A Fortiori and the Hidden: A Lecture for Lag BaOmer
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- The Hatam Sofer and Lag BaOmer in Tzfat/Meron
- The Pri Hadash, establishing local holidays, and “do not add”
- A fortiori reasoning in Megillah, Hallel, and Maimonides in the first root
- Lag BaOmer as a festival without a miracle, and the boundary of interpretation
- The Mahari Yaavetz prayer book, “a court all of whose members convict,” and hod within hod
- Law as rules, kindness as deviation, and the partnership of the attribute of mercy
- A critique of solving problems through rules, game theory, and circumvention examples
- The Talmud’s skepticism toward rules and the need for controlled flexibility
- Lag BaOmer as kindness within judgment, and the hidden as the content of the day
- Rema of Fano: a fortiori reasoning, keter, and the attributes of mercy
Summary
General Overview
The text presents a lecture for Lag BaOmer that opens with a quotation from the Hatam Sofer (responsum, Yoreh De’ah, section 233) about going up to the celebration of Rashbi in Tzfat/Meron, and from there develops a principled discussion about establishing festivals and customs, the limits of “do not add,” and the difference between law as rules and logic, and kindness as an act that does not stem from rules. It reconciles the Pri Hadash’s criticism of establishing a local “festival day” with the a fortiori argument from the Talmud in tractate Megillah that underlies Hanukkah and Purim, and argues that Lag BaOmer is exceptional in that it has no clear legal-logical justification, and therefore is understood as a day of the “hidden,” marking the need for kindness within judgment. Later on, he expands through examples from law, society, and game theory to show that rules alone do not solve complex problems, and concludes with a passage from Rema of Fano about the parallel between a fortiori reasoning and keter and the attributes of mercy.
The Hatam Sofer and Lag BaOmer in Tzfat/Meron
The Hatam Sofer writes that he heard people would come “to the holy city of Tzfat on Lag BaOmer, for the celebration of Rashbi of blessed memory,” and that their intention was for the sake of Heaven and their reward would certainly be great, but he refrained from joining them “for this very reason,” so as not to sit there and alter their custom in front of them. The speaker explains from this that the Hatam Sofer presents his reservation about the mass festive customs of Lag BaOmer as the reason he did not go up to the Land of Israel, because he did not want either to participate or to break a custom done with good intentions.
The Pri Hadash, establishing local holidays, and “do not add”
The text cites the Pri Hadash (Orah Hayyim 496, in his pamphlet on prohibited customs, section 14), who attacks the custom of communities that establish a “festival day” on the date a miracle occurred for them, such as “Purim Frankfurt” and “Purim Casablanca.” The explanation offered is that establishing a new festival without authority like that of a religious court raises the concern of “do not add,” because an ordinary person cannot add festivals to the calendar, even if he does not define them as Torah-level festivals.
A fortiori reasoning in Megillah, Hallel, and Maimonides in the first root
The Hatam Sofer is presented as reconciling himself with the Pri Hadash’s objection through the a fortiori argument from the Talmud in tractate Megillah: “If from slavery to freedom we say song, then from death to life all the more so,” while noting that the Talmud explains that on Purim “its reading is its Hallel.” The text adds that Maimonides, in the first root, wonders about Bahag, who counted Hanukkah and Purim among the 613 commandments, and it raises the possibility that the obligation is learned from Passover by way of a fortiori reasoning / paradigm construction, and therefore one can see it as having Torah-level force from the standpoint of the interpretive principles through which the Torah is expounded, even though Maimonides himself defines Hallel as rabbinic. From here the argument is built that when celebration is grounded in an interpretation drawn from the Torah, it is not “do not add,” because it is “deriving another law from the Torah, not adding something of my own.”
Lag BaOmer as a festival without a miracle, and the boundary of interpretation
The text argues that to establish a festival “on which no miracle occurred, and which is not mentioned anywhere in the Talmud or the halakhic decisors, not even by hint or allusion,” when in practice there is only “the avoidance of eulogy and fasting” as a custom, does not fit the a fortiori argument of Megillah and therefore remains within the category of “do not add.” From here it presents the reason that the Hatam Sofer cannot join in establishing a festive day on Lag BaOmer beyond refraining from eulogy and fasting.
The Mahari Yaavetz prayer book, “a court all of whose members convict,” and hod within hod
The text cites the Mahari Yaavetz prayer book “according to the hidden teaching” as a riddle: “for it is like a court all of whose members convict, and he is acquitted — namely hod within hod, see there,” and explains the law in capital cases that if all the judges convict the defendant, he is acquitted. It ties this to the structure of the sefirot in the counting of the Omer and the division of the days into “seven times seven,” and identifies hod within hod as Lag BaOmer, as the level of “judgment within judgment,” associated with the left side. It adds that according to that logic one should also have established a special day “when we reach gevurot, on the ninth day of the count of the children of Israel,” but “in any case those are already the days of Nisan, and one does not eulogize then,” and therefore the remaining option was hod within hod.
Law as rules, kindness as deviation, and the partnership of the attribute of mercy
The text defines “judgment” in the language of the Sages as a fortiori reasoning and as logic, and sets against it kindness as action that does not derive from a cause or binding rule. It brings examples of archetypes of kindness (Abraham and Rebecca) to illustrate disproportionate kindness, and emphasizes that pure kindness cannot be implemented as a fixed social norm. It explains, following Rashi in Genesis, that the Holy One, blessed be He, “intended to create the world with the attribute of judgment… saw that it could not endure, and partnered it with the attribute of mercy,” and from that concludes that the world cannot endure either on pure judgment or on pure kindness, but only on a combination.
A critique of solving problems through rules, game theory, and circumvention examples
The text argues that rules and laws do not solve complex problems, because ways are always found to get around them, and it brings a series of examples: dividing a cake by “one divides and the other chooses,” which generates egoism; selling incandescent bulbs as heaters; a reward for bringing snakes that ended up encouraging snake breeding; getting around store-closing laws in London by selling vegetables with a “special deal” on a couch; AI filters that are bypassed by phrasing questions differently; and economic laws such as the “scribes’ salary law” and bank fees that merely shift incentives and cause harm. It presents democracy as an attempt to harness egoism through rules, and from game theory brings examples of the prisoner’s dilemma (“Golden Balls”) in order to argue that people also act out of spite and non-rational utility functions. It also weaves in examples from engineering and electronics to argue that “mathematics doesn’t work in real life” when it comes to complex systems, and that digital systems succeed דווקא because they reduce continuity and noise.
The Talmud’s skepticism toward rules and the need for controlled flexibility
The text presents a “skeptical” Talmudic attitude toward rules through examples such as “the common denominator” in Bava Kamma and the question “what does the common denominator come to include,” “we do not derive from general rules, even where an exception was stated,” and the rule “the Jewish law follows Rava except for YAL KGM” alongside rulings of Maimonides in additional cases like Abaye. It describes the formulation of a rule as an approximation that gives direction but does not cover life, and compares this to trying to force a living language into the mold of grammar rules, and to the circles model in Ptolemaic cosmology that requires infinitely many epicycles. From here the picture emerges of a “delicate dance” in which one works with rules but knows when to round corners and when to act beyond the letter of the law.
Lag BaOmer as kindness within judgment, and the hidden as the content of the day
The text concludes that Lag BaOmer specifically lacks a “legal explanation” and an a fortiori argument, and therefore is perceived as a day of kindness situated within “judgment within judgment,” in order to teach that at the foundation of logic itself there are assumptions and intuitions that cannot be justified from within the system. It illustrates this through a logical discussion of the syllogism of Socrates and the problem of justifying the rules of logic themselves, where the search for “judgment within judgment” leads to something accepted without explanation — that is, to kindness. It connects this to the fact that Lag BaOmer is considered “the day of the hidden,” associated with Rashbi and the esoteric tradition, and presents the possibility that the day itself is not the result of an enactment from above but a custom that grew “from below,” whose purpose is to point to the idea that explanations are not always needed and that sometimes one bends a rule out of intuition.
