A Look at Torah and Torah Study – Lesson 16 – Rabbi Michael Abraham
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- Summary of the previous semester and the transition to the current one
- Two conditions for defining Torah study
- The definition of “Torah” — the corpus from Sinai and its interpretation
- Jewish thought is not “Torah” in the full sense
- The problematic nature of studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as “Torah study”
- Cold altruism — doing the truth because it is true
- Empathy as a tool and not as a moral value
- The danger of subordinating emotion to intellect — the Nazis and religious extremism
- Rational religious people versus emotional secular people
- The trend toward emotionalization in the modern world
Summary
General Overview
Lesson 16 in Rabbi Michael Abraham’s series “A Look at Torah and Torah Study” deals with two central topics: first, a continuation of the discussion from the previous semester about the definition of Torah study — what counts as “Torah” and what counts as “study”; second, an in-depth philosophical discussion about the nature of altruistic action, the relationship between rationality and emotion, and the differences between the religious and secular worlds in that context. The lecture combines theoretical conceptual analysis with concrete examples from life, politics, and popular culture.
Summary of the previous semester and the transition to the current one
Rabbi Abraham opens with a summary of the previous semester, which dealt with “Torah in the object-sense” — the essence of Torah itself. He mentions the idea that Torah descends from above and undergoes concretization, while we try to return and abstract it back through interpretive resolutions. The current semester deals with the “person” — the learner himself. He presents two central questions: what am I supposed to engage in for it to count as Torah study, and what am I supposed to do with the material (what kind of activity counts as “study”).
Two conditions for defining Torah study
Rabbi Abraham presents two necessary conditions for an activity to count as Torah study: the first condition — that what I am engaging in be “Torah”; the second condition — that the action I am performing be an action of “study.” He illustrates this with the example of a person binding volumes of the Talmud — he is engaged with Torah objects, but his action is not study. Similarly, a child learning to read is engaged only in “preparatory means for a commandment,” just like eating breakfast in order to have strength to study.
The definition of “Torah” — the corpus from Sinai and its interpretation
Rabbi Abraham defines “Torah” as that which we received at Mount Sinai and which was transmitted through tradition, including all the additions, interpretations, and expansions made throughout the generations. He emphasizes that he does not assume tradition is a “hollow pipe” — obviously many innovations were added over the generations, but since the focus of the activity is that same Torah from Sinai, the expansions too count as part of the corpus. The novel insights of Ketzot, for example, are interpretation of earlier sources that are themselves interpretations of previous generations, and therefore they are fully Torah.
Jewish thought is not “Torah” in the full sense
Rabbi Abraham makes a provocative claim: studying Jewish thought — from the Maharal through Rabbi Kook to Hasidic books — is not Torah in the full sense. The reasoning: when one studies Jewish thought, one is not interpreting what was given at Sinai but creating independent philosophical thought. In his works of thought, the Maharal was not a “commentator” — he created a philosophy with its own conceptual system. By contrast, in Jewish law there is a continuous tradition in which each generation interprets the previous ones, and that is the only corpus that meets the criterion. The Rabbi clarifies that saying “this is not Torah” does not deny its value — philosophy, science, and literature have value, but value is not the same as “Torah.”
The problematic nature of studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as “Torah study”
Rabbi Abraham raises a sharp claim regarding the study of biblical narratives: when people study how Jacob supposedly lied, what usually happens is apologetic study — they bring moral principles that are already obvious in advance and reconcile the story accordingly. If we had really “learned” from the Bible, we would say “it is permissible to lie because Jacob did it,” but instead we “teach Jacob” that he was not a liar. The Rabbi even challenged readers on his website to bring one example where they learned something genuinely new from a biblical passage (not a historical fact and not Jewish law) — and he did not receive a single example.
Cold altruism — doing the truth because it is true
A central part of the lecture is devoted to analyzing the concept of altruism in light of Maimonides’ words about “service out of love” and “doing the truth because it is true.” The Rabbi distinguishes between doing truth out of love of truth (which is an external reason, like loving chocolate) and doing truth because it is true. He argues that real altruism is דווקא “cold” — action done for the sake of what is right, without emotional motivation. He illustrates this with a story about a lecture in Sde Boker where he described a person asking forgiveness with absolutely no feelings of guilt, but only out of intellectual understanding that it was the right thing to do — and the students rejected this as “hypocrisy,” whereas the Rabbi argued that this is the highest kind of apology.
Empathy as a tool and not as a moral value
Rabbi Abraham brings an example from a TED talk by a neurophysiologist who lost the capacity for empathy in an accident and learned to behave morally in a “technical” way. He argues that empathy is a tool — like eyes that enable seeing — and not a moral value in itself. A person without empathy who behaves morally is no less moral; he is simply “disabled” in a certain sense. The common identification of morality with empathy is “a common mistake of psychologists who appoint themselves philosophers.” The Rabbi also mentions George Price, who tried to prove that altruism does not exist and ended his own life — and argues that the fact that altruism cannot be proven does not mean it does not exist.
The danger of subordinating emotion to intellect — the Nazis and religious extremism
Rabbi Abraham does not ignore the danger in cold altruism: the Nazis, in his view, carried out “altruistic” acts in this sense — they realized values they believed in while overcoming their natural emotions (which is why they had to get drunk before mass shootings). In the religious world too, groups deeply committed to Jewish law can lose moral sensitivity when they get used to suppressing any emotion that rebels against Jewish law and treating it as an “evil inclination.” The Rabbi argues that even when one acts according to Jewish law against one’s emotions, “it still has to hurt you; you still have to remain inside the conflict.”
Rational religious people versus emotional secular people
Rabbi Abraham presents a thesis opposite to the common image: religious behavior is far more rational than secular behavior, not the other way around. The religious person is used to using his head, deciding what is right, and acting accordingly; the secular person asks the heart. He illustrates this with the example of Shlomi Shabbat as a judge on a reality show saying “the heart, the heart, the heart” — without saying what he ultimately decides, because it is “obvious” that if the heart says so, that’s what you do. Another example: the debate over the hostage deal, in which the opponents of the deal were almost all religious — because they are capable of holding the dissonance between the pain of the heart and strategic considerations, whereas in the secular world “if the heart says it, then that’s what you do.”
The trend toward emotionalization in the modern world
Rabbi Abraham describes a process in which the secular world — and following it, the religious world too — is becoming more and more emotional. The differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim are being erased, and today there are many traditionalist Ashkenazim. “Existentialism” is penetrating the religious world: “Where am I in this story,” “I don’t connect to this.” The Rabbi ends with a joke by Dov Sadan about the next Jew who will lead a revolution — that he will be an orthopedist, because we started with the head (Abraham), went down to the heart (Jesus), to the belly (Marx), below the belt (Freud), and now only the legs are left. The joke reflects a real process of despair over intellect and clinging to the heart as the standard for decision-making.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, a summary of previous chapters. Basically, I said that this semester I’m trying to make it self-contained, meaning it shouldn’t require the previous semester, but still, for those who were here last semester, there’s some completion here. Last semester — we’re always here after breaks, so we need to do summaries. Next time too, apparently, it’ll happen again. We now have a two-week break. So we talked about how Torah basically descended from above and undergoes concretization, and we try to abstract it back again in order to rise back upward through — I showed this through the idea of those interpretive resolutions. I spoke about the meaning of study as exposure of the abstract principles, or as some kind of internalization of those abstract principles through the concrete cases. And the concrete cases are taken from our world, but the Jewish law in those cases is determined by abstract principles that can also operate in a completely different realm, like the Torah-world of the angels, what I discussed in that midrash about Moses and the angels. I said that last semester the topic was basically Torah in the object-sense, Torah itself — what is Torah? This semester I want to talk about the person, about the learner. Now the question is what the learner is supposed to do with this thing I described last semester, so that more or less marks off the two semesters. But even in the context of the learner, I divide it into two things that are connected. One thing is: when I engage in something, what am I supposed to engage in such that when I engage in it, it will be called Torah study? That’s from the perspective of the person, but I’m still looking at what I’m supposed to study. The second angle, which is connected — we’ll see that — is what I’m supposed to do with it. Meaning, what kinds of engagement or what kinds of relation qualify to be called Torah study. And I said that this question is divided into two parts. The first part is whether you are engaging in Torah, which is connected to the previous point. If you’re not engaging in Torah, it isn’t Torah study. The second part is that what you are doing has to be an act of study. Because if it is not an act of study, then even if what you’re dealing with is Torah, it still won’t be called Torah study. Someone who is binding copies of the Hebrew Bible or Talmud — he is dealing with books that are Torah, right? But what he is doing is not Torah study. Why not? Because what he is doing is not study. It’s not that it’s not Torah study; rather, the action he is doing is not an act of study. Therefore, for a certain act to count as Torah study, two conditions have to be met: first, that what I’m dealing with is Torah, and second, that what I’m doing with that thing is study. And we’ll see that both of those things are very difficult to define, and even controversial, I would say.
