Artificial Intelligence – Lesson 11 – Rabbi Michael Avraham

Okay,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All right, let’s begin. Just a general picture for a moment: we actually still haven’t even started talking about the technical aspects of computers, artificial intelligence, and the implications. I’m still in the introduction, which is really trying to set up a framework for the discussion. Today I hope to finish it, the introduction, and next time we’ll really start getting into some technical matters. But I think this introduction is very important for the discussion. I’m intentionally going into detail and expanding on it because I think a great many of the confusions in the discussions that will come later can be avoided if we’re aware of various aspects that I’m talking about here. So we spoke a bit about what a human being is, we spoke a bit about what judgment is, what thinking is, analytic and synthetic thinking, intuition, deriving a conclusion from premises, where the premises themselves come from. Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2, right, intuitive unconscious thinking versus recursive conscious thinking. And last time, in honor of our entering the month of Elul, I said I would present the end of our introduction in terms connected to these days. Right, we spoke about the entry of the High Priest into the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur through the portion of Acharei Mot with the two goats. We saw there that there is a very enigmatic passage there; it’s not entirely clear what is going on. Seemingly it’s not really talking about Yom Kippur at all; it’s talking about entering the holy: this is how one enters the holy, and not like Aaron’s two sons tried to enter and therefore died. So if you don’t want to die, then this is how—“בזאת יבוא אהרון אל הקודש”—this is how Aaron is to come into the holy, this is how you are supposed to enter. That’s how the passage opens. At the end it says that this is what we should do once a year on Yom Kippur. Meaning that this passage is not really the portion of the Yom Kippur service but the portion of entering the holy. And on Yom Kippur there is a law that one must enter the holy, so naturally all this service has to be done beforehand in order to make that possible, because this is how one enters. And therefore I mentioned that the Vilna Gaon, for example, says that in the wilderness they could enter the Tabernacle even not on Yom Kippur, and one had to precede it with this whole procedure in order to enter. But in principle it does not necessarily speak about Yom Kippur. We saw there the riddles of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, the hints Nachmanides gave us in order to shut the mouth of the Greek and his wicked disciples who were so arrogant as to think that only what they understand exists and what they do not understand does not. And I said that this hint, I think, can help us decode this strange passage. Now in order to do that, I gave an overview from above of the route traveled by the two goats, and in particular the goat that goes to Azazel. So basically what we saw there is that at the beginning we choose two goats which have to be—and by the way the Mishnah says—equal in height, in weight, in value; they have to be identical. That is not indispensable, but ideally they should be identical. Then they are consecrated, and once they are consecrated they have the status of an offering. What does that mean? It means that one who offers them outside, sacrifices them outside the Temple courtyard, is violating the prohibition of slaughtering offerings outside. Meaning, you are not allowed to do such a thing because it is an offering, unlike an ordinary animal that one slaughters outside and eats. But if it’s an offering, then you can’t slaughter it outside. So for us this is an indication that at the beginning of the process both goats have the status of an offering. Then we spoke about the lottery, and there too I showed that this is actually part of the service and therefore it is an offering. In the lottery it is decided which is for Azazel and which is for God. We saw that the lottery itself is done in a very strange way, and that too is a hint that we are dealing with an offering. After that comes the laying on of hands: the priest lays his hands on the head of the goat sent to Azazel, which is also discussed by the medieval authorities, and there the hesitation already begins—is this laying on of hands from the laws of offerings or from the laws of repentance? After that they tie the crimson thread, and Rabbi Chaim of Brisk asks: how can you tie a crimson thread? It is forbidden to make use of an offering—you are effectively using it to carry the crimson thread—but you are not allowed to make use of an offering. So he already begins discussing whether this thing counts as an offering or not. Then comes the sending away: they send it to Azazel in the wilderness by the hand of an appointed man. That appointed man is not a priest. If he is not a priest, that means there is really no sacrificial service here. So that is already a much stronger hint that the goat sent to Azazel stops being an offering at about this stage. I said that the most amazing thing here is that, according to some of the medieval authorities, the sending away is not indispensable—a dispute among the medieval authorities. Meaning, you can do the whole procedure and in the end not send it away, and according to some of the medieval authorities nothing has happened. Seemingly the whole procedure we have done up to now was in order to reach this climax at the end, where we send it to the wilderness—that’s the whole point. No: do all the preparations and stop there; you don’t have to continue with the actual sending away. Very strange. But that is a dispute among the medieval authorities. After that comes pushing it off the cliff. Meaning, it arrives at the cliff and there the appointed man—actually before that, on the way to the cliff, they built booths there, the appointed man can eat and drink, for him it’s not Yom Kippur, he also of course goes beyond the boundary, and for him it’s an ordinary day. And people pull at the hair of the goat sent to Azazel; that too is something forbidden to do to an offering. After that he reaches the cliff, and there is the pushing, which would seem to be the whole point of the matter, to push it off the cliff. But no: the pushing is, according to all opinions, not indispensable, and that is already stated in the Talmud. Meaning, you can get there and go back home and make a campfire gathering. You don’t have to do this thing at the end. And if you did push it, then when it gets down there you can now eat it without slaughtering or with slaughtering, you can eat it with a good appetite. Where did its holiness disappear? How did it begin as an offering and little by little its holiness dissipates until we reach a point where everyone agrees there is no holiness—not only is there no holiness, there is no Yom Kippur, there is nothing, everything simply disappears. I compared it to Alice in Wonderland, who falls asleep by the stream and dreams all the catastrophes described in the book, and then she wakes up and nothing happened, it was all a dream; all the stories she encountered there with the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts and all those matters, it was all a dream, gone like a dream that flies away—meaning, nothing happened. And the feeling is that the goat sent to Azazel is really taking us through a very similar process to what Alice goes through. We begin with trembling holiness, the peak of Yom Kippur, entry into the innermost sanctuary. And then little by little we expect to reach a climax, and in the wilderness there is nothing. There is no climax, it is not indispensable, you don’t have to send it, you don’t have to push it off the cliff, you can eat this goat, there is no Yom Kippur, no priests, no anything, just some ordinary person taking a goat for a walk and afterward he can eat it. Or not eat it, or not even take it for a walk if he wants. This whole story is so strange. And I also said in the background, beyond that, that the question is why specifically the goat sent to Azazel is the one that atones for all sins, and not the inner goat. The inner goat goes into the innermost sanctuary, the peak of holiness—I would have expected that to be the peak of atonement, because Yom Kippur is the day that atones, “כי ביום הזה יכפר עליכם מכל חטאותיכם” (“for on this day He will atone for you from all your sins”). So in the end I would have expected the inner goat to be the atoning goat. But no: specifically the goat sent to Azazel is the one that does the job. The inner goat atones for