Rema of Fano: a fortiori reasoning, keter, and the attributes of mercy
At the end, the text cites Rema of Fano (Asarah Maamarot), who draws an analogy between the thirteen interpretive principles and the thirteen attributes of mercy, and presents a fortiori reasoning as parallel to keter and to “the Lord, the Lord.” He explains that keter is “light” relative to its cause, and from what can be grasped on the revealed plane one learns upward, so that a fortiori reasoning serves as a passage from what is understood to what lies beyond comprehension, in the manner of “from my flesh I behold God.” The text adds a kabbalistic conception according to which the sefirot and the worlds are not a description of His essence but of His manifestations, and from this the role of a fortiori reasoning is understood as a tool that makes it possible to learn from the lower to the higher.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, as I said, since today is Lag BaOmer, we’ll take the opportunity to make a little bonfire in honor of Lag BaOmer. Take the Hatam Sofer — this is a responsum, Yoreh De’ah, section 233. “Indeed, I knew, for I heard that now upright men, and from afar they will come, to seek the Lord in the holy city of Tzfat on Lag BaOmer, at the celebration of Rashbi of blessed memory.” And yes, once it was in Tzfat, later they went to Meron. “And although all their intention is for the sake of Heaven, their reward is certainly great, but for this very reason I was among those who separated themselves, like ben Durtai, so that I would not have to sit there and alter their custom in front of them, and so that I would not wish to join with them in this.” In other words, the Hatam Sofer writes here why he did not go up to the Land of Israel. He didn’t go up to the Land of Israel because he heard that they do all kinds of carnivals here on Lag BaOmer. He didn’t want to break their custom, because surely their intentions are good and their reward is for the sake of Heaven, but he did not want to join them in this matter — he didn’t want to do it. “For the Pri Hadash already made quite a clamor,” in Orah Hayyim 496, in his pamphlet on prohibited customs, section 14, about places that make a festival day on the date a miracle happened to them. Right, the Pri Hadash brings a Jewish custom that in all sorts of communities, when a miracle happened to them — Purim Frankfurt, Purim Casablanca, things like that — they establish some kind of festival day for that date, and the Pri Hadash comes out against this. Why? He says, in my humble opinion — right, what’s the problem? The problem is obviously “do not add.” In other words, you’re forbidden to invent a festival. You can’t invent a holiday for yourself. What the Torah established, it established; what it didn’t, it didn’t. If there is a religious court, then there is “do not veer,” they can, they have the authority to add — Hanukkah and Purim or something like that. But just some regular person, who has no authorized institution, cannot add a festival to the calendar. That is “do not add.” What? That’s the question, and now that takes us into the parameters of “do not add”; I’m not getting into all that right now. The Pri Hadash argues that it’s problematic in any case. Even if you don’t call it a festival in the sense of a Torah-level one, if you add another celebration day during the year, there is a problem of “do not add” here. He says, in my humble opinion — now the Hatam Sofer says: with this I can manage fine with the Pri Hadash. Why? “For in my humble opinion we say, by means of this a fortiori reasoning: from slavery to freedom we say song; from death to life, all the more so.” The Talmud in tractate Megillah says: why do we say Hallel on Purim? Because it’s an a fortiori argument from Passover. On Passover, when we were saved from slavery to freedom, we say Hallel; on Purim, when we were saved from death to life, all the more so. The Talmud asks there: but after all there is no Hallel on Purim. “Its reading is its Hallel.” In other words, we read the Megillah, and the reading of the Megillah is the Hallel that we say on Purim. But that’s the a fortiori argument that the Talmud makes. And in fact, by the way, Maimonides in the first root brings that Bahag counted Hanukkah and Purim among the 613 commandments, and he wonders about him: what, are you putting rabbinic commandments into the count of the 613 commandments? So one of the explanations — I think it appears even in Nachmanides there — is that Hallel on Hanukkah and Purim is learned from the a fortiori argument of Passover. On Purim it’s an a fortiori argument, and on Hanukkah it’s probably a paradigm construction, same idea, because on Hanukkah too it was from slavery to freedom, while on Purim it was from death to life. So in any case, you can derive the obligation to recite Hallel from Passover to Hanukkah and Purim. And since a fortiori reasoning is a Torah-level law — not like we saw in Maimonides last time, but that’s the accepted view — so… so he says: with the objections of the Pri Hadash, says the Hatam Sofer, I’ll manage. Because this is not “do not add.” If I learn it by a fortiori reasoning from Passover, then a fortiori reasoning is one of the principles through which the Torah is expounded. So if I learned it through a fortiori reasoning, then that’s what Jewish law says. Making an interpretation on the Torah is not “do not add”; making an interpretation on the Torah means deriving another law out of the Torah, not adding something of my own. Okay? Therefore there’s no problem here, says the Hatam Sofer.
[Speaker B] Is that Torah-level?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s a big question. There’s also discussion in Maimonides in the first root, also about Hallel. Maimonides says Hallel is rabbinic, but not everyone agrees. “But to establish a festival on which no miracle occurred, and which is not mentioned in the Talmud and halakhic decisors anywhere, not in any place, hint, or allusion — only refraining from eulogy and fasting is a custom, and its reason I myself do not know.” Right, you establish a festival — no miracle happened here, we weren’t saved from death to life, not from slavery to freedom, not from anything. Some kind of festival that descends on us out of a vacuum; it’s not even clear what is going on there. So for that, you can’t bring me the a fortiori argument from the Talmud in Megillah. That really is “do not add.” And therefore, says the Hatam Sofer, to that I cannot join. Refraining from eulogy and fasting on Lag BaOmer appears, fine, that does appear. But to establish a festival on this day — that does not appear. That’s the difficulty. Now look at the last passage. “And in the prayer book of the Mahari Yaavetz he wrote, according to the hidden teaching, a riddle: that it is like a court all of whose members convict, and he is acquitted — namely hod within hod, see there. But according to this, it would have been fitting to establish every good thing when we reach gevurot on the ninth day of the count of the children of Israel — except that in any case those are the days of Nisan, and one does not eulogize during them.” Who wants to try to decode this riddle? Obviously I didn’t share the screen, but we’ll manage. So the Yaavetz is trying to explain why we actually celebrate Lag BaOmer. What is the occasion? So he says: this is according to the hidden teaching. What does that mean? “That it is like a court all of whose members convict, and he is acquitted.” What is he referring to? This is obviously alluding to that law in a religious court in capital cases, that if all the judges rule that the defendant is guilty, then he goes free. Right? That’s “a court all of whose members convict, and he is acquitted.” You know this? There are all kinds of interesting paradoxes in it. What happens when there are twenty-three judges? Twenty-two found him guilty and sentenced him to death. Now I am the twenty-third judge. Now if I think he deserves death, then I too will say he deserves death — but then of course they won’t kill him, because all twenty-three say he deserves death. If I think he doesn’t deserve death and I say he doesn’t deserve death, then yes, they’ll kill him — there are twenty-two against me. So I need to say that he deserves death in order to exempt him. Right? What do you do in such a case? To me it seems simple: you need to say the truth. What you think is what you should say. You can’t be smarter than Jewish law. Because if you think he should be executed and therefore you’ll say he is innocent, what comes out? It comes out that there is a situation where twenty-three judges actually thought he was guilty, and about that the Torah says that in such a situation you do not execute him. And you are basically causing it so that even though there are twenty-three judges saying he is guilty, he will be executed. The Torah itself took into account the possibility that all twenty-three judges would think he was guilty, and it said: in that situation, do not execute him. Are you smarter than the Torah? No — you need to say what you think, and afterward whatever comes out, comes out. Fine, that’s just in parentheses. So in short, there is this law that when a court unanimously convicts, he is acquitted. What does that have to do with here? “Namely hod within hod, see there.” So hod within hod is the sefirah of Lag BaOmer, right? The fifth day of the fifth week. Basically, they divide the forty-nine days of the Omer count into seven times seven sefirot. There is hesed, gevurah, tiferet, netzah, hod, yesod, and malkhut. The top three — keter, hokhmah, binah, or hokhmah, binah, daat — are not counted. So the lower seven are hesed, gevurah, tiferet, netzah, hod, yesod, and malkhut. That’s seven sefirot and forty-nine. And within the first hesed there is hesed, gevurah, tiferet, netzah, hod, yesod, and malkhut of hesed; hesed, gevurah, tiferet, netzah, hod, yesod, and malkhut of gevurah; and so on. There are seven within each of them, so altogether it comes out to forty-nine.
[Speaker C] So that’s written below for each day?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, every day is attached to some sefirah, so it’s always netzah within hod, tiferet within yesod, hesed within gevurah, and so on. Now, the sefirot are divided in two ways. There is a division of the sefirot from top to bottom — keter, hokhmah, binah, daat, hesed, gevurah, tiferet, netzah, hod, yesod, and malkhut — one above the other. And this order of the sefirot from top to bottom starts with the Ari of blessed memory. The book Etz Hayyim begins with a picture in which the infinite light filled all of reality, and then the light withdrew, and a circle empty of light was formed — this is called the void and the contraction. And into that circle there enters from above a line of infinite light almost all the way down, without touching at the bottom. And along this line the sefirot are arranged. Why doesn’t it touch at the bottom? So the Leshem explains that if it had touched at the bottom, the concept of up and down would not have been formed. It would be symmetrical. To create a hierarchy in which there is up and down, the line has to enter from above and not touch below. Then it’s clear that this is the bottom of the line and this is the top of the line. And now you can begin to arrange the sefirot, because if the line were completely symmetrical, then this line would be a circle, not a line. There’s no hierarchy; after all, what characterizes a circle? All the points are the same distance from the center. There is no hierarchy among the points. A line is the opposite of a circle. The circle around the contraction is a circle. There is, within this, the Ari’s discussion of circles and uprightness. Right, a line, or uprightness, always creates hierarchy, and the sefirot are arranged hierarchically from top to bottom. That’s the first order. After the world of line and contraction there is the world of Adam Kadmon. What is Adam Kadmon? Do you know the kabbalistic term? There is line and contraction — that’s the empty void with a line inside it — then Adam Kadmon, Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. Okay, what is Adam Kadmon? Adam Kadmon means the most primordial, highest world in which there is a human form. All the worlds from there and downward are all in human form. The first place where the human form appears is called Adam Kadmon — the earliest place where the human form appears. In the world of line and contraction there is no human form; there is a line. What is a human form? There are three lines. Three lines are our two arms continuing into our two legs, and the body in the middle — that’s three lines. So when the sefirot are divided into three lines, that expresses the form of a human being. And by the way, the division also exists in us. For example, hokhmah, binah, daat are in the head: hokhmah on the right, binah on the left, daat below, and keter is also in the middle, daat below. So there is right, left, middle, middle, and below. Hesed, gevurah, tiferet are basically around the heart — these are the traits. Hokhmah, binah, daat are the intellect; hesed, gevurah, tiferet are the traits, the heart. Netzah, hod, yesod are the two legs, the loins, so to speak. The right leg is netzah, the left leg is hod, and yesod is the reproductive organ and it is in the middle, at the bottom of the central body. And malkhut is below, underneath the body, and it too is in the middle. So notice: there are three lines here — hokhmah, binah, daat; hesed, gevurah, tiferet; netzah, hod, yesod; and malkhut. That’s three sefirot here, three sefirot here, and four in the middle. And it’s not in sequence — in other words, there is right, left, middle; right, left, middle; and so on. Now let’s calculate which sefirot are on the left side. Left is judgment and right is kindness. What is on the left side?
