A Philosophical Look at the Axis of Evil: Between Faith and Fundamentalism – Rabbi Michael Abraham

Well,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, hello everyone. I hope our situation—or at least that’s how it seems—will continue to improve. Today I want to talk about fundamentalism and faith, like we wrote in the announcement. This isn’t a Torah lesson in the classic sense, but as you know, all “Jewish thought” isn’t a Torah lesson in the classic sense. In my view there’s really no such thing as “Jewish thought” at all, but that’s another story. What I do want is to look a bit at what’s happening today from a somewhat broader perspective, also to get more into the philosophical roots of the issue, and as a result—and I think very often this is inherent, that it works this way—you can see connections between different processes that on the face of it seem unrelated, but when you look at the roots, they do connect. And in that framework, I hope I’ll be forgiven if I also touch on current events—I mean I’ll express positions on current events, not just touch on them. There’s a certain hesitation about getting into politics or things like that—politics in the narrow partisan sense—but also on issues of, I don’t know, war and peace, right and left, things like that. I’m also going to make some comments about those matters, and I think that will connect to what I’m talking about. I assume there will be disagreements there, but you shouldn’t be alarmed by disagreements—quite the opposite. So I’m already giving a kind of warning label that I’m also going to get into those things that people usually hesitate a bit to touch.

Okay, so I’ll start first of all with the axis of evil, right. In the title there we talked about the axis of evil, a term from Bush, I think, which basically speaks about some kind of axis or system headed, let’s say, by Iran, and it has various proxies in various directions—organizations, states, mainly organizations more than states. And somehow, Bush at least was the one who understood that there is an axis here. Meaning, there’s something here that isn’t just a collection of terrorist organizations or a collection of problems that need dealing with, but there’s something shared there. That shared thing, from his point of view I assume, was mainly organizational. Meaning, they’re all organized from the same place. But I think in my eyes they also have a shared philosophical root, and that’s what interests me more. The organization is only an expression of that.

So there’s some kind of religious axis here that employs violent actions, terror, seems very determined, and this is happening in many places around the world, not just in Israel—Iran, Lebanon, and so on. It spills over into Europe, it spills over into various other places, and somehow the feeling is that this struggle is beginning to fill the whole world. Opposed to this fundamentalist direction stands a conception—or at least it seemed that there stood—a conception that is more liberal, pluralistic, open, inclusive, and so on, and very often the feeling is that it’s somewhat at a loss. Meaning, it doesn’t exactly know how to deal with fundamentalism, and therefore very often freedom and the willingness to include, in some sense, play the role of a Trojan horse. Meaning, you bring into yourself elements that don’t really cooperate with your inclusiveness and your tolerance, and then you find yourself with a problem already inside the house—not just beyond the border or in other countries or with hostile organizations, but simply part of your own home suddenly turns into something else. I’m speaking mainly about Europe, of course, but not only Europe. The United States too, in a certain sense.

Part of the reason—I think not part, maybe the main reason—that raises various rulers who belong more to the right, less inclusive, less tolerant, is a kind of public reaction to policies of inclusion, to policies that are too pluralistic or too inclusive, and people feel that there is some kind of struggle here and they feel powerless against it. And I think that really is what stands in the background of this particular war we’re in right now. But there’s something of course much broader here, something global, of which this may be a very extreme expression.

So I want to talk a little about this axis of evil, about this phenomenon, this phenomenon of evil. Is it even a phenomenon of evil? What is this evil? Meaning, are we talking about a collection of evil people who just happened to gather here—a collection of evil people cooperating in order to kill everyone who doesn’t think like them or look like them—or is there something a bit different here?

Personally, at least, I’m not inclined to think—as long as there is no clear evidence on the matter—I’m not inclined to think that the percentage of evil people is greater in certain societies than in others. Meaning, I think that usually—I don’t know, just my feeling—usually the distribution is more or less similar, and if we see some movement of evil, we need to see what its philosophical root is, because this isn’t just an accidental gathering of evil people. Meaning, that’s not the point. Especially when the gathering is not a voluntary gathering. Meaning, if we build, I don’t know, a gang of robbers, then yes, probably there will be more evil people there. There will be more evil people because they come there because they are evil. Meaning, that’s what gathers them there, that’s the gang’s common denominator. But in a place where we’re talking, for example, about a certain religion—say Islam—or any group of that kind, it’s not people who gathered there because they’re evil. They’re there because they’re there. They behave there in a certain way, but it doesn’t seem to me plausible to attribute this to the idea that somehow in the Muslim world more evil people gathered than in the Jewish world, the Christian world, or whatever, or the Chinese world. Meaning, that’s not the point. The point is not evil people.

Maybe I’ll use a well-known saying of Dawkins, right—Dawkins, as part of his war against religions and religious conceptions, says that in every society there are good people and there are evil people. But only in a religious society are there good people who behave badly. Meaning, everywhere good people behave well, bad people behave badly. But a religious society, in his view—I’m quoting him right now—a religious society can cause good people to behave badly. That doesn’t happen in a non-religious society; that’s his claim.

Now, I think there’s something to that, even though it’s a bit infuriating and even though I’m on the other side of the barricade. But I think it’s hard to deny the fact that there is something there. Only I think it doesn’t necessarily speak about religions in the accepted sense—religions, that is—but rather there is something here that is expressed in religions but doesn’t have to be specifically in the context of religions. Maybe you could say beliefs, ideologies. It’s very easy to move to communism and fascism and Nazism, or all kinds of things like that, which were not religious conceptions, but there too there was a very strong ideology that caused people—who I assume were, at least in part, good people—to behave badly. And so I would expand Dawkins’s statement, not reject it but on the contrary expand it. Expand it to worlds that are not only religious, but worlds in which there are certain ideologies. And ideologies have a bad property—they also have good properties—but they have a bad property: they can cause good people to behave badly. They can also cause bad people to behave well; that depends on the ideology. But that’s not what I want to say. I’m disconnecting the question of what my attitude is toward the ideology, the movement, the conception, the group, from my attitude toward the people who hold that movement, ideology, conception. There can be good people who behave badly. There can be bad people who behave well.

And in a certain sense that’s a little encouraging. It’s a little encouraging because changing people, I think, is quite hard, but dealing with ideologies—of course it isn’t easy, certainly not with fanatical ideologies—but maybe at least it’s possible. It’s possible because you’re not changing the wiring, right? You’re changing the software, not the hardware. And in that sense I think there is here, after all, a somewhat more optimistic look at this terribly black-and-white picture that we tend to see around us.

So I want to speak really about the concept of fundamentalism. And fundamentalism basically describes, I would say for our purposes, two things at first glance. From one angle it is a return to the sources. Return to the sources is often described as a kind of fundamentalism, right, in the literal sense. “Fundamental” means basic, so to return to the basis, return to the source. But there is something very similar and yet different in fundamentalism—or another kind—and that is clinging to the sources, not returning to the sources. That’s not always the same thing. Very often to create a stronger connection to the sources does not necessarily mean that I cling to them fanatically. Think about the movement of returning to the Jewish bookshelf that has existed in Israel in the last generation. That is a movement that does want to return to the sources in some sense—not necessarily through commitment, I don’t think—but yes, through some sort of connection, at least cultural. That is not at all bound up with fanatical clinging to the sources. So these are two different things. You can call this fundamentalism, and you can call the second thing fundamentalism too.

So already here I want to put the first piece on the board and say that the fact that people believe in sources, or even are willing to return to sources or identify more with sources, is not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is what you do when you want to connect to sources—meaning, what your attitude toward the sources is. Do you relate to them as something absolute, binding, from which one may not deviate and there’s nothing to discuss, nothing to subject to critical examination—or not? You want some kind of connection, you believe that it’s true, that this is a correct framework, but you do not lose yourself, you do not nullify yourself before it; rather, you want to find yourself within it. A bit like panentheism, as philosophers call it. Is the world inside the Holy One, blessed be He, or is the world the Holy One, blessed be He? That’s pantheism. So here too: I can act within the sources and I can cling to the sources, and that’s not exactly the same thing. Both can be spoken of as fundamentalism or as commitment to sources, but I think there is a major difference between them, and I’ll speak about that further on.

Very often fundamentalism gets connected, for us, to evil or extreme wickedness. There is evil in all sorts of places, but something extreme is usually perceived as, or linked to, fundamentalism. But it seems to me that philosophically this is only a special case of fundamentalism. Meaning, if I define fundamentalism in the philosophical sense, then it seems to me that the definition—again, of course you can define as you wish—but it seems to me that this captures the essence, the core of the concept. Fundamentalism is holding a conception that I am not willing to subject to the test of critical thought. That is called fundamentalism.

Now notice that fundamentalism in this definition can be fundamentalism for good. Meaning, someone who holds moral ideas, good ideas, all kinds of ideas, and is unwilling to subject them to critical examination. He is not attentive to counterarguments, he is not willing to hear criticism, he is not willing to reconsider the principles or his interpretation of those principles or whatever it may be. He is a fundamentalist. It may be more pleasant to live next to him than to live next to ISIS or al-Qaeda. But philosophically these two sides are both fundamentalist, in the sense that their beliefs or ideologies do not stand the test of critical thought. They are above thought. Meaning, this is something not open at all—I don’t even allow myself to criticize it, qualify it, interpret it.

In this sense, by the way, if we look at the Christian world—and in the Jewish world there are the same divisions—in the Christian world, for example, Protestantism is much more fundamentalist than Catholicism, even though many people perhaps think the opposite. Because Protestantism speaks about returning to the sources, often—not all Protestants of course, it’s a huge world, but at least some of them—and they are unwilling to accept interpretations. Meaning, what is in the sources as is, that is what obligates. Catholicism, by contrast, for example gives a mandate to the pope—right, to the sages of the generations, in our language—to make interpretations, to adapt things to circumstances, to change principles that could have been basic principles. And the later popes have indeed made some fairly far-reaching changes. Therefore, specifically on this axis I’ve defined here as fundamentalism—an unwillingness to subject things to critical examination—Protestantism is much more fundamentalist than Catholicism, precisely because there is no pope. Precisely because there is no pope and no one who can truly receive authority to speak on behalf of the Holy Scriptures, or adapt the Holy Scriptures to reality, or something like that. The Scriptures stand on their own and they are what obligate. No one can go against them.