[Speaker B] Learning to read.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, learning to read?
[Speaker B] A child who’s learning — a child who’s learning to read so that he’ll be able to study Torah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s engaged in preparatory means for a commandment. Like when he eats breakfast, right? If he doesn’t eat breakfast, he won’t have the strength to study. Here the learning isn’t Torah study; he’s learning a language.
[Speaker C] What if I study and don’t understand? If a person reads and doesn’t understand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I said what I want to do; I haven’t done it yet. After I do it, it’ll be possible to start asking questions — not that everything necessarily has answers, but we can begin discussing questions of that kind. In principle, I said that the focus this semester will be that the core of Torah study is basically the study of Jewish law. Other areas that are not Jewish law — I’ll propose various other definitions for them — but that’s not Torah study in the full sense, in the hardcore sense. When I get there, we’ll see. It’s not that I have some wonderfully good answer to it; it’s a result of conceptual analysis. But that’s always true with a question like this. There’s no way around it. The simple assumption is that what most straightforwardly deserves to be called Torah is what we received at Mount Sinai. We received something at Mount Sinai, it was transmitted through tradition, and it reached us. As opposed to, for example, all sorts of other things that can certainly have value — the study of philosophy, science, literature, all sorts of things like that — and nobody, I think, needs to deny that they have value. But the fact that they have value still doesn’t mean they are Torah. And that too is a very common confusion. When I say something is not Torah, I have not thereby said that it has no value, or that engaging in it has no value. This is a question of definition: when are you considered a student of Torah? So I’m saying: what was passed down in tradition from Sinai, what belongs to the tradition that came to us from Sinai — that is Torah, in the broadest definition. But of course I’m not assuming here that the tradition is a hollow pipe, that everything we have in our hands here was given to Moses at Sinai and passed from generation to generation exactly as is until it reached us. It is completely obvious that what reached us is the result of countless additions, interpretations, expansions, all kinds of things that were done over the generations — that is completely obvious. And still I claim that since the focus of this activity is that same Torah that we received at Sinai, then the expansions, interpretations, refinements — all these things also join this corpus called Torah. I’ll explain why I’m insisting so much on these definitions, which seem a bit broad and general, because later on I’m going to claim — not just try to claim, I’ll try to convince you — that, for example, studying Jewish thought or philosophy is not Torah. Meaning, it is not Torah because, in my view — I’ll have to show this, but in my view — it doesn’t meet the criteria I described here. When you study Jewish thought, you’re not really interpreting what was given at Sinai. You’re creating ideas, like any other philosopher. Of course, sometimes there are illustrations from one verse or another, from one Talmudic passage or another. Even the Talmud itself, when it deals with Jewish thought, is not Torah — if you rely on the Talmud, that doesn’t help; no use, it flies away. The claim is that this is not done from a hermeneutic starting point. For example, when you study Jewish law, I study a novel insight of the Ketzot. A new insight that he came up with — no one said it before him. But his innovation is an interpretation of certain laws or sources that were handed down to us from earlier generations, and those themselves are interpretations of earlier things. In the end, this interprets or innovates something within that corpus that was given to us at Sinai. So as far as I’m concerned, interpretations of that corpus are also part of it. That is completely Torah. Okay? But in my view, Jewish thought — I don’t know, from the Maharal through Rabbi Kook and whatever, books of Hasidism and things like that — these are philosophies, better or worse, each person can decide for himself, usually worse in my opinion, but categorically, regardless of whether we think they are good, useful, wise, or not, they are not Torah. They are not Torah in this sense. I don’t think the Maharal was a commentator — I mean in his works of thought, not his halakhic writings and that, or perhaps Torah commentary, maybe we’d say that is commentary; we’ll discuss that too, that’s a bit trickier. But his works of thought are not commentary. He created a philosophy with his own conceptual system, and he has all sorts of ideas that may be right, may be wrong, doesn’t matter. But it’s not something he received in tradition, interpreted, and passed on. In Jewish law, in a very clear and unique way I think, only there does this happen: you basically have a continuous tradition in which each generation interprets everything that was in earlier generations. Part of what was in the earlier generations, but everything relates to earlier generations. Now that doesn’t mean there are no innovations; of course there are disputes, and each one with his worldview, and different commentators or different halakhic decisors have different worldviews, and they produced different laws or different conceptual systems. That doesn’t matter, because all those are interpretations of the corpus given at Sinai. And that corpus was given in order to be interpreted.
[Speaker C] Is it enough to study the interpretation, enough to study the bottom line? What does “enough” mean?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Study whatever you want. But even when you study the interpretation, that is Torah. If you study the source itself, of course that is Torah. And know — no, studying practical Jewish law is not Torah study in my opinion. No. No, in my opinion it isn’t.
[Speaker D] We’ll talk. What about Maimonides there, where he says knowledge of God?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, conceptual learning, the give-and-take of the Talmud, what the Talmud does — that is Torah.
[Speaker D] What? Which study did he call knowledge of God?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll call them by their own name. Soon — well, not that soon, later on. I’m doing this step by step. I just jumped ahead to give you the framework of the discussion so you’ll understand where the discussion is going. I’m still going to try to build this in an orderly way, and I’ll also try to answer all those questions — whether I succeed or not, you can judge. By default, if you come just to hear what you already thought beforehand — we talked about this once, I think — that an argument, or study, doesn’t matter, by the way this is connected to the definition of study, what we discussed — an argument or study from which you gained something is an argument in which you lost, because then it turned out that what you thought before was not correct, and something new came to you. After all, if you won, then it turned out that what you thought from the start was indeed correct. So what did you get from it? The other person gained from it; you didn’t gain anything, nothing new came to you. What is “reinforcement”? Reinforcement is not study. Reinforcement — fine, take vitamins, that’s also reinforcement. No, I’m saying this seriously, it’s not a joke.
[Speaker C] Here I always lose in an argument.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You see? Then you have net profit from every minute. So I’m saying — and this is also a paradigm for study. Study too is something that can change conceptions you had before. But if you come with your own conceptions and just dress them onto the material being studied, then you didn’t learn anything. And I think that’s what usually happens in Torah interpretation. That’s why I claim it isn’t really Torah study in the full sense — but that too… I’m talking now about interpretation of the Bible, not Jewish thought. Because just think — I’m getting ahead of myself a bit, but I want you to understand where I’m heading, because otherwise it all seems terribly unclear. Look, when we deal with some biblical passage — Jacob who lied to Laban or to his father or something like that — right? So what do we say? Okay, how can it be that he lied? Then we have, either by divine instruction, or whatever, some explanation why this wasn’t really a lie. Why — “I am Esau your firstborn,” you know all those devices that make it not a lie. David did not sin, and all sorts of things like that. What are we actually doing in all these moves? We’re taking moral principles that are already clear to us in advance, right? We encounter something in the Bible that doesn’t fit them. Now, if we were learning from the Bible, then the whole move would be the opposite. Ah, apparently lying is permitted. Here, Jacob did it, so I learned — now something new came to me. I thought lying was forbidden, and it turns out it isn’t; it’s permitted. Then I learned something new. But this apologetic study that we’re engaged in all the time, which says, wait, Jacob didn’t really lie because of this or that — so in fact I haven’t learned anything. I thought lying was forbidden, and I remained with the idea that lying is forbidden. So what did I learn from Jacob? Nothing. I learned nothing from Jacob. I taught Jacob. In other words, I explained to Jacob why he isn’t a liar. Okay, thank you very much, on Jacob’s behalf. What did I get out of that? Nothing. And I think biblical studies usually have that character. I wrote a column about this on my website and invited people: tell me, bring me one place — from all of literature, the internet, whatever you want — one place where you learn something new from a biblical passage. I got nothing. Not one. What do I mean? Something new — meaning something you would not have thought, and I’m not talking about a fact. Yes, if I hadn’t studied Torah I wouldn’t know there was an Abraham our forefather, fine, or the Exodus from Egypt. I mean, for example, a moral norm, or some innovation — not in the sense of the facts described in the Bible.
[Speaker F] What the Sages interpreted?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no — you’re talking about… I’m not talking about Jewish law. Jewish law, yes, certainly — it says you may not eat pork, we learned something new. And that’s exactly the point. But when we study the Hebrew Bible, not the study of Jewish law, what’s called Bible study, stories — even in the Torah itself, and certainly in the rest of the Hebrew Bible where almost all of it is like that — what do you learn? You don’t learn anything. At most you do some historical clarifications. Okay, historical clarifications I can also do by other means — through archaeology, through ancient writings, all sorts of things like that. Why is that Torah? But when you want to learn what is forbidden and permitted, what is proper and improper — forbidden and permitted is Jewish law, but proper and improper in the moral sense — you won’t learn anything from the Hebrew Bible. You won’t learn anything from the Hebrew Bible. You always come with what you already know, and if the Hebrew Bible doesn’t fit, then we’ll make it fit. Meaning in the end, you come out with what you came in with.
