Rabbi Michael Avraham’s Book Trilogy Conference, Part 1 – Midreshet Bar-Ilan

Table of Contents

• Opening of the conference and the constraints
• Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler’s greeting to the trilogy and the dialogue method
• Authority and tradition, and the tension between rationality and custom
• The boundaries of discourse in the study hall versus academia, and principles of faith
• Providence, prayer, and days of judgment within the discussion of the second book
• The obligation to “build and plant” and an educational model for love of God and fear of Him
• Transition to managing the conference and introducing the speakers
• Dr. Chayuta Deutsch on the structure of the trilogy, authority, and aggadah within Jewish law
• Jewish thought, the Sages, and the claim that aggadah is the “music” of the topic
• Examples from aggadah and Jewish law: zimmun, wine, and blood appearances
• Introducing the next speakers and the topic of providence
• Rabbi Moshe Rat against the view that “the Lord has forsaken the land” and its implications
• The a priori argument: the plausibility of intervention versus Russell’s “teapot”
• The tradition of the great sages of Israel and religious intuition as reasonable assumptions for providence
• The a posteriori critique: rejecting the “dichotomy” between nature and providence, and hidden miracles
• Evidence from reality: prayer, studies, and the rebirth of the State of Israel
• Summary of Rabbi Moshe Rat’s argument and the burden of proof

Summary

General Overview

The conference on the boundaries of discourse opened with a reading of remarks by Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler, who was unable to attend because of COVID isolation. In his remarks, he congratulates Rabbi Michael Abraham on the trilogy that sums up hundreds of columns and hours of thought, built as a dialogue between the Orthodox “Hillel” and “Michael,” and that gives primacy to reason and the sage. Rabbi Altshuler raises questions about authority and tradition, about the boundaries of discussion in the study hall as opposed to academia, and about the need not only to negate but also to “build and plant” a practical model for love of God and fear of Him, while citing Maimonides from Guide for the Perplexed and verses from Jeremiah about providence, kindness, justice, and righteousness in the land. After that, Rabbi Michael Abraham introduces the speakers, Dr. Chayuta Deutsch summarizes the three books and challenges the treatment of aggadah as mere literature within halakhic passages, and Rabbi Moshe Rat sharply attacks Rabbi Michael’s view of providence as a position of “the Lord has forsaken the land,” arguing that it has biblical, traditional, intuitive, and empirical grounds against it.

Opening of the conference and the constraints

Itai Lipschitz introduces himself as an educator at the institute and not as the head of the study hall, and reads the opening remarks of Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler, who is absent because of COVID isolation. Itai Lipschitz notes that he came from a funeral and that what he is reading is also, for him, a first hearing, and he offers opening greetings before passing the floor onward for the rest of the conference.

Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler’s greeting to the trilogy and the dialogue method

Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler congratulates Rabbi Michael Abraham on writing and publishing three books that summarize hundreds of columns and hundreds and thousands of hours of thought on topics that occupy many people. Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler says that the response in the books is built as a dialogue between “Hillel,” representing the Orthodox mainstream, and “Michael,” and compares this to dialogical traditions such as the Kuzari, the writings of the Ramchal, Mesillat Yesharim, and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, while claiming that here primacy is given to reason and the sage. Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler assumes that there is no real contradiction between the two archetypes and no need to choose between “wicked and wise” or “believing and foolish.”

Authority and tradition, and the tension between rationality and custom

Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler presents authority and tradition as central issues and asks to what extent the authority of the sages of the generations, halakhic decisors, customs, popular practices, and ways of thinking are formally and substantively binding. Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler presents Rabbi Michael’s approach as seeking a kind of “diet” for this whole system, setting up a leaner value system so as to allow common sense, logic, and standard life-conduct in a modern/postmodern world to fit much more easily with the way of Torah. Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler argues that this trend may ground faith for those seeking it, but may also create discomfort for those whose world of consciousness includes emotion and soul. He emphasizes that customs come from the inherited practice of the Jewish people and not from Sinai, and asks rhetorically how many women would agree to give up lighting Sabbath candles even though it is a custom, claiming that this custom symbolizes the Sabbath more than Torah-level laws of selecting.

The boundaries of discourse in the study hall versus academia, and principles of faith

Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler defines the study hall as a place of ongoing discourse around Torah topics and asks whether there are issues that should not be opened up, and whether there are conclusions that should be ruled out in advance. Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler says that in the academic world surrounding the institute, the answer to these questions ought to be negative, but in the study hall the answer is positive regarding the normative and halakhic plane, while on the plane of thought it is more flexible. Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler cites Maimonides, who defines as a heretic someone who thinks that the Holy One, blessed be He, has a form or a body, and notes that the Raavad dissented. He also mentions that Maimonides established thirteen principles, while Rabbi Yosef Albo argued that only three are truly principles.

Providence, prayer, and days of judgment within the discussion of the second book

Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler notes that around the issue of providence in the second book there are many varied views among the medieval authorities (Rishonim), and asks whether the option that “God has forsaken the land” also has a place. Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler asks whether the distinction between passive providence and active providence, and the implications for prayer and for the status and character of the days of judgment, can serve as a sufficient or satisfying alternative, and he defines the role of the conference as discussing these questions and their practical significance.

The obligation to “build and plant” and an educational model for love of God and fear of Him

Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler testifies that he read most of the books and argues that a book that points to a necessary diet for Jewish thought and calls for necessary halakhic changes must not only negate but also offer a path. Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler cites Jeremiah’s prophetic commission, in which there are four negative verbs, but the ending is “to build and to plant,” and he asks whether the books offer, beyond the diet, also a model and tools for love of God and fear of Him. Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler quotes at length from Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed, which concludes with the verses from Jeremiah, “Thus said the Lord: Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom,” and explains that a person should always feel himself before a great King, that love comes through the ideas of Torah and fear through the actions of Torah, and that the axis of Torah is “in the land,” against “the thought of the destroyers” that “the Lord has forsaken the land.” Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler concludes by saying that the book could have been more complete had it included practical lines for the figure of the believer in the realm of commandments and character traits, and says that the task before Rabbi Miki is “to build and to plant,” asking whether the next trilogy will deal with a paved path for the service of God.

Transition to managing the conference and introducing the speakers

Itai Lipschitz invites Rabbi Miki to run the rest of the conference according to the published order of speakers, and notes that there will be questions from the audience and that at the end of the evening Rabbi Miki will answer the questions not answered by then. Rabbi Michael Abraham introduces four speakers, notes that Chayuta Deutsch edited the trilogy and that thanks to her the idea of dialogue entered the books, since originally there was no dialogue, and says that the speakers will address different aspects, generally from a critical direction.

Dr. Chayuta Deutsch on the structure of the trilogy, authority, and aggadah within Jewish law

Dr. Chayuta Deutsch summarizes the first book, “The First Existent,” as dealing with faith and proving the existence of God through a dialogue between Hillel and Michael, clarifying the concept of faith, the relation between faith and certainty and intellect and emotion, the difference between faith and knowledge, the relation between the philosophical God and the religious God, and what a proof is, and she describes it as built from five conversations, ending with revelation, its validity, and why it is binding. Dr. Chayuta Deutsch describes the third book, “Paths Among the Stationary,” as dealing with the need and the possibility of refreshing Jewish law, and argues that Rabbi Miki presents in it a toolbox from within Jewish law for change. Dr. Chayuta Deutsch focuses on the second book, “No Man Has Power Over the Wind,” and argues that the title expresses freedom of thought, that it is impossible to force a person what to think. She brings a passage by Rabbi Menachem Froman from 1986 about “Do not read it as engraved but as freedom,” and about the possibility that a Jew may experience Torah as oppression, in order to show the power of freedom that the book offers.

Jewish thought, the Sages, and the claim that aggadah is the “music” of the topic

Dr. Chayuta Deutsch presents Rabbi Miki’s position according to which “there’s no such thing as Jewish thought”; thought is judged only by whether it is true, and Maimonides and the Kuzari do not get more protection than Aristotle or Kant. She adds that even the Sages do not get protection in the realm of thought, and their force applies only to Jewish law. Dr. Chayuta Deutsch quotes from the dialogue Rabbi Miki’s position that aggadah is literature like any other literature, and that there is no essential difference between a midrash of the Sages and Dostoevsky or Elsa Morante, and she says that while this formulation gives freedom, she disagrees with it when aggadah is an organic part of a halakhic passage. Dr. Chayuta Deutsch argues that one cannot study, and certainly cannot issue a halakhic ruling, without relating to the aggadot that the editors of the Talmud wove into the passages not by accident, and that skipping over them imposes a defect and disability on the passage and harms the understanding of its context, spirit, and heart. She attributes authority also to the editorial act of the Talmud and to the choice to insert aggadot among the laws.

