—I don’t accept the concept of authority with regard to facts at all. There is no such thing as authority regarding facts. The question of whether the Messiah will come or not is a factual question. Either he will come or he won’t. Now, with regard to a factual question, you cannot demand that someone adopt a factual claim because of authority. If you accept it, then you accept it, and if you don’t accept it, then no authority will help in telling you to accept it anyway.
[Speaker A] Ask questions—I don’t fully agree with that statement. When I was a little child and my father told me something, okay, maybe I wasn’t fully convinced, but—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Dad knows and I don’t know. No—“Dad knows and I don’t know” isn’t authority. That’s exactly the point. So what is it? Well, that’s a whole subject in itself. I distinguish between formal authority and substantive authority.
[Speaker A] No, but from my perspective it’s the same thing. It’s not like Rabbi Dad can force me to think that way.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no—it’s not about forcing. Substantive authority is the authority of someone who knows better than you, like a doctor. You go to a doctor—you don’t have to obey him, but he understands this and you don’t. If he prescribes you medicine, then presumably, common sense says to take it. Okay? Formal authority is authority like that of the Knesset. Meaning, its authority doesn’t come from the fact that it’s right; it comes from the fact that it’s the authorized institution. Exactly.
[Speaker A] Now I’m saying: in Jewish law, they attribute substantive authority to Maimonides.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but I don’t accept his substantive authority, because I don’t think he’s smarter than I am in these areas, and therefore there’s no reason to.
[Speaker A] But the question I wanted to start with was: when someone calls you a heretic, do you feel that it’s an attempt to silence you? Or is it an objective statement—he simply weighed the data and came to the conclusion that you’re a heretic, and that’s some conclusion he arrived at and is sharing with the world?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s both. First of all, it’s a sincere statement. That’s really what he thinks, in my opinion, usually. That really is what he thinks. But the very concept of “heretic,” and using the term “heretic,” is a kind of silencing. Because when you use that term, what you’re really saying is: I’m not willing to consider those arguments. Those arguments are outside the game; they’re illegitimate. You’re not saying, “I considered those arguments and I disagree,” because if you were saying that, then you’d present me with the arguments for why you disagree with mine. When you say, “No, no, you’re a heretic,” what you’re really saying is: I’m not arguing with you, I’m not offering counterarguments, you’re outside the bounds. I don’t discuss that.
[Speaker A] I don’t offer counterarguments to the arguments of heretics.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: usually, when someone says to another person, “You’re a heretic,” it’s an attempt to silence him. Yes, it’s those same people who don’t really have the ability to offer counterarguments to what I’m saying, and then they say I’m a heretic. There are people who argue with me—with arguments—and that’s perfectly fine; that’s a debate.
[Speaker A] Right, because ostensibly you too would say about certain people that they’re heretics.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? I wouldn’t say they’re heretics, I’d say they’re mistaken. Someone who doesn’t believe in God—is he a heretic? I assume so, but who cares? I say he’s mistaken. I understand. The fact that he’s a heretic is irrelevant. What’s relevant is what he thinks—he’s wrong.
[Speaker A] Now when I say he’s wrong, I need to give him reasons for why I think he’s wrong.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If I say he’s a heretic, then what am I saying?
[Speaker A] You’re not legitimate, I’m not discussing this with you. I get it. Meaning, what you’re saying is that calling someone a heretic is basically attaching some category to him, and then once I’ve given him the category—“heretic” means someone who doesn’t think like me. That’s the… interesting. So you’re saying it’s like when suddenly you hear someone say, “He’s a leftist,” or “He’s a right-winger”—it becomes, forget it, he’s not one of us, there’s no point listening to him. Nice—identity replaces… so to speak. It’s a statement of identity, not a statement of… and therefore you’re saying there’s really no point getting into “heretic” at all. And also when they say about me that I’m a heretic—you’re saying it has no meaning. Because even if I am, even if I’m not, what difference does it make? Address the argument, don’t address the person. And therefore you’re saying it doesn’t really move the needle, it doesn’t matter all that much. Right. Good, nice—I like that answer. I think we’ll stop here; maybe we’ll continue this another time. Thank you very much, Rabbi, it was really interesting, I enjoyed it very much. Thank you very much.