[Speaker C] On the left side there is gevurah and then there is hod…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Binah, right. Binah, gevurah, and hod. Right, those are the three sefirot on the left side. Now we take out binah because it’s not in the game. There are only seven sefirot, so there are really only two sefirot, right — hod and gevurah, meaning gevurah and hod, right? Now when we speak about a court all of whose members convict, what that means is a court that is entirely inclined toward the side of judgment. Right? Guilty is judgment, acquittal is kindness. Okay? What does “all convict” mean? It means judgment within judgment. How many days in the counting of the Omer are judgment within judgment? Two. Actually there are four, but basically there are two. There is either hod within hod or gevurah within gevurah.
[Speaker C] Is hod within hod judgment?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, hod is judgment, it’s on the left side, and gevurah is judgment. So pure judgment — hesed within gevurah is not pure judgment, because hesed is on the right side. You want a court all of whose members convict, right? A court all of whose members convict means pure judgment. So that’s either gevurah within gevurah or hod within hod. In fact, it could also be gevurah within hod and hod within gevurah, in principle, but let’s leave that aside right now. So he says like this — I’m going back to read. “And in the prayer book of the Mahari Yaavetz” — that is, Jacob Emden — “he wrote according to the hidden teaching that it is like a court all of whose members convict and he is acquitted, namely hod within hod.” Hod within hod is a court all of whose members convict — meaning judgment.
[Speaker C] Maybe here the concepts got mixed up a bit.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the prayer book of the Mahari Yaavetz he wrote according to the hidden teaching that it is like a court all of whose members convict and he is acquitted, namely hod within hod. Hod within hod is judgment within judgment, meaning a court all of whose members convict. Right? It’s completely judgment. “But according to this, it would have been fitting to establish every good thing when we reach gevurot.” What is that? Why did they choose hod within hod? There is also gevurah within gevurah. When do we reach gevurot — gevurah within gevurah? On the ninth day of the count of the children of Israel. That’s the second day of the second week. “On the ninth day of the count — except that in any case those are the days of Nisan and one does not eulogize then.” In other words, basically we were looking to establish a day that is all judgment, judgment within judgment, and turn it into a festival day — which is the opposite, right? Judgment is supposed to be something sad or severe; kindness is… no, we want the purest judgment to make into a festival day. We had two options: gevurah within gevurah and hod within hod. Gevurah within gevurah was pointless — what good is a candle at noon, right? — because it’s in the month of Nisan, so in any case one does not eulogize then. So in what sense would it be a festival day? You’re not bringing sacrifices that day, meaning it’s just not to eulogize. So what can you do? There’s no point doing it in the month of Nisan, it’s like that anyway. The only option left was hod within hod, which is Lag BaOmer. Therefore they established Lag BaOmer. Now I want to explain to you a bit more what stands behind all this. What is judgment in the language of the Sages? Judgment? A fortiori reasoning. Right? Judgment is a fortiori reasoning. “Is it not a matter of judgment?” Or “we do not punish based on a matter of judgment.” Right? Judgment is a fortiori reasoning.
[Speaker C] What does that mean?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Judgment — the concept of judgment is a fortiori reasoning. When I say, “Is it not a matter of judgment? If tooth and foot are exempt in the public domain, but horn is liable, then in the damaged party’s courtyard, where tooth and foot are liable, certainly horn should be liable” — that’s a fortiori reasoning. “Is it not a matter of judgment?” they always say. Judgment is a fortiori reasoning, obviously it’s a fortiori reasoning. In Talmudic terminology. Yes, in the Talmudic terminology of the Sages, judgment means a fortiori reasoning. When we say “we do not punish from a matter of judgment” or “we do not warn from a matter of judgment,” what does that mean? A thing learned by a fortiori reasoning is not punished on that basis.
[Speaker C] A thing learned by a fortiori reasoning is not punished on that basis.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I explained that in the previous lecture, didn’t I? So the concept of judgment means a fortiori reasoning. What is the significance of this? Why does the concept of judgment mean a fortiori reasoning? Think about the interpretive principles — now here I’m getting to the interpretive principles I said we’d get to. Among the interpretive principles, there are logical principles and textual principles. We talked about that, I think, right? The division of the interpretive principles into logical principles and textual principles. Logical principles are a fortiori reasoning and maybe the two types of paradigm construction. The rest of the principles are textual principles. What’s the difference? Textual principles have no internal logic to them. If the Torah writes a word here and a word there, then they tell me: make a verbal analogy. It’s not that there is some internal logic there; if the Torah had not told me, I would not do it, right? The Torah tells me: listen, if the same word appears here and here, we make a verbal analogy. That’s a textual principle. The text hints to me: make an interpretation here. But a fortiori reasoning, for example, is not like that. The Torah says that horn is liable in the public domain, and that tooth and foot are exempt in the public domain. And the Torah says that tooth and foot are liable in the damaged party’s courtyard. Now I ask myself whether horn is also liable in the damaged party’s courtyard. There is no hint in the text telling me to make an interpretation. The a fortiori interpretation is based on logic. The logic says that horn is more severe than tooth and foot, because after all, in the public domain horn is liable while tooth and foot are exempt. So if in the damaged party’s courtyard tooth and foot, which are lighter, are liable, then horn is certainly liable. There is no textual indicator telling me to make an interpretation — logic tells me to make the interpretation. That is a logical principle. Okay, we’ll come back to this distinction between logical principles and textual principles. In any case, a fortiori reasoning is the most distilled expression of a logical principle, as distinct from textual principles. In a fortiori reasoning there is logic, right? We do a fortiori reasoning not only in interpreting verses; we also do a fortiori reasoning in life. Okay, say if, I don’t know, if a fox can prey on a cat, then a leopard certainly can prey on a cat, because a leopard is stronger than a fox. Okay? It’s not because there’s a law given to Moses at Sinai to do a fortiori reasoning — logic says a fortiori. A fortiori reasoning is a logical principle. Okay, so basically a fortiori reasoning, or judgment, is meant to express logic, and therefore the principle of a fortiori reasoning is called by the Sages “judgment.” Now think what judgment really is. Judgment is basically something that has a rationale behind it. Say when I borrow from you, there is a law that I must repay you, right? Why? Because I borrowed, and the loan is the reason that I need to repay. So the law obligates me to repay. That’s called judgment. What is kindness? Why is it the opposite of judgment? Because kindness is giving someone something when I don’t owe it to him. There is no reason why I should give it to him. I give it because I decided to. Free choice, not because of some reason that caused me to do it. Okay. Judgment is something that works according to rules of cause and effect. There is a rule, and the rule dictates that this should be the result. There is an obligation, there is a prohibition, there are things like that. That is called judgment. The laws — Jewish law says there are rules: in this situation you must do this, in that situation you must do that. Those are called laws. Laws are action according to rules. Kindness is action not according to rules. That is called kindness. By the way, in our language kindness is something positive, but in kabbalistic language kindness is not necessarily positive. Any action not according to rules. For example, the Torah says about intercourse with an animal — the Torah says “it is a kindness.” About one’s sister or an animal, I don’t remember, I think it’s an animal. The Torah says “it is a kindness.” What is kindness? Kindness means it makes no sense, it doesn’t fit the rules, there is no explanation whatsoever why you would do such a thing. It’s not just forbidden; something forbidden is judgment. But this is kindness — not according to any logic. To act that way is not logical. Therefore the Torah says “it is a kindness,” something incomprehensible, with no explanation, no cause, not according to judgment. Meaning, judgment is when you have an explanation, a cause, rules. Kindness is action not according to rules. Say Abraham our forefather is considered the father of the attribute of kindness. Why is he considered the father of the attribute of kindness? Because he gave in a disproportionate way. The three Arabs come to him — yes, the angels disguised as Arabs — and he slaughters three calves to give them tongues with mustard. And if he had given them a drumstick, it wouldn’t have been enough for them? Why did he need to slaughter three? Remember that this was in a period without refrigerators; he lived in a hot area, there was no refrigerator. That means he wasted enormous quantities of meat to give these three Arabs, whom he doesn’t know at all, tongues with mustard. Again, I’m not talking about whether it really happened or not. A rabbinic midrash — what is it trying to say? It’s trying to say that Abraham did things without proportion, not logical. Not logical. Or Rebecca — I heard both of these examples once from Rabbi Pinkus from Ofakim; he’s already passed away, but I once heard this idea from him. He says, for example, Rebecca — Eliezer arrives with all the camels, and Rebecca, according to the Sages, is a three-year-old girl, right? A three-year-old girl says, leave it, leave it, I’ll water all the camels. She goes down to the well — do you know what it means to water forty camels?