Examples from aggadah and Jewish law: zimmun, wine, and blood appearances

Dr. Chayuta Deutsch argues that the insertion of aggadah into a halakhic passage brings life and nuance into view, things the rules will not cover, and she defines aggadah as the music of the passage, whose interpretation is broad but not infinite. Dr. Chayuta Deutsch brings examples from tractate Berakhot about zimmun, including the story of King Yannai and the queen, who killed the rabbis and then needed Shimon ben Shatach for zimmun, in order to present an extreme case of separation and shared eating empty of unity. Opposite it she places the story of Rav’s students after his burial, who want to clarify whether they join together for zimmun and receive the ruling that it is enough to have established themselves with “let us go and eat bread,” to demonstrate how the aggadah deepens the question of togetherness. Dr. Chayuta Deutsch brings a story from the Jerusalem Talmud about Rabbi Yehuda bar Rabbi Elai and his radiant face opposite a matron who attributes it to drinking wine or to wealth, while the sage attributes it to “my learning is readily available to me” and to the verse “A man’s wisdom lights up his face,” and she adds a similar story about Rabbi Abbahu in order to argue that Torah has an effect parallel to wine. Dr. Chayuta Deutsch brings tractate Niddah on blood appearances and argues that three aggadot about women—the wife of Rav Yehuda, Ifra Hurmiz, and Yalta—make doubt present, challenge the authority of halakhic ruling, and show that there is female knowledge of the body, and that even a ruling can rely on divine assistance or on seeking an additional opinion. She concludes that one who makes do with the laws and misses the aggadot arrives at study and halakhic ruling that are monotonous and lacking.

Introducing the next speakers and the topic of providence

Rabbi Michael Abraham notes that the next three speakers all sat with him at one stage or another, and invites Rabbi Moshe Rat to speak about matters of providence as a charged issue in the second book, while noting that the argument between them also takes place online.

Rabbi Moshe Rat against the view that “the Lord has forsaken the land” and its implications

Rabbi Moshe Rat opens with the midrash about the child riding on his father’s shoulders who asks, “Have you perhaps seen my father?”, and links it to “Is the Lord among us or not?” and the coming of Amalek, in order to frame a critique of anyone who takes that seriously. Rabbi Moshe Rat attributes to Rabbi Michael Abraham an approach according to which the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world and perhaps intervened in the past, but stopped intervening and leaves reality to the laws of nature. He says the result is that there is no providence, neither individual nor collective, that “prayers don’t help,” and that the Holy One, blessed be He, “doesn’t answer prayers.” Rabbi Moshe Rat argues that this position rests on the fact that we do not see providence and that there is no reason to assume divine intervention from the outset, and he analyzes this as an a priori assumption that the idea is “weird/crazy,” and as an a posteriori assumption that intervention is not visible.

The a priori argument: the plausibility of intervention versus Russell’s “teapot”

Rabbi Moshe Rat attacks the claim that providence is absurd like Russell’s “flying teapot,” and argues that if one accepts that there is a God, that He created the world, that He can intervene, that He intervened in the past, and perhaps still intervenes today, then there is no basis for saying that the assumption of intervention is absurd. Rabbi Moshe Rat uses the principle “establish a matter on its prior presumption” and argues that the one who claims that intervention ceased at some unknown date bears the burden of proof. Rabbi Moshe Rat says that miracles and prophecy were exceptions even in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), but the conception of God as governing the world appears simply throughout the Hebrew Bible through expressions like “He causes the wind to blow and the rain to fall,” “It was not you who sent me here but God,” and the presentation of the rise of the kings of Babylonia and Assyria as acts of the Lord. Therefore, stopping this mode of governance requires proof.

The tradition of the great sages of Israel and religious intuition as reasonable assumptions for providence

Rabbi Moshe Rat presents as another reason the belief of the overwhelming majority of the great sages of Israel in individual providence, and argues that the great sages of Israel also have spiritual intuitions, “divine inspiration,” and “spiritual intelligence,” and he asks people not to make do with saying “they can be mistaken,” but to prove that they were mistaken. Rabbi Moshe Rat brings the broad intuition of people that reality has meaning and that there is a guiding hand, quotes sayings like “there are no atheists in foxholes,” and points to states of danger that bring a person to cry out to God, rejecting the explanation that this is only “brainwashing.” Rabbi Moshe Rat argues that many people who become religious arrive there through an experience of a guiding hand, and that the flourishing of religion throughout history indicates that belief in a governing power is natural and simple, not absurd.

The a posteriori critique: rejecting the “dichotomy” between nature and providence, and hidden miracles

Rabbi Moshe Rat argues that Rabbi Michael makes an unfair dichotomy between laws of nature and providence and demands an open miracle in order to recognize providence, whereas providence works mainly through hidden miracles and “small shifts” behind the scenes. Rabbi Moshe Rat brings Purim and Hanukkah as examples of miracles that do not break the laws of nature in the plain sense of the story, and presents a concept of double causality in which there are natural causes and spiritual causes together. Rabbi Moshe Rat brings a Talmudic example about Levi, who became lame, where it is said, “both this and that caused it,” to illustrate that a natural cause and a spiritual cause can operate together.

Evidence from reality: prayer, studies, and the rebirth of the State of Israel

Rabbi Moshe Rat argues that experiments were conducted on groups of patients, in which many trials found clear signs that those prayed for recovered more, and he adds that the methodology weakened prayer, so positive results strengthen the claim. Rabbi Moshe Rat presents statistical studies according to which religious people have advantages on health and mortality measures, including a study in religious and secular kibbutzim showing gaps of ninety-three percent in mortality from heart disease and sixty-seven percent in mortality from tumor complications, as well as claims of a thirty percent drop in the likelihood of dying prematurely and mortality differences of seventy-five percent between those who attend synagogue and those who do not. Rabbi Moshe Rat argues that even if there are “natural explanations” such as community, this fits providence working through nature. Rabbi Moshe Rat argues that the rebirth of the State of Israel, the ingathering of the exiles, victories in war, immigrant absorption, and making the wasteland bloom constitute clear evidence of providence and correspond to the prophecies of the Torah, and he presents this as parallel to the child on the shoulders asking where his father is.

Summary of Rabbi Moshe Rat’s argument and the burden of proof

Rabbi Moshe Rat concludes that the position of “the Lord has forsaken the land” rests on a mistaken a priori assumption and on an unfair demand for an open miracle, and he argues that the idea of divine intervention is reasonable on the basis of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), the great sages of Israel, and human intuition. Rabbi Moshe Rat argues that there are indications from personal reality, from the effect of prayer, from statistical data, and from the course of the history of the Jewish people, and concludes that the burden of proof lies on the one who claims that the Lord has forsaken the land. Rabbi Moshe Rat adds that extreme skepticism is dangerous because it tends to expand into undermining foundational beliefs such as the revelation at Mount Sinai, the existence of God, and commitment to Jewish law.