[Speaker D] There’s Nachmanides, who says Abraham sinned by going down to Egypt, and it did something to me when I stood and studied that. So — it’s like the courage of Nachmanides to say such a thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, courage is courage, but what did you derive from it?
[Speaker D] And about Hagar — that she afflicted Hagar, and because of that there were four hundred years of exile — that kind of shocks me. So what are you…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What did you derive from it, that’s what I’m asking. Did you learn something new from it? That Jacob with Hagar, that they did… what does that mean? What did I learn from it? Did I learn historical facts? Fine, true, there are historical facts — to the extent that it’s factual, doesn’t matter, you can discuss that too. Nothing. I’m saying this is… okay, we’ll get to that later. I’m just saying that in the end I want to set the goal so that we’ll see what I’m aiming at and how I’m progressing toward it. My goal in the end is to try to argue that Torah study in its essence is the study of Jewish law. Now, by study of Jewish law I do not mean the bottom lines, let there be no misunderstanding. Studying bottom lines… that simply is not Torah study. It’s preparation for the commandment, in order to know what to do. In other words, Torah study is the study of halakhic dialectic, conceptual analysis, Talmudic give-and-take — meaning the Talmudic topics and of course the commentators and all that. That is what I call Torah study. That and only that. Now again, the other things — that doesn’t mean they have no value. Some of them have no value if they are not study. Others, if they are study but not Torah, then they have value but they are not Torah study. A different value. We’ll talk about that too. Later on I’ll qualify this a bit; I’ll speak about Torah in the object-sense and Torah in the person-sense. Meaning there are softer concepts of Torah, and we’ll get to those too, but that’s the framework of the move. And that’s why I started this whole story, this whole move, with the definition of Jewish law, because that is really where I’m heading. So I began with the very first Rashi on Genesis, if you remember, just refreshing a bit — the first Rashi on Genesis, where he asks why the Torah didn’t start with “This month shall be for you the beginning of months.” So I said that you can see his assumption was that the Torah was really supposed to deal only with Jewish law, right? Because “This month shall be for you” is the first commandment, and the whole Torah and a quarter that came before it really requires explanation as to why it is there at all. So he has some assumption that he doesn’t even bother — it’s like a first principle, it’s obvious, he doesn’t even bother to explain it. It’s so self-evident to him — and we’re so used to that Rashi that we don’t notice what a huge novelty there is in the question. Not in the answer — I said the answer is much weaker than the question — but the question contains an enormous novelty. You ask: why didn’t it start with “This month shall be for you”? Why should it start with “This month shall be for you”? What is there in “This month shall be for you” that there isn’t in “In the beginning God created”? When you ask people, they say, “What? The story of creation, that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world? The most important thing there is? ‘This month shall be for you,’ don’t eat pork, don’t eat this, roast, boiled in water, whatever — all kinds of trivial details? The truly important things are creation and morality and the book of Genesis.” No — Rashi says immediately, without even commenting, as if it’s obvious: why didn’t it start with “This month shall be for you”? What are all these unnecessary things — the creation story and all these matters? Who needs all these things? What is all that doing in the Torah? People don’t realize how revolutionary this Rashi is through the lens people normally use. In my eyes it really is self-evident, but in conventional terms it’s revolutionary, all those who focus… yes, from what I’m saying, notice what exactly Rashi is assuming here. Now the claim is that what lies behind this is that the essence of Torah is Jewish law. Jewish law, of course, comes to expression in commandments, in mitzvot. Right? Therefore “This month shall be for you,” which is the first commandment — that’s where this whole process should have started. I made a linguistic remark that “the law was given in Shushan the capital” — what is dat? Dat in Hebrew means law. Right? Not religion. Religion in English means being religious — religious feelings, standing before God, all sorts of things like that. Dat, religiosity in Hebrew, the translation of that into English is not religion. The translation into English is law, nomos, yes — the law. Okay? “And the law was given in Shushan the capital,” or all sorts of examples in the Bible — and therefore Kant, for example, looked at Judaism and said he didn’t understand why it was considered a religion at all. It’s a collection of social regulations or something, some strange club whose members are obligated by all sorts of rules, do this and don’t do that. What does that have to do with religion? Meaning, from a Christian perspective, religion means religious feelings, perhaps even morality, religiosity, things of that kind, standing before God. So in that sense all Kant’s students of course tried to explain to him — he didn’t understand, he got confused. He understood better than they did. He understood better than they did, except that in his eyes religion in the Christian sense — if that’s how you define the concept of religion, then he’s right, this is not a religion. Meaning, someone who has religious feelings but is not committed to Jewish law is not religious, right, in our ordinary language — not just mine. Right? He isn’t religious. But someone who is committed to Jewish law, no one’s going to ask him whether he has religious feelings and when he encounters the Holy One, blessed be He, every morning. Right? He’s religious. Okay? Why is he religious? Because he is committed to Jewish law. No, that doesn’t mean there aren’t such people; I’m saying they’re not defined in the plain sense as being religious. Sometimes if you push someone into a corner — “Yes, he’s religious, he has religious feelings,” and so on. Today that has already entered the language, but it’s borrowed from the Christian world. He’s religious, yes? He isn’t dati in the original Hebrew sense. Meaning, he has religious feelings. Okay? But that’s exactly the point: Judaism puts commitment to law at the center. That is Jewish religiosity, yes? In contrast to Christian religiosity, where there are almost no laws at all, and therefore it isn’t… the law certainly does not stand at the center. In Islam I don’t know; I assume it depends on different conceptions of Islam, because Islam has law. So there I’m not familiar enough, and certainly there are many nuances among different streams. So I tried to explain the concept of command, and with that I more or less finished — almost finished, actually. The concept of command — what do I mean by the concept of command? I wanted to argue that when a commandment appears in the Torah, “This month shall be for you the beginning of months,” right — that sentence belongs to a different linguistic type. It is not a descriptive sentence, not a statement that describes some fact. It is a command sentence. We talked about the fact that in grammar there is past, present, future, and imperative. Why is imperative on the axis of time? What does that have to do with it? Why are there four tenses? Why is command a tense? The point is that past, present, and future are declarative sentences. Sentences that describe facts — facts from the past, the present, or the future. Command sentences are a different type, which is none of those three. Command belongs neither to past, nor present, nor future. Tenses are irrelevant to it because it does not deal with facts. A fact may be in the past, may be now, may occur in the future. But here we’re not talking about facts, so what do tenses have to do with it? That is why it’s considered, in quotation marks, a fourth tense. It’s a different kind of sentence. We saw Maimonides in the eighth root, where he discusses negation of obligation, and verses that seem to us like command-verses turn out not really to be command-verses, okay? And therefore they are not counted among the commandments according to Maimonides. I talked about descriptive and prescriptive sentences. Descriptive — sentences that describe, like declarative sentences. And prescriptive — command sentences. Okay? These are sentences that are not neutral. When you tell me “it is forbidden to steal,” you described a fact — in the law book, say, it is forbidden to steal. But when you tell me “Do not steal,” you are not describing a fact; you are commanding me something. Right? You are commanding me something. It’s not… when you command me “Do not steal,” can I ask whether that sentence is true or false? It’s a command, not a factual claim. A fact can be true or can be false. But a command — it’s not that… you can say it doesn’t obligate me, it does obligate me, I don’t know — but true and false, or truth and falsehood, are not relevant with respect to prescriptive sentences. Only with respect to descriptive sentences, what Aristotle called propositions. A proposition is a sentence that can be judged in terms of truth or falsehood. Okay? That is basically a descriptive sentence. So therefore the main part of Torah, once we reached the conclusion that this is Jewish law, I’m now defining it linguistically — it is the command-verses. The command-verses are basically the halakhic parts of Torah, of the Bible I mean now, okay? Now last time I started speaking a bit about the meaning of command in our context, and we talked about Maimonides in the Laws of Idolatry, chapter 3, law 6, where Maimonides rules like Mar bar Rav Ashi regarding someone who worships idolatry out of love or fear. Maimonides rules that he is exempt. Most of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) explain that this means he worships out of love or fear of a person, because he doesn’t really love or fear the idol; otherwise that would be full-fledged idolatry. So presumably love and fear mean love and fear of a person. But Maimonides interprets it literally. One who worships out of love or fear is exempt, unless he accepts it upon himself as a god. Meaning, acceptance as a god is the antithesis of worship out of love or fear. This is idolatry and that is not idolatry. What is the difference? I said that religious service in its essence — I’m summarizing, but I do want this to be in your heads, so I’m reviewing a bit at somewhat greater length — when I engage in religious service, religious service means that I accept the command by virtue of the fact that I was commanded. There is no external reason because of which I am obligated by this command. Then it is a religious command. What Kant called a categorical imperative. I am obligated to morality not because I want to please someone, not because I think it will give me a good feeling in my stomach, or things of that kind. No. I am obligated to the moral imperative because that is what morality obligates. Period. That’s it. If they ask me why, the answer is: that’s it. Okay? That is religious service. Religious service means acceptance of a god. Acceptance of a god means that the factor who commanded these commands upon me is, for me, a god. What does it mean that he is a god? A god is someone I obey simply because he is who he is, not because of any additional reasons. Right? When I obey a policeman and don’t speed on the road, I do that so I won’t get fined, or in order to be safer, preserve my life, or all sorts of things like that. That is not religious service. Why do I obey the policeman? Why do I do exactly what he said? Why? Out of fear — I do that too, I’m afraid of him. So that’s literally service out of fear. Why not? Precisely because of that — because service out of fear is not acceptance as a god. Service out of fear means I do it because I fear some consequence or other. Okay? So acceptance as a god, notice, is set in contrast to service out of love and fear. Service out of love and fear is not the peak of religious service, absolutely not. It is not religious service at all. Service out of love or fear is simply — I’m serving myself. I fear or I love in order to sustain the feelings.