[Speaker D] Camels drink like… ships.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Desert camels — they drink a lot, a lot. Forty camels, and you’re drawing water from the well — it’s insane. Say, I’ll help you, I’ll bring you a bucket. A grown man comes, he probably has strength. Fine, he’s tired from the road, all good, help him a bit. But this is insane, not logical. That’s called kindness. Therefore Rebecca and Abraham are kindness in the sense that it’s not according to the rules, there is no logic in it. By the way, that’s exactly why it’s not really correct to learn from them. In the normal world, it’s not correct to implement kindness in its pure form. In the normal world, one needs to act logically. Even when you do good for someone, it should be in proportion, with logic, according to some rules, not wildly. It can’t work in this world. And therefore these figures, Abraham and Rebecca, are some kind of archetype. They’re not really role models to imitate directly; rather, they are figures that express a certain idea in a very distilled form, where the idea appears there in purity. That doesn’t mean that’s how it should be implemented in the world. But notice that there is a demand of you not always to work with the rules — sometimes to break through them, to benefit someone more, fine — but still not to go wild. That’s the point. In other words, the concept of kindness is a wild concept, one that does not operate with rules, and therefore it cannot be implemented in this world as-is, in pure kindness. In this world there are laws. You have to act according to logic, there are rules, what makes sense to do and what doesn’t make sense, there are proportions — that’s called judgment. Therefore Jewish law is based on laws, on formal rules. Kindness is something that really cannot run this world. Okay? Rashi writes at the beginning of Genesis — the Torah first says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Meaning, in chapter one the name God appears; in chapter two the Lord God appears. Why? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, intended to create the world with the attribute of judgment — God is the name of the attribute of judgment — yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, intended to create the world with the attribute of judgment, saw that it could not endure, stood and partnered with it the attribute of mercy. And then it became the Lord God. And that is basically the root of everything I’m talking about here. Meaning, to run a world only with judgment is impossible. Do it only with kindness? No. So you need to combine judgment with kindness, because pure judgment doesn’t work and pure kindness also doesn’t work. It has to be kindness but with some rules, some proportions, some logic to how you operate. You can’t have a world with no rules at all, just because. Think of states or a society or a community built only on kindness. There are no rules there. We give you a free hand, everyone does whatever he wants. That would be insane, unbearable to live in such a community. But a community that works only with rules is also unbearable to live in. There are situations where you understand that you need to go beyond the letter of the law. Rules can’t cover everything. Rules are too narrow. You have to combine kindness with judgment. You can’t… There are rules for how much charity you give — up to one-fifth, no more. That one-fifth you give beyond what you are obligated, that is charity. But not too much. The enactment of Usha: one who spends should not spend more than one-fifth. Okay? Beautifying a commandment — up to one-third. Meaning, there are some rules even for how to do kindness, even for how to do what goes beyond judgment. Even beyond judgment there are still some rules, softer rules, not binding like the rules of judgment, but there is no world that is only kindness and no world that is only judgment. Therefore, for example, a world of absolute capitalism cannot survive, and communism cannot survive. Because absolute capitalism — by the way, this is the opposite of what people think — what is absolute capitalism? Capitalism…
[Speaker C] Absolute? Yes. Pure kindness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Kindness! People usually say capitalism is cruel — it’s not. Capitalism, supposedly everyone only cares about himself, a kind of social Darwinism, cruel. Pure capitalism is kindness. Capitalism is pure kindness. And communism is pure judgment. Why? Because communism basically wants to say: no kindness. We distribute wealth by law equally among everyone. There is no room there for kindness. Kindness means that I give you something even though I don’t owe you, because I see that your situation is difficult and I have enough. That is kindness. That’s why communists or socialists often speak about justice rather than charity. Because charity is a capitalist concept, contrary to what everyone always thinks. Charity is a distinctly capitalist concept. Socialism believes in justice. What does justice mean from its perspective? What is justice? To divide among everyone. The law will divide. It’s not yours that you are giving from your good heart to someone who lacks. No — it belongs to both of you together. Both of you are equally entitled to it. Fine, that is basically a world of pure judgment, and it removes kindness from the picture. A world of pure judgment collapses. I think the Soviet Union collapsed because of this. Ultimately, at the root, because of this. Because every theory that wants to arrange everything through rules — it won’t work. By the way, also in our world today, in the arguments we know today. People think there is some system of rules that will fix everything. There isn’t. There never will be. It won’t be — it can’t be — you won’t find it. Every time they come up with some law — direct election of the prime minister, oh, this will save us! It collapses after two months. Why? Because there is no such thing as rules arranging everything. You know, I wrote about this on my website — there are a few very amusing examples of this. For example, in game theory they ask: how do you divide a cake equally between two children? You know this? You let one divide and the other choose first. Because when you divide, you know he’ll choose the bigger piece. So the optimal strategy for you is to divide exactly equally. Because the moment you make one even a little bigger than the other, he’ll choose the bigger one. Right? So the way to divide a cake equally between two children is really to let one divide and the other choose first. Okay, once I heard there was this crazy genius type, I have a mutual friend with him, Sam Vaknin, used to live in Kiryat Yam, later got into trouble over money, doesn’t matter, quite a character.
[Speaker C] Very smart.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So once I heard him on the radio saying he had an idea for how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Put all the points on paper, write down all the disputed points, one side divides them into two and the other side chooses first. Fine, nice. Why doesn’t that work? What?
[Speaker B] What that creates is a kind of tender where not the second-best offer wins. Wait. Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are several… there are variations on it too.
[Speaker B] Yes, exactly, right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All these stories are basically the same idea. Now, why is it a mistake to do it that way? It’s a mistake to divide the cake that way between two children. Because you’ll get the result that each one gets exactly the same portion. But why should I care that each one gets the same portion? What matters to me is their character traits. And this way you’re ruining their character. Because really, you’re educating them to be as selfish as possible, since the way you get the best division is if both of them are as selfish as possible. Then the division will be exact. If they’re not selfish, then one will divide it not exactly, and the other will take a little more—so what? In the end, the rule solves the formal problem, but it doesn’t solve any real-life problem. Exactly like all the legal revolutions people make in the country or anywhere else. People think that if you legislate this law or that legal system, you’ll solve all the problems. You won’t solve anything. In the end, every law—look, I once saw, the amusing examples I mentioned earlier, you know this? A few years ago a regulation came in that you can’t sell incandescent bulbs, only energy-saving bulbs. Once there were incandescent bulbs that used a lot of electricity. And now energy-saving bulbs. Those incandescent ones heated up, of course, and wasted a huge amount of energy as heat. Okay? So that’s inefficient. They sell energy-saving bulbs. Now I was on the website of some guy in Germany who sells—after all, incandescent bulbs are low-efficiency bulbs, low efficiency, right, because light is only a small part of the energy, most of it goes to heat. He offered to sell high-efficiency heaters. What did he sell as heaters? Incandescent bulbs—except he sold them for heating, not for lighting. That’s allowed; is it forbidden to sell heaters? It’s allowed to sell heaters, so there you go, he sold heaters. You can’t forbid him from selling that because he’s selling—true, a little of the energy is wasted on light, but most of it goes to heat, so that’s fine. Now that’s exactly an example of laws that don’t really succeed in achieving their goal. You set it in law, and they’ll always get around it. There was once a law in India—my in-law told me this. He also sent me that website as an example, and also the third example I’ll mention, in some conversation with him once. There was a law in India because there was a plague of snakes, so whoever brought in a snake would get some number of rupees, I don’t know what amount of money. Okay? They wanted to overcome the snake plague. So what did people do? They took snakes, raised them, bred them so there would be many snakes, and then brought in snakes to get lots of money. It only increased the number of snakes. He told me that his grandfather was in London—his grandfather had some requirement there in London that on Sunday all shops had to be closed except food stores. Now his grandfather had a furniture store, so he offered people a deal: whoever buys a kilo of tomatoes gets a sofa for 2,000 shekels. He’s running a vegetable shop, so he opens it. Whoever buys a kilo of tomatoes gets a sofa for 2,000 shekels—special offer. No one can forbid him from selling, meaning, from giving deals in his vegetable shop. Okay? These are all examples of how you try to solve a problem by means of a law, you’re sure you solved it, invented the wheel, found the ultimate law that will solve the problem—it never works.