Good afternoon. I’m honored to open this conference on the boundaries of discourse. This conference is taking place under a few constraints. Anyone not from here may not know, but I am not Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler, who is the head of the beit midrash. So Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler’s opening remarks will be read aloud by me. I teach here at the institute, I’m a ram at the institute, my name is Itai Lipschitz. And the additional constraint is that the person who was supposed to replace Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler was Rabbi Yehuda. So Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler is currently, like several hundred or more than several hundred people from our country, in isolation, coronavirus isolation. And Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler, who was supposed to replace him, is ill; we wish him a full recovery from here. So when the baton reached me, I said to Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler: I ask not to replace you, but simply to stand here like a scarecrow, with your permission, and read the remarks. And another constraint is that I’m coming right now from a funeral, literally right now, which means that when you hear Rabbi Yehuda Altshuler’s remarks, it will also be the first time I’m hearing them. So I’m basically being tested in reading cold. And maybe at the end, since in the end I’m the one holding the microphone and I also teach here, maybe I’ll add another word or two, and then after that the baton will immediately pass on. I’m sorry I can’t be here for the entire conference because I’m also teaching at this time. Welcome. So from this point on this is a quote from Rabbi Yehuda: Welcome to all the participants. Unfortunately I am prevented from taking an active part in this conference, but I would like to use the minutes allotted to me and first of all express thanks to the guest of honor, Rabbi Michael, for writing and publishing the three books that summarize hundreds of columns on his website, and especially hundreds and thousands of hours of thought and reflection on issues that occupy many good people. But I would like to share a few more thoughts. Rabbi Michael Abraham made the effort to put his thoughts on issues at the very furnace of the world down in writing. These thoughts arose in him, as he describes in his book, out of personal reflection and out of many conversations with various perplexed people who felt too great a gap between their own logic and common sense and what appeared to them to be Judaism, and at times their very soul and spirit were wrapped up in their questions. The response in the books is constructed as a dialogue. A dialogue that takes place between Hillel, who represents today’s Orthodox mainstream, and Michael, namely Rabbi Michael. This structure allows for great honesty, dealing with arguments and counterarguments, and that is its uniqueness. This method of dialogue has sustained many writers, beginning with the Kuzari, the rabbi and the king; the Ramchal, with mind and soul in Da’at Tevunot, pious man and sage; in Mesillat Yesharim in the form of a debate; Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in The Nineteen Letters, where Naphtali and Benjamin are positioned on opposite sides of the divide. Yet while all of these gave the final word, so to speak, to the seemingly less attractive side, the pious man, the soul, and the rabbi, Rabbi Michi has gone back and given pride of place to the intellect and to the sage. This is based on the assumption that there is no real contradiction between the two archetypes and no real need to choose between a wicked man and a sage, or a believer and a fool. I would like to point to a number of issues that I would like to place on the table at the opening of this conference. A. Two central issues, which are really one, stand at the heart of the book: authority and tradition. To what extent is the authority of sages of different generations, who disagree among themselves, binding? Formally and substantively, whether we are speaking of the authority of sages, halakhic decisors, medieval authorities and later authorities, customs, popular practices, and even modes of thought that shaped what the faithful of Israel call Judaism. Each person according to his own way, education, upbringing, style, and personality. In his books, Rabbi Michael seeks a way to put all these on a diet and to establish a leaner value system that will allow common sense, reason, and the standard conduct of our lives in a modern/postmodern world to fit much more easily with the way of Torah. The tendency to straighten and ground the world of Torah values in a way that will not contradict, and will even fit, the rational world certainly helps and contributes to strengthening the faith of those who seek this. But to the same extent it may give a sense of discomfort, and perhaps even more than that, to those whose world of consciousness is based not only on rationality, but also includes realms of feeling and soul, which are not really more vague, but whose role in our decision-making as human beings is extremely prominent in every sphere. The force of customs does not derive from Sinai but from the old Jewish folk tradition. Does that make them less important? How many women would agree to give up candle-lighting at the entrance of the Sabbath in favor of their husbands, even though this is merely a custom? That is a rhetorical question. It seems to me that many men and women would mark this custom as symbolizing the Sabbath for them much more than the laws of sorting, which touch Torah-level layers. B. The beit midrash, by its very nature, is a place where an ongoing discourse takes place around Torah issues, theoretical issues, analytic learning, Jewish law, or thought. Are there issues that it is better not to open up? Are there conclusions that should be ruled out in advance? In the academic world in which we live—and here I have to intervene: “in which we live” means literally, right? We are physically surrounded here by an academic world. This beit midrash is surrounded by an academic environment. So in the academic world in which we live, the answer to these questions and similar ones ought to be negative. In the beit midrash the answer to both is definitely yes with respect to the normative and halakhic plane. On the plane of thought, things are much more flexible. Maimonides would define as a heretic someone who thinks that the Holy One, blessed be He, has a form or a body, though it seems that the Raavad objected to this definition. Maimonides himself established thirteen principles, but Rabbi Yosef Albo argued that in his view only three of them are really principles. Around the issue of providence, which is discussed extensively in the second book—I mean Rabbi Michi’s second book—there are many varied opinions among the medieval authorities. Does that mean that the option that “God has abandoned the land” also has a place? Can the distinction that appears in the book between passive providence and active providence, and its ramifications for the issue of prayer and the status and nature of the Days of Judgment, really serve as a sufficient alternative—or a satisfying one? It isn’t vocalized, so I’m asking the question both ways: a sufficient alternative or a satisfying one. It seems to me that the role of this conference is to discuss, among other things, these questions and their practical significance. A third point. I read most of the books. Whoever doesn’t know—reading most of the books takes a lot of time. And I would like to share a feeling that arose in the wake of the reading. A book that points to a necessary diet for Jewish thought, in the author’s opinion, and calls for necessary halakhic changes, bears an obligation not only to negate but also to offer a path. In Jeremiah’s inaugural prophecy, the Holy One, blessed be He, defines his mission in six verbs. Four of the verbs are negative, but the ending is “to build and to plant.” And here is the final significant point that I want to touch on, and it is connected to the educational aspect that as head of the beit midrash it is important to me to emphasize. And for anyone who came in halfway through—I am not the head of the beit midrash; I’m reading the head of the beit midrash’s words. Do the books, beyond the diet they propose, also present a model that offers tools for love of God and awe of Him? The Guide of the Perplexed, which deals quite a bit with uprooting mistaken conceptions in faith, Maimonides concludes with two verses from Jeremiah, chapter 9, verses 22–23. I quote: “Thus says the Lord: Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who practices lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these I delight, says the Lord.” And Maimonides expands there and states: “A person’s sitting, movements, and occupations when he is alone in his house are not like his sitting, movements, and occupations when he is before a great king. Nor is his speech and freedom of mouth as he wishes when he is with the members of his household and his relatives like his speech in the king’s court. And because of this, one who chooses human perfection and to be truly a man of God should awaken from his sleep and know that the great King who hovers over him and cleaves to him always is greater than any flesh-and-blood king…” Three dots in the quote. “Know that when the perfected know this, there will come to them fear, submission, dread of God, awe of Him, and shame before Him in real ways, not imaginary ones…” Three dots. “And it is that we are always before the Lord, blessed be He, and before His Presence we go and return. And our great sages of blessed memory would refrain from uncovering their heads because the Divine Presence hovers over a person and shelters him. Reflect how he explained to you that the aim of this entire Torah is one end only: to fear the honored and awesome Lord. And that this end touches deeds, you may know from his saying in that verse, ‘if you will not observe to do,’ and behold it has been made clear that it is reached by means of deeds, which are the positive and negative commandments. But the beliefs which the Torah taught us, namely apprehending His existence, blessed be He, and His unity—those beliefs teach us love, as we have explained several times. And you already know how often the Torah warned concerning love: ‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might,’ for the two aims, namely love and fear, are attained through these two things.” Here it is in bold letters: “Love is attained through the beliefs of the Torah, which include the apprehension of the true reality of the existence of the Lord, blessed be He, and fear is attained through all the deeds of the Torah, as we have explained.” And regarding the verses from Jeremiah, Maimonides concludes and explains: “And he added another matter that is very necessary, namely his saying ‘in the earth.’ The verse said: ‘For I am the Lord who practices lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these I delight, says the Lord.’ So ‘in the earth’ is the axis of the Torah, not according to the thought of the destroyers who thought that His providence, exalted be He, ended at the sphere of the moon and that the earth and all that is in it has been abandoned—‘the Lord has abandoned the land.’ It is not so, but rather as the master of all the sages explained to us: ‘The earth is the Lord’s,’ meaning that His providence is also in the earth according to what it is, just as He providentially watches over the heavens according to what they are. And this is his saying: ‘For I am the Lord who practices lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth,’ and afterward he completed the matter and said, ‘for in these I delight, says the Lord.’ And he said, ‘In lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness I delight, says the Lord,’ meaning that My intention is that lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness should issue from you in the earth, as we have explained concerning the thirteen attributes, for the intention is to imitate them and that we should walk in their ways. Thus the intention mentioned in this verse, and its explanation, is that the human perfection in which one may truly glory is to attain apprehension of God to the extent of one’s ability, and to know His providence over His creatures in their coming-to-be and their governance, and after this apprehension to walk in ways in which he always intends to practice lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness, imitating God’s actions.” End of the quote from Maimonides. It seems to me that the book could have been more complete had its author also offered practical lines for the figure of this believer, the figure of… in the realm of commandments and in the realm of character traits. It seems to me that the task now standing before Rabbi Michi is to build and to plant. The negation has already been written, and after it, can a path be drawn for love and fear of Him? Is there a paved road for the service of God that can be offered to someone whose questions were answered by the book? Will the next trilogy deal with that? So that is what Rabbi Yehuda intended as an opening, and I read it as best I could, word for word. I’ll now invite Rabbi Michi to invite the speakers, introduce them, and the conference will proceed according to the published order of speakers. And we wish all of us an enlightening evening. I assume that at some point whoever is moderating will also allow questions from the audience, because after all, at the end of the evening, if you noticed the order of things, Rabbi Michi will answer all the questions that haven’t been answered by then. So good luck. Thank you. I’ll be brief because we need to move on. We have four speakers planned. First is Chayuta, Chayuta Deutsch. Dr. Chayuta Deutsch, a writer who also edited the trilogy. A lot of what is there, it seems to me, I owe to her, including the dialogue that was mentioned here—that was her idea; originally there was no dialogue. It seems to me that each of the speakers—I don’t know exactly what each one will say, but from what I gathered—will deal with a different aspect. There are many aspects in this trilogy; each will deal with a different aspect, usually from a critical angle, naturally, and that’s perfectly fine—that’s why we’re here. So Chayuta, please. Hello. Is the microphone okay? Good. Hello, good afternoon. I was asked to briefly review the trilogy, so I’ll start with a few words about that and then continue to my topic, which is what appears in the announcement. The first book, the first volume: Faith, proving the existence of God. To explain the matter of the first part, I might quote a short excerpt from that dialogue mentioned here a moment ago between Hillel and Michael, the two speakers in the book. “They taught me that faith is above reason,” Hillel argues in his conversation with Michael. “So I assume it can’t be proven, but precisely because of that I don’t understand why I should accept it.” “You’ll be surprised,” Michael answers, “but in my opinion it is possible to prove God’s existence. Before we try to prove this, it’s worth examining the concept of faith itself.” And the sentence he says is really a kind of preliminary set of headings for what will later be included in the book. Does faith mean certainty? Is it connected to feeling or to intellect? What is the difference between faith and knowledge? What is the relationship between the philosophical God and the religious God? In addition, before the discussion it is also important to examine the concept of proof. What would count as proof for our purposes? All these are important questions to ask when we enter this discussion. That is how Michael answers Hillel in the book, and indeed the book enters exactly into that discussion. It is built out of five conversations, each dealing with a different kind, essentially, of proof for God’s existence. In the last part the book deals with the question of revelation, its validity, and the question of why that revelation actually obligates us. That is the first book. Now I’ll skip to the third because I’m going to speak a bit more about the second, to illustrate from it and refer to part of it. So the third book is called Walks Among the Standing Ones. I don’t remember the subtitle by heart—On the need and the possibility of refreshing Jewish law, right. And actually, unlike the quote, I won’t argue with someone who isn’t here. But I think Rabbi Miki really does give models there. He presents a toolbox from within Jewish law itself—how change is possible, why of course things require change, and what makes change happen. Fine, that’s the third book. Now I want to talk about the second book, whose title is No Man Has Power Over the Wind, toward a lean and up-to-date framework for Jewish thought. So notice the title, No Man Has Power Over the Wind. I think that is a very strong statement, very essential to a book that deals with the question of authority, and these things have already basically been said by my predecessor here, right? “Jewish thought”—there’s no such creature, Rabbi Miki argues. Thought is thought, and the only question to ask about it is whether it is correct or not. There is no point in checking its DNA to see whether it was born to a Jewish mother or converted properly. Even though there are difficulties—and now I want to say something, because despite the difficulty, since I’m about to pick a fight in a second with something within this whole framework—but I want to say that this morning by chance I opened Facebook, as I do every morning, and its reminder feature brought up an article I had posted—a piece written by Rabbi Menachem Froman. And I want, with your permission—sorry for using this—to read you a very short excerpt from it and explain what the power is before I attack. So it is very important to me to speak about the power and the freedom, or liberty, in the matter of authority that Rabbi Miki proposes in his book. This article was written in ’86, and in that respect Rabbi Menachem Froman of blessed memory was really ahead of his time. As someone who had returned to religious observance, he too came in and was very sensitive to questions like these—of liberty, freedom, creation. Just listen to what he writes. He writes as follows. “The Torah is the covenant with the infinite. Of the writing of the Torah, which was engraved on the tablets, our sages expound: do not read ‘engraved’ but ‘freedom.’ Moses brought us freedom on the tablets from Mount Sinai. But even if this is the ideal of the Torah, it does not necessarily come true in practice. It is very possible for a Jew to live within a Torah framework and experience or live only its restrictions and commands without their meaning. It is possible, yes possible, for a person to fulfill the clauses of the covenant without awareness of with whom that covenant was made,” and so on. “This possibility—that a religious Jew may feel the Torah as a factor that oppresses him—is not theoretical or remote. Very generally, one can of course say that the feeling of one’s personality being deprived, of expression being blocked by meaningless restrictions, is what caused most Jews to leave the religious framework and establish the free public. It is very hard to speak in generalizations, but I feel that when I am in secular society there is more freedom, whereas in religious society I more frequently feel oppression—not only of impulses but also of creativity and of life in general.” I won’t go into those remarks now, because that part is by now not so relevant, and today truly, thank God, there is a lot of creativity; we won’t get into it. But I think something in this paragraph formulates very well the power of the book’s title and also of the content of the book—that is, No Man Has Power Over the Wind. And it really gives a great deal of freedom, this statement that nobody can force you what to think. This statement runs like a thread, I think, through the doctrine that finds expression in the book. But I’ll move on. So we said that no man has power over the wind and you can’t force thought, and there’s no point at all in distinguishing between a thought that was born in a Jewish place or a non-Jewish place and what its DNA is, and so on. Maimonides and the Kuzari get no special treatment or discount; their words are judged on their own merits exactly like the words of Aristotle or Kant. They may be right and they may be wrong. But what about the sages of the Talmud themselves? Well, they too get no special treatment. Rather—their force is valid only for Jewish law. In Jewish law, that’s where authority is: in the Talmud and in the Jewish law ruled from it and descending from it. But what about aggadah? And that is why I gathered here. Aggadah is a different story. Genuine Lithuanian-style learners tend to skip it, which is almost a point of pride for them, to say: we skip aggadot, that’s for girls or something like that; we learn, we really learn, we don’t learn aggadot. But only when I edited the relevant chapters of the book did I understand the depth of the issue. To be honest I almost couldn’t believe my ears or my eyes, but okay—that’s it. That’s the subject I want to speak about. So, in my best judgment—and now I’m again reading a passage from Michael, from the dialogue, right?—“In my best judgment, from the standpoint of the text itself, aggadah is literature like any other literature; the lessons rise from it.” I’m skipping. “The study of aggadah has value in my eyes similar to the study of a literary work, a poem, or a philosophical book. And yes, Hillel, you heard correctly: for me there is no essential difference between a midrash of the sages and a literary work like a book by Dostoevsky or Elsa Morante”—who, by the way, is an excellent writer. Okay, so Rabbi Akiva and Rava are equivalent to Dostoevsky when they appear inside aggadot, right? This sharp, pointed formulation sharpens, on the one hand, the aspect of freedom. Yes, yes, you examine, you are allowed to think, you are allowed to weigh things on their own merits. So Rabbi Miki really offers, in his method, in his theories, and in his theology, a great deal of freedom, and in my view that is a wonderful thing. I think he is right when he speaks about aggadah when it stands separately. I want to say here that I want to disagree with this view when we are dealing with aggadah that is an organic part of a halakhic passage. I want to argue that you cannot study, and certainly cannot rule on Jewish law, without relating to those aggadot that the editors of the passage, the editors of the entire Talmud, wove into them—and not by accident. And in my eyes, skipping over that, as some yeshiva-style scholars do, whose names we won’t mention here, is an act that imposes a blemish, a disability—an act that really imposes a blemish and a disability on the whole passage and harms understanding of its overall context, its spirit, and its heart. In fact, I can hardly understand how one can rule on Jewish law without the aggadic aspects scattered throughout the Talmud in the different halakhic passages. My claim is actually simple: if we give weight to the Talmud, then we must also give weight to its editorial act, and within that to the choice to insert aggadot among the halakhic discussions. The ones who inserted these aggadot were of course the editors of the Talmud, whether that was Ravina and Rav Ashi, or the Savoraic sages, or others perhaps even later—what difference does it make? But that same authority that the Talmud possesses as an unquestioned given—even Rabbi Miki does not argue with that authority—also belongs to the choice to insert these aggadot. Fine, and I want to say briefly—there’s no time, I want to have time for my examples. I brought three examples here; we’ll see how many I manage. I want to say that I studied over there across the road in the academic belt here, but I also studied in the beit midrash. I studied here at Bar-Ilan in aggadah research, and I also studied in the beit midrash at Beit Morasha, and there I really studied this subject of aggadah in practice. I studied with Rabbi Yehuda Brandes, who is my friend and teacher. And this point is a substantial one; I think it is less academic, though in the end it also becomes academic. But the essential point is that you can’t see these passages, can’t study these passages as Torah study, without seeing the aggadot. Fine, I’m skipping, skipping, sorry. I want to argue that the insertion of aggadah into a halakhic passage carries a strong statement: Jewish law sits upon life, and in life there are nuances that will never find full expression in halakhic rules. And the aggadah makes that life present and plays the game—sometimes creating the tension. There is Jewish law, okay, and there is life. In life there’s this whole distortion, as it were, of nuances. I want to argue even more than that—that aggadah is a kind of music. Someone even told me an interesting idea: just as the song of the Levites—there are Temple laws, the laws of the chosen house, right? The laws of the Temple. Among those things there is music. So that music—why do you need music? Why