two things, for impurity of the Temple and its holy things, but beyond that the goat sent to Azazel atones for everything else, when in the end with what does it atone? We did nothing with it. This passage is so strange that I think it cries out for interpretation. And therefore I said that if it cries out for interpretation, then let’s interpret it. And I already said, I gave fair warning, that I’m not completely sure to what extent this is a homily or an explanation, but I think that even if it’s a homily, its conclusion is still correct and interesting. Okay, so I want to—I gave an introduction, basically. I said that in axiomatic systems we start from a point of departure of certain assumptions, and from them we derive a conclusion. Now logic deals with the path from the assumptions to the conclusion. Right? Basically, if I assume the assumptions, then I also have to adopt the conclusion. Logic in essence is a process of if-then. If there are assumptions, then there is a conclusion. You don’t have to accept the assumptions, and if you don’t accept the assumptions, then you also don’t have to accept the conclusion. But there is one thing you cannot do: if you accepted the assumptions, you must also accept the conclusion. Okay? Meaning, the whole essence of logic is a process that is really only a hypothetical process. A process that says: if you assume this, then the conclusion is that. Now this raises difficult questions about the whole body of knowledge that we have. Because whenever I build some logical argument, or what in other contexts is called a proof, then I prove the conclusion from… from the assumptions. But of course I cannot prove the assumptions themselves, right? If I can prove them, then let’s go to the first assumptions on whose basis I proved those assumptions. Meaning, at the foundation there sits a collection of claims—our axioms, our basic assumptions—which I do not prove. All a proof does is derive conclusions from those assumptions, and from those conclusions perhaps still more conclusions. Anyone who studied geometry knows this structure of an axiomatic system. Now I mentioned, I think, that I’ve often asked students or pupils as well: what is more correct in geometry, theorems or axioms? Right? Axioms have no proof, theorems do. So seemingly theorems are more correct, right? But that is of course nonsense, because the proof of the theorems is really just grounding them in the axioms. Now if you think the axioms are not correct, then what help is it that you have a proof that takes you from the axioms to the theorems? If the axioms are not correct, then that will not convince me of the truth of the theorems. So you can’t say that the theorems are more correct than the axioms. So how is this whole game built? We have, essentially, axioms that are arbitrary—we have no proof for them—and all we can prove is only on the basis of claims that are themselves arbitrary. So in fact there is no meaning, no certainty, in any claim I make, because even if I have a proof for it, at the base of the proof sit claims that are arbitrary. Therefore, in effect, this empties of content the whole logical process I described. And all of this comes from the fact that we are focusing on logic, which can only take us from the axioms to the conclusion. I said that if you ask a mathematician what the sum of the angles in a triangle is, he should really answer you: I have no idea, that’s not my mandate to answer. All I can answer is: if you give me your assumptions, or the space you are in—whether it’s Euclidean space or non-Euclidean or another—then I can tell you what the sum of the angles in a triangle is, because all I as a mathematician am responsible for is only the if-then. But I cannot give you the then by itself. I can’t give you that “then” in itself except hypothetically. If you assume those assumptions, then the conclusion is this. If it is a Euclidean space with Euclid’s four axioms, then the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. But if the assumptions are different, the sum of the angles will be different. You can build an axiom with any sum of triangle angles you like, made to order. As much as you want, there is no problem doing that. So this insight—that every proof ultimately sits on foundational assumptions—confronts us with a dilemma that is completely parallel to the dilemma I described, I think, in the lecture before last, about synthetic and analytic maturity and postmodernism and so on. Why? Because now you have to decide what your attitude is toward axioms. If you are like the youth I described in that process of maturation, that youth is not willing to accept anything that has no proof. Then he cannot accept the axioms. If he cannot accept the axioms, then he also cannot accept things that do have proofs, because the proof is based on axioms that he does not accept. So in fact, anyone who demands a logical proof for every claim as a condition for adopting the claim will be left with nothing at all, left without any claims—he cannot know anything. By contrast, if you are willing to place trust in assumptions even though you have no proof for them—remember synthetic maturity?—then if you are willing to accept the assumptions despite having no proof for them, then all the theorems I proved on their basis also have meaning. Once I think the axioms of geometry are true, I can also give you an unconditional answer: the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, period, because I know the axioms are true and therefore I can also derive the conclusion. But someone who does not accept the axioms because he has no proof for them, then the conclusion too is no longer true for him, because logic only says that the conclusion is true if the premises are true. Now decide what your attitude is toward the premises. And therefore it is really the attitude toward premises that determines your attitude toward our entire world of knowledge. One who is not willing to accept unproven things will not accept premises, and then he also cannot accept any conclusion. He remains a complete skeptic. The only way to get out of this skeptical bubble is to place trust in the premises. Not unlimited trust, I said—synthetic maturity means I am willing to trust common sense, my intuition, assumptions that seem reasonable to me. It is not unlimited trust. Nothing is certain. But the fact that it is not certain does not mean it is doubtful. The central mistake of postmodernism is identifying something uncertain with something doubtful. Those are not the same thing. Something uncertain means I’m not sure, but something doubtful means fifty-fifty, no more correct than its opposite. That’s not the case. Maybe it’s not necessarily identical. Something not certain can also be ninety percent, seventy percent, ninety-five percent, I don’t know. Even if I quantify it in percentages, that’s just illustrative, but I mean I can have a high probability that it’s true. I’m not certain. The skeptic, or postmodern thought, basically says: well, if it’s not proven then it’s arbitrary. If it’s not certain then it’s doubtful. But that’s a very hasty identification. There is no reason to identify uncertainty with doubt. You can call it doubt, that’s just semantics, but doubt in the sense that I am not willing to trust a claim is doubt of fifty-fifty, where the claim is no more true than its opposite. A ninety-ten doubt does not mean that I do not trust the claim; I do trust it. It’s just true that I’m not certain. Meaning, I could be mistaken. So the same thing here. Now what this really means—let’s try—in other words, what it means is that we have two options for how to relate to such a body of knowledge, a body of knowledge built from axioms from which we derive conclusions. If I accept unproven things as admissible—not certain, but admissible—then this whole system is a body of knowledge that I definitely trust, I can accept it. Not certainty, but trust. But if I am not willing to accept unproven things, then the axioms are arbitrary from my point of view, and therefore everything derived from them is also arbitrary. So in practice, my attitude toward all claims in the universe is one of doubt. Meaning, I cannot adopt any claim, nor its opposite; for me everything is in a cloud of doubt, a heavy cloud of doubt. These are the two options before me. Now let’s talk about this a little in terms of Kabbalistic sefirot. The ten Kabbalistic sefirot—I’m leaving Keter aside for the moment—in the formulation of wisdom, understanding, knowledge, kindness, strength, beauty, eternity, splendor, foundation, and kingship. So wisdom and understanding are the first two. Every pair out of each triad has the same relationship, like kindness and strength. Right?