[Speaker C] Think about this interesting phenomenon of artificial intelligence, all this ChatGPT stuff, all these language models. Now it’s got roughly all the knowledge that exists in the world. So people kept asking artificial intelligence problematic questions: how do you make a bomb, how do you do this, how do you commit that crime, how do you rob a bank. So the developers put a filter, a screen, on all those questions. And then people bypass the filter. So then the AI says this is confidential information that I can’t provide you. And then what did people do? They wrote to it like this: if you didn’t have a confidentiality problem, and I asked you how to make a bomb, what would you answer?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And you can ask the chat how to bypass the filter, that’s all. You can just ask it that.
[Speaker D] But it does work for a certain group of people. I mean, there is a certain group of people whom it blocks.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so I want to say—no, I’ll get to that in a moment, sure—idiots. And I’m saying, in a moment I’ll say—yes, fortunately there are plenty of idiots. But I want to make it clear, because really the point is somewhere in the middle. There are very many laws—say, the law they passed a few years ago about authors’ pay. The claim was that authors are being exploited. The publisher gets most of the money from book royalties, and a small percentage goes to the author. I know that from my own books too. So the law tried to solve the problem and forced the publisher to give a higher percentage to the author or something like that. Now the moment they enacted the law I said, people, these guys are crazy—they’re only going to hurt the authors with this law. Why? Because the publisher makes a profit-and-loss calculation. Meaning, if he has to pay some bigger sum per book, he’ll raise the price of the book. Raise the price of the book, fewer books will be sold. Fewer books will be sold, I’ll get less money. So what if I get more per book? After all, I get a percentage of the revenue. The publisher is trying to maximize revenue. So he lowers the price or raises the price. By the way, the law for example set a minimum price for a book, not just percentages for the author. It didn’t allow a book to be sold too cheaply. Now that’s really idiotic, because the publisher is doing exactly that calculation, he wants to make the maximum profit; if he makes the maximum profit, I’ll also make the maximum profit. You don’t let him lower the price, that means there will be less revenue. Are you smarter than the publisher? He knows the book market better than you do. Or bank fees. There was a law about bank fees, which of course changed nothing. The private market is always smarter than the legislator. Meaning, whatever the legislator does—especially when you’re dealing with professionals, not some law aimed at the general public—you’re dealing with banks, you’re addressing them, they live in that world, they think about it, and they will always be smarter than you. You’ll never manage to outsmart them. And so this feeling that a system of laws can solve real problems is a mistake. And with the cake too, by the way, you get to the point where the cake is divided exactly equally, because that’s a simple problem. In non-simple problems, you won’t even manage to achieve the formal result. You know, all democracy is built on this. What is democracy? It says: take the biggest villains, tell them if you don’t behave nicely we won’t elect you again in four years. So you’re basically saying that their selfishness is what will make them behave nicely. I’m leveraging their selfishness for my benefit. So I say: precisely because they’re selfish and want to be elected all the time, I found a trick that will make the biggest egoists behave nicely. And what does that do? Exactly what the cake division does: first, they don’t behave nicely, because this is a more complicated system than a cake; and second, in the end you only increase the selfishness. The right way to solve this problem is to make demands outside the law. To tell a person: forget it, the law allows you to, but if you won’t be a decent human being, you’ll pay the price. Because if you do it through law, through some clever mechanism, then he’ll circumvent the mechanism. Laws don’t solve real problems, certainly not when they’re complex. By the way, this is known in game theory too. All the game theory people are terribly proud that game theory is useful and appears everywhere—nonsense. Game theory is useful for nothing. All the problems where you’ll see a game-theory analysis that helps you are problems you could also solve without it, because they’re simple. In complicated problems, game theory never works. In fact, one of the criticisms of game theory is that it assumes optimal players, rational players who act to maximize profit. Okay? But our players aren’t like that. Right now there’s a game on the BBC—there’s a collection of wonderful clips, by the way, I recommend you watch them—Golden Balls. It’s based on the prisoner’s dilemma. They take two people and tell them this: there’s some amount of money, and now each of you has two boxes, two golden balls, one of which says steal and the other says split. Split means divide, and steal means steal. Okay? Both sides. Now the rule is this, like the prisoner’s dilemma. If I chose steal and you chose split, I get all the money. I tried to steal from you. You’re kind-hearted, you want to split, I’m a thief—the thief wins, meaning I take it from you. If you choose steal and I choose split, then you take everything. If we both choose split, then it’s divided between us. If we both choose steal, no one gets anything. Okay? Now the game—but it’s more sophisticated than the prisoner’s dilemma. Because the game starts with two people trying to convince each other, let’s choose a strategy—usually, let’s choose the strategy where we both split. We’ll both divide it, it’s a shame if we both do steal, then neither of us gets anything. Each one wants to get everything, so he’ll say steal. If we both do steal, we won’t get anything. So let’s compromise; at least we’ll get half, but let’s go with an agreement, yes? A coalition—let’s make a coalition in the language of game theory—both of us choose split, and each gets half. Okay? That’s usually how it goes. But I found one clip—and there, no, there aren’t any two clips that are alike, it’s amazing how creative people are, every clip is something else, it’s just fascinating, I really recommend watching it. There’s one clip where one person says to the other, he says this: I’m informing you that I’m choosing steal. That’s it. It’s a given. Now you decide what you do. If you do split, then I get everything. If you do steal, then you don’t get anything. If you do steal, then neither of us gets anything, so in any case you get nothing. Right? So I’m telling you: choose split, and I’ll give you half. That’s it, I chose steal, period, I’m informing you. Nothing will help. Now you have to decide what you do. Now what does the logic of game theory say? Obviously to choose split, right? If you choose steal, you get nothing. If you choose split, maybe he’ll be honest and share with you, and maybe not. But at least there’s a chance you’ll get something. If you choose steal, then for sure you get nothing. Most people will choose steal in a situation like that. Just out of spite. Exactly. It’s more important to him that the other guy gets screwed than that he receive some expected profit. That’s exactly the situation where game theory fails to predict human behavior, because you’re looking for where profit is maximized—that’s the strategy in game theory. But no, people have all sorts of more complicated utility functions, right? Different utility functions. Okay, and for our purposes, the point I was making is why game theory talks about rational players and therefore doesn’t work. In any case, complex things can’t be solved with game theory, because a game-theory solution is a solution by algorithm, by rules, by laws. And a solution by rules doesn’t work in the real world. And here’s the basic theorem in game theory—not the basic theorem, one of the basic theorems—it’s Zermelo’s theorem. Zermelo’s theorem says that in every game like chess, either black wins, or white wins, or it’s a draw. Exactly. Like a mathematician, a theorem like that takes a whole semester to prove. It’s actually a nontrivial theorem, and do you know why it’s nontrivial? Because the theorem doesn’t say that in every game there will be either a draw or black will win or white will win. The theorem says that built into the game of chess there is one result. There is an optimal strategy by which white can always force a win, or an optimal strategy by which black can always force a win, or there is no winning optimal strategy and each side can force a draw. But only one of those three possibilities, not that in each game there will be a different result. It’s not a trivial theorem at all; it has to be proved. There is a whole family of chess-like games where this is true. There is also a family of games where it isn’t true. The claim is about a principled strategy, not about the outcome. Obviously in every game there will either be a draw or white will win or black will win. The claim is that there is a property of the game—it’s a mathematical property of the game—we just don’t know which of the three it is. Because it’s complicated. We don’t know which one, but if we did know, then there’s a solution here by means of rules. But here—and the moment—what?
[Speaker C] Know what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Know what the strategy is. The moment they find the winning strategy, the game of chess will be canceled because—tic-tac-toe, you have to fill a line of three, right? That’s a game nobody plays after age three, because it’s obvious it’s a draw, you can’t win that game. It’s an example of a game where there is a strategy that forces a draw; each side can force a draw and no one can force a win. What?
[Speaker D] Whoever starts wins?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not true. You can force a draw. You won’t beat me if you start. You can force a draw. No, it won’t help you to start, that’s exactly the point. White doesn’t win, black doesn’t win; rather, either side can force a draw, unless someone makes a mistake. But if you use the right strategy, you can force a draw. It’s not an interesting game, it’s a boring game. Why is chess interesting? Because it’s complicated. In principle it’s like tic-tac-toe. Meaning, if we had the full strategy, there’d be no point in playing chess—it would be like tic-tac-toe, only complicated for now. Soon computers will solve that too.