And we know this among us too, by the way—Pharisees versus Sadducees, or Karaites. It’s a very similar division. A very similar division, and in fact the Pharisees are less fundamentalist, because the Pharisees are willing to make derashot, willing to make changes, willing to make adaptations. There are sages, and you can call it da’at Torah and popes and whatever you want, but in this sense there is a positive side to it—positive, again, if I assume fundamentalism is negative. There is a positive side to it because we allow ourselves to involve ourselves too in the question of what the Holy Scriptures say, and we do not completely nullify ourselves before the Holy Scriptures, despite all the slogans people keep saying all the time: of course I’m nullified before the Torah and I’m nothing compared to it and it’s all just Torah, Torah, Torah. But in the end, what the Torah says is often what I put into its mouth. And therefore the discourse can be very fundamentalist, but the final outcome is not fundamentalist. Meaning, the final outcome is something that does make adaptations to the sources; it does not cling to them in a fanatical, blind, uncompromising, or uncritical way.

And precisely those who do not accept popes and not da’at Torah and nothing—think about the hilltop youth. The hilltop youth are the equivalent of extreme Protestants in the Jewish world, because the hilltop youth basically want to return to the sources. They do not accept the authority even of rabbis, great rabbis of the generation—however you define your great rabbis, they do not accept those authorities. Why? Because the rabbis interpret the Torah in a way that is not really faithful to the source, and they want adherence to the source. They are unwilling to accept all the compromises and pragmatism of rabbis and halakhic decisors and things of that kind. And in this sense, even though there is rebellion here against authority, it is rebellion in the name of fundamentalism. It is not rebellion against fundamentalism, it is rebellion on behalf of fundamentalism. Meaning, it is rebellion against approaches that are not fundamentalist.

And therefore, very often approaches of da’at Torah and popes and absolute beliefs, which seem fundamentalist and do have a dimension of that, actually reflect something very non-fundamentalist, because they basically say there are human beings who can speak in the name of the Torah, who can give interpretations of the Torah, who can take things away from their simple meaning, who can do whatever. Now, very often in order to justify this they say: they have da’at Torah. What he sees we do not see, and somehow he saw it in the Torah, even though what he says is the opposite of the Torah and we all understand that too—but he has da’at Torah. So very often these fundamentalist slogans come to cover over or justify non-fundamentalist conceptions.

And so we have to pay very close attention to these phenomena, because the issue of fundamentalism and non-fundamentalism often appears in a very twisted way. It’s a kind of fractal. Meaning, within the fundamentalist side there appears precisely a non-fundamentalist facet whose justification is itself fundamentalist, and it all gets terribly mixed and replicated within itself. So it’s not so simple to describe ideological, religious, political processes in terms of yes-fundamentalist or no-fundamentalist. But in the philosophical and theoretical world things are always much easier than in the practical world, so let’s sail over there.

I’ll perhaps give an example, one more example or two, of why fundamentalism does not have to go in the direction of evil. There is fundamentalism in favor of conceptions that are plainly good conceptions. Think about climate activists—people whose intentions are good by all accounts. You can agree, disagree, I don’t care, I’m not getting into the argument right now over how near the disaster really is and how bad our situation really is—that’s another question, I’m not entering it right now. But those who truly devote themselves with their whole personality, their money, their energy, to activity for the climate or activity for LGBT rights or activity for—I don’t know—various things of that sort, these are people who in the end are deeply devoted to an ideology that is overall a good one—in their eyes certainly, but I think also in mine. The problem is that often the feeling is that their adherence to the ideology comes without any willingness to accept counterarguments or criticism or reservations or anything like that. So they are fundamentalists, even though they come from the secular side of the map—leftists if you like, or whatever. Here too there are all kinds of strange links. It is fundamentalism in every sense of the word. It’s just a kind of fundamentalism that is sometimes more comfortable to live next to than ISIS. But sometimes not. Meaning, sometimes it can really lead to violent acts for the sake of those good values—genuinely good and positive values—that it is devoted to.

In that sense you can see that fundamentalism can appear both on the religious sides and on the non-religious sides, or anti-religious, or progressive—there are lots of broad generalizations here that are not precise, but we know what we’re talking about. And therefore I want to claim that the common denominator of all these phenomena is unwillingness to subject your conception or your conceptions to the test of critical thought. I don’t care at all what those conceptions are. Whether the conception is a religious conception that one must murder everyone who doesn’t look like you, or Mother Teresa devoting herself in order to save people and help them, or climate activists, or whoever—all of these are fundamentalists. Fundamentalism, in my view, is a very problematic thing irrespective of its contents. Of course I would rather be next to Mother Teresa than next to al-Baghdadi, just on survival grounds, but in terms of my philosophical critique, it is the same critique of both. Meaning, they are both fundamentalists, and in that sense I have the same criticism.

The criticism is that every conception, every position, everything, must stand the test of critical thought. The moment you do not subject something to the test of critical thought, a problem of fundamentalism arises. And it doesn’t matter at all what that something is—if it is from the right, from the left, religious, secular, whatever you want. The moment there is something that is beyond criticism, beyond critical thought, in my eyes we are in a problem of fundamentalism. And therefore I want to broaden the canvas and not speak specifically about the axis of evil, where it is very easy for all of us to see fundamentalism because there it is fundamentalism for evil. And therefore it is very easy to identify fundamentalism immediately with evil. But what is problematic about fundamentalism is not the evil, but the lack of criticality. And sometimes this is lack of criticality for good purposes, for good concepts.

Yes, even in our public discourse today you can see complete fundamentalism here in Israel between groups where nobody is killing one another yet, thank God, but you can see very strong fundamentalism from all sides. In the sense that people are not willing to hear counterarguments, not willing to reconsider their position; everything is painted in black and white, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s Netanyahu supporters, anti-Netanyahu people, Kaplan protesters, or right-wing protesters, whatever. It doesn’t matter. All these churches wandering around here in the world—the problem there is not their ideas at all. With everyone’s ideas, more or less, I think one can manage. They think not, but they’re mistaken. One can manage with almost everyone’s ideas, apart from truly extreme edges. What one cannot manage with is the impossibility of having a dialogue. And the impossibility of having a dialogue exists in all directions, even though each side is convinced that it is actually very open and only the other side is fundamentalist. You can say that about me too, so I’m certainly open to hearing that criticism as well—but anyway, let that include me too. Still, I think that really is the picture.

The war, the wars or struggles that are happening in the world today, are basically struggles between poles that are all fundamentalist. Contrary to what is often sold to us—no, this is a struggle of fundamentalism, sons of light against sons of darkness, liberals and tolerant people against murderers, or something like that. No. It is that too, but beyond that, it is also a struggle of fundamentalists against fundamentalists. And very often there is a justification for being fundamentalist because the one facing you is fundamentalist, and you can’t be a sucker, as they say—defensive democracy. Defensive democracy means I’m allowed to be fundamentalist because the one facing me is also fundamentalist. I can’t be tolerant because then I’ll lose the battle. I’ll be shooting myself in the foot. By the way, that’s an argument I don’t dismiss lightly; it has a place. But notice that because this argument exists, its result is that from all sides fundamentalism is created, churches are created, they have priests, they have principles of faith, dogmas, and that’s it. Meaning, it is not open to critical thought. And that is true on all sides.

I don’t know, I have quite a lot of experience speaking with all sorts of poles in society here—in Israeli society at least. Of all kinds. I really do have quite a rich dialogue with many different kinds of people, and I truly feel that there is something shared among all of them. This fundamentalism characterizes all sides and all directions, and that is what is so deeply frustrating in this matter.

You can see, for example, a fascinating connection—even though you can discuss whether it is really part of the same phenomenon. In the last year or two you suddenly see some wondrous connection, or a sharpening of a connection that had begun earlier—a wondrous connection between two very extreme poles: Muslim fundamentalism and progressive fundamentalism on the left, which operate in remarkable symbiosis in many places around the world. Meaning, LGBT activists can go to endless demonstrations in favor of Hamas, when it’s obvious that if they were in Gaza they would hang them or drown them. And somehow a symbiosis is created between fundamentalists from every direction. And it seems to me that if you look at left-wing activists who are not fundamentalist—not fundamentalist in their ideas about climate or whatever, LGBT rights and so on—people who support these things but whom you can talk to, usually they won’t be Hamas supporters. They won’t be Hamas supporters, even though there is a kind of correlation there, that the left goes with Hamas in the world—I’m talking globally, not here in Israel, right? Meaning, the governing groups, right-wing governments, are usually the ones that are pro-Israel. Meaning, right-wing rule is pro-Israel, left-wing rule is usually anti-Israel. Usually. It’s a very high correlation. But it seems to me that one really has to distinguish here between fundamentalists on the left and non-fundamentalists on the left and on the right. And this strange affinity between the two opposites is formed as a unity of opposites, between the extreme opposites, because both are fundamentalists. Not because—well, both are fundamentalists; the “because” here is a bit problematic. Meaning, fundamentalism alone is not enough to explain this connection. I’m just drawing your attention to the fact that suddenly a struggle has arisen here in which the axis of struggle has rotated. Now the struggle is not left versus right, religious versus secular, and so on, but fundamentalists versus those who are not such. And on the fundamentalist side are both the left and the right, or both the progressives and the religious, and on the non-fundamentalist side are those in the middle, who can be left, can be right, but are also willing to hear criticism, reservations, counterarguments, at one level or another. It’s all very schematic and very generalized, but I think there is a skeleton here that is a correct skeleton.

So I want to enter a somewhat more systematic and conceptual analysis of this issue, and I’ve done this more than once, so I’ll do it here briefly. I tend to describe the history of civilization, in the West at least, in parallel to the maturation of a private individual. And the claim is that it can be divided schematically into three successive stages: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Both the maturation of the West, let’s call it that—if we speak of the West, because I don’t want to enter into philosophy; “the West” here also includes Islam, meaning not the Far East, that’s what I mean—and the maturation of a private individual.