[Speaker B] Rabbi, when the Rabbi classifies all these types for us—the youth, the mature person, the child, the adult, and all this distinction between the approaches the Rabbi divided up—he is really discussing the point of what a person’s stance is toward the claim, right? Toward the theorem, toward the claim. Right. But what does “what’s his attitude” mean? Meaning, what does he feel? Does he feel that it’s certain or… You’re going to tell me you’re dragging us

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] back again to this issue of the mind and the heart?

[Speaker B] No, but I’m interested, because it comes out that this is the core of the whole story, and basically the Rabbi says it doesn’t matter. Why should I care what you say? After all, we both know the data. Nobody is claiming some fact or some statistic differently from the other; the whole difference is subtle and concerns what exactly my feeling is, and in general do we even understand what it means, what exactly my feeling is—we don’t know that either. What does it mean that I’m certain? What does it mean that I’m not certain? What does it mean that I want…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, you mean to ask again about the question of intuition and emotion?

[Speaker B] No—why does it matter? If even according to the Rabbi everything in the end comes down to what you feel—if you feel it’s certain or you feel it’s…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To what I think, not to what I feel. Intuition belongs to thought, not to emotion.

[Speaker B] But to feel that it’s certain or doubtful, to accept it or not accept it, all that isn’t in the domain of knowledge, it’s in the domain of emotion.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, entirely knowledge. Yes, I determine cognitively that this thing is true with, I don’t know, an 80% chance, 90%, whatever. That’s not emotion, it has nothing to do with emotion. But again, let’s not get into that issue now, that’s not… Fine. So I want to translate this for a moment into the language of the sefirot. Wisdom and understanding are the first two sefirot. Understanding—we are told that it means understanding one thing from another, right? That is the root of understanding. Understanding one thing from another is basically logic. The logic that tells us—the hypothetical logic—that if the premise is true, then the conclusion is true. Okay? That is understanding. What is wisdom? Wisdom is the axioms that stand at the foundation. Wisdom gives us the axioms, and understanding derives conclusions, and from those conclusions still more conclusions, but the steps of derivation, the logical tools, belong to the world of understanding. Wisdom is what I called intuition or common sense, which says that something is true without my having an argument of understanding that leads to it. On the contrary, it is the infrastructure from which arguments can emerge by means of the tools of understanding. Therefore wisdom is “כוח מה”, the “power of what.” What is true in itself, not out of something else. Understanding is something I prove on the basis of something else. Wisdom is the axiom. Meaning, it is the thing that forms the foundation for everything; therefore wisdom is the first sefirah and understanding is a sefirah that comes after it. And what is the third? Knowledge. Knowledge is really the whole structure in which at the beginning there is wisdom, and from it understanding derives conclusions; this entire system is what I call our knowledge. Knowledge is the synthesis between wisdom and understanding. That is the upper triad; below that is kindness, strength, beauty—the exact same relationship. But I’m not going into that now. Every such triad has exactly this kind of dialectical structure of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Anyway, so what does that mean for us? Look, we know—we talked about it—at the end of the previous lecture I talked about the fact that there are fifty gates of understanding and corresponding to them fifty gates of impurity. And the Vilna Gaon writes that it is forty-nine gates of impurity, not fifty. “כל פעל ה’ למענהו וגם רשע ליום רעה” (“The Lord made everything for His purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil”), a verse from Proverbs. So “כל” is fifty, and “וגם רשע ליום רעה” also has the numerical value of forty-nine. So the negative side is forty-nine gates of impurity. Fifty—“כל פעל ה’ למענהו”, for the sake of the Holy One, blessed be He—the positive side is fifty gates of understanding and forty-nine gates of impurity. And then I asked a few questions. First: why is it called a gate, gates of understanding? Second: why is the opposite of understanding impurity? The opposite of understanding is foolishness. Why impurity? And in addition, how can that be? After all, “זה לעומת זה עשה אלוהים” (“God made one corresponding to the other”). We know that what exists on the side of the good ought to exist on the side of the bad. On the good side there are fifty gates of understanding, and here there are forty-nine gates of impurity. And also, how can it be that the people of Israel—it says in the New Zohar that the people of Israel were about to sink into the fiftieth gate, and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, hastened and took them out of Egypt. But if there is no fiftieth gate, then into what were they supposed to sink? We had all kinds of questions like that. And then I said at the end of the lecture, we finished with the issue of boundary conditions. I said let’s think for a moment about the concept of a gate. What is a gate? A gate is something that leads me from one place to another. Right? A gate takes me from one room, say, to another room, like a door. Therefore the metaphor used when we speak about understanding is gates of understanding. Why? Because understanding leads me from the axiom to the conclusion, from that conclusion to the next conclusion. Therefore the metaphor that describes the process of understanding is a gate. The gate takes us from place to place. And therefore you can understand that the metaphor describing wisdom is the room or the place—let’s call it a room for the sake of discussion. So basically we have a room from which a gate emerges that leads me to another room, and another gate to another room, and so on. Now we have forty-nine or fifty gates. How many rooms are there? I asked you how many rooms there are. So we said it depends on the boundary conditions. If it is a straight linear line, then there are fifty rooms with forty-nine gates between them. Room one, a gate to room two, a gate to room three, a gate to room four, up to room fifty. So we have fifty rooms with forty-nine gates between them. A second possibility is circular boundary conditions. Circular boundary conditions mean that the first room leads to the second, the second to the third, the third to the fourth, and when you finish, the fiftieth room really turns out to be the first room. That means I have forty-nine gates but also forty-nine rooms, not fifty. So everything depends on the question of what our boundary conditions are: open boundary conditions or circular boundary conditions that close in on themselves. Now what does that really mean? I think that in the metaphor I described earlier, it means that the significance of understanding and of wisdom depends on the question of what boundary conditions you set for this chain. What does that mean? Why would someone set circular boundary conditions? Because he is not willing to accept a room that is not grounded in a gate. Right? In the linear chain there is a room that no gate leads into—it is an axiom. There is no argument proving it out of something else. And from there onward understanding begins to generate more and more rooms and more gates and more rooms and so on. But the beginning is some sort of room that is not grounded in a gate; there is nothing that leads into it. Now the person who does not accept this—the skeptic—who is unwilling to accept the existence of a room for which you have no proof leading into it, no gate entering it, that person is unwilling to accept that the chain is built this way. He closes it on itself. When you close it on itself, every room has a gate leading into it. Right? There is a room, this room leads to that gate. Only then, of course, you move in circles. Why are you moving in circles? Because perhaps you have the illusion that there is a difference between rooms and gates. But when the setup is circular, there is no difference between rooms and gates. Just as there is a gate between every two rooms, there is a room between every two gates. There is no way to define which is a room and which is a gate; these are just names, they have no meaning. Or in the analogy—in the thing being illustrated, right, all these things are just a metaphor. But in what the metaphor refers to, what I am really saying is that anyone willing to accept only axioms for which you have a proof cannot accept anything. So no claim is really a room. You don’t arrive at any room in which you are willing to stay. A room is just a transition from gate to gate. The sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees—that is not a claim I assert as a true claim; it is an intermediate conclusion between the axiom and the next theorem after it, which will be proven on the basis of this theorem. But none of them is truer than the other. It is just a chain of if-then. Do you understand that the chain of if-then is exactly the circular metaphor?

[Speaker C] The metaphor—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The circular metaphor basically says: no room is true in itself. All I can say is that there is a gate leading to it from the previous room. But do you understand that if I live in such a world, then there is no room that is true in itself. Therefore I really close this chain in a circular way. By contrast, when I speak about a linear chain, a straight chain, that actually describes the synthetic view. Why? Because it basically says: look, I have an initial room. You ask me: how do you get to this room if there is no gate leading into it? Or in what the metaphor refers to: how do you know the axiom if you have no proof leading to it? The answer is: because it is just true. “כוח מה”, right, that is wisdom. I am willing to accept wisdom as a tool that validates claims, not only understanding, not only logical proof. Okay? Now once this room is perceived by me as a room, and there is no gate leading into it, that means already here I see that room and gate are not the same thing. There is no gate that is not between two rooms, but there is a room that is not between two gates. There is a gate going out, but no gate going in. Okay? So that creates a distinction between the rooms and the gates. The symmetry is broken. Once the symmetry is broken, that means there are rooms and the gates lead me between them. Or in other words, all the claims in the chain are claims that for me are knowledge that I adopt. In my eyes this is true knowledge. These claims are true claims. The first is true by its own force, “כוח מה”, and the later ones are true by force of a proof built on the first. Okay? Therefore the entire system of knowledge suddenly receives meaning, because all the claims of geometry become claims that I am willing to stand behind—they are true claims. If someone asks me what the sum of the angles in a triangle is, I do not answer “if it is like this then it’s 180.” No, the answer is 180. Why? Because the assumptions that two parallel lines do not meet, or that exactly one straight line passes through two points, and so on—all those assumptions are, for me, true assumptions. They are not just a platform from which I set off on some intellectual game in which I prove various conclusions. No. Those assumptions are, for me, truth claims. Not certain, because this is intuition, but truth claims. And therefore everything built on their basis, all the rooms I reach through the gates of understanding or the gates of logic, are also claims I accept. All of them are true claims. In other words, everything that determines your relation to the world of knowledge is the question of how you relate to the first room. If you relate to the first room as a room that has validity despite the fact that there is no gate leading into it, then you do not have to close the chain circularly. You leave it open, and then there is an axis of progress. I know this, and then I learned this too, and then I learned this too. Think of geometry lessons: every time we learn more theorems and more theorems and our knowledge of geometry becomes broader. By contrast, if I am in a circle, there is no starting point and no axis of progress. You can start anywhere and proceed wherever you want, it has no meaning. Meaning, you are not progressing anywhere. You can move from here to there and from there to here and from here to there, but you have not advanced; you are not acquiring knowledge, not accumulating knowledge, you are just accumulating… and even then I don’t know what, only that if that, then this. And so on. Meaning, I can never give a non-hypothetical answer. I think it’s called an apodictic answer. A non-hypothetical answer. I always have to give a hypothetical answer, and therefore I really know nothing. I’m a skeptic. I’m very strong in logic, but I have no information. We talked about this: anyone who demands certainty is left with zero information. Remember? The philosophical or logical principle of uncertainty says that if you demand complete certainty, you are left with zero information. So that is exactly what we see here. And therefore what I want to claim is this: now look at the forty-nine gates of understanding. What does it mean that on the side of understanding there are fifty and on the side of impurity there are forty-nine? These are not different kinds of gates. They are the same gates, it is simply the same logic. The only question is this: if you give meaning to the room from which you set out—to the axioms—you are willing to accept them even without proof, then everything built on top of them is knowledge. You have accumulated more and more knowledge. Okay? And therefore this becomes understanding plus wisdom, it becomes knowledge. So you have fifty such rooms and all of them have meaning. By contrast, if the first room, from your point of view, is just an arbitrary assumption for the sake of the logical game, but you are not really willing to accept it, then in practice the forty-nine gates of understanding remain empty. They have no meaning. No one can pour any content into them. I remain knowing nothing. I finished the whole geometry course, studied geometry for a year or two, and still if someone asks me something, I know nothing. Not because I don’t know geometry, but because I do not perceive the theorems of geometry as real claims, as claims I adopt as true claims. For me it’s this sort of logical game that if this is true then that is true, and if that is true you can prove this too, and so on. But if you ask me what is true—I don’t know. Nothing is true. Because nothing is proven in a non-hypothetical way. Rabbi? Yes.