[Speaker D] An artist who does the work, like a painter or something, I don’t know.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what about him?
[Speaker D] Like, he has no commandment? No, the point is that he…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Some kind of inner feeling. Yes, although there there isn’t some external thing that you are serving, so I wouldn’t define it as religious obligation. But you’re right that there isn’t someone else. Like they say about judges, yes, that he should have only the fear of the law before him. Meaning, and nothing else. If you’re a judge, only the law is supposed to stand before you.
[Speaker D] A sword on his thigh?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A sword on his thigh.
[Speaker D] Like they say, that Jehoshaphat says, “You judge for the Lord.” A command.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So indeed, a god — by definition, the concept of a god — is such a factor, one to whom I am obligated simply by virtue of who he is. That is called a god. That is why judges in the Bible are called gods. “And the owner of the house shall approach the judges.” Right? The Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin, at the beginning of Sanhedrin, says that “judges” is written three times in that passage, therefore a monetary court requires three judges. Elohim means judges in plain Hebrew. No, it’s not a homiletic reading. It’s the literal meaning. Elohim means judges. Why judges? Because the judge — you obey the judge simply because he is a judge. Not because he is right, not because things will go better for you if you obey him or worse if you don’t obey him. That may also be true, but that’s not why you obey him. You obey because there is an obligation to obey the judge. Therefore a judge is called elohim. In other words, elohim is someone whom you obey simply by virtue of his being who he is. And that is what Maimonides means when he says acceptance as a god. When there is acceptance as a god, that is religious service. If you serve out of love or fear, which ostensibly are kinds of service… that’s how one should serve God — no. If you serve out of love or fear, that is not religious service. It is… you’re serving for ulterior reasons. Right? I said that Leibowitz always takes a correct principle and takes it one step too far. And he reaches the conclusion that everything really has to be technical and a scriptural decree. No, that’s not true. Obviously in prayer you are supposed first of all to pray because you are obligated to pray. In that Leibowitz is right. But no — the fact that you enjoy it, that’s external to the act. But I’m saying: you also want to make requests, I don’t know, to praise, to thank, to request — all those things. That does not invalidate the prayer. In other words, a second level, a third level, a fourth level, the intentions of the Ari, whatever you want — add all that later on. But he is right that that is not the focus. Meaning, the focus is that you come to pray because there is an obligation to pray. That’s all, period. You don’t need anything from the Holy One, blessed be He — not healing, not livelihood, nothing. There is an obligation to pray, that’s all. Commandments require intention — that means the intention to fulfill one’s obligation. And that is also the basic intention in prayer. The intentions — what we call intentions in prayer — are higher levels of the concept of intention. So Leibowitz rejected them because he wanted to emphasize level one. But there’s no need to reject them. Level one really is the foundational and most important one, and on top of it there is still room for all the other levels. Therefore service out of love or fear — the fact that it isn’t religious service doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t love and fear the Holy One, blessed be He. There are commandments to love God and to fear God, two Torah-level commandments. It’s just that those are not the reasons on account of which I serve Him. Those are two different things. I serve Him because He is God. After that I also love Him and fear Him — everything is fine. But that is not the motivation because of which I serve Him.
[Speaker D] Are reasons for the commandments a second level?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whenever I say reasons for the commandments — is that a second level?
[Speaker D] Reasons for the commandments, in my eyes…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying, it depends what you call reasons for the commandments. I claim that the whole discussion of reasons for the commandments is just empty chatter, generally speaking. It’s just — it doesn’t really persuade anything, it’s just games. It never really explains the details of the commandment, and… Maimonides himself already engages in apologetics, yes? Why nonetheless… it’s not really persuasive. But I do think there are reasons for the commandments, and they are not just arbitrary things. So if you ask in the sense of whether I do it in order to bring about those benefits the commandment is supposed to bring, then the answer is no. I need to do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it. That does not mean there are no benefits, and it does not mean I do not want… those benefits to exist. But the reason because of which I serve is because of the command. And that is the important point here. Now this defines Torah study on two levels. First, it defines this field called Torah, which when I study it, I’m called a student of Torah. What is this field? First of all, the commands. About the rest I haven’t yet explained why not, but first of all it is the commands, okay? Now, the second thing — the second thing is that when I fulfill the commandments, I’m supposed to do so because of the command. Meaning, command has two roles. First, it defines this field called Torah — basically Jewish law, the commands. Second, it is also the motivation for fulfillment. So that when I fulfill the laws, I am supposed to do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded. That is supposed to be the motivation because of which I act. And study is basically some kind of… yes, the commands represent the will of God, as opposed to facts. When the Torah describes facts, there is no divine will there; facts are being described. Abraham went here, this happened, that happened — those are facts. The commands express the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, and He and His will are one, as the author of the Tanya says — Nefesh HaChayim also says it in a different language — He and His will are one. When we study Jewish law, we are basically studying the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, and that is how we cleave to Him. And therefore, the study of Jewish law is the very essence of Torah study, because you cleave to the will of the Holy One, blessed be He.
[Speaker C] Maybe in this context I’ll
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] show you some passage from Nefesh HaChayim. I found it, here. It’s in armor plating; this is the armor-plating method for solving problems. Okay, what is this thing, this yellow square?
[Speaker E] Share it. It’s from the projector itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is the will of God, and if you study Jewish law, you are attached to His will, and He and His will are one, right? So you are basically attached to the Holy One, Blessed be He. Now he says yes, but aggadah is also Torah. Like Rashi, right? After the fact, yes? Aggadah is also Torah. Also things that don’t pertain to Jewish law. Aggadah is a general term, including things that don’t pertain to Jewish law. That too is Torah. Why is that too Torah? Because it is the speech of the Holy One, Blessed be He. Now notice, that is not the will of the Holy One, Blessed be He. Because there is no will there, it’s not… there are no commandments there, right? It is the speech of the Holy One, Blessed be He. Meaning, we basically have two categories in Torah. There is the will of God, which is Jewish law, and there is the word of God, which is the other things that the Holy One, Blessed be He, also says. That is why he brings all these sources that show you that the Holy One, Blessed be He, speaks these things that are not Jewish law. The concubine at Gibeah is not a halakhic topic, right? But when the sages deal with it down here, the Holy One, Blessed be He, speaks it up there. Now when the Holy One, Blessed be He, speaks it, He turns it into Torah. But in principle, Torah in its essence is the wills, it is Jewish law, like that first Rashi. But the rest too is Torah, in this sort of after-the-fact sense, right? The rest too is Torah; the Holy One, Blessed be He, speaks it, and by that He turns the rest too into Torah. Now what’s nice here is that there is a continuation of the Talmudic passage in Gittin that he doesn’t bring here. The continuation of the passage in Gittin says that Elijah the Prophet says to Rabbi Evyatar, Elijah the Prophet says to him: “My son Evyatar says thus, my son Yonatan says thus.” So now Rabbi Evyatar asks him: Heaven forbid, is there doubt before Heaven? What, the Holy One, Blessed be He, doesn’t know what happened there with the concubine at Gibeah—whether he found a hair or found a fly? So he said to him: “Both these and those are the words of the living God. He found a fly and was not particular about it; he found a hair and was particular about it.” What does that mean? That both of them are right in some sense, right partially; both of them are partially right, essentially. Apparently there was some combination here—at least that’s how I understand it. Apparently both things were present, both a hair and a fly. His anger was stirred, but only after the final straw. Meaning both the hair and the fly together caused the anger. So each of the sages saw part of the picture, okay? But both were right, at least partially. The full picture is the combination of the two perspectives of Rabbi Evyatar and Rabbi Yonatan. But now notice the wording of the Talmudic passage: “Both these and those are the words of the living God.” The will of the living God, seemingly, is only one will, right? But the words of the living God—the Holy One, Blessed be He, can say that he found a hair and say that he found a fly, and both become Torah. Meaning, it’s probably not accidental—seems to me he is hinting to this—that the passage there in Gittin uses the term “both these and those are the words of the living God” and not “both these and those are the will of the living God.” And therefore, indeed, in the Talmudic passage in Eruvin 13b, where “both these and those are the words of the living God” also appears, there the Ritva asks: how can that be? What does it mean, “both these and those are the words of the living God”? Like the judge’s wife, right? You’re right, you’re right too, and you’re right too. Meaning—what… if He wants the Sabbath to be permitted then it is permitted, if He wants it to be forbidden then it is forbidden; what does it mean that He wants both? Regarding wills, there is no such thing as “both these and those are the words of the living God.” Regarding the words of the living God, yes. Meaning, the halakhic concept, essentially, the halakhic part of Torah, is the will of God. The non-halakhic part of Torah is the word of God. And therefore once again we see what we saw in that first Rashi, that the focus of Torah and of engagement with Torah is Jewish law, which is the will of God. That does not mean the other things have no value; they are the word of God, not the will of God. That too has some kind of status. Later on I’ll call it Torah in the person, but let’s leave that for now.