Let’s begin with a private individual. When a person is a child, the stage of childhood is the first stage; it is a dogmatic stage. It is the stage in which the child says: if the parents say it, they probably know. If he wants to know something, he asks the parents, asks the teachers; whatever they tell him, he accepts; it is probably true. He does not doubt them. At a certain stage the child matures and reaches a point that one might call, say, the beginning of adolescence. And in the adolescent stage you suddenly begin to hear questions from the child toward the adult, the parents, the teachers: wait a second, who told you? Prove it. Maybe it’s not true. These “Matrix”-style questions from children are terribly annoying because there’s not really any way to answer them, because if you answer, then about the answer too he says to you, wait, who told you? Prove it. Meaning, you’ll never get out of it.

So a critique begins among adolescents. They stop taking what adults say as self-evident, absolutely clear, absolute, and the adolescent rebellion begins. I’m speaking of the intellectual adolescent rebellion, not the emotional and psychological dimensions. The adolescent stage ends when the adolescent reaches the following sad insight. The adolescent rebellion is basically founded on the adolescent wanting justification, proof. Prove it, who told you? Give me proof and I’ll accept it; no proof, then no—I’m a rational person. You won’t buy me anymore with the slogans that worked when I was a child. Now I already have my own opinion. Give me proof, I’ll accept it. No proof, then it’s nonsense; I’m not willing to accept it.

A person who aspires to rationality, to acting on the basis of arguments and proofs, with logic as his guiding light—okay? At the end of adolescence he… matures further and arrives at the conclusion that nothing can be proved. Nothing can be proved. Why? Because every proof is based on assumptions, obviously. In the background, at the beginning of the discussion, there are always some principles that you have to accept. You can’t prove everything, because then it’s an infinite regress. Every argument that proves this claim is based on those assumptions. If you also want to prove those assumptions in order to accept them, then you’ll have to build arguments based on prior assumptions, and so on; you’ll have to retreat infinitely many steps. Meaning, you can’t prove everything. Every argument that proves some proposition is based on propositions or assumptions for which there is no proof. Therefore the adolescent who basically says, I will be rational, I will accept only things for which I have proof, actually reaches a state in which he cannot accept anything. Because he says: there is nothing that really has proof. I was very optimistic when I thought I would accept things with proof and reject whatever lacked proof and I’d be a rational person. At some point he suddenly discovers he can’t accept anything. Nothing has proof.

Now a crisis is created. This crisis leads us into adulthood. And this adulthood can happen in three ways, through three channels of maturation. How do I know there are three? Conceptual analysis. Let’s think: what is the crisis at the end of the Enlightenment based on? This crisis is based on two principles. One principle: only what is proved is acceptable; only what is certain is acceptable. The second principle: there is nothing certain; there is nothing that can be proved. The combination of these two things together creates the crisis.

How can one emerge from the crisis? One option is to remain with both insights, to say: only a certain thing is acceptable; nothing is certain; therefore nothing is acceptable—that is, to remain skeptical. That is the first route out of the crisis, the skeptical route. The second route out of the crisis is to give up the second assumption. True, only a certain thing is acceptable—I remain with that. But it is not true that nothing is certain. How can that be? After all, every argument, every proof, is based on assumptions. How can you reach certainty? There is a crushing logical consideration here—how can it be bypassed? How can one say no, no, I have ways of reaching certainty? The answer is: by a fundamentalist path. Here we arrive at fundamentalism. What does that mean? If I have sources of knowledge that are charismatic, transcendent, above reason, something spiritual—call it whatever names you want—something not based on a logical argument, something above logic, above thought, above reason. That is a fundamentalist conception. There is something that is not open to critical thought, and it will give me the desired certainty. Why is this good? Because after all we remember that only a certain thing I am willing to accept. I am a rational person. So rationality in that definition can only be either skeptical or fundamentalist. Meaning, either you are skeptical if you adopt both assumptions, or if you adopt the first and reject the second, you are a fundamentalist. Because then you have other sources of certainty, not logical, rational sources. No problem: you can hold these conceptions because they are certain, and certain things are acceptable. Anything else is nothing, speculation, falsehood, heresy, doesn’t count, not worth considering at all. That’s the second option.

The third option, of course—it’s simple combinatorics—the third option is to adopt the second claim and give up the first. Either I adopt both, or I adopt the first and give up the second, or I adopt the second and give up the first. What does it mean to adopt the second and give up the first? I say: true, there is nothing certain. I’m not going to transcendent things, fundamentalism—no. There is nothing certain, that’s true. But I am not skeptical. Why am I not skeptical? Because I do not think that only a certain thing is acceptable. I give up the first assumption. It is not true that only a certain thing is acceptable. What the adolescent thought at the beginning—he thought he would be rational, that he would accept only proved things, certain things—no, that was an illusion. There is no need to set such a high bar for acceptable claims. Acceptable claims do not have to be certain. Even if they are not certain, they are acceptable. It is enough that it makes sense. Common sense is enough for me. I do not need logical proof. I do not need absolute certainty. This I call the third kind of maturation. I call it synthetic maturation. “Synthetic” for reasons connected with Kantian concepts, and I won’t get into that here.

So basically we have three ways—there is no fourth way—three ways out of the crisis. Out of this crisis. To adopt both assumptions and be skeptical; to adopt the first and give up the second and be fundamentalist; to adopt the second and give up the first and be synthetic. “Synthetic” means a person willing to accept uncertain claims as acceptable claims. He is willing to accept them even though they are not certain, even though he has no proof for them. But he is willing to accept them.

Notice: this is not skepticism, and it is also not pluralism. This can be complete monism. A person like this can be a monist, meaning someone who believes in one truth and no other. He can be that. Why? He says: what I think is what is true; that is the truth, and everything else is not true. The only thing is—I’m not sure of it. Fine. There is a difference between saying I am not sure of something and saying this thing is speculation and its opposite is exactly equal to it, meaning it has no advantage over its opposite. Or in simpler language I’d say: there is a difference between a fifty-fifty doubt and an eighty-twenty doubt. Meaning, if I have an eighty-twenty doubt, I say eighty percent is good enough. For me that is a correct claim. True, I am not certain, but it is a correct claim. Someone who claims the other proposition is not right because that is only twenty percent. I am not sure he is wrong, but he is not right. So you cannot say that I am a pluralist in the sense that I have no one truth, or that I acknowledge all truths with equal weight. I have my truth; I just give up certainty. I do not identify the concept of truth with the concept of certainty.

And notice: the fundamentalist and the skeptic both identify truth with certainty. Both of them. Both the skeptic and the fundamentalist. Only the skeptic says: truth is only certainty; since there is no certainty, there is no truth. The fundamentalist says: truth is only certainty, and I have certainty—not rational or logical, but religious, or whatever, spiritual, transcendent. Fine, then I’m a fundamentalist. What they have in common is that both identify truth with certainty.

Now that is the general move. I want to claim that exactly the same thing happens in the world. Up to this point I have described the maturation of a person, or the options for a person’s maturation. I think this is also a process that describes, schematically and very crudely of course, the development of civilization in the West. The claim is that at first there was dogmatism. Yes, the tribal magicians told you how to bring rain down, how to cure diseases. No one thought to check them, no one thought, wait, who told you? Prove it. Fine, there are clear truths, the tradition hands them down, and that’s true because the tradition says so.

At some stage the Enlightenment revolt arrives. You can identify the Enlightenment revolt, say, with ancient Greece. Of course, all these are overly sharp markers. It could begin a bit earlier, a bit later, but you can identify it more or less with ancient Greece—and ancient Greece itself spans quite a few centuries. And there, systematic thought begins, logical thought is created, Aristotle’s Organon, and philosophical, rational, ordered thinking begins. And people begin asking of dogmatism, of religious conceptions, of mythologies even in Greece itself: who told you? Prove it. Maybe it isn’t true. I can describe other logical structures to you. Why are you so convinced that this is what’s true? Do you have an argument? Do you have proof? That is the Enlightenment revolt.

This Enlightenment—or modern rationalist period—if I need to identify where it ends, in my view it ends in the twentieth century. Meaning, it begins more or less in Greece and ends in the twentieth century. In the twentieth century some sort of crisis arises. It has sociological and historical explanations—World War II and so on, doesn’t matter—but on the philosophical level some sort of crisis arises, in which at first, yes—say at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century—modernism ruled the roost. There was great optimism: science would solve all the universe’s problems. Human problems, the universe’s problems, medicine, law, morality—everything was scientific. A science of morality, a science of law, a science of whatever you want. And there was tremendous hope that science and systematic, logical, rational thinking would solve all the problems.

Around World War II—and again, it may be because of it, it may be connected to it, I’m not getting into those correlations at all—a crisis happened. The crisis showed us that science does not solve the fundamental problems of the human being and of society. Yes, true, we have things called the social sciences, but it seems to me they haven’t solved many problems to this day. Maybe they created a few. Perhaps they describe the phenomena correctly; even that I’m not sure of. But they don’t really solve them. Meaning, we cannot decide the difficult questions that trouble society and the individual in a scientific way. Those are moral questions, ideological questions. Science is not the right tool—not science and not logic in the narrow, rigorous sense. Okay? And therefore a very great crisis arose. Because if nothing is certain, and only a certain thing is acceptable, just as with the private individual, a fracture is created.

Out of this fracture there emerged—or should emerge, and I think did emerge—three groups, exactly parallel to the private individual. One group that emerged is postmodernism. It began earlier, admittedly, but it crystallized in the middle of the twentieth century and somewhat afterward. It basically adopts skeptical maturation on the plane of the private individual. Because there are narratives, everyone has his own narrative, there is no one truth better than another, and therefore this is basically parallel to what I called skeptical maturation. What does that mean? They basically adopt the conception that truth is only certainty. Notice that the postmodernists adopt the conception that truth is only certainty, but since there is certainty about nothing, therefore there is no truth either. Meaning, their standard for truth is a very high standard, just like the fundamentalists’.

The second group that emerged from there is the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists, of course, did not emerge only then; they existed before too. But it became a distinct group following this process. And fundamentalism basically tells us: there is an absolute certain truth, religious of some kind, and therefore we have solved the problem—we have certainty. And still, truth is only a certain thing. In that sense it is like the skeptics. The struggle between these two, with which I opened this talk, is a struggle between two groups, both of which identify truth with certainty. Both of them. Both Western pluralism and inclusion, and fundamentalism—Muslim if you like, or Christian or whoever—agree that truth is only a certain thing. Again, everything is very broad-brush and very generalized; I apologize, but that’s the purpose. The purpose here is to try to see a very, very large picture. There are many shades and sub-shades, but it seems to me there is such a large picture.