[Speaker D] What is the difference in practice for a skeptic? After all, he too will simply say: listen, I don’t accept these claims, but in practice he does everything I do.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He does it and thinks it. We’ll get to that in a moment. We’ll get to that in a moment. So what happens here is that seemingly there is a very small difference in the first room, but it projects onto the meaning of the whole structure. Does it have content or not? The first room determines everything. Therefore, when there are gates of understanding, they are those same forty-nine gates, but they are gates of understanding. And when there is no first room, they are the same gates—not different gates, the very same gates themselves—but without the first room they are gates of impurity, not gates of understanding. Now why is the metaphor impurity? The metaphor is impurity because what is impurity? Right? A corpse is the ultimate source of impurity. As has already been pointed out in various books, usually books of thought, impurity—in the Kabbalistic context demons are considered impurity. A demon is a creature without a root. It has no spiritual root above it. That is what is called a demon. So the essence of impurity is something without a root. Think about a dead person—that is the ultimate source of impurity. Right? What is a dead person? His entire material dimension is as it was when he was alive. Nothing has changed. What is missing is a certain point that gives life to the whole body. Not the body—the whole body is here—but there is a certain point that gives all the vitality to the whole body. Without it, that very same body is dead, it is impure. Meaning, impurity is disconnection from the root. Once a tree is cut off from its root, it dries up, right? It has no vitality. The entire tree can remain; its physical dimension is there. But if it is disconnected from its root, then it really has no existence. That is why a living tree and a dead tree look very similar. The difference between them is only whether it has a root below. But the root below turns the whole tree into something with entirely different meaning. And therefore the opposite of gates of understanding is gates of impurity. Because gates of impurity mean that this whole chain has no root. The initial room that gives it all its meaning is, for me, not a room but a gate. Meaning it has no special status at all. It has no status whatsoever—it is circular, there is no such thing as a first room. Okay? So from this kind of perspective, this is really a perspective of impurity. Impurity not in the negative moral sense of wickedness, but impurity in the sense of disconnection from the root. It is a kind of emptiness, because one who wants to adopt only things for which he has a proof remains empty. It is what in philosophy is called analytic emptiness. One who adopts only analytic thinking remains empty of information. This is exactly the phenomenon I am describing here. By contrast, one who adopts the first room as admissible—yes, the axioms or the basic claims as admissible claims—then all the knowledge built on their basis becomes knowledge that is itself admissible. I accumulate more and more knowledge, and then it is called gates of understanding, because when understanding takes me from wisdom it creates knowledge. But gates of impurity do not emerge from wisdom and therefore do not create knowledge either. They just stand on their own. That is why there it is 49 and here it is 50, because at the end there is a room. And that is the fiftieth gate. Nachmanides, in the introduction to Genesis, also says that the fiftieth gate is something different—“ותחסרהו מעט מאלוהים” (“You made him but little lower than God”)—and it is not like the preceding forty-nine gates. The fiftieth gate is a room, not a gate. And that is the meaning I am proposing here. Now I come to the question someone asked earlier. In our world, I think it is much easier to understand this than it might have been even 200 years ago, or 100 years ago, even 150 years ago. Why? Because in our world there has emerged a certain conception. There was always skepticism, but in our world skepticism has turned from a question mark into an exclamation mark. And the great innovation of postmodernism is not its skepticism. Skepticism already existed among the Pyrrhonists in Greece centuries before the common era. Skepticism is an ancient idea. What changed in the last hundred years, let’s say, is that skepticism became an ideology, and people perceive it as something that has alternative content. Meaning, think of the culture prevailing today in much of the Western world—not all of it, but much of it—which tries to develop what is called postmodernism in practice. Books and articles are written about it; in my opinion it is all nonsense, but never mind. Books and articles are written, knowledge is produced, conferences, exhibitions in the artistic context and whatever else, and suddenly there is this feeling or atmosphere that skepticism becomes a philosophical method with alternative content. Meaning, postmodernism not only negates everything else, it also tries—unsuccessfully, in my opinion—but it also tries to represent alternative knowledge. And that, in my view, is an illusion, but it is a certain step beyond the skepticism that always existed. People doubted—maybe, maybe not, right or wrong—such questions always existed. But here the question mark—yes, the metaphor I use—stretch out the question mark and it becomes an exclamation mark. Meaning, people feel they also have, let’s call it, a full wagon. People talk about this in the context of secular and religious, following the Chazon Ish and Ben-Gurion; I’m not talking in that context, but in the context of postmodern versus synthetic. They claim that they too have a full wagon, just full of a different sort of thing—full of some outlook, liberal, relativistic, progressive, depending how one interprets that term today, but much of progressivism is like that. And the feeling is that they have an alternative payload. And I think that this feeling is an illusion. There are many people—for example logical positivism, which I spoke about last time or the time before—logical positivism was sure that it was offering a rational alternative to what preceded it. Meaning, it accepted only things for which there is proof and for which there is a precise definition of the concepts being used, and only about such things can one speak, and certainly adopt—not only speak. The extremists among them are not even willing to speak about other things. But certainly to adopt other things is impossible. Now when you think about it for a moment, you realize that these people were not—they were very fanatical and dogmatic people. People who did not cast many doubts. But their whole method was a method of doubting. Only for them, doubting was perceived as the height of rationality: I work only with logic, only with proven things. And somehow they ignore the fact that you cannot work only with logic. Logic takes you from premises to conclusion, but where do you get the premises? So sometimes they blurt out that I derive the premises from observation. Ask them: and why do you accept the observation? Why don’t you cast doubt on that? Let’s leave that question aside. But you do not really derive your premises from observation—that is nonsense. A large portion of scientific assumptions, most of the essential scientific assumptions, do not come from observation. They are conceptual assumptions: the principle of causality, induction, all kinds of things—yes, all of Hume’s doubts. These are assumptions that do not come from observation, and there is no science without them. There is no science without them. Without them, science is empty exactly like the gates… it too says nothing except for the interesting intellectual game you are playing. Meaning, the same thing exists with respect to science as well. Logical positivism actually lives in a sort of illusion that now it is shattering metaphysics, religious faith within it, all things that are not pure logic with precise definitions of concepts. That’s it, nothing beyond that. But if you adopt only that, you are left with nothing. And for some reason they ignore this point—that is the circle. But this circle creates some sort of… this circle has rooms and it has gates. And people feel that they are still in a situation where there are rooms and there are gates, there is a difference between them. And therefore they think: yes, I too am accumulating knowledge, I too have logical tools, and I use logic. But that is nonsense. He does not understand that he lives in a circular world. He is accumulating no knowledge at all. There is no difference between rooms and gates if the chain is circular. There are no rooms. You cannot adopt claims as admissible claims just because you proved them logically, because the assumptions from which the logical proof emerged—you cannot adopt those. And therefore this is really a very great illusion, widespread among very intelligent people, that somehow it managed to develop into a very great illusion that we can work only with logic. And that is a mistake, a basic logical mistake. Yes, Rabbi? Yes.

[Speaker E] I don’t quite… I understand very well how the Rabbi is arguing against logical positivism in everything he said. I don’t understand how the Rabbi is arguing against postmodernism, as I understand it. On the contrary, postmodernism is really at the other pole—it goes only on assumptions. It says that everything is intuitions and assumptions and desires and feelings and aspirations, and that’s how you create the world.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is exactly the complete opposite of positivism. Fine, that’s another discussion; I don’t agree at all. And their claim is that there is no such thing as just and unjust or true and false.

[Speaker E] Not at all, Rabbi—they fight for their truth

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] through fire and water, they give their

[Speaker E] lives for their truths, all of them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They fight for the absence of truth. What are you talking about? That is the one idea they fight for: the absence of truth. Any claim that asserts some truth, they come out against it. That is pure postmodernism. I am not talking about marginal phenomena on the periphery of postmodernism. Distilled postmodernism essentially comes out against every claim whatsoever, no matter what claim, and also against its opposite.

[Speaker E] I don’t think so, Rabbi.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s how they fight against the… It isn’t right to make claims at all.