[Speaker C] Aggadot are Torah in the person, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] From this discussion about idolatry—that idolatry can involve a case of exemption because it isn’t really religious worship, but worship for which one is liable is worship consisting of accepting something as a god—from that you can of course also learn about worship of God. In worship of God too, if you worship Him out of love or fear, you aren’t really worshipping Him. Worship for its own sake is worship simply because He commanded. That is called worship of God. And here we can see this in Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 10 of the laws of repentance. The Jewish people suffered enough, as they say. Fine. “A person should not say: I will fulfill the commandments of the Torah and occupy myself with its wisdom in order to receive all the blessings written in it, or in order to merit the life of the world to come, and I will separate from the transgressions against which the Torah warned in order to be saved from the curses written in the Torah, or in order not to be cut off from the life of the world to come. It is not fitting to serve God in this way, for one who serves in this way serves out of fear, and this is not the level of the prophets nor the level of the sages. And none serve God in this way except the ignorant, the women, and the minors, whom one trains to serve out of fear until their knowledge increases and they serve out of love.” So up to here Maimonides is basically saying: even positive motivations—receiving the blessings written in the Torah, or the world to come, or things of that sort—or avoiding Gehenna, maybe positive motivations; but the moment I have any motivations at all, that is no longer worship for its own sake. Exactly as we saw in the laws of idolatry: one who worships idolatry out of love or out of fear—those are external motivations. Love and fear of God are positive things, positive commandments. Fine. But they cannot be the motivation because of which you serve the Holy One, Blessed be He.
[Speaker D] He can’t remain with that motivation the whole time?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not only can’t he remain with the motivation, that isn’t supposed to be his motivation. But not because of that. It isn’t supposed to be his motivation. Not because it doesn’t last.
[Speaker D] In his case.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, how does he get out of it?
[Speaker D] He serves out of fear. So that’s what it is.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He is not at the proper level. Yes. I once spoke about this—I once gave a series of classes on repentance, and I really brought this example there. Suppose—yes, take what’s called a toy model, some simple model like that. A world, yes, with zero spatial dimensions and time. Right? In physics they always start with some world that is just a point. There is a person who serves God not for its own sake. His goal is maximum reward, minimum punishment. That is his goal in life. Now the man is perfectly righteous, because he is careful about every last jot and tittle of the Mishnah Berurah and is concerned for all opinions, because he wants maximum reward and minimum punishment. Okay? Now I want to persuade him to serve for its own sake. To change his path and become a more exalted servant of God, right? A servant of God for its own sake. Is there any way to do that?
[Speaker D] Impossible.
[Speaker F] Yes, that’s the contradiction here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, there is no way to persuade him, because when you persuade him you have to appeal to him through the principles he believes in. Now if from his standpoint the principle is maximum reward, minimum punishment, at most you can say to him, “Look, if you serve for its own sake you’ll get more reward.” Fine. It’s like—like Adam HaKohen. I once heard a story. There was a well-known maskil, Adam HaKohen—besides also being a street in Tel Aviv—who once said he wanted to repent on his deathbed in order to refute the saying of the sages that even the wicked at the entrance to Gehenna do not repent. Meaning, that’s about the same thing. Meaning, you can’t repent in such a way; you can’t study for its own sake in such a way. You are trapped inside some conceptual framework that you can’t get out of. So that’s the answer to your question.
[Speaker C] But for our purposes, one could say that the person says, “I assume there is a world to come, reward and punishment, so I’ll do it. There are commandments, say, to keep the Sabbath, to pray three times a day, I do that, not eating kosher—that’s not such a huge burden for me—but I don’t want to take the risk that I’ll be punished in the world to come.” So, game theory. He’s basically saying, “I’m doing it only so that I won’t…”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that’s the person I described. So what about him?
[Speaker C] So that’s what we’re saying, that it’s worth nothing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not that it’s worth nothing; it’s not for its own sake. “From not for its own sake one comes to for its own sake”—it has value, but it’s not for its own sake. Like with idolatry. Not first-rate idolatry. Fine, if you want to be a first-rate idol worshipper, then it’s not out of love or fear; you need to accept the deity for the sake of its unification.
[Speaker C] Maximum reward—he does it only to minimize damage.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter; that’s another version of the same fellow. What difference does it make? Yes. So the claim is that there could be someone who just doesn’t want punishment; he doesn’t need the reward. Just don’t bring me to Gehenna. That’s all. Fine. So he keeps all the positive commandments and the prohibitions. The optional commandments, no. Meaning, that doesn’t bother him. Fine. In any case, I’m saying: that’s law 1 in Maimonides, okay? It basically says that we are not supposed to serve for external reasons, foreign reasons, including fear of God, which is a positive reason in itself. But it cannot be the reason because of which I serve. Law 2: “One who serves out of love occupies himself with Torah and commandments and walks in the paths of wisdom not because of anything in the world and not because… not out of fear of evil and not in order to inherit good, but he does the truth because it is truth, and in the end good comes because of it. And this level is a very great level, and not every sage merits it, and it is the level of Abraham our forefather, whom the Holy One, Blessed be He, called ‘My beloved,’ because he served only out of love. And this is the level that the Holy One, Blessed be He, commanded us through Moses, as it is said: ‘And you shall love the Lord your God,’ and when a person loves God with the proper love, he immediately performs all the commandments out of love.” Now here, apparently, he contradicts what we saw, because there in the laws of idolatry he spoke of one who worships idolatry out of love or out of fear—those two reasons. Here he distinguishes; he says out of fear is a foreign reason, not service for its own sake, but out of love is service for its own sake, right? But notice how he defines service out of love here. There is no emotional element here, right? “Not out of fear of evil and not in order to inherit good, but he does the truth because it is truth.” You can see it in the second line. Is that what you would call love? To do the truth because it is truth? Service out of love—you’d expect some bursting emotion, I don’t know, something emotional. To do the truth because it is truth—that is distilled Litvak. Right, what is this? Right. It is completely, completely an intellectual matter, right? So what is called service out of love? What?
[Speaker G] Because if it’s true, that’s what needs to be done—rather, he loves the truth, so because of that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “He does the truth because it is truth”—he didn’t say he loves the truth.
[Speaker G] Rather, that what needs to be done is the truth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because it is truth. Who said one needs to do the truth? That’s an oxymoron. If that is the truth, that means one needs to do it. That’s why it is truth—that is the meaning of truth.
[Speaker F] And you do the truth because you love the truth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I do the truth because it is truth, because it is truth. If I do it because I love the truth, that is a foreign reason. I do the truth because there is an obligation to do truth, because it is truth, that’s all. The fact that I love the truth—so what if I love the truth? I love it, it gives me a warm feeling in my belly, so I do it for my belly. It doesn’t matter that love of truth sounds lofty, but love of truth is a psychological trait. Some people love truth, some people love chocolate. So what? You do the truth because it is truth, not because of love of truth. To do the truth because it is truth. That’s it. That is the meaning of worship of God. So notice: when he speaks here about serving out of love, this is not the opposite of serving out of fear in the sense of loving versus fearing; rather, serving out of love in this context is a cold rational matter, unlike emotionality, which includes both fear and love—emotional love. Every foreign reason is basically service out of fear, because it is service you do for yourself, or out of concern about one consequence or another. What he calls service out of love here is what he called there acceptance of a deity. That is not what he called there serving out of love. This is what is called accepting the deity. Now here there is a point.
[Speaker C] What does acceptance actually mean here—like, the truth?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, to do the truth because it is truth. Yes, I do it because the Holy One, Blessed be He, commanded; that is the truth. I don’t need explanations of why to do it—because it will be good for me, because society will be repaired, because I don’t know what, because the world won’t heat up, I don’t know, all sorts of reasons like that.
[Speaker D] He doesn’t feel when he knows. He doesn’t feel anything, he knows.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does that have to do with emotion? I didn’t say he doesn’t have it.
[Speaker D] When he learns something
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] and I suddenly see
[Speaker D] that he knows, then I love him, I’m happy.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say he has no emotion. I also didn’t say he has no emotion; I said the emotion is not important. If he has emotion, let him have emotion, but emotion is not the reason why he acts. He has it. If he has it, then he has it; if he doesn’t, then he doesn’t.