[Speaker C] What? But the point is that if I know what my opponent is going to do in chess and I know how to exploit that—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It won’t help you. The whole idea of a forcing strategy is a strategy that says that even if you know what I did and even if you know what I’m about to do, it still won’t help you at all; I can force checkmate on you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you do this, I’ll come from here; if you do that, I’ll come from there—that’s the meaning of a forcing strategy. A forcing strategy means that no matter what you do, I have a strategy to beat you.
[Speaker C] There isn’t such a thing in chess.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course there isn’t—because it’s complicated. But there is such a strategy. The theorem says there is such a strategy; it’s proved by induction, but it’s not a constructive proof, meaning they don’t show what the strategy is, only prove that it exists.
[Speaker C] Is there definitely one in chess?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, Zermelo’s theorem. Not only in chess—in all games of the chess type. You have to define exactly what the properties are, but it doesn’t matter. In short, what I’m saying is that complex problems can’t be solved this way. All right? Let’s return to them. What does that actually mean? It means that the world cannot exist on pure law, because mathematics cannot handle real-life problems. Okay? That’s something I discovered, unfortunately, in my fourth year of engineering studies. I got to Tadiran and worked there half-time on some filter for the Lavi, the Lavi aircraft. I had to produce some filter there that didn’t exist; it required some different technological solution because this was in the field of waves, and even at wavelengths that didn’t exist—they needed something specific. I did tons of mathematics and all that. In the end they canceled the Lavi; in the middle they canceled the project. And I thanked the Holy One, blessed be He, for it, because it was clear to me that what I had done wouldn’t work. Why? Because it had too much mathematics in it. If there’s something that has too much mathematics, it simply won’t work. And I was there in the factory and saw all sorts of technicians who saw that something wasn’t working, gave it a smack, and suddenly it worked. Some capacitor wasn’t working, they threw it out and put in a transistor instead. I didn’t understand what they wanted; I came from university, I don’t know, I had done calculations, orthogonal polynomials, all kinds of things like that. They said to me, are you crazy? None of that will work. You have to step on it a little, push a little here, try from there—and they were right. Meaning, what they did ended up working, and what I would have done wouldn’t have worked. Mathematics doesn’t work in life. By the way, that’s the whole idea of digital electronics. Digital electronics is precisely designed to neutralize the mathematics. Because it’s either one or zero, there’s no playing games here; that’s why it works. That’s why digital works better than analog. In analog things, they depend on all sorts of noise that can disrupt you, all sorts of things can create malfunctions there. In digital things, it’s either one or zero. Make a big enough gap—either five volts or zero volts—so it came out four, it doesn’t matter, four is also one, there won’t be errors. That’s the whole idea of digital electronics. In any case, the claim is that law—or working according to rules, mathematics, logic, analytic reasoning—doesn’t work on life, doesn’t solve the problem, can’t sustain life. And working without rules also can’t work. Yes, you need some system of rules; you can’t have a world where everyone does whatever he wants—that doesn’t work, it can’t work. Even if people try to do good, you still need some sort of structure so the business can function. Even if you have a group of people who are all good, you can’t do without some minimal system of rules within which things can operate. Now I could talk at length, by the way, about the reform and the arguments around it today, many of which revolve around this point. People think there is some system of rules that will either save the world or destroy the world, and that’s not true. No system of rules will save it or destroy it. The solution is not in this system of rules or that system of rules. You need a minimal system of rules that is reasonable, but within it, if people don’t function with some norms that go beyond the rules, then it won’t help—any system of rules can be bypassed.
[Speaker C] Like the Rabbi said earlier, the more rigid and closed a system is, the more only those with the intellectual ability manage to get around it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then you realize that the smart wicked people will abuse everyone. And that’s not worthwhile. Better to leave the field more open, and not give the smart wicked such a great advantage. In a certain sense, making a system of rules that enables only smart wicked people to bypass everyone is more dangerous than giving everyone a freer hand. Because then I can balance him and he can balance me; we—I also know how to solve simple problems. If the problems are complicated, then only he knows how to solve them, and he’ll exploit us all. There is something stronger in a weaker system of rules. In any case, the claim I want to make is that the world must exist—it cannot exist on pure law, and it cannot exist on pure kindness. The world has to exist on kindness accompanied by law, or law accompanied by kindness, right. Meaning, there is a framework of rules, but within it one has to understand that there is going beyond the letter of the law, there are exceptions, there is rounding off the corners here and there. You know what? The Talmud’s attitude toward rules—today I’m being a bit associative—but the Talmud’s attitude toward rules, for example, is a very skeptical one. The Talmud doesn’t like rules. Even when there are rules, the Talmud doesn’t really obey them, and doesn’t expect us to obey them. Yes, in tractate Kiddushin there are several canonical examples that I always bring in this context. At the beginning of tractate Bava Kamma, the Talmud says: There are four primary categories of damages: the ox, the pit, the grazer, and the fire. All right? Their common denominator is that they are your property, their supervision is upon you, and when they cause damage, the one who damaged is obligated to pay compensation from the best of his land. Fine, there’s a summary at the end, right? What is actually the essence? What is the idea common to the four primary categories? Then the Talmud on page 6 asks: The common denominator comes to include what? You die when you read that question. The Mishnah drives us crazy. It keeps talking about cases and this and that—just give me the rule and leave me alone with all the examples and cases. Maybe it is similar and maybe it isn’t; give me the rule itself! Why are you talking to me in examples so that I’ll extract some rule from them, maybe I’m right and maybe I’m wrong and I get tangled up in everything—just give me the rule and everything will be fine. Why are you talking to me in examples? Right, this is the casuistry of the Talmud. Casuistry? A casuistic approach is an approach by cases, not by rules, as opposed to positivism. Two legal conceptions, yes: the British conception is casuistic, the German or continental conception is more positivist. So for once the Mishnah does give me the rule. It brought me four examples—ox, pit, grazer, and fire. I don’t even know what that is; there are arguments over what it is, a whole mess—and in the end it gives me the rule. Ah, wonderful! For once they did me a favor and also told me what the rule is. And the Talmud on page 6 does not ask, why do I need “the four primary categories of damages: the ox, the pit, the grazer, and the fire,” since you gave the rule—why bring the examples? It asks the opposite: you gave me examples, why do I need the rule? Which is absurd—but it’s very sensible. Because that rule is worth nothing. In real life it’s worth nothing. What will you say—anything that is your property and whose supervision is upon you? If I wrote only that, what would you say about a guardian? An animal deposited with him caused damage—it isn’t his property, its supervision is upon him, but it isn’t his property. What would you say about a robber? The robber too—it isn’t his property, and if the animal he stole caused damage, then he isn’t liable, the owner of the animal is liable? How does that work? It’s not—this rule doesn’t work. It simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work, so it isn’t a good rule. Exactly—but there is no good rule, that’s the whole idea. There is no good rule. The fact is that the Mishnah formulates that rule; as far as it’s concerned, that’s the rule. It’s not that the rule is incorrect; it’s the best there is if you want to formulate it with rules, but the rules don’t really work. So I give you a rule that gives you some direction, and don’t take it too seriously. Understand that you have to round off corners from time to time. The Talmud in Kiddushin says: We do not derive from general rules even in a place where an exception is stated. Right? They say: all positive commandments bound by time, women are exempt, except for A, B, C, and D. The Talmud asks: But there is also this one—there is another commandment that women are obligated in even though it is time-bound. Well, fine, don’t make a fuss. We do not derive from general rules even in a place where an exception is stated. So there’s also E—what happened? You understand, this is strange. If they tell me all positive time-bound commandments women are exempt from, and I find an exception—fine, they didn’t list all the exceptions, they said the rule and there are a few exceptions, I understand. But no: they state the rule and a list of exceptions, and now if there’s one more exception? Don’t make a fuss, there’s another exception, so what? Meaning, even the most pedantic formulation you can imagine—don’t take that seriously either. I’m sure whoever wrote that Talmudic passage was laughing himself to death. He’s mocking them, that’s obvious. He tells them: here, I gave you a rule, did you enjoy that? Great, wonderful. Now you found an exception? You found an exception—don’t make a big deal out of everything. Right, the law follows Rava except in six cases in disputes with Abaye, right? Except for Ya’al Kegam. “Despair without knowledge,” “conspiring witness,” “a side-beam standing on its own”—the acronym Ya’al Kegam. Maimonides rules in other places too like Abaye against Rava. An explicit rule in the Talmud, not some post-Talmudic rule of one kind or another. An explicit rule in the Talmud: the law follows Rava except in six cases. Maimonides rules in “do not form factions” like Abaye; Maimonides rules in “if one did it, it is ineffective” like Abaye against Rava. Then all the rule-lovers begin explaining: no, no, that’s only when their dispute is directly their own, but not when they argue according to tannaitic opinions, or not this—all sorts of tricks of one kind or another. It’s simply not true. This rule is a nice rule, but if it’s clear to you that the Jewish law follows Abaye in another place too, then rule like Abaye in another place too. If you don’t have a position of your own, then that’s the rule. Fine, that’s all. No need to make a big issue out of rules. Why? Because rules are law. And rules don’t really work. We talked about this when I