does it matter? There are laws for how to offer a sacrifice, right? Why do you need them to play trumpets there when sacrifices are being offered, at least for some of the sacrifices? So I want to argue that aggadah is the music of the halakhic passages, and interpretation of aggadah is indeed broad, but it is not infinite. Today aggadah has fairly clear rules of interpretation. The field of literature is a very sophisticated field today; there are rules, contrasts, recurring motifs, and so on and so on—I won’t detail them. Since these days they are finishing, in just a few days, the daily page cycle of tractate Berakhot, most of my examples will be brought from tractate Berakhot or lean in some way on tractate Berakhot. Fine. Now I want to speak about the passage of zimmun and communal blessing in the chapter “Three Who Ate,” but not only that. The Mishnah states: “Three who ate as one are obligated in zimmun,” and the question is: what is “as one”? What defines a group for the purpose of zimmun? The form of sitting, the very act of sitting? How do people join a zimmun? And in the passage there really are different opinions about the possibility of joining. It is worth noticing that there really is a halakhic question here sitting on top of a social question. What is called “together”? What is called “eating together”? And we see that according to the Mishnah, “together” is reclining—we’ll see that later. I’m skipping. But really, in different segments the passage asks: what is a shared meal, such that they are obligated in zimmun and one can bless for everyone? Does the menu have to be uniform? If everyone is eating grain and one person is eating a vegetable, does that count? Is it important to maintain a certain numerical ratio between “everyone” and “the one”? Is one obligated to eat specifically grain, or perhaps a cup of wine is enough? The laws are set as they are set. Among the aggadot there are two that in my view converse with one another and with the heart of the passage, and together they form a kind of good framework for the technical questions of the rules of joining a meal. So I’ll start actually with the later aggadah in terms of its location in the passage, and then go back to the first. “King Yannai and the queen were eating bread together, and because he had killed the rabbis”—that is, King Yannai and his wife were sitting at a meal and eating. And the story reports in passing that they had also killed the rabbis before this meal, that is King Yannai—which is very interesting—and so “they had no one to bless for them.” They had no one to recite the blessing for them. Why? Because they had killed everyone who could have blessed for them, right? It reminds me, with all due respect, I think Woody Allen once said: why aren’t the Germans funny? Why don’t the Yekkes have humor? They killed all the funny people. So it’s like that: King Yannai killed everyone who could bless, so there is nobody to bless. Now it’s interesting: even though he killed all the sages, it still matters to him that a blessing should be said at the table. His wife says: I’ll bring you my brother, but you have to promise to keep him safe. And then she invites Shimon ben Shetah. So he is invited to the king’s table and is asked—I’ll skip some of the wording—is asked to bless, to lead the zimmun for our diners. Now imagine an opulent table, food fit for a king, except that in this case the king is the mortal enemy of the person reciting the blessing, right, who is now going to say zimmun in his presence. Think of the togetherness, right? Another group of people eating together where there are no greater mortal enemies than this, because he has just murdered all his friends and he himself is obviously sort of hiding for his life or something like that. So in terms of psychological essence there is no aspect here of joining in the sense of friendship, unity, shared eating, all that this thing means. And this is really emphasized by the cynical remark of Shimon ben Shetah: what exactly am I supposed to bless over? Over the fact that Yannai ate from his own? It’s obvious that there is perhaps even a hint here—maybe this is a bit exaggerated—to “such-and-such ate, and the sword shall eat him.” It could be that this “ate,” after he ate what he ate, I can still… anyway. But in the end Shimon ben Shetah, according to his own view, thinks that if it is enough to drink wine and in that way you join, they give him a cup of wine and he leads the zimmun. And such is the power of Jewish law: psychology aside and Jewish law aside. But I still think that through the concrete presentation of this aggadah there is here an extreme case, an interesting act of observation by the Talmud, that points to—notice what the heart of the passage is. The heart of the passage is: what is partnership? What is unity? A mirror image of this situation appears in an aggadah found in the previous chapter, touching on the question of reclining and the ability to bless together. The Mishnah says: “If they were sitting, each one blesses for himself; if they reclined, one blesses for all.” That is, there is something technical here in the form of sitting. Reclining is a matter of ease, of time, of free people, and so on. The Talmud says: if they reclined, yes; if they did not recline, no. Meaning only if they reclined can they bless together. And immediately the Talmud objects: “But wasn’t it taught: ten who were traveling on the road, even though all of them eat from one loaf, each one blesses for himself. If they sat down to eat, even though each one eats from his own loaf, one blesses for all.” It says “they sat down,” implying that merely sitting is enough; or do we need reclining, like the sages? Then Rav Nahman bar Yitzhak says: for example, when they say, “Let us go and eat bread.” Meaning this meal was established by some prior determination—let’s go and eat in such-and-such a place—and that is the meaning of a group, of joining: their minds were set on one place, to sit there and eat there. Then it tells us—and then comes an aggadah—about Rav’s students after they were occupied with his burial. “When Rav passed away, his students went after him.” And they wondered: does this count as reclining? Wait a second—are we considered a group for the matter of zimmun or not? Because according to the Mishnah, no, we didn’t recline. Now think also about reclining—it’s the way of free men. We are here mourning our teacher; it doesn’t fit. On the other hand, the feeling seems to be: come on, there’s nothing more together than this. We are one group, grieving over the death of our master, mourning him. They don’t know the law; one of them even made another tearing of his garment over the fact that where is our teacher, the one who would have ruled for us on the law? One thing leads to another, an old man comes and reminds them that it is enough that they said, “Let us go and eat in such-and-such a place,” and that is enough for zimmun, and indeed they did zimmun. So again, beyond being an example and perhaps really an actual case from which the law is learned, turning a historical event into precedent, the aggadah adds the music—the music of the subject, which is the deep music of the passage: what is eating together, what is fellowship, what is togetherness. And at the depth of the matter, as I said, it is a story about a tightly bonded group while mourning their master. At Yannai’s meal there is an inversion of that story, because there there is an outward appearance of sitting—the king, and one might even assume that they reclined as was their custom then—but the inner part is missing; the main thing is missing. So there really are two extreme cases here, and this question—in that sense maybe the aggadah has a bit of a subversive role—what actually determines things here? The technical halakhic framework, or the inner reality of separation or of unity? These two extreme aggadot—maybe this is a laboratory case, in your language, as you once wrote about an ukimta—meaning there are here very intensified cases of together and apart, and in the range between them the Talmud determines the… that is, aggadot always give the feeling that rules will never cover the abundance of nuances that reality contains, and the picture obtained by combining aggadah and Jewish law is a fuller picture. If you like, maybe it is like the difference between a black-and-white drawing, or a one-dimensional, two-dimensional one, and a three-dimensional, multicolored one. Now how much time do I have? Who’s moderating here? Do I need to finish? I have ten minutes? Seven minutes? Excellent, thank you. So I’ll manage to skim through the two examples. The second example is about drinking wine; I’ll skip the peg that connects it to tractate Berakhot. A story about a noblewoman and Rabbi Yehuda. She said to Rabbi Yehuda: “Your face resembles either pig-breeders or moneylenders.” He said to her: “By my trustworthiness, both are forbidden to me”—it is of course forbidden to lend at interest, and it is also forbidden to raise pigs—“rather, I have twenty-four latrines.” I won’t enter the context in the passage; I’m skipping to what is apparently the source of this Babylonian Talmud aggadah, which is an aggadah in the Jerusalem Talmud. There are three wine passages in the Jerusalem Talmud. Where? Where are there wine passages in the Jerusalem Talmud? Just guess. Sabbath—Kiddush, Passover—four cups, and Shekalim—Purim, the four cups of that. So there is a repeated passage, both its halakhic part and its aggadic part, which is what I’ll refer to. For example: Rabbi Zeira asked Rabbi Yoshiya: what is the measure of the cups? The passage is a halakhic passage. What is a cup of wine? What is the measure? Is cooked wine allowed? Not allowed? Can one drink them all at once? Can one fulfill the obligation with Sabbatical year wine? The sort of questions Jewish law likes to deal with. Must the wine specifically be red wine? And so on and so forth. Then the Jerusalem Talmud brings the story of Rabbi Yehuda bar Rabbi Ilai, who is either the source of the story in the Babylonian Talmud or both derive from some earlier source. Fine. Rabbi Yehuda bar Rabbi Ilai would drink the four cups on Passover night, and his head would ache until the festival. He would drink those four cups and then get a headache and would have to bind his head from the pain until the festival. I think there is a version that says until Atzeret—that is, until Shavuot. Whether it means from Passover until Sukkot or from Passover until Shavuot, but his head hurt terribly for a long time. That’s the point—wine also has that effect, as is well known. A certain noblewoman saw him, and his face was shining. She saw that his face was radiant. She said to him: “Old man, old man, one of three things is in you: either you are drunk on wine…” In the Berakhot passage there are only the other two elements, without the wine element. He said to her: “May the spirit of that woman explode”—there’s actually a brawl here that isn’t characteristic of the relationship between noblewomen and sages, but that’s another story—“May the spirit of that woman explode! None of the three things is in me.” He said to her: “Rather, my learning is abundant in me, and it is written: ‘A person’s wisdom lights up his face.’” Which is interesting. I learned something new, or became wise, right, my learning is abundant in me. I discovered some new law or some new Torah insight, and “a person’s wisdom lights up his face.” So the shining face that the gentile noblewoman mistakenly thinks comes from something material, like rich food, or from—I don’t know—very wealthy people, something physiological, he says: No, lady, you understand nothing. This is “a person’s wisdom lights up his face.” You have no ability at all to recognize the radiance that comes from wisdom. By the way, not only the noblewoman. The passage then immediately goes on to bring the story of Rabbi Abbahu, who arrived in Tiberias, and Rabbi Yohanan’s students saw that “his face was shining,” in the same language. So they told their teacher Rabbi Yohanan—and you can see that this is a Land of Israel story— and they said to him: We saw Rabbi Abbahu, he found treasure. That’s the more delicate way of putting it. They won’t say moneylending and all that, right? He found treasure. He said to them: Why? They said: His face is shining. He said to them: Maybe he heard a new teaching? “Perhaps he heard some new Torah?” He went to him and asked him: What new Torah did you hear? He answered: I discovered an ancient Tosefta, some old Tosefta, and he applied to him the verse, “A person’s wisdom lights up his face.” And the whole