[Speaker E] What do you mean? They are fighting for their truth; they just have no way of proving it to one another because…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

[Speaker E] Fine, all right, but that’s a social discussion.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m speaking right now on the philosophical plane. Philosophical postmodernism as I defined it, okay? Is social postmodernism an expression of the philosophical postmodernism I’m describing? That can be debated. I think yes, but it can be debated. But let’s talk now about the concept of postmodernism as I defined it. So what I want to say is that this system of the gates of understanding and the gates of impurity—right? All the questions I asked earlier: why is the opposite of the gates of understanding the gates of impurity? The answer is that indeed the opposite of understanding is not foolishness. People of the circular type are not stupid people; they are very smart people. They just have a different conception of wisdom. But they are very intelligent people, they can be brilliant mathematicians or scientists or philosophers, whatever. They are brilliant. These are not stupid people. It is not understanding versus stupidity. It is understanding versus wisdom. And it is detached understanding versus understanding rooted in axioms, in a layer of wisdom from which one can begin to work. And therefore the metaphor describing the antithesis of the gates of understanding is the gates of impurity. Because it is those same gates of understanding themselves, not different gates. Only at their base they have no root, they are cut off from the root; therefore they are gates of impurity. I asked how the people of Israel were about to sink into the fiftieth gate if there is no fiftieth gate. That is exactly the point: once you sink into this conception that only logic exists, only the gates and not the rooms, then you have supposedly arrived at the fiftieth gate—but there is no fiftieth gate. The fiftieth is a room. And if you think that the fiftieth too is a gate, then you are stuck inside this circle and you will not be able to get out. You know that anyone who wants a logical proof for everything, and without that he won’t accept anything—you understand that you cannot talk to such a person. There is no way out of such a state. How will you convince him that he is mistaken? You will have to bring him a proof, and concerning the axiom of the proof he will ask you: but who says it’s correct? Right? Everyone who always says: yes, but who told you? Maybe the opposite. You know that question? So you answer him, yes, but I have such-and-such a reason. But the reason—who told you? Maybe the opposite. You understand that this is a conception or a way of thinking from which there is no way out. You really are trapped inside this circle and cannot get out, because it is impossible to provide you with an explanation that is not conditional on something else, about which you will not be able to ask “who says, maybe the opposite.” Because if that is your question, by its essence it has no answer. Okay, and therefore that is really the sinking of Israel into the fiftieth gate—or how can one sink into the fiftieth gate? We do not sink into the fiftieth gate; we sink into the conception that even the fiftieth is a gate. Once even the fiftieth is a gate, you are in a circle and cannot get out. And therefore, “זה לעומת זה עשה אלוהים”—just a second—therefore that too is one corresponding to the other. I said: why is this fifty and that forty-nine? It’s not—this is forty-nine and that is forty-nine. The difference is only whether you think there is a room at the end—sorry, a room, not a gate. If you think there is a room at the end, then these forty-nine gates are gates of understanding. If you think there isn’t, then there are gates of impurity. Now, the fact that you think there isn’t does not mean there really isn’t. You think there isn’t, but you are mistaken. Okay? Therefore what we are dealing with is a kind of living in an illusion. And now I want to argue that this is really the meaning of—again, I say there is a homiletic flavor here—but this is the meaning I propose for the process of the two goats, or the goat sent to Azazel. You tell a person: look, why does the goat sent to Azazel atone for all sins? Where do sins come from? Sins come from mistakes. Meaning, if someone knew that the Holy One, blessed be He, is here and that this is the clear truth and this leads in a positive direction and that leads in a negative direction, why would he sin? There would be no reason to sin. Rather what happens? He builds for himself some ideas or other ideas, but these are ideas that have no real root. You build them only—this is the common conception—you build them only in order to justify your possibility of acting otherwise, or not acting according to your obligations. And this can be moral, it can be religious, in any context. Now when that is what happens, they tell you: look, let’s do an exercise with you. We will consecrate two goats, two animals, both offerings. One goes to the Holy One, blessed be He, into the innermost sanctuary, to the limit of holiness. The other goes to the goats of desolation—remember Ibn Ezra and Nachmanides—to Satan, to Azazel there in the wilderness. Okay? We offer to both of them. We perform a metaphysical experiment. Okay? And in this metaphysical experiment there is a shiver of holiness because this is the peak of Yom Kippur, everything depends on atonement. And both are offerings. There are two authorities, there is Satan and God, right, the Holy One, blessed be He, and we offer to both of them and go with both of them all the way. Okay? Now with the inner goat we go and arrive at the Holy of Holies. With the goat sent to Azazel we begin going outward, outside the Temple, into the wilderness. Along the way there is a continuous shedding of layers. The holiness peels off from it, suddenly Yom Kippur too disappears, suddenly in fact you don’t need a priest at all, just some appointed man, an ordinary person, can go there. And one may pull out its hair; there is no Yom Kippur at all, no prohibition of going beyond the boundary, no service, nothing—it disappears. And in the very end they tell me: you know what, you don’t even have to send it to the wilderness, and certainly not push it off the cliff. Do nothing. Why not? Because this whole process comes to tell you: you are living in an illusion that you are moving from room to room through gates. But that is an illusion—it is a circular route. In the end you will wake up and see that it was all a dream; there is really nothing here. There are not really two such wings that you can follow all the way, this one to the end and that one to the end. To go to the side of Azazel is to enter a circular route. There is no such side in reality; that side is an illusion. There is no such side. You think this room is a room, but it is a gate, not a room. You are mistaken. Okay? You will simply find yourself at the place from which you set out. So this appointed man—we begin with the fact that we just have two ordinary goats, then we consecrate them, an offering. We sacrifice them, lay hands on them, send them, this and that. What is the end? The appointed man finds himself with this goat—it is no longer holy, it is nothing—at exactly the point where he was at the beginning of the process. Exactly! Just like Alice in Wonderland. What does that mean? You enter all the way to the fiftieth gate and discover that there is no fiftieth gate. You were living in a movie, in the Matrix. Right? You basically built for yourself a whole world in which you are a rational, logical person and you derive this from that and that from this and you are very smart and you produce for yourself a worldview and a philosophical doctrine and all sorts of things like that, but underneath there is nothing. You are building on assumptions that you yourself do not accept. So you are just playing games, logical games of if-then. At the very end you will wake up and find that you reached the final room, the fiftieth gate, and you discover there is no such gate. You find yourself at the point of departure from which you set out on the route. You can make a campfire gathering with this goat for Azazel and eat it with a good appetite. Where are the offering, the holiness, Yom Kippur, fasting, all the great commotion, Aaron’s sons dying if they don’t do this with exact exactness? Nothing. Everything is fine, nothing happened. You wake up like Alice in Wonderland—you wake up and behold, a dream. Nothing happened. And that route is the route that atones for sins. That is why the goat sent to Azazel atones for sins. The goat sent to Azazel basically says, and puts us through, this experiment, because we ourselves perform this metaphysical experiment. Let’s really test what happens when you go all the way, all the way, to the positive side and all the way to the negative side. And we discover that this crazy dilemma between the positive and the negative is living in a movie. There is no negative side. It is simply something we created in our imagination. There is no such thing. And therefore in the end you do not even have to do what the whole process was aiming at—send the goat, push it off the cliff. All the preparations are toward that, and you do not even have to do it at all. Slaughter it, don’t slaughter it, eat it raw. You don’t even have to slaughter it. Eat it, do whatever you want. Nothing happened, all the norms evaporated. And that is what Nachmanides says about Ibn Ezra, right, on “ולא יזבחו עוד את זבחיהם לשעירים” (“and they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to the goat-demons”). “בהיותך בן שלושים ושלוש תדענו” (“when you are thirty-three years old you will know it”), we spoke about that in the previous lecture. Ibn Ezra says that this is the secret of Azazel—when you are thirty-three years old you will know it. What does that mean? Nachmanides says: go thirty-three verses further on, and there it says “ולא יזבחו עוד את זבחיהם לשעירים”. Why? Because you take an offering to the goat, to the chief goat, to Satan, and you discover that there is no such thing. And therefore you will come to a state in which this feeling will no longer arise in you that there are supposedly two sides here: either the Holy One, blessed be He, or Satan, Azazel, the goat, whatever—all these are just metaphors, of course. And suddenly you discover that there really are not two sides here; you created that for yourself, you are living in a movie. And sin, in the end, is a result of living in a movie. That is the claim. Again, someone who truly thinks differently, someone who believes in nothing, really thinks differently—about him I am not speaking, that is something else. That is not a sin that is the result of inclination or of living in a movie or something like that. Someone thinks differently—that is what he thinks—and he does what he thinks. He is completely coerced. Not because he is right, but because he is coerced. What—he does what he thinks; what do you want him to do? I am talking about someone who sins. Someone who sins is someone who understands that this is what should be done, but still does not do it. Why doesn’t he do it? Because he builds for himself some movie in which there is this and there is that and he is in a dilemma, this way and that way. So let’s put you through the movie. Let’s play your game and go with it all the way. And when we go with it all the way, you will discover there is nothing there. And therefore atonement on Yom Kippur is specifically achieved through the goat sent to Azazel. Because the goat sent to Azazel shatters the foundation from which the sin comes. Even though it is seemingly not the inner goat, which is supposedly the central goat, the important goat—no, it’s the goat sent to Azazel. That is also why Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner says: why do the two goats have to be equal in height, in weight, in value? Why do they have to be identical? So he says: because the deeper the equivalence, the deeper the distinction. What does that mean? Suppose one goat were beautiful, very healthy, everything, and the other were kind of scraggly and skinny and whatever. Then you would say, okay, this one is for God and this one is for Azazel because this one is superior and the other is just some worthless goat. He says no—I want to emphasize to you that it is not because of that. The two goats are the same thing. This one is for God and this one for Azazel because this one chose the good—these are metaphors, the goats did not choose, we did—this represents for us the two paths that stand before us: do we choose good or choose evil. And what determines whether this is good or evil is what you chose; it does not depend on who you are. When we draw—you know, in Haredi children’s books—you know those illustrations where Esau is always some repulsive wicked figure with wild hair you can’t even look at, and Jacob is some half-angel in human form. That is a crazy educational mistake, to draw it that way. Because you want to explain that Jacob and Esau are different from one another because Jacob chose the good and Esau chose evil—not because Jacob was born beautiful and Esau was born ugly. If you make them different, you have lost the essence, the substance of the distinction. To sharpen the distinction, you have to blur all the other differences. On the contrary, draw them exactly the same, and just say: this one chose the good and therefore he is good; this one chose evil and therefore he is evil. Not because he was born this way and the other was born that way. That is not what makes a person good or evil. The question is what he chooses, not how he looks or how he was born or what he did. The same with the two goats. The two goats through their atonement are there to show us the meanings of choice. We choose good or choose evil. That is what determines whether we are good or evil. In the end there is not really good and evil. Go all the way with evil and discover that there is nothing there. You are living in a movie. It becomes evil because you chose to do that thing. You create the evil by your very choice. It is not that there is evil and you choose it; there is no such thing. You create evil by choosing it. Okay? And therefore when they put you through this experiment, they are trying to persuade you that there is nothing real there. Dissolve the movie, turn off the projector. You are living in a movie. If you turn on the light, in short, there is nothing here; there is only one side. And once we understand this, all our sins are atoned for. That is why the goat sent to Azazel, because sins came from living in a movie. That is really the claim. There is—I can’t resist, so I’ll share with you—there is a very beautiful poem by Bialik. I copied it here. And there is also a Talmudic statement in tractate Shabbat, just as an aside: Rabbi Yannai proclaimed, “חבל על דלית ליה דרתא ותרעא לדרתא עביד” (“Pity the one who has no courtyard but makes a gate for his courtyard”). Very beautiful, I think, for our purposes. You build lots of gates, but there is no room to which this chain of gates leads. Think of someone who builds a magnificent palace with many gates and decorations and all that. You expect to see the king there inside; you pass through one gate after another and through labyrinths and mazes and this and that, and then you reach the very end and find yourself at the entrance gate. There is nothing in between. Meaning, this whole structure encloses nothing, serves nothing. Once it serves nothing, the structure itself loses its meaning. If you have no courtyard, why are you building a gate for it? Fine, but that is just a nice saying from the Talmud. In any case.