So the struggle between them is a struggle that there isn’t much way to move forward in. They certainly cannot talk to one another, because truth is absolute truth. One says only logic; the other says from heaven, from Allah, from al-Baghdadi, I don’t know from where. There is nothing to discuss. Meaning, all we can do is at most fight, or I don’t know what, or at least try to distance ourselves from one another and not harm one another. But we don’t really have a way to progress in this struggle.

The third channel of maturation is the synthetic channel. The synthetic channel says: I do not give up concepts of truth; I give up concepts of certainty. It is not only a certain thing that is acceptable. I am willing to live with eighty percent, willing to live with something that seems reasonable to me and go with it. That is my truth. And someone who says otherwise is mistaken. Not with certainty. It is not that I am certainly right and he is certainly wrong, but I have a position, I have a position and I go with it.

And in that sense I think this is the only alternative that can bring some kind of progress in the struggle between the first two poles, because basically they have no shared discourse, precisely because they do have a shared point. The shared point, the identification of truth with certainty, does not allow dialogue between them. And if you say to him, listen, sir—he accuses me of being a pluralist because after all I’m not sure, I’m not certain. No, no, no, I have a truth; I’m not a pluralist. The other accuses me of being dogmatic because I do have a truth. I say no, no, no, I’m not dogmatic because I’m willing to accept criticism of my truth. I’m not certain of it. Let’s hear if you have good arguments. We’ll listen. We’ll see. I’m willing to hear that. So I’m some kind of intermediate level that both sides very much enjoy mocking, slandering, labeling. But they basically are not willing to understand that there is a third path here, a third alternative as against the other two conceptions.

And I think the only way to try to create dialogue and make progress is if we adopt this conception, because that is its entire essence. Its whole essence is: let’s have a dialogue, let’s clarify the matter. We probably won’t arrive at a certain decision, but maybe we can manage to persuade one another well enough that we’ll adopt something, reach agreements. And therefore I think the only way to deal both with fundamentalism and with postmodernism is not each one against the other, but a synthetic alternative that will try to deal with them by means of arguments and not by means of rifles. And in that sense I think the philosophical analysis I’ve presented here, in a nutshell, in capsule form, has very great importance also on the practical-current-events level. Very great importance. Because if we understand the roots of the struggles, we can perhaps try to see what to do with them or how to move forward other than shooting at each other.

Now please—very often there is such a phenomenon, I said it earlier too, that because the pluralist feels that the one standing opposite him is a fundamentalist, and you can’t talk with him, then the pluralist creates for himself his own fundamentalism. Today it’s called defensive democracy. Defensive democracy—which is an idea I’m certainly willing to accept in itself—but it seems to me that today it gets translated into creating an alternative dogmatism. It has become a dogmatic religious conception unwilling to accept anything that doesn’t look like it. And the reason for this is apparently that they see opposite them fundamentalists with whom there’s nothing to talk about, so what are you going to do? You can’t be a sucker, you can’t surrender and let them kill you, so you have to create a counter-fundamentalism. Because people do not sufficiently internalize, I think, that there is also an alternative: to remain with a position that disagrees with the fundamentalist without being certain of it, but not to accept everything he says. No, because I have a truth of my own too. Even if I’m not certain of it, I’m certainly willing to hear his arguments. He may persuade me; that’s fine. I’d be glad if he would hear my arguments too. But I do have a position. It is not true that if I am not a fundamentalist then I have no position, and if so then I’ve already lost the battle. Meaning, because he’ll kill me, and then I need defensive democracy, so I create a church of my own, and that’s how you arrive at the extreme phenomena we see today, by the way in Israel too and in the whole world, of a takeover by circles that are sure about themselves that they are liberal, and nothing could be further from liberalism. Meaning, some terribly fanatical, terribly dogmatic conception of principles that once were liberal and today have become dogmas—dogmas about which one may cast no doubt, which do not stand the test of critical thought, and which nobody is willing to qualify.

Now of course this is only one extreme pole of this movement. But often the extreme poles are the ones that make the loudest noise. Therefore the struggle appears as a struggle between churches. And I’ve written about that on the site more than once: that most of the arguments conducted today are arguments between churches. Meaning, the priests of these against the priests of those, the devotees of these against the devotees of those. There isn’t really true dialogue in which you hear arguments, are persuaded or not persuaded, weigh them, examine them, and form a position. Because to do that you need to hold a synthetic position. A synthetic position is a position that says: listen, the truth is like this in my view—but eighty percent, seventy percent, I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Certainly possible. I have no exalted source on this matter. I have my considerations, considerations of common sense based on assumptions for which I have no proof, but it makes sense to me, it seems reasonable to me. But by all means, you’re invited to speak with me and show me that I’m mistaken, persuade me. I have no problem with that in principle.

By the way, I’ve also written more than once on the site that I oppose all laws that muzzle speech, including the law that doesn’t allow Nazi statements or Holocaust denial. I think the matter should be completely open. Again, where there is an immediate danger, that’s something else. But the mere fact that there is a very extreme view that seems very problematic—so what? I am not willing for the minister of education to decide for me whether there was or wasn’t a Holocaust. If someone claims there was no Holocaust, I want him to voice it, present his reasons, and I will weigh them. Either I’ll accept them or I won’t. I do not want political commissars deciding for me what will and won’t be heard in the public square. And therefore in that sense there is a difference between a pluralist church and syntheticity. Syntheticity says: no, I think you are wrong, I think your error is harmful too, but if you have arguments I’m willing to hear them, because maybe I’m mistaken; I’m not sure I’m right. That won’t stop me from fighting you with full force when you threaten me. I have my positions and I’m not embarrassed by any of them. But I am certainly willing to hear, certainly willing to be critical, and certainly not certain of my conceptions.

And therefore I think this position—which again, from the fundamentalist side they call postmodernism, and from the postmodern side they call fundamentalism—why? Because from the postmodern side they see that you do hold a truth, so you’re a fundamentalist. From the fundamentalist side they say, wait a second, but you’re not certain—ah, so you’re postmodern, you’re skeptical, you don’t count, you’re not a real religious person. Okay? That’s not true. I think there is truth and I also think it is not certain. Notice: this is neither a fundamentalist position nor a postmodern position. But from both sides, of course, they choose to look at the half of the cup that suits them and ignore the other half of the cup—or the other half of the glass.

So in that sense it seems to me that this analysis gives, or sheds, some sort of comprehensive light. Gives or sheds some kind of comprehensive light, even with semi-practical implications.

I perhaps now want to look more closely, more specifically, at fundamentalism itself. There’s a fundamentalist person standing opposite me—I don’t know, an ISIS man, a cruel mass murderer. Okay? How do I relate to this person, to this phenomenon? On the one hand, it’s a very dangerous phenomenon, because here it’s not only an opinion, of course; there are also implementations. But on the other hand, I refuse to see such a person as evil, at least not automatically. He is a religious believer, he is certain that Allah told him to do this in the name of—I don’t know—whatever mission and its faithful ones, to do this thing, and he does what Allah told him. In the end, he really is doing what he believes in. He’s not doing it because he’s evil, or at least not necessarily. There may be evil people there too, but not necessarily. He’s doing it because—he may be doing it because it’s a religious principle.

We know as Jews: our principles, say—we don’t have the power and the rule, and therefore, as the Kuzari says, it’s hard to compare us to others. But if you look at Jewish law at its source, if we had power and rule here, I’m not sure we wouldn’t also be killing various people, lowering them into pits and not raising them out, and all kinds of things of that sort, because that is what Jewish law says. And I want to claim that someone who would do that is not necessarily an evil person. He is doing something that in my eyes is wrong, but he is not necessarily an evil person. As Dawkins said: he is a good person whom religion obligates to behave badly. Okay? And so the same thing exists in the Muslim world; it just appears there in more extreme forms.

So in this context I want to claim—I return to my starting point—that bad actions do not necessarily indicate bad people. Sometimes ideology causes it. On the other hand, there is another side to the same coin. The other side of the same coin is that the fact that you believe in a certain religious or ideological conception is not automatically an exemption claim. It does not automatically give you an exemption claim. Because I expect you as a human being also to examine what al-Baghdadi says to you—or, to distinguish, what Moses our teacher says. I am not willing to accept anyone in an absolute way. I’m not talking about the great rabbis of the generation or those who appoint themselves as the great rabbis of the generation today. I’m talking about people who really are great, who were great, and whom all of us—or I at least—think are great. And still, I’m not willing to accept everything they say as absolute truth without criticism. No one.

That’s what the Talmud says: “Had Joshua son of Nun told me this, I would not obey him.” Meaning, there are things that even if Joshua son of Nun says to me, I do not accept. Because I am not willing to accept anyone’s words absolutely. And it’s not that I don’t respect him. I respect him very much, and therefore I will seriously weigh what he says. But in the end, my own intellectual criticism also has to enter, because I am not a fundamentalist.

And in that sense I do have criticism of believers who do bad things so long as they did not really do their homework. Meaning, if they did not subject things to some sort of critical examination, then yes, I do have a kind of claim against them. The fact that you believe does not exempt you from responsibility. You need to check: first, whether there is a Holy One, blessed be He; second, if there is, whether this is what He said. Maybe this is an interpretation. Maybe this is an incorrect implementation under these circumstances. There are many things still to examine even after we have become convinced that this is what our religion instructs us or obligates us to do. And so the fact that I believe in something does not give me an automatic free pass.

So on the one hand it does mean that I am not necessarily an evil person. On the other hand one must be very careful about negligence in decision-making. If you make decisions to obey in a negligent way, without criticism of those decisions, then there is certainly room to make claims against you.

I once gave—I think I’ve told this story before—I was at an interfaith conference here at ORT Ramla high school, an Arab high school. All the students were Arab, all the staff were Arab. There was an interfaith gathering there: rabbis, qadis, Christians, Druze, all kinds of Muslims and so on. And they all spoke there with the students, each one in turn for some time. And when I spoke with the students, I said to them: look, I see here—and I don’t know the other religions well enough—but I see here a phenomenon that I know from the Jewish world. And indeed, many of the people there, the religious leaders who were there, said: listen, listen to your religious sages, or something like that. Young people do rash, violent, extreme things—listen to your religious sages. And I told them that in my eyes the instruction is exactly the opposite: do not obey anyone. Do not obey anyone, because obedience is a terribly dangerous thing. Absolute obedience is a terribly dangerous thing.