sequence repeats itself, as I said, in the three wine passages, and in the three tractates. And what do we learn from this? Why do we need this story with the noblewoman? By the way, as I said, not only noblewomen get confused, but also Torah scholars inside the beit midrash. I think there is a statement here, and in that statement wisdom and Torah have an effect similar to wine. There is a kind of… in my opinion this is a case that comes to challenge. On the one hand, wine lights up the face, causes a person’s face truly to show joy, richness, all that. On the other hand, if you are a serious Jew, then when you study Torah you should have those same effects. So… fine. We’ll conclude very briefly and in passing with a passage in tractate Niddah, not Berakhot. I studied it recently with my daughter around some assignment, and suddenly thanks to her I noticed a few things. The mishnayot at the end of the second chapter of tractate Niddah and the Talmudic discussion on them deal with questions of impurity and purity in women’s blood appearances. And the passages essentially present a kind of color spectrum that is supposed to be the guide for the rabbi who rules whether to declare the appearance pure or impure. And the tannaim and amoraim disagree among themselves in many passages on questions of the source of the blood, its appearance, the comparative standard, different states of doubt, and so on. Now here I’m skipping, skipping, it doesn’t matter. From the discussion among the sages we learn that the answer to these two questions—what is the source of the blood and what is the nature of its color—is not always clear, but as is the Talmud’s way, the passage tries to establish clear principles even for cases of doubt. At the end of this passage there appear—I apologize in advance for the feminism in this example, but I think that… this… it’s not… it’s not agenda-driven, though according to Rabbi Miki, I know, everyone comes to aggadah with his own world of ideas. I almost find it hard, in this passage, to see how in an entire halakhic discussion in which women are the object—they are discussing, pardon me, the appearances of their blood—and then suddenly the passage makes three women present, and they suddenly become the subject. And they have something to say. And in their own ways, the three women challenge, in one way or another, the authority of the sage and his ability to judge blood appearances. The first is Rav Yehuda’s wife, who is also the mother of Rav Yitzhak. Then Ifra Hormiz, who is a colorful and interesting figure, the mother of King Shapur—Shapur Malka. And then Yalta, Rav Nahman’s wife, who not long ago in the daily page cycle smashed four hundred barrels of wine. In all three stories, a woman challenges in one way or another the authority of the sage and his ability to judge blood appearances. Rav Yitzhak’s mother, Rav Yehuda’s wife, teaches that there are things only a woman knows about her body, and that an external eye will not be able to see them. So much so that when Rav Yehuda hears his wife, he stops ruling. He says: she is right, I cannot rule on this matter. Ifra Hormiz, who gives Rava a kind of test with sixty blood appearances, adds a trick element to her test—lice blood—and Rava manages to identify its source. But not by means of the clear professional criteria that the passage had established up till now. It was accidental, completely by chance, some divine inspiration settled upon him, with heavenly assistance, and he succeeded in finding out. And Yalta’s case is the most interesting, because after receiving a ruling that declares the blood impure, Yalta insists on getting a second opinion. She goes for another opinion—now this contradicts an explicit law, that a sage whose colleague forbade something may not permit it—and she insists. Yes, time is up, I’m finishing. Fine. So she claims that she saw that the rabbi who ruled for her had an eye inflammation, and so she asks for another opinion and indeed receives one, and in the end she is declared pure. So what do these aggadot add—and with that I’ll finish—what do these aggadot add, which I only mentioned in brief and didn’t enter into all the details? First, the music of doubt. Right, ruling is ruling, law is law, but know that there are unclear cases. Life is all situations of doubt. So first, it adds the music of doubt, and second—and sorry for the feminism here—it makes present the female factor, the woman’s point of view. There is a woman behind this laboratory. That’s it. And I argue in conclusion—this really is my concluding sentence—I argue that anyone who contents himself with the laws and misses what these aggadot add, then his learning, and therefore also his ruling, is monotonous and lacking. Please do not skip the aggadot. Aggadah is a dimension and a measure that is needed. Thank you very much. Thank you to Chayuta. That was the barest tip of a large collection of arguments we had while working. The next three speakers all sat with me at one stage or another of their lives. Rabbi Moshe Ratt, here in classes at the institute, also a bit Rabbi Yaavetz, and Yehuda Zilberberg, the veteran one from our old physics days. So I’m very happy to meet them here again. Rabbi Moshe will speak a bit about issues of providence; this is one of the charged topics in the second book. This argument has also been going on between us online, and I think anyone who wants can continue it there too, on his website and on mine. But I’d like to invite him, a man of the Yedaya Institute, who completed his doctorate here, also studied with us here in the institute. Please. There is a well-known midrash that as a child I found very funny, a midrash that also connects to the portion of Zakhor that we read this week. It’s a parable about a child whose father takes him on his shoulders and walks with him in the marketplace, and everything the child asks for, his father gives him. The child says: Dad, give me fruit, and he gives him fruit. Dad, give me sweets, and he gives him sweets. They walk through the market like that, and then they meet some man, and the child asks that man: tell me, have you perhaps seen my father? His father hears this and says: Really? I am carrying you on my shoulders and you ask, “Have you seen my father?” He immediately throws him off his shoulders and a dog comes and bites him. Similarly, the people of Israel go in the wilderness, and the Holy One, blessed be He, gives them clouds of glory, manna, and quail. Then they ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?” The Holy One, blessed be He, says: If so—immediately Amalek comes and punishes them. Now as a child this really sounded funny, this picture of a child riding on his father’s shoulders and asking someone, “Have you seen my father?” But it turns out that there are people who take this joke seriously. Rabbi Michael, as was mentioned earlier, and I have known each other for years. I studied with him here at the institute, I learned a lot from his books, we are both members of the Yedaya Institute. But on this issue of individual providence I am forced to disagree with him very sharply. For anyone who doesn’t know or hasn’t yet read Rabbi Michael’s approach to individual providence, it can be summed up in one sentence, in his own words: “The Lord has abandoned the land.” What does “The Lord has abandoned the land” mean? That there is a God, there is the Holy One, blessed be He, He created the world, He indeed managed the world in the period of the Hebrew Bible, maybe in the period of the sages as well. He intervened and watched over things, performed miracles, and so on. But at some point He decided to stop intervening in creation and withdrew from the world. He still knows what is happening, He is aware of everything we are doing here, but He does not intervene, and instead leaves the laws of nature to manage reality. The result of this… this extreme statement, this sharp statement, basically says that everything that happens to us is not under providence, is not directed from above. There is no divine hand here managing affairs, neither on the individual level nor on the collective level. Rather, it is all laws of nature, statistics, chance, and so on. And an even more severe implication that follows from this is that prayer does not help. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not answer prayers. We can pray and cry out as much as we want; He will not intervene. Prayer may be good as thanksgiving, as a relation of closeness, but prayers will not be answered. This is the thoroughly shocking approach that Rabbi Miki presents in his books. What I want to show now is that this approach is not only harmful in terms of the damage it causes to faith, but also that it has no real basis whatsoever. Why does Rabbi Miki claim that the Lord has abandoned the land? Why does he argue that there is no providence, no divine intervention in reality? The answer is very simple: because he does not see it. Rabbi Miki looks at reality and says: we do not see divine intervention. We see nature, we see regularity, we see statistics; we do not see divine providence. So if we don’t see it, that means… fine. But of course Rabbi Miki knows very well that not having seen something is no proof, right? There are many reasons why we may not see something and yet it still exists. We do not see the Holy One, blessed be He, either. Rather, Rabbi Miki adds one more assumption. True, if we have a good reason to believe in something, then even if we don’t see it, we can explain why we don’t see it and still say that it exists. But in this case, not only do we not see providence, not only do we not see intervention, we also have no reason whatsoever to think there is divine intervention. The very idea of divine intervention, Rabbi Miki says, is an idea with no basis. There is no reason, no initial assumption at all, to think that there is divine intervention in reality. And therefore, since there is also no reason to think there is divine intervention, and we also do not see divine intervention, in his view, the required conclusion is that indeed the Lord has abandoned the land and there is no divine intervention. Maybe once there was; today there isn’t. In other words, if we divide this claim into two parts, it really contains an a priori component and an a posteriori component. The a priori assumption means the assumption with which we approach the issue before we have examined reality. And the a priori assumption is that belief in the existence of divine intervention is a strange, bizarre, absurd belief; we have no reason to assume it a priori, before we’ve checked anything at all. And from this it follows that when we come to the a posteriori part, to examine reality, we approach it with far more skepticism and suspicion than if our a priori assumption were different. And the two things are tied to one another. If I assume a priori that it is in fact reasonable that there is providence, that it is logical and plausible, then I will much more readily accept evidence for it, all kinds of things that I can interpret as signs of providence—I will indeed interpret them as corroboration of providence. But if from the outset I assume that this is a strange belief with no basis, then I will have to work very, very hard in order really to prove that there is providence and intervention. Therefore these two assumptions—the a priori assumption that it is unreasonable, and the a posteriori assumption that we do not see providence—are bound up with one another, when the focus, really the root of the entire conception Rabbi Miki presents, is that a priori assumption that there is no reason to believe God intervenes in reality. And therefore that is the assumption I want to attack now. If we read what the rabbi wrote in his book, and even more so on his website, where he expresses himself much more sharply and bluntly, he refers there to belief in divine intervention as something utterly bizarre. As if who on earth would even think there is such a thing as divine intervention in reality? He does not hesitate to compare it to atheistic concepts like Russell’s flying teapot. Yes, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell said that it’s as if someone comes and tries to persuade me that there is some teapot flying around the moon. Maybe there is—right, the reason we don’t see it is that it is small and far away—but clearly this is such a strange thing that a priori it sounds absurd to me, so why should I assume such a thing exists? For Rabbi Miki, belief in divine intervention is as strange and baseless as that flying teapot, as believing that there are invisible fairies