[Speaker E] Rabbi, if what I really understand from the Rabbi is that the choice of evil—the goat sent to Azazel basically comes from ignorance, from lack of knowledge, from creating an imaginary world—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that is why I said, I emphasized, no.

[Speaker E] Then according to that I accept it completely, I very much accept that

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] position in Socrates and others, but according to that free choice does not exist. Shmuel, you accept it, but that is not what I said. I did not say that, no. If it comes from lack of knowledge or ignorance, then it is not a sin. I said earlier: then it is coercion. I am talking about someone who chooses evil but builds for himself some movie that will justify the evil. I have two columns on the site about weakness of will. It is worth reading them there; I won’t get into it because it is not really our subject here, but there I explain in great detail how sin is created. Now sin is not necessarily in the religious sense. Sin also in the moral sense, or even sin against a diet. You decided on principles of a diet and then you fail, you don’t keep to it. A person builds for himself some movie that allows him to sin, but he is not coerced—he has responsibility for this. That is the point. This is not someone who is mistaken because he thinks differently.

[Speaker E] But the story of the goats is really against weakness of will, really like a clear claim against weakness of will, because in the end there is no difference between them, it’s all the same thing. It’s just that here you didn’t know, and now you see there’s nothing there, and you keep going and you see there’s nothing there, so you understand that you’ve been atoned for because now you’re a different person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Shmuel, in your movie it is the same thing, but it is not really the same thing. What you discover in the end is that it wasn’t the same thing; it was just a movie.

[Speaker E] Not that it’s not the same thing—that there’s nothing there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, the inner and the outer… no. The inner and the outer are not the same thing because there is no outer. Now you were living in a movie in which there were two things, and you created that movie for yourself. That is your responsibility; you are not coerced. But again, this is a subject I don’t want to get into because it deserves a lecture of its own. Look at Bialik’s poem. He entered the treasures of the orchard with his torch in his hand, and there are fifty gates to the orchard, and in all its paths there are terrors, depths of abysses and mountains of mountains, and flaming swords in the gates, and behind the doorposts serpents lie in wait for them. And he passed safely among them all, stepping over serpents and slipping beneath the sword. He hastened inward and inward to come—you see the “inward and inward,” right, of course, the inner goat. And the fifty gates—that is the whole context here. He hastened to come, and before him his torch; astonished, silent, princes drew back. Fifty. Bold of soul was he, to break through and come to the fiftieth gate. He will succeed in reaching the fiftieth gate, this bold soul with the torch. And he will break through and come to the treasury of treasuries, where no stranger has yet trodden. And he will burrow to the border of no border, the place where opposites are united in their root. The place where logic disappears, mysticism, the unity of opposites as it is called. And he will continue to burrow and find the straight in the crooked paths. The straight path he finds is really a crooked path, but in his movie it is straight. And he looked and came one day to the place of no time and no place. That is the same place where opposites are united in their root; there too there is no time and no place. You remember what happens on the way to Azazel: there is no Yom Kippur, no boundary, no time and no place. The boundary is not a boundary, not beyond the boundary; time is not the usual time of Yom Kippur. We go outside time and place. Until light with darkness came to an end, to the edges of chaos. The eye had no dominion there. And the last, the fiftieth gate—ah, hidden God—how far away still. And the torch grows dim and grows dim, the roads become confused, the paths bend, and all of them are only corridor to corridor. And where is the last of the gates? You pass gate after gate, and where is the last one? To where does it lead? And where is the essence of the hall? Where is the room we are supposed to reach? And his soul has already grown weary from burrowing; the light of his eyes is no longer trustworthy and his spirit is not steady. And when he could no longer walk upright on two feet, he crawled on his belly. And while licking dust, on his lips still one final plea burned without reserve: if only I may come to the fiftieth gate, once the curtain is lifted I will peer beyond the screen. What is there at the fiftieth gate beyond all the screens, the gates, and everything? The prayer was heard, and before the dimming torch reached its end, and the fiftieth gate—entirely of pure marble stones, of course a hint to the well-known aggadah about Rabbi Akiva and the four who entered the orchard, where in the end they saw pure marble stones—appeared before him. His hand trembled, his eye struck with radiance; would he hold back from knocking one more moment? Suddenly he would strengthen himself and dare and rise from crawling and knock on the door of the fiftieth gate, the fiftieth room. Then the torch would go out and the doors of the gate would open, and he would peer inward—and his body would collapse, and beside it a wisp of smoke, and it would be dragged over the threshold of restraint. That’s it. It’s called “He gazed and died”—that’s the title of the poem. What does that really mean? He reached the end, he is poised on the threshold, on the entrance to the fiftieth room, and he dies. What was there in the end? Two possibilities. Either there is some kind of room there that he did not succeed in uncovering—“ותחסרהו מעט מאלוהים”. Nachmanides says that the fiftieth gate the Holy One, blessed be He, did not reveal even to Moses our teacher. Or there really is nothing there, and therefore he saw nothing. Both possibilities remain open. That is the enigmatic part—I said this is a kind of riddle. But I think this poem—I don’t know how I came across it after I first gave this lecture in Yeruham—I came across this poem and it just struck me tremendously. Because it is really as though I had read this poem and on its basis written this lecture. It really describes wonderfully, I think, the picture I tried to present here. Fine, enough self-praise. Yes?