True, if all the moderate religious sages can moderate the extremists, then fine. But if by chance there is one extreme religious sage and everyone listens to him absolutely, then the whole group becomes very extreme, including the good people within it. And in that sense, dispersing authority—even on the practical level—is a better method than hanging everything on some enlightened ruler who will restrain the public. I believe more in that conception. Meaning: yes, make independent decisions. That’s what I mean. So—not to obey the sage.

Now what was strange there was that during the break, after we had finished speaking, we spoke among ourselves with the other people, not the students, and they really scolded me. They were really angry with me, exactly the same scoldings I hear within the religious world: what do you mean, you’re undermining religious authority, and where will this lead, and all kinds of things like that. And it was very interesting to see that the whole world is one workshop. Meaning, the same dilemmas, the same phenomena exist everywhere. We are often convinced that among us there are none of the things that exist there. There is everything, of all kinds and types. The similarity is really surprising. In recent years I’ve had the chance to look a bit at processes in the Christian and Muslim worlds, and the similarity to what happens among us is really surprising. Again, different doses, different levels of extremism, but the similarity is surprising. It is really the same thing. Almost everything happens everywhere.

Ultimately the claim is that the dispersal of authority, or the non-absoluteness of commitment to sources or to leaders or to whoever it may be, ultimately gives—at least I think—a better answer also on the practical plane. It gives a better answer on the practical plane. Everyone is terribly afraid: what will happen if there isn’t absolute trust? Then there’ll be sloppiness. That may be true too. But absolute trust has the difficulties that it itself creates. Absolute trust creates difficulties. From one fundamentalist person there develops a fundamentalist group all led in his image and likeness. Yes, the law of large numbers stops working. Usually the law of large numbers says this person will offset that person, and if you let everyone make decisions, then in the end some reasonable average will emerge. Each one will pull a bit this way, a bit that way, but on the large scale it will come out reasonable. But if you give one person control, then it is either perfect good or absolute evil, because one person takes the whole group to be in his image and likeness. And that is a very, very dangerous situation. I prefer the law of large numbers over extreme lotteries.

So what I’m basically saying here is that doubt—people often tell us today that doubt is a value, right? In the postmodern world doubt has become a value. I think there is something to that, but again, they took it too far. Doubt is a value only in the sense that there is value in not being a fundamentalist. There is value in subjecting everything to critical thought, and in the end the decision has to be yours—not your rabbi’s, and not Moses our teacher’s, and not even the Holy One, blessed be He’s, because in the end what the Holy One, blessed be He says passes through your interpretation and the question is what you understood, and so on. So be aware of that. Maybe you did not understand correctly. Don’t rush so quickly to carry out extreme acts just because the Holy One, blessed be He said so—certainly if that comes through various emissaries of His.

So I’m saying that doubt really does have value, but that is doubt in the constructive sense. It is doubt in the sense that it’s not one hundred percent but eighty. But in the postmodern world doubt became a value in the sense that it must be fifty-fifty. Meaning, everything that is not certain is speculation. That is basically the conception. Because truth, after all, is only certainty. So if it is ninety percent—there is no ninety percent. If it’s not one hundred percent then it’s fifty, or yes, depending on how many options there are, but one hundred divided by the number of options. The claim is: this doubt is not sacred doubt, far from it. It is stupid doubt, I would even say, but also harmful, because ninety percent is not fifty percent. There is no reason to turn ninety percent into fifty percent.

And so I do see value in casting doubt, but not doubt with an exclamation mark—doubt with a question mark. Let’s try to examine. Maybe I’m not right. Let’s hear arguments this way, hear arguments that way, form a more balanced and thoughtful position. But not doubt in the sense that comes out against every position, because positions must not exist. That, I think, is taking a correct principle one step too far.

In that sense, of course, these things can be applied within our own world too. Within our world too there are fundamentalist conceptions, and again, they usually do not murder in the name of those conceptions, but sometimes they do fairly extreme things in the name of those conceptions. Even murder can happen, but not only that. Usually not. And so even in our little patch of God’s earth one needs to know that the struggle against fundamentalism is very important on the one hand. On the other hand, the way to do it is not necessarily to create an alternative fundamentalism, a fundamentalism of the vacuum, doubt as an absolute value, right? Rather, a synthetic dialogue that says to the person: come, let’s sit and talk. Let’s see what your arguments are, let’s hear my arguments, and let’s see. Maybe we can move forward, maybe we can agree or disagree, draw closer, compromise, see, formulate different positions. I think that is a much more reasonable way to move forward.

And we move too quickly into alternative fundamentalism. In our discourse, for example, if there is a group we oppose, then everything it does is black. We are not willing to accept that there are certain acts that are actually okay or can come from motives that are okay. Everything is painted black, because against black there must come an alternative black, or white, right? But not gray. Gray will fail in battle. No—gray does not have to fail in battle. Gray can fight for its positions. It has positions. It just is not one hundred percent sure—eighty, ninety, okay—and I will fight for that because that is my position. Maybe my motivation will be lower; that’s the price, what can you do. But I think if we can create a synthetic position that has a position, has an ideology, has conceptions, even though it is not certain and is willing to fight for them, it seems to me that this is a much better alternative than creating a counter-dogmatism that only perpetuates the tension and leads nowhere. Again, when there is a threat to life one has to fight, obviously. I do not mean to be a pacifist. But where there is no threat to life, but rather various kinds of struggles, it is better to conduct them through dialogue and not through reciprocal entrenchment.

This has many expressions also in the world of halakhic thought. I’ve often spoken about first-order halakhic ruling and second-order halakhic ruling. Second-order halakhic ruling is adherence to precedents, and that is usually what halakhic decisors do—and certainly those who don’t decide for themselves. First-order halakhic ruling is conceptual analysis, a return to primary sources, and the fact that the Rashba writes something, or Rabbi Akiva Eiger or the Mishnah Berurah writes something—fine, that gets weighed, I’ll weigh it, and in the end I’ll decide whether I agree or I don’t agree. Again, the same tension between fundamentalism—clinging to the Rashba—and saying: the Rashba was a great man, I deeply respect his position, it has significant weight, but nothing is absolute. The alternative is not, okay, so I throw everything out, I don’t care about anything, the Rashba was an idiot. No, that’s not the alternative. There is a synthetic alternative that says: I am willing to weigh everything. I will give respect to those who deserve respect, but the fact that I give him respect does not mean he is certainly right, and it does not mean I nullify myself before him. I will issue the halakhic ruling as it seems right to me, not as it is written in the Rashba or in the Mishnah Berurah. I will read them and that will help me ultimately formulate my position—assuming, of course, that I’m qualified. I’m not claiming every child should do this. But as a model, as an ideal to strive for, it seems to me that here too we are touching from another angle on the question of fundamentalism.

The same thing—I’m now writing something, an article that will go up soon, on attitudes toward secular Jews. There was some discussion on the “Third Way” WhatsApp group about how one relates to secular Jews: “a child taken captive,” whether that concept is condescending or not condescending, and so on. And I said there in a brief comment—I elaborate more in the article—that in my view there is a problem in the discourse, in the methodology of the discourse, before the positions themselves. Because immediately we enter into a given conceptual system: apostate out of spite, apostate out of appetite, child taken captive, all kinds of things like that, and we try to label the person: wait, does he belong to this category, that one, maybe some combination. But we imprison ourselves within an existing discourse. We are not willing to take into account the possibility that maybe this entire discourse is simply irrelevant. We are in a completely different reality and need to formulate a different conceptual world for it. And one can do this in a way faithful to Jewish law, even if I do not adopt the existing halakhic concepts or the existing halakhic precedents.

And there too I see a certain kind of fundamentalism or second-order halakhic ruling that says: I immediately run to precedents, to concepts. There is such-and-such Rashba and such-and-such Shakh and this and that, and he says this and the Chazon Ish wrote that, and whether in our generation there is anyone who knows how to rebuke, or whether this is a child taken captive, and what the practical difference is between these two conceptions. Wait, wait, one second. Look at reality for a moment. See what we have here in reality. Who are these people? What motivates them? Secular Jews, right? How do you interpret this phenomenon? Now try to think whether it fits any of the existing concepts. In my view it fits none of them, as a result of changes that I think can even be described fairly clearly, and therefore one needs to develop a different conceptual system. And that’s perfectly fine; it is completely faithful to Jewish law.

I won’t get into the distinction I’ve also made several times in the past between simple conservatism and midrashic conservatism. There is a conservatism that clings to the principles of Jewish law as they are, and there is a conservatism that takes the principles of Jewish law and applies them—derive from it and from itself, while recognizing the context. Meaning, I apply it in the new circumstances according to what those circumstances require. That is no less faithful to the principles. On the contrary, it is more faithful to the principles, because I am applying them correctly. Someone who applies them exactly as it says in the Talmud to a reality that is completely different, in the end actually is not really fulfilling what the Talmud says.

Now I’m not entering the details, but there too this is a kind of struggle against fundamentalism. So this is not done only with rifles and ISIS and so on. Even in our little patch of God’s earth, within the halakhic world, between different halakhic conceptions, I think one has to pay attention to this issue.

I’ll perhaps add two more comments that are really current, and I’ll also express a position here. First of all—and I’ve written this on the site more than once as well—we have a tendency to judge other religious systems according to their texts. Yes, listen to the talks of Moti Kedar or all the Orientalist experts: they’ll tell you, after all it says such-and-such in the Quran and in the Hadith and they have this religious principle and that religious principle, therefore don’t believe a word. Now I’m not an Orientalist, I’m not an expert. But I do know what is written in Jewish sources and how much of it is actually implemented in practice. And we all know the gap is huge.