[Speaker D] And also as a result—so love too is basically a result after you understood.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I’m saying.
[Speaker D] Not something that accompanied him the whole time.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So again, it doesn’t matter whether it accompanies him the whole time or not; love in the emotional sense is not the motivation because of which I act. That’s all. If it is born afterward, it will be born; if not, not. So I once brought—
[Speaker C] Here, either you love it or you don’t love it, so—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I once spoke with—there was, I once went to Yeruham, to the yeshiva there, and I had a friend from Sde Boker, some school principal there, of the environmental high school in Sde Boker, a very good high school like that. And he once invited me to speak during the Ten Days of Repentance about matters of atonement, forgiveness, repentance. But he said to me: without religious matters; it’s a secular school, without religious matters—meaning, let’s try to talk about these topics. Fine, an interesting challenge. So I decided to speak. I told them this: the teachers and students were sitting there, and it really was a high-level crowd, I enjoyed it. So I told them, look, suppose I hurt a friend of mine. Okay? Now I feel nothing, I have no pangs of conscience, I’m completely detached, completely autistic, it doesn’t touch me in any emotional way. Okay? I get home happy and cheerful, whistling some merry tune to myself, and then I say to myself, yes, but actually it’s not okay to hurt my friend. It’s not okay, it’s not moral, so I’ll go ask him for forgiveness, to appease him. All while humming a merry tune—I don’t feel anything. Not that I have pangs of conscience and all that, okay? That whole lobe is cut out in me. Fine? I go ask him for forgiveness because I was not okay. Inside I feel no sorrow, no pangs of conscience, nothing. Now I come and ask him for forgiveness. Would you accept such an apology? I asked them. Would you accept such an apology? Suppose Elijah the Prophet came—he’s not religious, he’s the secular Elijah the Prophet—and tells you that inside I feel nothing. They said no, that’s hypocritical. What do you mean hypocrisy? You aren’t really sorry, right? I told them that this is the most elevated apology I can imagine. Because if I come to apologize because I have pangs of conscience, then I’m doing it in order to support my pangs of conscience. By contrast, if I have no pangs of conscience, then why am I coming? Again, if I’m coming for interests, so that later he’ll repay me with some favor, that’s something else. I’m talking about someone who comes because it is the right thing to do.
[Speaker C] From that moment on you didn’t feel anything?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what she said to me. So, what can I do?
[Speaker C] Did someone tell you afterward?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And now what? Do I have pangs of conscience? I don’t. So everything is fine. What’s the difference? It’s the same thing.
[Speaker C] No, from the outside, it’s not…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, from the outside she only updated me that I hurt him. But I understand that one must not hurt. I understand intellectually—again, I don’t have that feeling. I don’t… yes, I feel nothing.
[Speaker C] Yes, exactly. That’s also okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I once saw a TED lecture by some American neurophysiologist who herself had been injured in a car accident; something happened to her brain. It was very interesting. And she said there that she feels nothing. She has no empathy for people whatsoever. She described herself. Fine? But she learned to behave empathetically in a purely technical way. Okay? And she understands that it’s not okay to hurt and so on, but she doesn’t feel the hurt because she lacks the ability to feel empathy with the other. To put herself in his shoes and understand that when it hurts, it’s unpleasant for him, it’s not okay. That ability to feel empathy is very important for moral behavior. But there is… no, apparently not, if I understand correctly—I don’t remember already what… no, but I’m saying, many people identify morality with empathy. And that is a common mistake of psychologists. Psychologists who appoint themselves philosophers. That’s a mistake. Empathy is of course a very important tool, because you need to understand that you hurt him in order to understand that you were not okay. Just as if you don’t see it you won’t understand, because you need sight in order to know. But that doesn’t mean sight has moral value. Sight is a tool without which I can’t activate morality. Okay? So here too, same thing. The fact that she has no empathy does not make her a less moral person. She is simply disabled; that is, there is a certain type of perception she doesn’t perceive, like someone who is blind. And when she learned to behave artificially, that isn’t hypocrisy. On the contrary, it may even be more moral, because she doesn’t even have the heartache when she comes to appease someone or when she avoids hurting someone. It isn’t because of her heartache deterring her, but because she truly understands that it is not okay. Unless she is merely imitating her surroundings and wants to fit in—that doesn’t matter—but in principle, if she does it for value-based reasons, then that is the most elevated thing possible. Meaning, therefore their claim that this was hypocrisy is a claim unwilling to acknowledge the existence of what I call altruistic action. Altruistic action is an action done for the sake of the other—but notice, not because of my empathy for the other. Because if it is because of my empathy for the other, then it’s not really done for the other; it’s done for myself. Therefore altruistic action, in the sense in which I define it here, does not require empathy at all. Empathy is a tool like eyes; that is, to understand what my actions do to the other. And then, if I know that it hurts him, I won’t do it. But empathy is a tool, not the value itself. And if someone doesn’t have that tool, then that’s a kind of disability, but he is not less moral. Okay? That’s the point. And I’m saying, someone who does the truth because it is truth, what Maimonides is talking about here—that’s what he is describing. And there are a great many people who are unwilling to accept that such an action even exists at all. Check yourselves—I’m sure that for most of you too, on first intuition, that’s how it is. There’s no such thing as a person acting not out of some motive that drives him, but simply because that is what is right. You always look for—wait, but what drove him to it? What, did he feel pangs of conscience? Did he want to please someone? We are always looking for various explanations. This search for explanations—sometimes there are other explanations—but the automatic search for explanations basically assumes that altruistic action cannot exist. And that an action I do because it is the right thing cannot exist. No, I have no motivation at all—neither personal nor external, nothing, absolutely nothing—simply because it is right. There are also many people, by the way, who are put off by such a figure. It’s a terribly mechanical figure, not human. It isn’t… yes, but it’s a little the opposite of cynicism, because it’s the reverse: they expect you to be empathic, and this conception of doing the truth because it is truth seems a bit cynical. And you don’t involve emotion in the matter; you do it like a robot, yes, without feeling, without sensing. What?
[Speaker E] I think,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] not only can it—it comes from the deepest place, I think. That’s exactly the point. And what people don’t grasp in this context is because people think that for everything I do, I have to have some external motivation of some kind. External meaning including my feelings—that too is called external. It’s easier for him, but it’s not—but the other person, when he doesn’t have that thing, he simply won’t feel it.
[Speaker C] The Nazis had no feelings at all.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But they had feelings, of course they had feelings; that’s why they drank wine to get drunk before they did what they did. Not sure at all. What, suddenly Germany had six years of disappearing feelings?
[Speaker C] I’ve seen people like that, sociopaths with the look—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] his romantic look at the sauna. I understand; I’ve seen people like that too. But the fact that this happened over 12 specific years in the middle of the 20th century means there was something there beyond that.
[Speaker C] People didn’t change.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But they don’t do it today.
[Speaker C] Fine, so—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That means something happened there—on the contrary. In a certain sense the Nazis were like that; that’s what is disturbing about such people. Because the Nazis had the same feelings you had, which is why they had to get drunk before they shot people at Babi Yar or in places like that. I don’t know, some of them—doesn’t matter—they definitely had feelings. I don’t think so. There are very few sociopaths in the population.
[Speaker F] Do you know the story of George Price? George Price was a devout Christian, an American, and a physicist. He wanted to prove that altruism does not exist and that we all act only out of some desire, out of egoism. So at some point it troubled him; when he was 40, he donated all his wealth in order to prove that he was altruistic. Then he realized and said, oh, even that altruistic act I did out of a motive, in order to—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] prove that altruism exists.
[Speaker F] And he never got out of it, and in the end he took his own life. And his claim is that altruism in fact does not exist.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I understand; that is exactly the claim I’m talking about.
[Speaker F] Even when a person wants to do a moral act when he recognizes the truth, it is his desire to see the truth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that is exactly the view I’m attacking here. I disagree.
[Speaker F] But the desire to see something as true?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it is not a desire to see something as true; it is the truth. That’s exactly the point. I don’t do it because I love the truth; I do it because this is the truth. And the assumption of this Price is exactly the assumption I’m attacking here, because what did he try to do? He tried to perform, from what you describe, an altruistic action in order to prove the existence of altruism, and then he understood that this proves nothing. But the fact that it proves nothing does not mean it does not exist. Meaning, true, you can’t prove it, because I can always attribute it to love of truth, and who knows whether you did it because it is truth or because you love it and it warms your belly to do the truth, okay? You can’t prove it. But just because you can’t prove something does not mean it doesn’t exist.