fluttering around us. Why would I even think of such a thing? Now if somebody making this claim were some hardcore atheist, some Richard Dawkins type, who believes neither in God nor in the Hebrew Bible nor in miracles nor in anything, then in that setting I would say okay, you are right. Looking at the world from that atheistic angle, then yes, divine providence really does sound like something strange, something exceptional. I wouldn’t try to convince you until we first went through the preliminary stages of showing that there is a God and that He created the world and so on. But Rabbi Miki—for you to claim such a thing? Let’s go in order. Rabbi Miki, according to your view, is there a God? Yes. Did He create the world? Yes. Can He intervene in reality? Yes. Is He capable of intervening in present reality? Yes, of course; if He wants, He is omnipotent. Does He intervene occasionally, rarely, in reality? Even that Rabbi Miki does not rule out. He says one cannot rule out that sporadically He sometimes intervenes in reality even today. Okay, so maybe He intervenes a bit more than that? Absolutely not—that’s completely bizarre. How can you even think such a thing? Excuse me, if we have already accepted that there is a God and that He intervened in reality in the past and that He is capable of intervening in reality and that maybe He even does so today, then why should the a priori assumption that He intervenes a little more than that be so absurd and bizarre? Fine, maybe it isn’t necessary. Let’s examine whether He does it or not. But a priori to say that it is absurd and bizarre like a flying teapot—why? What is more reasonable than applying the presumption of continuity? Rabbi Miki likes to use halakhic principles in discussions of thought, so we have a principle accepted in Jewish law in many areas: presume a matter remains in its prior status. If we agree that the presumption is that in the past God intervened in reality and managed the world, then until proven otherwise the assumption is that He continues to do so. Whoever wants to claim that suddenly, on some unknown date, He stopped—that person bears the burden of proof. So again, if this were an atheist saying there was never a God and He never intervened, that would be one thing. But once you agree that there is a God and that He can intervene and that He intervened in the past and maybe also intervenes in the present, then you cannot come and say that a priori this belief is absurd. You can say that you think things have changed. You can say that you think it is false. But you cannot say that a priori it is absurd and bizarre like some flying teapot, right? And one could say, well, Rabbi Miki will say, okay, there was also prophecy once and there were miracles once, and they stopped—today there is no prophecy and no miracles. So just as God stopped those, maybe He stopped intervening in the world. So first of all, maybe He stopped still does not mean certainly. We have a doubt; here too we remain with the prior presumption. You have to prove it; it is not enough to say maybe. Second, we have to remember that even in the Hebrew Bible period miracles and prophecy were exceptional things. It wasn’t as if they happened all the time. There were hundreds of years in the biblical period when there was no prophecy and no miracles. The psalmist says: “We do not see our signs; there is no longer a prophet, nor is there among us one who knows how long.” In other words, it is not that in the past there were always miracles. Miracles were always exceptional things, and prophecy too. But providence—the simple belief that God is King of the world and as King manages the world—that is a belief that appears plainly throughout the Hebrew Bible. God makes the wind blow and the rain fall. When a woman becomes pregnant, God granted her pregnancy. When rain falls and there is produce, “God visited His people to give them bread” in the book of Ruth. Everything that happens, God does it, right? Joseph says to his brothers: “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” The prophets say: In the name of God, behold I am bringing against you the king of Babylon, the king of Assyria. God is the one managing everything that happens in the world. In other words, this belief that God intervenes is not some unusual miracle or something like that; it is part of His very being God, part of His very essence. To come and claim that suddenly He stopped doing that, after you have already agreed that He exists and that He did it in the past—the burden of proof is on you. And certainly a priori, before we have checked, this is not something so bizarre and absurd as is claimed. So that is regarding the first part, and that already suffices to reject the a priori claim that this belief is something bizarre and absurd like a flying teapot. But more than that: we have further reasons to assume a priori that there really is providence and divine intervention. The second reason, beyond the Hebrew Bible, is the simple fact that the great Jewish sages—an overwhelming majority of them throughout the generations—believed in individual providence. Rabbi Miki, as is his way, says: I don’t care what they believed; their opinion is not worth more than mine; great Jewish sages can also be wrong, and so on. Here, first of all, I disagree with him. I think the great Jewish sages, many of them, were not only people with sharp intellects, but also people who had spiritual intuitions, sometimes divine inspiration, what you might call spiritual intelligence. Just as there is musical sensitivity, right? Suppose someone comes and says: I listened to Beethoven and Bach and to me they’re just bad. Fine, then you probably lack musical sensitivity. I agree that you don’t hear it. But there are people who are more sensitive, who hear things better. And those great Jewish sages who had divine inspiration, who had experiences of God, had high spiritual intelligence. When they looked at reality, they saw providence in it. They saw patterns, they saw things. Now maybe they were wrong. I am not saying that everything anyone ever said is necessarily correct. But again, if you want me to accept that they were wrong, it’s not enough to tell me that they can be wrong. Prove to me that they were wrong; show me that they were wrong. Otherwise why should I accept your opinion over theirs? Just because it’s possible they are mistaken? Maybe you are mistaken. Therefore the fact that the great Jewish sages believed in providence, even if in different forms, even if to different extents—whether over every single detail, or only over certain people, or only over the Jewish people—the very fact that all of them understood providence as occurring in reality, and even interpreted certain events accordingly, is already a reason that, even if I am not yet at the a posteriori stage—not proving there is providence—on the a priori level it makes belief in providence a reasonable thing and not so absurd as is claimed. So that too is enough to reject the a priori claim that the belief is bizarre and absurd like a flying teapot. But more than that: we have yet more reasons to assume a priori that there is providence and divine intervention. The third reason is the point of intuitions. Rabbi Miki likes to talk about intuitions in his books, to give them honor and a place. And what more widespread intuition do we have than the simple intuition that many, many people in the world recognize—that there is indeed a God, that there is meaning to things that happen, that God intervenes in their lives, leads them, guides them, and so on. This intuition is so widespread that there are psychologists who claim there are no real atheists in the world. Even an atheist who defines himself as an atheist—his patterns of thought in certain senses still relate to reality as meaningful, as directed, and so on. Hence the well-known saying: there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no atheists on a crashing airplane. A person in a moment of danger cries out to God out of some deep intuition that this can help. What does Rabbi Miki say? These are not intuitions. He says these are the results of brainwashing, of religious education, of religious influence that affected people and caused them to think this way, but it is not really an intuition one can rely on. I don’t accept that. The fact is, as we said, that even completely secular people, even atheists, often return to religion precisely because they do feel and experience God on their personal level. Many stories of people who return to religious observance say: I felt there was a guiding hand in my life, I felt things weren’t happening by chance but according to a plan, and so on. Then I went looking and I reached religion and returned to observance. To say that all this is brainwashing and so on—I don’t accept that. And as I said, even if this is something that comes from religion, let us ask ourselves why religion achieved such tremendous success. Why were all people in the world, until the modern age, religious to a large degree? Because the belief that there is a force that created the world and guides it is so simple and so natural and not absurd and bizarre, that all people believed in it, whether in one form or another—as one God or as idols. But that belief, that intuition, is so simple that it is accepted and shared by the whole world, certainly by all religious people, and also by many secular people, even by those who deny it. To summarize this first part: so far we have spoken about the a priori stage, meaning before we examine whether we see providence and divine intervention in reality or not, we ask whether the very idea is absurd or not. And unequivocally, within the framework of assumptions that Rabbi Miki himself accepts, this idea is not absurd or strange. If one agrees that there is a God and that the Hebrew Bible is true and that there were miracles and so on, there is no reason whatsoever to assume a priori that this has been canceled, and it is certainly not a strange idea. All the more so when the great Jewish sages—whose divine inspiration and spiritual intelligence I believe in—throughout the generations continue to affirm providence, including in our own day. All the more so because this is a widespread intuition among many people, and I do not accept the claim that this is only religious brainwashing. It is something much deeper—the sense that there is a guiding hand, that things do not happen by chance. Anyone who says, “I hope that such-and-such will happen,” is in a sense praying. Anyone who says, “Justice will ultimately prevail,” in fact believes there is some providence that will bring about the triumph of justice. All these things are very, very intuitive. Therefore again, the burden of proof lies on the one who claims this is an absurd belief. That is regarding the a priori side. After showing that this is indeed not an absurd belief, let us examine whether we also see it on the ground. Let’s now look at reality a posteriori and see whether we see providence in practice. And here Rabbi Miki does something completely unfair. What does he do? Rabbi Miki says: there are laws of nature in the world, and I make a sharp dichotomy between laws of nature and natural causes on the one hand, and providence on the other. In his view, anything that has natural causes is not providence; nature caused it. What am I prepared to accept as providence? Only something with no natural cause, some open miracle that breaks the laws of nature. Only if I see such a thing will I be willing to accept that there is providence. Why is this unfair? Because when we speak about providence, that is not what we mean. There are miracles, true; everyone agrees that open miracles like the splitting of the sea or a staff turning into a snake do not happen much today, if at all. But that is not what we mean by providence. Most providence operates through hidden miracles. Small things that God directs behind the scenes without anyone seeing. And with all due respect to the laws of nature, no one sits and watches every molecule and every molecule in the universe to see whether it moved in a slightly unusual way, right? The Holy One, blessed be He, can easily move things—small shifts, a loose screw here, an idea that entered someone’s mind there, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Africa—and in that way direct whatever He wants without anyone sensing a deviation from the laws of nature, right? Such small miracles can happen and no one can rule them out. But since Rabbi Miki starts from the position that the very idea of providence is bizarre and absurd, then in his view