I’m not even talking about the Sages explaining to us that the rebellious son never existed and was never created, and they never killed him and in fact one cannot kill him either, when the Torah says in plain words: take him to the elders of the city and kill him—or the idolatrous city, or whoever, which never existed and never will exist. Okay? So already in the Talmud itself this happens. And it happens among us today too. Does anyone entertain the idea of destroying churches, demolishing them, throwing out the sacred books of other religions? There are some who entertain the idea, but they are a very extreme minority. Most people do not entertain it. By the way, the reasons often given are tactical reasons: if we do it then it will be a desecration of God’s name in the world, they’ll do it to Jews. I don’t buy that. To the credit of many halakhic decisors, I don’t buy that. Many halakhic decisors would not do it even when we could do it and there would be no fear, because they understand that it just isn’t done. You cannot do such a thing in our world. It is simply wrong to do it. You can’t take writings that are sacred to someone and throw them in the trash. Not because he’ll do it to you and you fear his revenge. No, not only because of that. But also because one simply doesn’t do such a thing. The Talmud says yes? Fine, circumstances have changed, and one has to understand why.

But there is a very large gap between what is written—“lower them in and do not raise them out,” all the things you want, I can bring you sources from now until tomorrow; I don’t have to, you all know them—and in practice, most halakhic decisors and of course the people on the ground would not dream of behaving that way, even if they did have the power in hand. Therefore, by the way, many of the fears about the so-called messianics that we hear today—the Jewish messianics, yes, Smotrich and his friends—are in my view greatly exaggerated, because I too know the texts and everything is true, but I also know that on the way from the texts to implementation, things undergo sublimation and refinement. And not only because of fear, but because people have common sense and pragmatism and they know what to implement and what not to implement. And those who examine religious conceptions according to their texts, according to their ideology, make a bitter mistake. Because adherence to ideology is very often pragmatic adherence and not fundamentalist adherence.

In places where there really is genuine fundamentalism and real adherence to the sources, that is indeed very dangerous. Very dangerous. Even if the sources say good and correct things, as I at least would like to believe regarding the Torah, I would be very, very afraid of someone who implements the words of the Torah in a fully fundamentalist way. I would stay away from him like fire. Even though he is completely faithful to the Torah, at least as he understands it. I am afraid of fundamentalism, not of the question toward what you direct it or what kind of system you are clinging to in such a fundamentalist way. Fundamentalism is a problem in and of itself.

So therefore, in this sense, I want to say—and I wrote this on the site too—notice that the same point can also be applied to Muslims. As I said, Moti Kedar—without my being an Orientalist—I’m pretty convinced, certainly there are large Muslim groups, and this I know not just a priori but in reality too, there are very large Muslim groups that do completely different things with the same sacred texts. And not because they’re afraid and not because it would be a desecration of God’s name, but because they genuinely do not think one should implement it as is, exactly like among us. And there are large groups like that. Therefore I do not buy these fatalistic claims that “there will never be peace” because they have such-and-such religious principles, and they are religiously forbidden to give up this and that. All these principles exist; I assume the Orientalists know what they’re talking about. Okay, I’m not an Orientalist. But I am a religious person, and within the religious system that I understand and know, I know the relation between what is written in the sources and the implementations. And very often the practicalities of the world, practical considerations, affect the religious conception. At first this happens as a constraint, because you can’t fulfill things exactly as they are, and then suddenly you understand that it’s also not right to fulfill them exactly as they are. And you anchor that within your religious conception, and it changes in a way that often people don’t even feel. It simply undergoes some metamorphosis and changes.

And therefore I do still have some hope—not a very great one, unfortunately—but some hope that something in our conflicts with our neighbors can also change. And in that sense, yes, lately a thought has somehow crossed my mind that in the current war—well, with Iran it’s already farther off, but with Gaza—there is a very great opportunity. A great opportunity not to wipe out Gaza and solve the problem with a final solution, but to reach a state in which we can progress toward an agreement, toward a political settlement. Once power is very clear and hopes are faint—and I know this sounds very left-wing and naïve—maybe this is the time to try to say: okay, friends, we are willing to make compromises, willing to reach an agreement. We have demands A, B, C. You will get a state, you will get everything, but these and these are our demands: demilitarized, different education, no problem—everything, publicly declare it before the whole world. This is what we want. It seems to me that support for us in the world would also change greatly if we put this on the table and not leave it hidden.

But then the objection always comes up: yes, but that’s naïve. They won’t keep the agreement, and they have Muslim principles, and so on. So first of all, not all Palestinians are extreme religious Muslims. Not all of them are like that. There are many like that, but not all of them. And even those who are religious, as I said before, sometimes the constraints of reality change in one way or another the implementation of religious principles. Just as I do not accept a fatalistic attitude toward religious Jews, even those who are not my cup of tea—Smotrich and his hardal, so-called messianic friends are not my cup of tea—but the criticism of them is, in my opinion, completely exaggerated. Completely exaggerated, because they do have a practical relation to the world. They do not cling to the sources exactly as they are. On the contrary, they do quite a bit of acrobatics in order to get along with the sources. And I want to hope that at least there is some chance that there is something like that on the other side too.

Now of course one has to take calculated risks, risks such that we could survive even failure—not just commit suicide because of the hope that maybe things will be good here. But yes, to take those risks, because in the end there is some chance that what stands opposite us is not absolute fundamentalism—not everyone there, at least, is an absolute fundamentalist—and maybe this thing has a somewhat more positive horizon than we think. The way we should try to deal with it is not to confront Islam, but to confront the fundamentalist approach to the principles of Islam. And that perhaps can be done through dialogue—I don’t know—but also through the constraints of reality, using force. For that’s what force is for. It’s perfectly fine to use force. But to use force when we have some horizon of what we want to achieve through it. And I’m not entirely sure that the decision-makers today have such a horizon. I tend to think they don’t.

So that’s it. That’s an implication. I’ve expressed an almost political position here, but I think it connects to this way of looking at fundamentalism, which has aspects in one direction and aspects in another. It can be terribly depressing when we say that everything is fundamentalist. When we define for ourselves the concept of fundamentalism, suddenly we see that in various areas more optimistic feelings arise, or a more optimistic chance of solving the problem. Not everything is as bleak as it seems—not in the sense of victory and defeat, but in the sense of a horizon, a distant horizon, where one can get to.

Okay, I’ll stop here. So if anyone wants to comment or ask, as is my usual way in classes, you’re welcome. May I ask? May I ask?

[Speaker B] Yes, yes. The Rabbi is basically reading, and I completely agree with critical thinking. The problem is that we’re not talking here about science; we’re really talking, if we want to get to the root of the matter, about value-based disputes. And value-based disputes, in the end, when you get down to their root, aren’t really about arguments—there aren’t really arguments for values. So we’re forced, if we really want to be attentive, to be truly empathetic here, and for a limited time to adopt and unpack the other person’s point of view. And everyone presents arguments, but here it’s not so much arguments; here you need to feel the other person, and that’s really, really hard.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And this isn’t only intellectual work, of course not. On the intellectual level, you can present these arguments and those arguments. The question is how willing you are really to listen to them, to actually take them into account.

[Speaker B] But there aren’t really arguments here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, there are, there are arguments. On that point we disagree, but I can’t open that up here, because that gets me into rhetoric and intuition and logic and the relationship between them, and emotion—things we’ve argued about more than once already.

[Speaker B] Right.

[Speaker C] May I ask a short question? Yes. What you said, what the Rabbi said, ignores people’s longing for certainty. Meaning, the fundamentalist isn’t interested in being 80% convinced. He wants 100%.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not ignoring it—on the contrary, that’s the problem we have to deal with.

[Speaker C] Then you can’t deal with him, because he wants 100%.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, first you said I’m ignoring it, now you’re saying it’s impossible. I don’t agree.

[Speaker C] No, ignoring it in the context of designing the solution.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t think you’re right that it’s impossible.

[Speaker C] You can’t convince people to be skeptical if they really want to be certain.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They want it—there are lots of things we want. We’re human beings. Human beings can make decisions, and a person driven by urges and psychology is a person who is thinking badly, and you have to try to save him from that or help him get out of it. We won’t always succeed, but I’m not a fatalist. Sometimes we will succeed.

[Speaker C] But he gets emotional benefit from the certainty he has. Okay, so let him overcome it. Yes, but I mean, how do we deal with that? We basically want to take away some mental asset of his, and people aren’t willing to give up mental assets they have.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not “aren’t willing”—don’t want to, fine. But not wanting doesn’t mean it’s impossible. There are costs, but the fact that there are costs doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It means it takes work, and you have to try to persuade, and you have to show the assets on the other side. The other side also has assets, and if you manage to talk with him and persuade him, maybe it really will move forward. I’m not a fatalist; I don’t agree with this deterministic outlook that we’re slaves to our psychology. It’s not determinism.

[Speaker C] We could sum it up: doubt does not override certainty.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I claim that there is doubt that does override certainty.

[Speaker C] Good question.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the doubt is intellectual and the certainty is emotional, then doubt does override certainty. In Jewish law, “doubt does not override certainty” applies when both are on the intellectual plane—the proof is there.

[Speaker C] I said it as a metaphor, of course. Okay, okay.

[Speaker D] Rabbi, may I ask too? The Rabbi tried to show that there are several kinds of fundamentalism. I think I can understand that—for example, someone who very much believes in democracy and liberalism and thinks that’s the supreme value could also become fundamentalist in that. But I didn’t really understand the distinction between that and good and evil. Meaning, if we’re precise and talk specifically about Muslims, say, or radical Islam: they’re fundamentalists within their Islam, but I think objectively, no matter whom you ask, everyone will understand that the implementation of that fundamentalism is evil. Meaning, even within Islam itself there’s a division—if we take, there’s a modern Islam that can be very religious but doesn’t get to this kind of fundamentalism, I don’t know, say those in Dubai, they’re modern and don’t go to that extreme, versus, I don’t know, Iranians. So I didn’t really understand that distinction.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Which distinction? So you said there are fundamentalist Muslims and those who aren’t, agreed.

[Speaker D] No, no, no—I’m saying there are fundamentalists who, within the religion, are supposedly good, and fundamentalists who are…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why do you think the good ones are fundamentalists? There is a fundamentalism of good, like Mother Teresa, for example, what I said earlier on the conceptual level. But in this context, who told you they’re fundamentalists?