discussed in one of the previous classes—this is really our topic in the course, I’m returning to it, yes? After all, that’s what I was talking about when I discussed the development of the world of exegesis and its conceptualization, the introduction of the world of exegesis into a set of measures, yes, of grammatical rules, of the language of interpretation. Like taking a language and putting it into the vise of grammatical rules. Okay? What is that? It’s some attempt to grasp something living—a language—and put it into a set of rules, to turn it into mathematics. But it doesn’t work. There are always exceptions in grammar. Why? Because the rules are an ad hoc approximation; they don’t really capture the thing itself. Rules cannot capture something complex. A complex thing has no description in terms of rules. If you think it does, you’re a fool. Rules can be a first approximation, giving you some kind of framework. But you need to understand that rules alone will never capture something from life. There will always be rounded corners, there will be exceptions. And whoever keeps insisting: no, no, there is this sub-rule, that rule doesn’t work here, it only works there—he adds more and more rules and more and more, but it never works. And you’ll always keep adding more rules, like the epicycles and deferents in Ptolemaic cosmology, right? They assumed the whole cosmos consisted of circles. Now every time—we know today that it’s ellipses, right? But they understood, they saw in observation that it wasn’t a circle. They said: no, no, it’s a circle, and next to it there are two more small circles, which is already almost an ellipse. But they saw it doesn’t work that way; it’s an ellipse. No, so there’s another little circle there that closes the—, and here another circle. And the greater your observational resolution, the more and more little circles you have to add, and it’s infinite. Because to generate an ellipse out of circles, you need infinitely many circles, right? In other words, there is no circular description of the real orbit. You insist on imposing on it some simple logic, yes, circles—it doesn’t work. The logic is on you, not on the world. Logic is your tool; the world doesn’t operate that way. Yes, the world doesn’t owe you anything, it was here before you, as Mark Twain said. Meaning, therefore, the attempt to deal with complex problems, to deal with life using some set of rules, doesn’t work. Without rules it also doesn’t work. You can’t deal with the world without rules; our thinking operates with rules. So you need to know that it’s a delicate dance between working with rules and common sense, which tells you when to deviate from the rules, when there is an exception, where to bend the rules. In other words, it’s a very delicate interplay between the rules—without breaking them—but yes, bending them to the proper degree. Okay? You can’t run a world any other way. Whoever thinks you can run a world only with the good hearts of human beings, or only with rules that will handle all the wicked and fix the world—it doesn’t work. Neither of them works. And that is why the Holy One, blessed be He, associated the attribute of justice with the attribute of mercy, kindness with law. Because the world can be run only with the divine name Elohim together with the divine name, not with this one alone and not with Elohim alone. And I return to this. So now, all the more so—we said this is law. Why? Because it’s logical, right? If here it is so, then all the more so there too it is so, right? That’s the logic. Now what are these festivals that the Pri Chadash—the Pri Chadash forbids adding festivals. The Chatam Sofer says: with the Pri Chadash I manage fine. I have the a fortiori argument of the Talmud in tractate Megillah: If from slavery to freedom we say song, then from death to life all the more so. Meaning, for all the festivals people add, I have an explanation according to law. Law here is a fortiori reasoning, a logical explanation. I can derive it from the rules, from the Torah, by means of the rules and know that I have justification, a basis for adding these days. Therefore, says the Chatam Sofer, there is no problem at all. There is law that explains how I add these days. No problem, everything is fine, it’s justified. But there is one day where that doesn’t work. Lag BaOmer. There is no logic behind it. No logic whatsoever. There is no explanation, no a fortiori, nothing happened there. What is this joy doing here? What is this holiday? And that is apparently pure kindness. There is no law, no explanation, no logic, no rules explaining why we don’t eulogize, why it is a festive day. Okay? Where do we place it? In law within law. The festive day of kindness is placed in a time that is law within law. Or strength within strength, which doesn’t work because that would be like a lamp in daylight, or splendor within splendor. And splendor within splendor is the only possibility left. What is the idea behind this? Law within law is a court all of whose judges find guilt. Whoever wants to run the whole world according to law, sees only law, pure law, that is law within law—it cannot work. He will discover that there is nothing behind it. He will end up needing kindness anyway. And so what we are really saying is that once a year all the halakhic justifications, the law, the logic, the halakhic rules, are broken. Where is that? In the place that is most law-like of all. Splendor within splendor. The most logical there is. Think by way of analogy—think of a logical rule that says all human beings are mortal, Socrates is a human being, conclusion: Socrates is mortal. Right? That’s the classic syllogism. Okay? Now someone comes and says: I accept the two premises, but who says the conclusion is true? Prove it. Explain it. All human beings are mortal, Socrates is a human being, conclusion: Socrates is mortal. What more am I supposed to prove to you? A logician will tell you no, there is something to prove. You actually assumed the logical rule—we’ll call it modus ponens for the sake of discussion—that if every X is Y and A is X, conclusion: A is Y. Let’s call that modus ponens. So now I have an argument with three rules. First rule: all human beings are mortal. Second rule—three premises, not three rules. Two rules and one specific premise. All human beings are mortal, second premise, and MP, modus ponens. Three premises. Now the conclusion is that Socrates is mortal. But if I insert the rule too as one of the premises, then the argument is fine, no one can argue. Not true, of course you can argue. Now who says this argument is valid? Now you will have to produce a meta-rule that says: if every X is Y and A is X, and there is also a rule that if every X is Y and A is X then A is Y, conclusion: A is Y. Formulate the rule MP-bar or MP-prime, yes? Which basically says that if you have such two premises plus MP, then the conclusion is this. That too has to be inserted, and so on, of course ad infinitum. In other words, if you try to look for law within law, the justification for the logical or rational tool itself, you won’t find it. You cannot justify law by means of law.
[Speaker C] The logical tool is a justification for something else that we already understand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, there really is such a logical rule. But that’s it—you can’t ask, and where does that logical rule come from? That’s a question of law within law. The logical rule is the law. You’re asking: wait, and what is the law within law? In other words, what is the logic behind the logical rule? There is no such thing. When I explain to you the logic of something, I use logical rules. If you ask me what the logic is behind the logical rules themselves, I won’t know what to answer. It’s self-evident. Now what does self-evident mean? Self-evident means something I accept without explanation. Meaning, when I ask why logic is logical—that’s again the question of law within law—the result is kindness. The result is something that works not because of rules; it simply works because it works. And therefore Lag BaOmer is in fact a festival that has no legal explanation. Therefore it is a festival of kindness, and it is placed on a day that is law within law. And this is to teach us this principle: behind all logical explanations sit some unformulated intuitions that do not enter into the rules. I’m not saying it’s arbitrary. It’s not arbitrary—it’s logical. But it doesn’t enter into the system of rules. I don’t know how to conceptualize it, I don’t know how to define it. It is simply right because I know it intuitively. And that is what they are really coming to tell me: at the foundation of law, when you go to a court all of whose judges find guilt, the result is acquittal. Law within law ultimately leads you to kindness. The world simply cannot stand on law alone. If you adopt only things that are logical—by the way, this belongs to the Sunday series; I explained there that if you adopt only things that are certain, you won’t be able to adopt anything. Right? The postmodern maturation. Meaning, if you want to adopt only things that have justification, only things that are certain, you won’t be able to adopt anything. Because there is no such thing as only law. In a world of only law there is nothing. And maybe that is what Lag BaOmer tells us. Lag BaOmer tells us that a world that is pure law, law within law, is kindness. What? There is supposed to be something without a reason that fits the laws. People have some kind of intuition that it is fitting to celebrate here, I don’t know, to make some sort of festive day, may we all be healthy. I don’t have that, but whoever does have it—let him do it, let him go with it. That’s fine. Right, there are no justifications, there is nothing. On Purim too there is something like this, some deviation from the halakhic rules, because there is some day in the year that comes to signal to us that the halakhic rules are like a shell—they are not the thing itself. And sometimes there are things that work not by the rules, but people do them anyway. And I think it is not for nothing that this is considered the day of the hidden. Rashbi—this is the mystical teaching. That’s what it says, right? And in the prayer book of Mahar”i Avitz it is written “according to the hidden teaching.” What does “according to the hidden teaching” mean? That is the whole idea of the hidden. What is the revealed? The revealed means that I have some logical rules that explain this Jewish law, this insight, right? The ordinary explanations we are used to. What is the hidden? The hidden is something for which we have no explanation in terms of the ordinary rules; we do not understand why it is true. There is something inside that apparently causes it to be true, and I don’t know how to pour that into the ordinary rules I use. That is called the hidden. Right? In a certain sense, the hidden exposes the kindness inside the law. The law is the plain meaning, and the hidden is the secret—that is the kindness. Okay? And therefore I think that Lag BaOmer, whose rationale is that it has no rationale, is really the festival of the hidden.
[Speaker C] Yes, Rabbi, basically if for a second we leave the idea aside and just look at it in practice, this is an explanation that gets dressed onto it, right? He uses this day, Lag BaOmer, and says—it’s not that because of this they actually instituted Lag BaOmer.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nobody instituted Lag BaOmer—that’s exactly the point. Nobody instituted it; people just do it. It comes from below, not from above.