[Speaker F] But even if I set aside love of truth, I agree. But regarding the truth itself—when you recognize that this is the truth, a person still has a desire to act according to the truth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that desire is a derivative desire because it is the truth; it is not the motivation for the action, it is a result. When I understand that this is the truth, then that is what needs to be done. Now there is—we are built in such a way that some of us at least, or in certain cases, this also arouses in me some desire to do it, like giving charity to a poor person. The compassion to give to the poor person does not mean that the action is not altruistic. It may very well be that I would do it even without the compassion, because I think that is the right thing to do. We are built in such a way—evolution did it, the Holy One, Blessed be He, did it, it doesn’t matter, both can do that—to implant in us certain emotional or psychological motivations to do that thing, but that does not mean I am not doing it for altruistic reasons. We—this is something I’ll get to later, meaning this duality of motives, or motive and absence of motive in parallel. That is exactly what I want to claim. My claim is that there is—and again, you can’t prove this, but you also can’t prove the opposite, so I think the situation is balanced. Everyone can decide what he decides, but those who claim the opposite cannot prove it either, for exactly the same reason that I cannot prove my claim. So it is an unfalsifiable claim—neither the altruistic claim nor the anti-altruistic claim. My claim is that a person can perform an action in a completely cold, purely altruistic way. Cold and altruistic are, surprisingly, synonyms. Usually people identify altruism with warmth, with empathy. No—in my eyes altruism is coldness. There is a very beautiful article by some American philosopher, Susan Wolf—I don’t remember, I think she’s Jewish—about the moral saint. She describes a figure we don’t like all that much. I don’t either. Meaning, someone who does exactly what is right, some kind of saint. He does exactly what is right, always calculating what is the most correct thing to do, true, morally right—not right in the self-interested sense. It’s an awfully mechanical figure, not a figure pleasant to live beside. Maybe in the world to come, I don’t know, be optimistic. Even halakhic decisors are not like that; maybe you are positing some ideal of the ideal halakhic decisor, I don’t know. But it really is something not so human. Meaning, it’s a little hard, a little hard. Look, I knew someone—I won’t say who because that would be slander—but I knew someone who was a very, very good man in his ways, and I think there are quite a few like that, devoting his life to helping others, to ideals, to all sorts of things like that, and he is a very hard person to live with. Very hard to live with. And it’s not because he’s not moral, but because from his point of view—he told me, with me there are no friends, there are fellow travelers. Meaning, those who act with me to realize my interests—those are called friends. He has no friends in the emotional sense—that we’re friends, we have a bond, so we have mutual obligations. No, no, there’s no such thing. I am committed to ideals. Meaning, whoever joins me in realizing the ideals is the friend. There are no ordinary friends, only fellow travelers. Now, these are people who are hard to live with. Meaning, every time you want to relax a little, fool around a bit—what do you mean? That’s wasting Torah study. You need to go save three poor people, establish another institution, and I don’t know what, settle another hilltop in Samaria. Meaning, all sorts of things in all sorts of directions. There are such people on the right, there are such people on the left. All kinds of people who truly devote themselves; they really are righteous. They devote themselves to the existence of values, but it is something very hard for us to live next to. Part of that, by the way, is because it obviously challenges us. After all, I am not on his level. I can loaf around once in a while and do things that aren’t value-laden every single minute. But part of it is also, I don’t know—something about this person seems terribly mechanical, terribly. But my claim is that such a thing exists. Meaning, there is a person who does—and by the way, you don’t have to be that mechanical. To be a moral saint you can also be an empathic saint, and still always do what is right—just also develop your ability to feel empathy and respond, and if someone wants to fool around, then go along with him a bit too, it’s okay. Meaning, that too is a certain kind of behavior that can be completely moral; it isn’t a compromise behaviorally. I’m just saying that if I want to sharpen or focus what it means to be an altruistic person, it is דווקא the cold person. If emotions are added in, that doesn’t disqualify it; that’s perfectly fine. But his altruism is specifically the cold dimension, not the warm one. Okay?
[Speaker C] But there is something
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] dangerous in that. Because when one works only with his intellect, his intellect can lead him to all sorts of places, and he is used to imposing it on his emotions and doing it. And sometimes emotions come to moderate us or guide us in a certain sense. Yes, those Nazis we spoke about earlier, in that sense, performed a completely altruistic action. They realized the value they believed in, even though, in my view, many of them at least had emotions just like mine and yours. They overcame that and did what they thought was right. And in order to overcome it they sometimes had to get drunk—all the known stories, even about Himmler there are stories like that, that he had to drink wine when he went to see some mass execution there. He was not a sociopath; that’s exactly the point. By the way, that also makes him much more guilty. He was not a sociopath. No. On the spectrum of sociopathy he wasn’t there. Fine, I can’t know that, but I’m saying in principle, that is the danger in people who completely ignore natural feeling and impose their understandings, their cognition, over their emotions. Okay? But in principle, altruistic behavior is that kind of behavior. That’s what Maimonides is speaking about here when he says to do the truth because it is truth, and in the end good comes. Now emotions can help us behave this way. But that does not mean emotions have value—they have no value at all. The value lies in the right behavior. Emotions can be an instrument that can help me do it; empathy is an instrument that can help me realize moral behavior. But it’s not that empathy has value. There is no moral difference between a person with more empathy and a person with less empathy.
[Speaker C] Could it be that keeping the commandments in this way and studying Torah develops these abilities in you so that you know how to do the…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you believe that, fine. I don’t think it’s true, but maybe—it’s another question, an empirical question, whether it happens or doesn’t happen. I’m not at all sure it happens. Often, by the way, I feel the opposite.
[Speaker C] No, I mean in the large numbers,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] when you educate an entire people for generations, for 3,000 years. What? I very often feel the opposite. The fact that groups that are very loyal to Jewish law lose their moral and human sensitivity.
[Speaker C] Yes, that’s an extreme.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that is because it stems from the fact that they became used to imposing what I think is right over natural human feelings. And everything where morality rebels against an action that Jewish law commands is perceived as the evil inclination; you have to control it. Maybe you do have to do what Jewish law says and overcome it—but it should hurt you, you should be inside that conflict, and then decide what to do with it, okay? And they say no, what do you mean, I need to suppress that thing in order to be a true servant of God. That is called doing the truth because it is truth. Fine, that is the danger in this whole issue of doing the truth. Therefore I think that very often, by the way, one of the common mistakes of secular people is that they don’t grasp this. It is often accepted to think that a religious outlook is more emotional and less rational, while a secular outlook is rational. That is complete nonsense; it is exactly the opposite. Again, I’m not judging now; this is not at all a question of who is preferable. First of all, as a factual description: religious behavior is far, far more rational.
[Speaker C] More traditional, maybe.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know; “traditional” is something else—that’s a pathology of its own. The secular person’s behavior is much more emotional, much more. Therefore in the secular world they cannot understand a place where there is dissonance between what I think is right and where the emotion rebels. If the emotion rebels, then it isn’t right. They are not willing to accept the existence of such a dissonance, yes? The example that always came to my mind in this context was one of those music shows, a music reality show. Shlomi Shabbat was one of the judges there; I don’t remember what it was called—A Star Is Born, The Voice, all those things, I already don’t remember what it was called. Shlomi Shabbat was a judge. There was someone who came up to sing there, or some woman, I don’t remember. I was with the kids, that’s why I remember it as a piece of family mythology. We watched the program—it was many years ago. And then he responds to the singer, says, listen, there were such and such problems, but the heart, the heart, the heart—and everyone bursts into thunderous applause. And then after the applause died down, I asked, so what did you decide? And the gang was rolling on the floor laughing. Because what do you mean, what did you decide? He’s saying, as if the intellect says you don’t pass, but the heart, the heart—it spoke to my heart, you must pass. Okay, so you’re in a dilemma, right? But he didn’t bother to say, okay, so what did I decide? I didn’t understand—you described a dissonance; now explain to me what you finally decided. He didn’t explain. Why not? Do you know why not? Because obviously if the heart says so, that’s what you do, right? That’s obvious. Why is that obvious? I say the opposite.
[Speaker C] If the intellect says so, then what do I care
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that the heart says otherwise? You do that. Because I need explanations if I don’t do it. Exactly, that’s what I’m saying. It’s not only East-West, in my opinion; it’s secular versus
[Speaker C] religious.
[Speaker D] There’s also Rabbi Mizrachi and traditional Mizrahi Jews in that.
[Speaker C] I’m not talking about Mizrahi Jews, but about all Eastern culture generally.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure that it’s specifically connected to Easternness. I don’t think the Ashkenazi judges there would have behaved differently. Fine, but for our purposes, I claim this is a difference
[Speaker C] between
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] religious and secular people, in my opinion.
[Speaker C] It could
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] be that there is also something Eastern here, I don’t know, but this is a difference between religious and secular people. The religious world educates you more to work with your head. Now, you can criticize, you can say this is all nonsense, that it isn’t true—I’m not getting into that with you; what I’m saying now isn’t evaluative, it’s a factual description. A religious person is used to using his head, deciding what is right to do, and acting accordingly. A secular person asks his heart: what does my heart tell me here?