[Speaker D] Okay, okay, so why did the Rabbi begin by saying that the division isn’t really between good and evil in what we call today—and the Rabbi spoke about this

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] many times—that this war

[Speaker D] is good versus evil.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said there can be fundamentalism for good and there can be fundamentalism for evil. In the sense that if someone doesn’t subject his good principles to critical examination, he too is a fundamentalist, and in my view that’s a problem. Usually people think the problem is evil, and good is excellent. And I say no: if the good is fundamentalist, then there’s also a problem in the good. But that doesn’t mean we’re all fundamentalists. It doesn’t mean everyone who behaves well is necessarily a fundamentalist.

[Speaker D] What’s the problem with good?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Someone who’s a fundamentalist of good? Yes? He takes his good value—climate, say—and in its name burns places down. Or saving animals. Or just isn’t willing to hear arguments because he’s in favor of democracy, but he’s not willing to hear that the other side is also in favor of democracy, just with a somewhat different model of democracy. So the value he clings to is a good value, but the way he clings to it creates distortions. Yes.

[Speaker D] So there isn’t necessarily any connection between fundamentalism and good and evil, basically—it can be.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fundamentalism is not a function of the content. Fundamentalism is problematic both with good content and with bad content.

[Speaker D] And its result also isn’t always definite.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Okay.

[Speaker E] But I wanted to ask: you said about all kinds of bad people that they’re not bad in your eyes because they have a good reason. So who is bad in your eyes? Pure evil? Because every bad act has a reason.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t think so. Look, for example, someone who—I don’t know—a contract killer, okay? That’s the career he chose for himself. And again, there may be circumstances that caused that, maybe. But as far as I’m concerned, in principle he’s a bad person. He’s a bad person. I know why he does it: he does it because he wants a lot of money. But someone who acts that way, who sells his moral values for the interest of money—I understand why he does it, but understanding is not justification. I think he’s a bad person. But if someone says, no, no, killing these people is good because they’re going to kill the whole world, because The Protocols of the Elders of Zion say that the Jews will kill us all and take over the world, therefore Jews must be killed—that’s a person I do understand, and I don’t think he’s a bad person. If he checked properly. If he just buys into The Protocols of the Elders of Zion because it fits his own evil, that’s a different matter. But if he was genuinely convinced that that’s the case, then from his point of view he’s doing what is good for the world. I’ll still defend myself against him—I won’t let him kill me—but I don’t judge him in the personality sense. I don’t see him as an evil person. Understood.

[Speaker D] So now, Rabbi, what’s going on in our religion? How is it that we don’t implement all the supposedly bad parts of our religion, like, I don’t know, like…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So when you ask people, usually, as I said, ask people and they’ll usually tell you: because our hand is not strong enough, and desecration of God’s name, and they’ll do the same to us, and for the sake of peaceful relations, and all sorts of things like that. But I—maybe I’m too optimistic—I see within myself and I also see in others that slowly we’re internalizing the point: it’s not right to implement it, even if there would be no problematic consequences for us. And people slowly understand, like the rebellious son. They say there are laws that are declarative laws. The Torah itself apparently does not expect us to implement them in practice.

[Speaker D] Fine, but the Rabbi has shown several times that Jewish law isn’t really connected to morality, so there really are laws that are anti-moral and one has to act…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sometimes yes; I didn’t say always. I didn’t say that every anti-moral law I won’t observe. I said I’ll have criticism of it. It will have to pass through my crucible of criticism, and I need to see: there’s a conflict here between Jewish law and morality. I’m not going to get into that whole big topic now of Jewish law and morality—I’ve spoken about it in several series—but clearly there is a real conflict there. Sometimes Jewish law will prevail and sometimes morality will prevail.

[Speaker F] That’s what I wanted to ask about, may I? Yes. In your view, when you said earlier about the four death penalties of the religious court, that if someone carried them out today, even if our hand were strong enough, then he’d be mistaken—in your view is that a religious mistake or a mistake in value-based responsibility?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The four death penalties of the religious court—I’m not sure that’s a mistake. The four death penalties of the religious court, with all the restrictions of the Sages—after there are witnesses and warning and acceptance of the warning and all that—and if the law says it’s forbidden to desecrate the Sabbath, and the person knew that, and knew he was liable to death, and received warning and accepted the warning, then that’s fine. Those are the rules of the game; I don’t rule that out. You have to live the reality in order to form a clear position. But that’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about “they are cast down and not raised up,” I was talking about burning the sacred writings of Christians, or mosques or monasteries or churches, things like that. About that I have no doubt.

[Speaker C] How is that different from killing someone who desecrated the Sabbath?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? How is it different from killing someone who desecrated the Sabbath?

[Speaker C] They’re not Jews, they didn’t receive warning, and they didn’t accept the warning.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the person also didn’t accept it, but—

[Speaker C] The person who desecrated the Sabbath also doesn’t accept

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] it.

[Speaker C] On what justification can you kill him for not accepting a certain belief?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the person desecrates the Sabbath because he doesn’t believe in this whole system, then in my opinion he is exempt from death regardless. Even then he would have been exempt from death in the time when capital punishments existed. I’m talking about cases where he believes in the system, and because of his evil inclination he desecrated the Sabbath. And if he desecrated the Sabbath in front of witnesses, after warning, and after accepting the warning, I do not rule out that this could be carried out. And he deserves death for such a thing? Doesn’t that sound too severe? Too severe? No. If from the outset they say death for

[Speaker C] such a thing? For a certain position, death?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Does that seem moral to you? Not a position—desecration of the Sabbath with witnesses and warning, absolutely not a position. To that extent—

[Speaker C] That extent? What do you mean, that extent?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Listen, you can say about anything, “to that extent?” or “how much?”

[Speaker C] No, if the organizing criterion is morality…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the organizing criterion is not morality. No, absolutely not.

[Speaker C] Okay, so why, in the case of “they are cast down and not raised up,” is the criterion of morality brought in?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say it’s brought in. I said you also have to take moral considerations into account.

[Speaker C] So why not here?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say not here. I said there are two different considerations. There is the moral consideration and there is the halakhic / of Jewish law consideration. The final decision, bottom line, is made by taking both into account. That’s a whole doctrine; I can’t spell it out now because I’ve written and spoken about it a lot. But briefly: there is room for both kinds of considerations, but they are two different kinds of considerations. However, today it’s clear to everyone that the law of “they are cast down and not raised up,” which is ultimately not some verse, not one of the 613 commandments, but rather a policy that was practiced in Jewish law in the situations and circumstances that prevailed then—in the circumstances that prevail today, it seems to me that for most of us, I think, there is an intuition that it is not right to act that way. It is not right to act that way; it is not the correct policy. And therefore?

[Speaker C] And regarding desecrating the Sabbath too, there’s an intuition not to kill a person because he…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It may be that you have that.

[Speaker C] I don’t. Fine, interesting.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Desecration of the Sabbath, for example—we do not desecrate the Sabbath to save, at least according to one of the reasons of Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya—we desecrate the Sabbath to save a life only because “desecrate one Sabbath for him so that he may keep many Sabbaths.” Meaning, the value of the Sabbath overrides the value of life. Even the life of a Jew, not of a non-Jew.

[Speaker C] And that fits with your intuitions?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not a question of intuition; that’s what the Torah says. Now the question is, okay, you have to examine what the policy is, how to interpret, everything’s fine. Morality can also enter as a consideration, but I do not subordinate Jewish law to morality, absolutely not. On the contrary, in my view these are two disconnected categories, and the mutual influences between them are only through very, very well-defined channels. They have to be defined היטב—well. I’ve done that in various other places.

[Speaker F] Does the Rabbi have a good source for the idea that implementing a policy which today our intuition clearly says should not be done is something that is halakhically / of Jewish law not correct in the strictly halakhic sense, even before moral considerations? Could we hear something?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What, are there no sources for this? There are millions.

[Speaker F] What, like the rebellious son and things like that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “They abolished capital punishment when murderers became numerous…” No, leave that—“they abolished capital punishment when murderers became numerous.” What is that? Yes, an excellent

[Speaker F] source.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is the Chazon Ish saying that in our generation there is no one who can rebuke, and all sorts of things like that? All of those… And Rabbi Kook also said something like that. Rabbi Kook—never mind—attempts to introduce into semi-halakhic / of Jewish law patterns intuitions like the intuition I’m talking about. There are situations in which you simply don’t do such a thing. You simply don’t. Everyone understands that it’s not implementable, especially regarding things that are policy. Capital punishments aren’t even policy; capital punishment is a commandment, explicitly counted: to kill Sabbath desecrators and to kill one who is liable to death. I’m talking about the policy of “they are cast down and not raised up”; that’s merely policy, not even a clear prohibition or positive commandment.

[Speaker I] Rabbi, one more question?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] My views are very non-positivist in halakhic / of Jewish law thinking. You have to be careful not to take halakhic / of Jewish law principles in too fundamentalist a way. “We do not derive from general rules, even where an exception is stated”—that’s a saying I’m very fond of. Meaning: always use common sense. Meaning, there is something to our intuitions—they also have weight, even against things that are explicitly written.

[Speaker H] Yes, but when the Rabbi says that people are stoned for violating the Sabbath, is there anything more fundamentalist than that? You’re saying because that’s what’s written in the Torah. So where does that fit in?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fundamentalist does not mean carrying out what is written in the Torah. Not everyone who carries out what is written in the Torah is a fundamentalist. Someone who carries out what is written in the Torah but is willing to examine it through critical thinking is not a fundamentalist, even if in the end he concludes that he will indeed carry it out. But as long as it passes his cognitive test and only afterward he decides, then he is not a fundamentalist. It doesn’t matter what he decided. Someone who does it without putting it through that testing furnace is a fundamentalist. Fundamentalism is judged not by the result but by the path—how you arrived at the result.

[Speaker H] Yes, but in the end, if I take two witnesses and warning—a person desecrated the Sabbath, two witnesses and warning, and he still did it—then there’s no room left for discretion. If I’m a fundamentalist and I go according to what religion requires… Why is there no?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why is there no room for discretion? I showed you earlier that…

[Speaker H] There’s no room—he’s liable to death, so you kill him.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying—I said three minutes ago that they abolished capital punishments when murderers became numerous. Murderers increased. Now capital punishment for murder is written explicitly in the Torah—explicitly. Why did they abolish it? Because murderers increased. There is room for common sense everywhere. And the Sages used it without hesitation in many things. Not everything that seemed immoral to them they automatically abolished. That’s not true; they didn’t do that. They didn’t abolish the law of the mamzer. And they didn’t abolish capital punishments either until murderers became numerous. And it’s not that every time something morally doesn’t smell right to me, I abolish it. It doesn’t work like that. But yes, it has to go through critical thinking. I don’t implement it the moment I read it—read, implement immediately. No. It goes through here, goes through here, a decision comes out, and then I decide what to do.