[Speaker C] Yes, I wanted to ask you in the middle. First of all, about Bialik in principle as well. They said—it’s not from me, I don’t know, it’s the noises. They said about Bialik that a great Torah genius could have emerged from him before he left. That’s how they spoke about him. Never mind. I wanted to ask you something else about the whole lecture. What you said about the two goats is all very well. I really agree with you. It’s just that there’s some problem, because Moses our teacher didn’t have the first room; for him there wasn’t the last room. That’s what it says in the Talmud. But in principle I want to ask you something else. The Talmud says in Rosh Hashanah that fifty gates of understanding descended to the world, and Moses our teacher received all of them, and on his own he did not want to receive the last one, “ותחסרהו מעט מאלוהים”. Okay, fine, everything is all right. The fifty gates of understanding, the Sages brought this in order that a person understand one thing from another and so on, and that’s how the whole Talmud is built, all the Talmud we study is built on the very idea of understanding. Now gates of impurity are not mentioned at all in the Sages. It is something mentioned in the New Zohar, and it has no connection at all to the gates of understanding. These are entirely different layers. It’s not one against the other. Gates of impurity in Kabbalah—just a second, let me finish. In that same Kabbalah there are also gates of purity and gates of holiness. The fact that the mystics attached gates of impurity and spoke about how Israel was supposed to sink there and so on—there’s no connection. There was no—just a second, let me finish the question. In Egypt there were no gates of understanding at all. The gates of understanding descended—that’s the statement of the Sages—that they descended into the world and spread throughout the entire world. We have an obligation to learn and become wise, to learn those gates of understanding within the Torah. What does that have to do with the gates of impurity? Sorry, these are different layers—this is cold, this is blue.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That was exactly my question, and I proposed the answer. Now you can say that you are not willing to accept the Kabbalistic picture on which I relied; fine, that’s another argument. I gave an explanation according to the accepted Kabbalistic picture that the gates of impurity correspond to the gates of understanding. Ah, so that is what I want—

[Speaker C] Last week when you spoke about Passover, about the Torah speaking of four sons, you said that the wise son corresponds to the wicked son. But that is really not so. The four sons are each something different; it’s not one against the other.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so here too I don’t agree with you. That’s not the spirit of things there, but leave it, let’s not wrangle over the homily, as they say.

[Speaker C] No, I mean, in principle—I really bought the homily, it’s a very beautiful homily indeed. I had already read about the two goats before from one of the writers, I can’t remember who, he also… Let’s do this afterward, but let’s—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] continue afterward; I just want to finish the lecture. Let’s see if after the lecture we can talk about other matters, because I want to finish this point. So look, I just want to finish the introduction, really. So I return to us. What I am describing here is really a picture in which our knowledge is built out of some foundational assumptions whose basis lies in intuition, in some immediate perception, common sense—call it whatever you want—some self-evident apprehension not based on something else, here is the first room, and on that we build, by means of the tools of logic, understanding, more and more levels of knowledge. And therefore I think that many times when people speak about things beyond the intellect, some may call it emotion, in my view these are not successful terms. They are not successful terms because what they really mean to speak about is wisdom versus understanding, but all of it is on the intellectual plane, all of it is part of the intellect. There is no such thing as beyond the intellect. The expression “beyond the intellect” is, in my view, an oxymoron. We think with the intellect; there is no such thing as beyond the intellect. There are things that are above—not above, but outside logic. Outside logic not in the sense that they are contradictory; contradiction is no such thing, a contradiction cannot exist. Rather, things for which logic is not the tool by which one reaches them, because all logic can do is take us from a premise to a conclusion. Reaching the premises themselves is not done by logical tools; it is done through intuition or common sense and the like. So that is why people often call these things things beyond the intellect, because again people mistakenly identify intellect with logic—but that is not correct. Intellect is composed of these two components, wisdom and understanding. Therefore faith too, in my view, is not beyond the intellect. Faith also really belongs to this concept of wisdom, meaning it is some kind of apprehension. Someone understands that there is a God—that is his apprehension. Whether he has proofs or does not have proofs is not what matters, because the proofs are in any case based on certain assumptions. And therefore at the base sits the word wisdom, which is really an expression of what is called faith. Faith is part of the intellect, our ability to grasp things directly, not because I have some logical proof leading me to them. And these things are the foundation, the axioms on which I can build additional structures, structures of understanding. So one conclusion says there is no such thing as beyond the intellect; intellect is composed of wisdom and understanding, that’s all. There are things that are outside logic, where logic is not the tool for dealing with them, but there is no beyond the intellect—everything, all of this is intellect. And it belongs to science just as much as to faith, there is no difference. I deal with them by exactly the same tools, in science and in faith. No difference at all. And the other side of the coin is that when people say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is beyond logic—there is no such animal. There is no such thing as beyond logic. Meaning, there are no things that contradict logic. A round triangle is not an existing thing; even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make a round triangle. Right, I’ve spoken about that more than once in previous series, but I won’t step into that minefield again here. What I want to say is simply that the picture I described, from my point of view, contains everything. Meaning, there are no exceptions. There is nothing beyond logic, and there is also nothing outside this picture that is beyond the intellect. Within this picture there is wisdom and there is understanding. Okay? And between these two we have to maneuver. But these things are not only of theological importance—what we think about the Holy One, blessed be He—they also really tell us how our thought is built. For example, where our creativity is located. Creativity often finds expression in how I arrive at premises, not how I move from premises to conclusion. That part is more straightforward; it is basically the operation of logical tools. Sometimes there is creativity in choosing the right logical tools. But creativity is always what goes beyond the mechanical. We already spoke about this in previous lectures when I discussed the concept of creativity a bit. We will come back to it. And therefore, when we now begin to go through concepts of computers, artificial intelligence, what artificial thinking is, we will always try to compare it to the concepts we have met so far in the introduction and see what of all this is present in artificial intelligence and what that means from the relevant philosophical perspectives. Okay, consciousness, is it a person, does it have rights, and all sorts of implications. But of course first we need to understand what is going on there in artificial intelligence. What from our thinking is there and what is missing there. That is really the gist of the discussion I want to conduct going forward. One last remark I want to still fit into this introduction, and I really will make it very short, is this feeling that says that thinking is done by logic, which really means that thinking is based on rules. Very often people assume that thought is based on rules, and using rules is what we usually call logic. Now of course this is not true; a great deal of our thinking is not based on rules. One can argue whether there are hidden rules that we are not aware of and that we really act according to, only unconsciously, or not—whether there are actions of ours that are not done according to rules but are essentially creative steps, not hidden rules of which we are merely unaware, but no, they do not work with rules at all. This is of course connected to the question of creativity, because creativity is usually perceived as some action that cannot be described by following rules. Wittgenstein talked about following rules; I mentioned that one of the previous times. And in this matter too, this is a very important introduction, because rules belong to understanding. Rules tell me that if this, then the rule says that. Rules belong to understanding. Wisdom represents the more creative things, the things beyond inferences, the gates as against the rooms—or rather the first room—and not the logical inferences. And these things will find expression in our discussion of thinking, artificial intelligence, because we will have to see which of these elements exists there and which does not. Are there really some hidden rules behind the steps of artificial intelligence, which we are not always aware of—turning the box from black into white, as they call it today in the world of artificial intelligence—or not? Or is there nothing inside the box? You can turn it white too and still see nothing. Meaning, there are no rules somewhere inside controlling this process. Therefore all these concepts I discussed so far in the introduction—we are now leaving them, but I want them to remain in the background for us because we will come back to them. The next part of the series will simply be to present technically: what is a computer, what is artificial intelligence, to get to know these concepts a little more deeply, really as an acquaintance with what these things are, and then come back and ask, after we have gotten to know it, what do we do with it in relation to the things we encountered in the introduction. That will be the philosophical discussion that will arise from this matter—perhaps also a somewhat Torah-based discussion, and philosophical and so on. That’s it. Next time I really want to begin the technical part. That’s all for now. If there are comments or questions, you’re welcome. If I may, Rabbi, please—

[Speaker F] Can you go over again the explanation of the difference, the meaning of understanding and wisdom, the difference between them?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Understanding is understanding one thing from another. Understanding one thing from another is, in the analogy I gave, basically deriving a conclusion from premises. How do we do this? With logical tools. Okay? Suppose I have two premises: all human beings are mortal, and Socrates is a human being. From those two premises I derive the conclusion that Socrates is mortal. How did you get from the premises to the conclusion? There is a logical rule that says that if every X is Y, and A is X, then A is Y. Let’s call this logical rule Moshe. Okay? Now what I do is take the two premises, apply the rule Moshe, and arrive at the conclusion that Socrates is mortal. This rule, the logical rule that takes me from the premises to the conclusion, is what is called understanding. Understanding one thing from another—a conclusion from premises. By contrast, wisdom is the thing whose truth I am convinced of from itself, not by means of an argument deriving it from something previous, but in itself. I understand immediately that this thing is true. What Descartes called evidence or self-evidence. Okay? I have some kind of self-clarity that this is true. I do not need logical proofs for that. On the contrary, these self-evident principles serve me as axioms, and logic helps me derive from them conclusions that are probably less self-evident to me, so I need logic in order to arrive at them. Okay? That’s it. Okay. Goodbye, Shabbat shalom. Can the Rabbi hear?