[Speaker C] In a certain sense there was also traditionalism. Traditionalism is something emotional at its core, and therefore secular people can’t contain it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Secular Ashkenazim especially can’t contain it easily. They can contain it easily, and that’s exactly the point—that once they couldn’t contain it, and that’s exactly the point, that secular culture is slowly moving from potential to actuality, and the differences between East and West are being erased.
[Speaker C] In the end
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the end, they’re not called anything. Today secular Ashkenazim look like secular Mizrahim; they’re emotional to the same degree. And that’s why they’re willing to accept all the types you hinted at earlier—religious, semi-religious, and traditionalist—no problem. By the way, today there are a lot of traditionalist Ashkenazim, which didn’t used to exist. Traditionalist Ashkenazim—making kiddush, going to synagogue, going to a game, like the Sephardim—there are a lot of them. All this white return to religion in Tel Aviv, all these places, those are Ashkenazi phenomena too. That’s because I think in essence this is a matter of secularity, not of being Eastern. Once you’re secular, then all you have is what your gut tells you. A religious person has some kind of system that det… again, I’m not getting into the question of who’s right; that’s not the point at all. I’m talking descriptively right now. Meaning, he has some sort of system that determines what is correct. Now, he feels like the secular person—meaning, sometimes he’ll resist, sometimes he won’t be able to handle it, it’ll be hard for him, that’s all fine. But from his point of view, that doesn’t automatically mean he won’t do it. Because if the system says that this is right, then yes, I’ll do it. Among secular people—there used to be a chemist in Jerusalem named Professor Shahak, who was very anti-religious. Every time he’d pull some duck out of his sleeve, publish some outrageous case involving religious people. Once it was about a priest’s wife who was raped, and the halakhic decisors required her to separate from her husband, and they had children, and it was a terrible tragedy. Another time he told about some non-Jew on the Sabbath, and religious Jews passed by and didn’t violate the Sabbath to save his life. And there was a huge uproar; a great noise was made in the world, as our rabbi says, and some kind of commotion started there. In the end it turned out that at least a large part of those cases had never happened at all, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But the truth is that he was right. What difference does it make if it didn’t happen? That really is what Jewish law says. What difference does it make whether it happened or not? And when I had a discussion with people there, I said to them, take that priest’s wife case. They said, “Tell me, don’t you have a heart? You, or those halakhic decisors who decided this. Where is your heart? That woman went through a terrible trauma. She has children she loves, a husband she loves, a family. You’re putting her and the whole family through another trauma now after the first trauma. Where is your heart?” Now, their assumption was—it’s very strange—I said to them, “Look, if you had told me, ‘Listen, your principles seem stupid to me,’ fine, that’s an argument. To me they don’t seem stupid; to you they do; we have a disagreement. But you’re not even arguing about that. You’re willing to accept that I have principles that say that despite the pain they still have to separate—you’re not willing to accept that I actually follow them.” Meaning, because if the heart says otherwise, then you have to go with the heart. What do you mean, your heart doesn’t…? You have no heart? Why are you assuming I have no heart? I have a heart just like you do. It hurts me just as much as it hurts you. It’s just that I’m not… one second, it’s just that I’m not willing to accept that whatever my heart tells me is automatically what I should do. Sometimes there are situations where I have to do something that my heart rebels against, but I think it’s right, and that’s what I’ll do. By the way, our politics are saturated with arguments of this kind. Think about the arguments around the hostage deal—and again, without getting into who was right. I expressed very clear positions on this, but without getting into that question at all, notice who was on the two… Why is it that those who opposed the deal were all religious? All religious, almost. Where did that correlation come from? Because to oppose the deal means leaving those poor hostages there to suffer in captivity; your heart is torn apart. Because of some future strategic considerations, one kind or another—maybe there will be future casualties, maybe I don’t know, they’ll take over territory from us… I don’t know, all kinds of things like that, strategic considerations. Now, in a secular world there’s no such thing. Meaning, if their heart tells them right now that the hostages are suffering, they shed tears, they describe heartbreaking situations—completely real ones—it’s horrifying what they went through there. But from their standpoint, that’s the bottom line. Once I described that, it’s obvious what needs to be done. In a religious world you get used to saying: okay, I understand, this is a very hard situation, my empathy tears my heart apart, truly, people are suffering there, it’s insane even to think about it. Okay, but that’s not the end of the verse; there are other considerations that need to be made. Now again, it could be that those considerations are wrong, and it could be that those who wanted a deal were right—I’m not getting into that at all. I’m only using this to describe these two modes of conduct. Meaning: do you go with your heart, or do you do what is true because it is true, and your heart—with all due respect to it.
[Speaker F] But a lot of people returning to religion go to the more emotional side of Judaism, and only a few of the people returning from secularity return to the rational side.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s an interesting comment. I hadn’t thought about that.
[Speaker F] Because I have two friends who returned to religion because of rationality, meaning they studied philosophy and then jumped to asking what Judaism says, and we noticed this in recent years—we said this—it’s one thing I noticed in a lot of cases.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And they themselves—what? They themselves also became emotional?
[Speaker F] They themselves are on the rational side.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so I live—I’m from a different period. I was at Netivot Olam, which is a yeshiva for people returning to religion, in the mid-1980s of the previous century of course, not the 17th century. And there there was such a wave of return to religion; Rabbi Shakh’s “rabbit speech” happened exactly when I was there, and so on. And there it really wasn’t like that. Back then people returned to religion only in the opposite way: those people who were willing to make decisions with their heads and make a change. There was return to religion in the more traditional sense too, really more Eastern a lot of the time—people who had sentimental ties to their parents’ home or something like that, or to their grandparents’ home or something like that—but the people I saw around me were really precisely the part you described with your two friends. So again, I don’t know how to make generalizations; there are all kinds, and what kind of metamorphosis they go through when they make the change.
[Speaker F] And in today’s reality, Ashkenazim too, Sephardim, Mizrahim—the people returning to religion mostly go to Hasidic groups, to Breslov, Chabad, things in that style.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, I’m not familiar with the statistics.
[Speaker F] It could be because society—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But again, truly, today I think the secular world has simply become much more emotional. Ashkenazim too—there’s no longer a difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim; maybe there still is a difference, but it’s already small, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Everyone is emotional. Really, it’s an emotional herd that’s very hard to deal with. By the way, this penetrates into the religious world too, of course. All this existentialism that plays such a big role—wait, where am I in this whole story, and why should I do these technical things that mean nothing to me, and I don’t connect to it, and he observes not touching women and he doesn’t observe not touching women, because each person according to where he places himself and what speaks to him, and all kinds of things of that sort—that is the penetration of those same emotional winds into the religious world, and then the religious world too undergoes some kind of metamorphosis. Some interpret that favorably; I interpret it negatively, but never mind. Factually, it is certainly happening, and somehow it has become much more emotional inside the religious world as well.
[Speaker C] Maybe because we’re in this Middle Eastern region, we’re becoming Arabs? Maybe, I don’t know. Fine, that’s how it is—the culture of the East, Eastern culture, is not black and white.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I agree. I agree. I’m just saying—the correlation, why this is happening to us, yes maybe, I don’t know. I think it’s happening in the West too. I think it’s happening in the West too, not in the Middle East. In Europe, in the United States, among Ashkenazi souls that never came into contact with Arabs and not in the Middle East—I think similar things are happening there.
[Speaker F] No—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not because of contact with Arabs; these are processes that our culture is going through.
[Speaker C] Certainly in the United States, because the United States is also a very emotional country relatively speaking. But to see it in Europe—you see that the number of atheists there is larger, and that’s what consumes them: they have no feeling, they’re not—they kind of decided that the intellect—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m pretty sure atheists are much more emotional than religious people.
[Speaker C] Depends, true, but as a generalization again, there’s always—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, once I heard a joke—maybe I’ll end with this, our time is already up—about Dov Sadan. He was a literature lecturer at the Hebrew University, an interesting man. He said that the next Jew who will make a revolution in the world will be a Jewish orthopedist. Why Jewish? Because everyone who makes a revolution is Jewish. But why an orthopedist? So he says because the first Jew who made a revolution in the world was Abraham our father, saying, “Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?” Use your head; there is God here, okay? Moses our teacher too, say—never mind, the Torah. The next Jew who made a revolution in the world was Jesus, that man, saying, “The Merciful One desires the heart”; everything is in the heart. We began first of all with “lift up your eyes on high”—with the head; then we went down to the heart. The next Jew who made a revolution in the world was Marx, right? Who said everything is in the belly—capital, interest. The fourth Jew who made a revolution in the world was Freud of course, that everything is below the belt, okay? Meaning, we started from the head, then heart, belly, below the belt; the next one will apparently be an orthopedist. Now, what lies behind that joke is a real process: despair over the intellect and clinging to the heart as a more significant measure in areas of decision-making, of morality. What your heart tells you is much more important than what your logical consideration tells you. And this is actually a secular phenomenon, not a religious one—contrary to the common image that the religious are supposedly more emotional. In my opinion that’s simply a misunderstanding. Jewish religious people—Jews. I don’t know, in other worlds it’s something else. Okay, let’s stop here.