[Speaker C] Yes, but it started from something.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it started from the fact that people started doing it. But the claim is that if people have some kind of intuition like that, we don’t necessarily throw it out just because the rules don’t fit. There is something that can work even if the rules don’t line up with it. There are situations where we don’t—we have a strong feeling that here the rule should be bent, here we don’t operate by the rule. And maybe Lag BaOmer is dedicated to that very idea. Meaning, I’m saying more—not that on Lag BaOmer there is something in the hidden dimension that causes this day truly to be a festive day even though we have no explanation.
[Speaker C] It could be that here there isn’t even something in the hidden.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All Lag BaOmer comes to say is this idea: that if there are things in the hidden, then sometimes even if we have no legal explanation, we still do them. But not because Lag BaOmer itself specifically has some hidden logic behind it. Maybe not. Maybe there is nothing there. And all it comes to say is only this idea, this idea that there do not always have to be explanations. And here there really is no explanation—not that there is an explanation I don’t know how to formulate. Maybe, I don’t know. Okay, Lag BaOmer, yes. For our purposes, I have a few more minutes, so let me show you another nice passage about a fortiori reasoning, not Lag BaOmer. The Rema of Fano, one of the disciples of the Ari of blessed memory in his period in Europe, before he arrived in Israel—Egypt and the Land of Israel. Was the Ari in Europe? Yes, of course, he was in Italy, and from there he went up to the Land of Israel. His early period was in Europe, and later he came to the Land. Rabbi Chaim Vital studied with him in Safed in the Land of Israel, but he had earlier disciples, cubs of the Ari, who were in Europe; this is the early Lurianic Kabbalah, the European version. The Rema of Fano is one of them, and he has a book called Ten Discourses.
[Speaker E] Wasn’t he in Egypt, that fellow?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who? The Ari. He was also in Egypt and also in Safed.
[Speaker E] I think he grew up in Egypt and from there he went up…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe—I don’t know where he was born—but he spent a period in Europe. I don’t remember the biography exactly right now. In any case, so, the Rema of Fano. In the Passover Haggadah, at the end there’s that song, “Who knows one?” “Who knows thirteen?” Thirteen what? What is “thirteen attributes”? The hermeneutic principles, or the attributes of mercy. You understand? So in the Brisk Haggadah, for example, when you look in the commentary there, what will you find? The hermeneutic principles, of course. There’s some vort from Rabbi Chaim there on an a fortiori inference, all kinds of things like that. In the Hasidic Haggadot, of course, you’ll find that these are the attributes of mercy. This is thirteen and that is thirteen. Now, the Rema of Fano there, in the essay on the attributes in the book Ten Essays, draws an analogy between the hermeneutic principles and the attributes of mercy. One corresponding to one.
Now, the a fortiori inference corresponds, in his view, to Keter, which is “The Lord, the Lord, God, compassionate and gracious”—that is Keter. So “The Lord, the Lord,” the first two names, that is Keter, and it corresponds to the a fortiori inference. What is the parallel? Let’s read just a tiny bit. “A fortiori alludes to the supernal Keter in its relation to the Cause of Causes, for Keter is slight, and wisdom is nothingness in relation to its cause. And despite this, gazing upon it is forbidden—how much more so that which is above it.”
Meaning, it works like this: there are the ten attributes—I described them earlier, right? What are these ten attributes? What is their relation to the Holy One, blessed be He? Is the Holy One, blessed be He, the highest attribute? Is that Keter? In the accepted approaches, the earlier Shomer Emunim apparently understood it that way. But the earlier Shomer Emunim—Rabbi Yosef Ergas, a kind of introduction-to-Kabbalah book—because there’s a later Shomer Emunim, so this one is called “the earlier one.” Shomer Emunim is that kind of ethical work. What? The hertek, yes.
So the accepted claim is that all the attributes and worlds and configurations and sefirot, everything we talk about in Kabbalah, does not speak about the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. Even the Infinite Light, which is the first manifestation—even that is not the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. The Raavad, at the beginning of his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, says that Keter is the will to be revealed. Not the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself—it is the will to be revealed. “Wisdom, from where shall it be found?” That is not Keter; and wisdom comes from Keter, so Keter is not something revealed. Wisdom is the beginning of the revelations; Keter is the will to be revealed. But what is the revealed thing itself? The revealed thing itself is not in the game. It’s not on the map. That is what is called His hidden essence. The Holy One, blessed be He, Himself—that is something else.
The entire kabbalistic description—sefirot, configurations, worlds, all these things—is not a description of the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. It is a description of His revelations, and the highest thing, Keter, is only His will to be revealed; it is some sort of potential revelation. Now what is he really saying? So what is this all for? What is all of Kabbalah, all this description, meant to do? So there are disputes about what exactly it is meant for, but what does it say? It basically says, “From my flesh I behold God.” It is basically saying: I am trying to give you some description from which perhaps you can learn something about the Holy One, blessed be He. This is not He Himself; these are His revelations, but through them one can try to learn about Him.
So he says: that is the a fortiori inference. A fortiori corresponds to the supernal Keter. Why? Because the relation between the supernal Keter and the Cause of Causes—which is the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, not Keter; Keter is only the will to be revealed, the highest revelation, or the potential one—not even revelation, because wisdom is the first revelation, while Keter is the potential for revelation, the will to be revealed—what is the relation between it and the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, the Cause of Causes? A relation of a fortiori inference. What does that mean? Keter is more refined—every attribute is more concrete than the attribute above it. Every sefirah is lower; we spoke about the hierarchy of the line. Every attribute is lower. What does “lower” mean? The higher attributes are more abstract; that is why the metaphor is light. Light is a physical entity, but a very abstract one. The higher the sefirot are, the more abstract they are. But there is an analogy between the lower sefirah and the higher sefirah. From the lower one can learn about the higher, “from my flesh I behold God,” as the Ari, of blessed memory, says. From the world, from my body, I can learn about the sefirot. From the sefirot I can learn about what is above them. From what is above them I can learn about the Holy One, blessed be He.
By the way, among the kabbalists there are positive descriptions. Philosophers speak only about negative attributes—Maimonides and others. Among the kabbalists there is no such thing; the attributes are positive attributes. Why? Because we learn from the sefirot about what is above them, about the One who possesses the sefirot. Okay? And therefore he says that this is the attribute of a fortiori inference. What is an a fortiori inference? It is learning from the lighter to the stricter, from what is here to what is above it. Keter is “light” relative to the Holy One, blessed be He, who is the “strict” one. So if Keter has such-and-such qualities, I can learn a fortiori that these qualities also exist with the Holy One, blessed be He. And therefore the role of Keter is really the role of a fortiori inference. It is the role of learning from the lighter to the stricter.
And therefore the principle of a fortiori inference, which is the first of the thirteen hermeneutic principles by which the Torah is expounded, corresponds to the first attribute in “The Lord, the Lord, God, compassionate and gracious.” Think about “The Lord, the Lord, God, compassionate and gracious”—the Maharal already writes this—“God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and truth”—all these have meaning. You can also say about a human being that he is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, right? All these are terms that have meaning in language. We describe the Holy One, blessed be He; that is why they are called appellations or descriptions, but it is not a name. The only thing that is a name is “The Lord,” Yod-Kei-Vav-Kei. It has no meaning; it is a name, like Moshe. “Moshe” has no meaning—yes, this is Bertrand Russell’s article on reference from 1905; he spoke about two kinds of reference, yes? By name and by description. Okay?
So the name that is truly a name in relation to the Holy One, blessed be He, is Yod-Kei-Vav-Kei. Everything else is descriptions—descriptions or appellations—and they are not unique to Him; they can be used elsewhere. By the way, even “Elohim,” for example, is an appellation for judges. The Torah uses “Elohim” as a description of judges. Meaning, nothing besides Yod-Kei-Vav-Kei is a name; everything else is a description. And therefore the claim is that the supernal Keter really relates to the thing itself. You cannot grasp the thing itself. You use Keter, which you can try to begin to grasp, and by a fortiori inference you learn what happens above it. Okay? Therefore Keter corresponds, in the context of the attributes of mercy, to “The Lord, the Lord.” “The Lord” has no rationale, of course, right? It is not—it has no description, no content, so it corresponds to a fortiori inference, because a fortiori inference comes to tell me how I learn from what I do understand to what I do not understand. And therefore it corresponds to a fortiori inference.
That is to say, the role of a fortiori inference is basically to transfer my understandings from the lower thing to the higher thing. And that is the meaning of the sefirah of Keter. Therefore he says that it corresponds to Keter. Now he brings this into the topic of “If her father had but spit in her face,” the topic of dayyo in tractate Bava Kamma there, with a fortiori inference and dayyo. And “for seven days”—that is the seven sefirot. I’m not going to get into that here.
[Speaker C] Thank you very much, Rabbi.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Thank you. We went a bit over today, but at least we fulfilled our obligation for Lag BaOmer.