[Speaker E] Rabbi, can you hear? In the homiletic spirit of today, as someone mentioned earlier, the Rabbi spoke about the two goats and the Rabbi mentioned here the wise son and the wicked son, and it really does seem reminiscent. After all, the wicked son and the wise son say fairly similar things, but the wise one we embrace, and the wicked one—I don’t know where the Rabbi addresses this—the wicked one is after all just asking a question: “מה העבודה הזאת לכם” (“What is this service to you?”). It’s quite similar to what the wise one asked, and one could have answered him with some answer. Instead of answering him, they stick a label on him, and before he even asked the question he already had the label “wicked,” and they already tell him we’re not going to answer you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but I think that when you listen to the music of the sentence, not just the words themselves, you can understand why the Sages classified them this way. When someone says “מה העדות החוקים והמשפטים אשר ציווה ה’ אלוקינו אתכם” (“What are the testimonies, statutes, and laws that the Lord our God commanded you?”), first of all that’s a more developed question. He elaborates, he is really interested, he wants to understand what it means. The wicked one asks, “מה העבודה הזאת לכם”. “What is this service to you?” sounds like someone tossing out some kind of reservation, sort of “what are you bothering me with?” That’s the music. I think there is something in that music, not just the label.

[Speaker E] I agree—no, I agree, I agree—but the differences are subtle, and the child asks, and straightaway the way is to throw him down the stairs and tell him the truth, if by chance you had been born then, you wouldn’t even have been here. Is that an answer the Rabbi would accept?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Instead of teaching him? Fair enough, but you know, the claim is that the wicked cannot be taught, because the problem is wickedness, not ignorance. That goes back to your previous question. Meaning, if he is really just mistaken, then certainly you have to teach him—that is the simple son. But “מה העבודה הזאת לכם” is someone who hates you, not someone who doesn’t understand what you want.

[Speaker E] Yes, but there is something driving him, so there is something driving him.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is that well-known interpretation that after he says “מה העבודה הזאת לכם”, “אף אתה אמור לו”—how does it go there? “אילו היה במצרים לא היה נגאל” (“Had he been in Egypt, he would not have been redeemed”), right? Now why in that style—why don’t they say to him, “Had you been in Egypt, you would not have been redeemed”? Exactly. They never actually speak to him. So the point is that he asked the question and left. There’s no one to talk to. He asks, and you speak about him—he’s not in front of you.

[Speaker E] It doesn’t say he left; it says that we say to him, Rabbi, that’s all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but the fact is that when I speak about him, I speak about him in the third person.

[Speaker E] That’s the problem—that the parents don’t speak to him. The parents take this rebellious son and say “בננו זה” (“this son of ours”)—they don’t speak to him at all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is an answer. In the Passover Haggadah there is an answer.

[Speaker E] Yes, but not to him—they don’t say it to him.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly—why? So the interpretation says because he isn’t here. He threw out a question and left; he doesn’t really want an answer.

[Speaker E] In the case of the stubborn and rebellious son, this terrible child eats and drinks excessively, right? The parents take this thirteen-year-old boy—or younger—bring him to the court or the elders and say “בננו זה איננו שומע בקולנו זולל וסובא” (“this son of ours does not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard”). They don’t speak to him at all—“this son of ours”—and the judges don’t speak to him either.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They speak to the judges, not to him.

[Speaker E] Yes, yes, but with him—they don’t seem to speak to him, and the judges don’t speak to him either.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because the procedure described there is the appeal to the judges. Obviously they spoke to him before. What, parents don’t talk to their child when they see he is going astray?

[Speaker E] No, apparently not, apparently not. And the court says something to the parents—it asks them, say, by the way, before you stone him?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They said about that that it never was and never will be.

[Speaker E] But even the story has to be understood—what is this aggadah?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I understand the story very well. The parents obviously spoke to him. Where does it say? Why is that important?

[Speaker E] But shouldn’t it have been proper to describe to us that we spoke with him? Maybe he answers them? Nothing—he doesn’t…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The stubborn and rebellious son is a legal passage: what happens with a child when all the talking does not help.

[Speaker E] But legally not in practice, legally not—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] in practice—with conversations and descriptions and all that… a child for whom all the talking doesn’t help.

[Speaker E] But aggadah… an aggadah that comes to teach us—from the outset they tell him this is a law that they tell us is not really a law because it will never happen, so then what is being discussed? Rhetoric and the ability to shape our consciousness. And how is our consciousness shaped?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By not speaking to the child. Because if you failed to educate him and already at thirteen this is what he is doing, apparently he is a lost case—except that it does not happen.

[Speaker E] What about the parents? And the parents can wash their hands of it? There isn’t a single word of criticism of them?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rabbi, nothing? I have no idea whether there is a word of criticism or not, but the assumption is—the assumption is that if they did their best, and parents usually try to do what they can, and it didn’t succeed, then he is a stubborn and rebellious son.

[Speaker E] But again, this is an educational aspect—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] not a case description.

[Speaker E] How can it be that the parents have no responsibility? They decided to bring him into the world, and he grew into what he grew into, and they have no responsibility at all? He grew up as if out of the blue?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We are speaking of a situation in which they have no responsibility. We are speaking of a situation in which there is no word of criticism of them.

[Speaker E] Not even a single word of criticism.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why, they are not at fault in anything? We are speaking of a case where they fulfilled their obligation. If they did not fulfill their obligation, then it is certainly reasonable that they would not execute him. Where is that written, Rabbi?

[Speaker E] That’s nice, but it isn’t written in the Torah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It says something even stronger—it says they never did it, not only if the parents did not fulfill their obligation, even if they did fulfill their obligation. So what do you mean, where is it written? You don’t have anything more explicit than that.

[Speaker E] What, the fact that the Sages say it never happened and never will happen solves the problem for us?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, because they say this is a passage with a very, very specific educational purpose. It is not a practical regulatory commandment.

[Speaker C] Here too you are now speaking on two different levels again. The stubborn and rebellious son is a passage written in the Torah, and the four sons in the Haggadah is a homily. It has nothing to do with Jewish law. Here you jumped from here to there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even so, if it sounds the same—

[Speaker C] No, I mean, they are not connected. They are entirely different layers.

[Speaker E] We are not historians of Jewish law or of aggadah or of the Torah. We are trying to live it as a living Torah.

[Speaker C] Absolutely, Shmuel, I’m not arguing with that. I’m just saying it’s not related. This is Jewish law; that law has a certain meaning. And the four sons in the Haggadah is a homily.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And Jewish law and homily—how can one speak of them in one breath?

[Speaker C] Nothing happened; certainly there is a one-to-one resemblance—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rather, people are asking similar questions about both these things.

[Speaker C] Fine, the problem is that the Torah never spoke about four sons.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Sages say it did, so we study the Sages.

[Speaker C] The Sages bring verses from which they derive it—that is a full-fledged homily.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What difference does that make? I now want to understand this homily—what practical difference does it make?

[Speaker C] No, you can’t project that onto Jewish law.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who is comparing it to Jewish law? We are discussing a rabbinic midrash and the passage of the stubborn and rebellious son and asking similar questions about both of them, that’s all. No one brought proof from one to the other, no one mixed them up, everything is fine, I don’t see the problem. Fine, friends.

[Speaker D] Rabbi, Rabbi, one last question. So in practice what is the practical difference between a skeptic and a person who is not a skeptic? After all, both of them will get on a plane, both of them will do the same actions, both of them will think that science is correct or things like that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] My answer on this point is that there are no true skeptics. There are people who present themselves as skeptics, but they are not really.

[Speaker D] Okay, and a true theoretical skeptic—how would he behave? Just randomly? One time he gets on a plane, one time not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea. Yes, exactly—there is no way to behave.

[Speaker D] He would seemingly randomize his behaviors.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, or jump off a roof and hope he will die, even though he has no way of knowing whether he will die. Yes, I don’t know—a true skeptic really cannot function. I don’t think there is any coherent way to describe how a consistent skeptic, a true skeptic, behaves.

[Speaker D] Well, maybe it’s written in the books of postmodernism.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nothing is written there, and certainly not that. Okay, friends, goodbye, good night, thank you very much.