anything that has a natural explanation and is not far-fetched and not statistically tiny, he will not accept. Nothing, in his view, will count as proof of providence until he sees some huge transparent hand coming down from the sky and moving things around. But as I mentioned, that is not how providence works. We see in the Hebrew Bible that Joseph says to his brothers, as mentioned, “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” Excuse me—weren’t they the ones who sold you? The brothers sold you. When on Purim we soon say “for the miracles,” the miracles You performed for our ancestors—what miracles? Read the story of the Megillah: there is no miracle there. Everything is completely natural events. Every detail in Hanukkah: there was the victory of the Maccabees. Fine, true, few against many, but that too has a natural explanation. They surprised them, fought guerrilla warfare, there were political reasons. Everything has a natural explanation. The whole idea of Purim, now that we are approaching it, is precisely this—the transition from open miracles to hidden guidance, miracles that take place behind the scenes. Behind the scenes, ostensibly through natural causes, where the wisdom is to see the hand of providence in that as well. But with Rabbi Miki there is no hiddenness of the divine face. If I don’t see it, then it’s not hidden—it doesn’t exist, it has withdrawn, the Lord has abandoned the land, right? And it is unfair. It is unfair to turn providence into a straw man and say: if I see a huge transparent hand, then I’ll accept it; everything else I won’t accept. That is not what we mean when we say providence. The idea of double causality—that things have natural causes, but also spiritual causes, and that providence moves things—that is the idea of providence. Here’s another example from the Talmud. It tells of the sage Levi, who became lame. Why did he become lame? Rabbi Yohanan says: because he flung words upward, right? He accused the Holy One, blessed be He—You ascended on high and forgot to watch over Your children—in a way that somewhat resembles our topic here. And therefore, as a kind of prepayment for that, he became lame. So the Talmud asks: wait a second, is that why he became lame? He became lame because he tried to demonstrate before Rabbi a bowing movement of the High Priest and pulled a muscle or something like that, and that’s why he became lame. The Talmud answers: both this and that caused it. True, there was a natural reason he became lame, but also a spiritual reason. After all, it did not have to happen. So God turned things, moved the muscle a little so that the spiritual cause would bring about the natural cause. That is the idea of providence. So to come and say that anything with natural causes is not providence—this idea follows only from the a priori rejection that divine intervention is absurd. If I don’t assume that, if I assume that divine intervention is reasonable, I have no problem saying yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, moves things behind the scenes through slight shifts that do not violate the laws of nature. The laws of nature still exist within such a framework. Just as a person can stretch out his hand and move the apple falling from the tree slightly, certainly the Holy One, blessed be He, can also move it slightly without our seeing anything especially obvious, right? But what do we in fact see? Right? If we now set aside the previous discussion, can we actually run some test or experiment or see something that really would show there is divine intervention in the world? If we look in that way, we will see that the higher we move from the individual to the collective, the more clearly and unmistakably we see providence. On the individual level, each person can often see events in his life that really feel like coincidences, things that work out for him, or all kinds of things that a person with a bit of spiritual intelligence sees as the hand of providence. But that is indeed personal, right? One person may feel that way, another may not. If we rise a bit higher: Rabbi Miki says, let’s do an experiment. Let’s take two groups of sick people; for one they prayed, for the other they didn’t. Then let’s see whether prayer helps—whether those prayed for recover more than those who weren’t prayed for. Well, for example, experiments like this were done—not just one, but many. And in quite a few of these experiments they really did find clear signs that those who were prayed for recovered more. Now Rabbi Miki says there were methodological problems with those experiments. That is true—there were problems. But those problems were exactly the opposite kind of problem. What do I mean? The problem is that the kind of prayer used in such experiments is very weak prayer. Why? Because they take a person who doesn’t know the one he is praying for, and the patient also doesn’t know the one praying for him, so there won’t be any bias, and they tell him: pray for someone you don’t know, without knowing anything about him—just a chirp of a prayer, so to speak. And there’s another problem: who said the patient isn’t praying for himself? Who said his relatives aren’t praying for him? In short, there are problems here such that even if one saw no effect, one could say: fine, no effect is seen because this is not real prayer; it is a simulation of prayer. But if after all these limitations—where you are effectively weakening the prayer—you still, in many experiments, do see effects, then all the more so that this proves the power of prayer. Certainly in cases that were not tested this way and where you did not put the Holy One, blessed be He, to an experiment and an exam and so on, you can find all sorts of excuses one way or another, but to say we don’t see it? We do see it. There are enough such experiments that do show a change. Let us rise one level higher—not an experiment on a small group of people, but statistics. Do religious believers statistically have an advantage in health, in recovery, or in longevity over nonreligious people? Right? If there is providence, and providence rewards the righteous, then perhaps we would expect to see such a difference. The answer is that unlike the experiments, where some succeeded and some did not, here there is no doubt. Many studies, both in Israel and worldwide, show unequivocal differences of dozens of percentage points between the data for religious groups and nonreligious groups. I’ll briefly give a few examples. A study done here in Israel on kibbutzim followed morbidity and mortality data over sixteen years in twenty-two kibbutzim, half religious and half secular. The mortality rate from heart disease in the secular kibbutzim was ninety-three percent higher compared to the religious kibbutzim. The mortality rate among patients who suffered complications from tumors was sixty-seven percent higher. Right? This isn’t some negligible thing. Another study from 2005: religious people live longer than secular people. The chance of dying prematurely among religious people is thirty percent lower. And so on. The connection between people who attend synagogue and those who do not: the mortality rate was seventy-five percent higher among those who do not attend than among those who do, and so on. Statistically there are differences between religious and secular people, period, on many measures—mental health, physical health, and so on. Now Rabbi Miki will come and say: there are natural explanations for this. It’s because of community, because of whatever, and so on. Fine, maybe there are also natural explanations. But what exactly did you expect to see? If we agree that it is not absurd a priori that God intervenes even in ways that look natural, then what is the problem if there are natural explanations? True—but that is how the Holy One, blessed be He, runs things. Again, only if you reject that view in advance as absurd will you refuse to accept it. And if we rise even higher than that—not groups but the entire Jewish people—I simply cannot understand what greater evidence of providence one could need than the whole story surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel: all the events of the establishment of the state, the ingathering of exiles, repeated military victories, also of the few against the many, the absorption of immigration from all over the world, the making of the desert bloom, all this in a way that also corresponds very closely to prophecies that the Torah itself stated thousands of years ago. What more was needed than that? How is this any less than that child riding on his father’s shoulders and asking where his father is? What am I supposed to believe? That God promised thousands of years ago that He would gather the dispersed of Israel and return us to our land and so on, and indeed He did it, because that is what is happening? Or am I supposed to believe: no, God did promise it, but at some point He changed His mind, abandoned the land—but by sheer luck, somehow, because the Jewish people remained faithful to their land, events rolled forward in such a way that the prophecies happened to be fulfilled without God intervening? Why should I think such a strange thing? In his book on evolution, God Plays Dice, Rabbi Miki distinguishes between plausibility and probability. He says there: true, from a probabilistic standpoint there may be, say, a one in a million chance that evolution would happen. Then Dawkins says: a one in a million chance can happen once. Rabbi Miki says: yes, but what is more plausible? That a one in a million chance came about by accident, or that a guiding hand did it? If I have a reasonable a priori possibility that a guiding hand did it, that is the possibility I will choose. The same is true here. It may be that there is some one in a million probability, or I don’t know what, that of all peoples the Jewish people would survive exile and return to its land and make the desert bloom—something no other people did before—and that all the surrounding nations here, all the Arab peoples, would conveniently lose so that the prophecy would be fulfilled, and not settle the land so there would be room for the Jews to return. There is some one in a million chance that this would happen probabilistically—fine. But what is more plausible? That it happened by chance, or that it happened because the Holy One, blessed be He, did not abandon the land and really fulfilled His prophecies? Right? And one can bring more examples—from the Gulf War, for instance, when dozens of missiles fell and there were almost no deaths, or only a few, and so on. But Rabbi Miki says that if Nachshon Wachsman died and the prayers did not help, then prayer does not help, period. I truly cannot understand the logic behind such an approach. In short, I’ll summarize. We saw that Rabbi Miki’s approach stems mainly from his a priori assumption that the very concept of divine intervention is absurd and bizarre and unacceptable. We saw that this a priori claim is incorrect—both from the Hebrew Bible, and from the sages of Israel, and from simple intuitions—the very idea of divine intervention is logical, reasonable, and plausible. Therefore I have no reason whatsoever to set such a high bar, that only if I see a transparent hand from heaven will I believe there is divine intervention. I can certainly accept the data we’ve seen—whether it is what I feel personally, whether it is miracles of prayer, whether it is statistics, and all the more so when we speak about the Jewish people, the establishment of the state, and all that. These are very good proofs that God has not abandoned the land; He continues to manage things, and there is no reason to insist specifically on some overtly supernatural phenomenon in order to accept this. The burden of proof lies on Rabbi Miki if he wants to argue that God has abandoned the land—unless, of course, he goes back and claims that God was never in the land to begin with, but then that already goes beyond the boundaries that I think he wants to go beyond. And I will only say that this approach—this sudden extreme skepticism—not only is problematic in this discourse, but also tends always to expand further. If I do not accept anything that is not empirically and scientifically proven, then the very beliefs in Sinai, in the existence of God, in obligation to Jewish law, they too will gradually be undermined over time. And therefore this approach, as I said, has no foundation beyond some personal feeling, and it is also dangerous and harmful. It is really proper to come out against this approach and to try to show why there is no reason to accept it. That’s all.