[Speaker D] Yes, the question is whether the decision can really go against what is written.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes. I gave examples.

[Speaker D] Also—

[Speaker C] Can a private individual decide that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s another question, and there are situations—there are examples of that too. What about a sin for the sake of Heaven? The topic in tractate Nazir. A sin for the sake of Heaven is a situation in which you do an act that is unequivocally a halakhic / of Jewish law transgression, with no permission at all, and you are an ordinary person, not a halakhic decisor, you don’t go ask anyone, and you decide to commit that transgression. And the Talmud / Talmudic text says: “A transgression for the sake of Heaven is greater than a commandment not for its own sake.” Like Yael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, yes, and those examples. Even a private individual, in very extreme situations—again, there is an obligation to keep Jewish law. And in very extreme situations, even a private individual who has no one to ask—if he has someone to ask, let him ask; if he has no one to ask and he has to make the decision, then he has to make the decision himself. Lot’s daughters decided to have sexual relations with their father—incest—and the Talmud / Talmudic text praises them for it. The Talmud / Talmudic text praises them for it. That same Talmud / Talmudic text in Nazir—it’s on the same page—as “a transgression for the sake of Heaven.” Why? Because it was clear to them that the world had been destroyed. By the way, that wasn’t true at all, but from their point of view, that’s how they understood it. It’s described in the Torah itself: “There is no man in the land,” yes, “let us go to our father and preserve seed from him.” They understood that if they didn’t do this, there would be no humanity left. So they decided—two learned women, yes, Lot’s daughters—that they would have sexual relations with their father, and the Sages praise them for that.

[Speaker J] May I ask a question? Yes. Yes, I just wanted to make sure I understood. Basically, in everything you said, you weren’t trying to persuade us which is the true path and which is not. You were saying what is most worthwhile—meaning, it’s most worthwhile to be synthetic; that’s maybe the most tolerant approach, the one that leads to the fewest mishaps, if I understood correctly. But I mean, that’s not really a way to persuade, say, a fundamentalist.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t—I don’t have a way to persuade a fundamentalist, nor a skeptic. But what I can do, and this is a way that does persuade both fundamentalists and skeptics, is to show them: look, there’s a third alternative. Because very often they choose their path because they think the options are either to be a fundamentalist or to be a skeptic. So since I’m not a skeptic, I choose to be a fundamentalist—or the opposite. The moment I say no, no, those are not the only two options; there is also a third option. Now, I haven’t proved that it’s the right one, or that the other two are wrong. But once I tell them, look, there’s a third option, some people will find themselves identifying with that option. And then they’ll stop being skeptics or fundamentalists.

[Speaker J] Yes, but he’s convinced of his truth, that it’s the only truth, no?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I claim that he’s not. I claim that many—I don’t claim, I know. I’ve spoken with people, and I already have experience in these things. And people who defined themselves as skeptics or defined themselves as fundamentalists—once you show them that there is also a third option, suddenly they reexamine themselves and say, wait a second. For example, I think to myself: I’m not willing to be skeptical, progressive, postmodern—horrible, terrible—I need to have a position, so I’m a fundamentalist. No, wait—you can have a position even if you’re not a fundamentalist, a synthetic position. And then suddenly he says, oh wait, I hadn’t thought of that. All I wanted was the ability, or the justification, to hold a position. But if I can have justification without being a fundamentalist, then of course I identify with that. So very often the conceptual analysis itself does the work; you don’t need to bring arguments in favor of the synthetic position. It’s enough to put it on the board as an alternative too. And this is from experience. I mean, in many, many arguments—not only in this general question—in many arguments, the very fact that you show people there’s an option they hadn’t thought of, and suddenly they discover in themselves that they identify with that option. The Third Path is entirely built on that logic. People think the world is divided between Religious Zionists and Haredim, and I’m basically saying: look, there is a third path. What is it? What is the third path? Now, I didn’t persuade them that this is wrong or that this is wrong. I showed them there is also such an option. If I showed them—if I managed to show them—that there is such an option, suddenly the person says, wait, I hadn’t thought of that; actually I really identify with it. Because until now he said, wait, if I’m not Religious Zionist then clearly I have to be Haredi, or if I’m not Haredi I have to be Religious Zionist. About me, people are always saying: wait, are you Religious Zionist or are you Haredi? Or Reform. And so they’re always trying to classify me: wait, you don’t fit this, so you must be that; but you also don’t fit that, so you must be this. I fit neither this nor that because I’m something else. That’s all. People think dichotomously, and they even adopt their own positions out of that dichotomous thinking. Very often you prove it to yourself by elimination: if I’m not A, then obviously I’m B. But if there’s also option C, then the fact that you showed yourself that you’re not A doesn’t mean you’re B—maybe you’re C. Thank you very much.

[Speaker J] So you don’t

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] need positive arguments in order to persuade.

[Speaker K] To what extent can one really conduct a stable way of life on the basis of an approach that the Rabbi calls true but unstable?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think it’s hard. But what can you do—that’s the truth. It’s also hard to conduct life—maybe life will be stable—but very incorrect life, with fundamentalist or skeptical outlooks. So in terms of cost, every direction has a price. It’s very easy to point to the prices of the directions I don’t identify with, but there are prices in every direction. So from the standpoint of cost, I don’t know which path is preferable. So if all sides have a price, then at least I’ll go in the right direction. Once they asked me—at the beginning we were in a Haredi environment. From the time we got married, my wife and I, and later the children, they grew up in Haredi educational settings, Haredi cheders and yeshivas and the like. And at a certain stage we changed direction. Now, in retrospect, when people asked me, I said: look, I didn’t completely identify with Haredism even at the first stage. But I thought that because of the costs of non-Haredi education, I would choose Haredi education and try to make corrections. At a certain point I concluded that it’s hard to make corrections. It’s hard to make corrections, and in my eyes Haredi education has heavier costs than non-Haredi education. In my opinion. You can argue about it, but I’m describing my way of thinking. And then I said: look, since both paths have costs, cost considerations won’t help me. So I go back to considerations of truth. And if the truth is like this, then I go with it. I was prepared not to go with the true path if they would show me: look, there are heavy costs here; there is a less true path but with lighter costs. Then I’d be willing to consider another path. If there are costs on both sides, then let’s go with what is true.

[Speaker K] Thank you.

[Speaker C] And to what extent can you educate children according to this view of truth but not stability?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think you can, but of course it’s always harder, right. I don’t have solutions for that, and I’m also not an educator, so I don’t feel I’m the right address.

[Speaker C] Thank you.

[Speaker I] I wanted to ask you, if I may, about what you mentioned: you said that someone educated on extreme religious values is not necessarily a bad person, but rather he clings to his sources, his religion, and so on. But you say that overall you expect him to ask himself, and to understand on his own, not to believe and accept things just because he was educated that way. But you see that on the ground it doesn’t happen at all, that it’s just herds—almost all of them don’t wake up at all to ask themselves. So how do you expect that from such people?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are always grounds for mitigation in punishment. There are grounds for lack of guilt, and there are grounds for mitigation in punishment. So I claim that if you have religious belief, that is not an argument for lack of guilt; it is an argument for mitigation in punishment. Meaning, you are guilty because in the end you were supposed to make decisions. Now true, the average person in your situation probably would not have made a different judgment than you, and therefore I would reduce your punishment, but the responsibility is still on you. Meaning, in the final analysis, a person has a head and is supposed to use it. The fact that it’s true that most people don’t do that—that’s an argument for mitigation in punishment, I agree.

[Speaker I] Fine, but mitigation in punishment has no practical implication, because we’re not talking about punishment—it works for them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. I mean judgment, not religious or legal punishment.

[Speaker I] Okay, theoretically. Okay, that would lead me to the second question, but I think it’s too complicated and would take too long. But as you say, what you suggested as a proposal regarding the conflict with Gaza—to let them try and so on—that’s not… you mentioned it. What applies to a religious value—it’s not only because of what the Middle East expert says, that there’s a gap between the religious values and in practice what we do. But when the religious value seeps in and becomes cultural, that’s already a bigger problem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I completely agree. The problem is a hard problem, and I’m not belittling it. I’m only pointing out—this has to be discussed a lot—but I’m only making this point. It’s worth noting that there is still a gap between the fact that it is written in the holy books and the question of what we actually do. Now the question whether such a gap exists and how big it is, and the question in which parts of the population this exists—after all, there are different sectors of the population—all that certainly has to be discussed. To present a position in this area, I would need to do it much more systematically and orderly. But I just wanted to make this point because it also has implications for the picture I described. Okay? So we’ll stop here.

[Speaker G] If one more small question is possible? Yes, yes. Really a small question about fundamentalists: do you see change? We keep seeing over the years that sometimes they rise and sometimes they fall in terms of what’s happening on the ground. Right now, in my opinion, we’re in a period where they’re very, very much on the rise, especially in Israel as well. Is there some reason that at certain times we feel them more in day-to-day life, like now in public discourse, or is it a political matter? How do you explain it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know; that really is a complicated question. The world is complicated. Philosophy is simple; the world is always much more complicated. But one thing occurs to me to say right now: it’s some kind of process of positive feedback—what in engineering they call positive feedback. What does that mean? These become fundamentalists; those see that they’re fundamentalists, so they too become fundamentalists. Now these get angry at those for being fundamentalists, so they become even more so. So there is an escalation in which each side feeds the other, and both become more and more fundamentalist. And nobody can stop it because whoever stops it will, as it were, lose; the other side will crush him, he’ll yield, and he’ll lose the war. And the question is—I spoke today about the prisoner’s dilemma in the afternoon class—the question is whether we can manage to create some kind of pact in which both sides stop the escalation process. I don’t know, maybe—how do you do that?

[Speaker G] Yes, interesting. Thank you very much for everything you spoke about today.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] My pleasure. Okay then, goodbye, all the best.

[Speaker G] Thank you very much, thank you, all—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the best.