The Essence of the Laws of Repentance in Maimonides – Lecture 5 – Rabbi Michael Abraham

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It’s a negative action, but that does not mean that the thing in question is a positive value. For example, it could be an asset. Money is an asset, right? I have a right to hold on to my money, right? It’s my property. If you take my property from me, you violate my rights; you did something negative, something bad, right? But that’s not because holding money is a value. It’s because holding money is a right I have. It’s my interest, it’s my asset, and you’re not allowed to harm it without justification. Okay? Meaning, when harming something is a negative act, that doesn’t mean that the thing itself is a value in the evaluative sense, in the positive sense. It may simply be an asset. Just an asset. It’s good for me; I have a right to be in that condition. Don’t damage that condition if you have no justification for doing so. I claim that freedom is like money. Freedom is an asset; it is not a value. Okay? So basically, if I’m in a state without restrictions, just as I might have a lot of money—having a lot of money is also a kind of having fewer restrictions, because I can do more things, okay? So these are close cousins; this isn’t just some random example, it’s a very close one. So I’m saying these situations are, all in all, rights that I have; it’s a condition I’m in. If someone violates my rights—my money, my freedom—then he’s doing something wrong if he does it without justification. But simply being in that state, as long as no one is infringing on it, that’s not a value; it’s an asset. It belongs to me, it’s my right—don’t take what’s mine, that’s all. Okay? So if that’s so, I would define freedom as an asset, not as a value. Okay?

Now then, what is it that we value when we speak about freedom as a value? It seems to me that we mean a different concept, and that concept is liberty. What is liberty? To be a free person. Liberty means acting autonomously, a person with a divine soul, what we spoke about in previous sessions. That is to be a free person: someone who does not let circumstances, society, or the environment dictate what he thinks or what he does. Rather, he is the master; he holds the reins. Okay? Now this thing—I call it liberty—and it is a value, not an asset. A value means preserving a mode of action of a divine soul, an autonomous mode of action, where I determine for myself what I think, what I do, how I conduct myself, and I do not let any external factors—good or bad—control me. We spoke about this: both the good inclination and the evil inclination are inclinations. I’m supposed to make decisions myself, not let inclinations run me—including, not the evil inclination, the good inclination too, sorry, including not the good inclination. I’m supposed to conduct myself—that’s what we defined as the soul; the author of Tanya defines it—as a divine soul and not an animal soul. Right? An animal soul is something that can take you toward good and can take you toward evil. What is animal-like about it is that it takes you, regardless of whether it takes you toward good or toward evil. Meaning: you are not the one going, you are not the one deciding; something is taking you. Sometimes that can be external circumstances; sometimes it can be internal pressures inside you, your psychology—that too is something taking you. Okay? The demand, as we saw in the author of Tanya last time, the demand to conduct yourself in the mode of a divine soul means that nothing takes you anywhere—not to do good and not to do evil. You take yourself. Okay? The comedy trio pops up again here, right? “I didn’t go with Father, not with Mother; I went with the guys.” So yes—then I don’t go with Father, not with Mother, and not with the guys; I go according to what I decide. Okay? That is a person who is truly free. All right?

Liberty, unlike freedom, is a value. Why is it a value? Because liberty is not a condition. It’s not just a state—having money, having no restrictions. No. Liberty is a mode of action, where I decide that I’m not letting go of the reins, that I’m making the decisions, that I form my values, that I determine what I think and what I do. All of that is my constant struggle: to remain myself all the time and not something else. Since that’s the case, this can be seen as a value and not merely an asset. What? A slave? In a moment, in a moment, we’ll get to the slave too. So I claim that liberty—when people usually talk about the value of freedom, they actually mean the value of liberty, not freedom. If you have no restrictions, then you have no restrictions. The fact that you live in—I don’t know—in a free country as opposed to North Korea, that doesn’t make you a better person than the North Korean, right? You’re in a more pleasant state, a freer state, one that allows more, okay? But that doesn’t make you a better human being. That’s your condition. Where do we test to what extent you are more—not “better,” let’s say—but more excellent, yes? “Better” means doing good for others; here I’m not speaking necessarily on that plane, but rather: to what extent are you more of a human being? Right? In fact, that is tested more in North Korea. Because in North Korea, where you have more restrictions and people try more to dictate what you think and what you do, and to deprive you of freedom—precisely there you can express much more powerfully the fact that you are a free person. Or in other words: not only are liberty and freedom not synonyms, liberty can be expressed only in a place where there is no freedom. In a place where there is complete freedom—purely hypothetical, of course—but in a place where there is complete freedom, no restrictions, there is no liberty. What does liberty even mean there? Nothing. Nobody expects anything of me, nobody is trying to influence me to do anything—do whatever you want, okay? There is no liberty in such a situation. Liberty exists only where there is no freedom. And to the degree of bondage, chains, or lack of freedom, so too the degree—or the potential—of your ability to express being a free person.

I assume some of you, at least, know logotherapy—what’s his name—Viktor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” right? So that book, its first part, begins with a description of concentration camps. He was a prisoner in concentration camps, okay? And he describes how there were people who preserved their human image, their divine image, and there were people who did not, okay? And his central point was that the circumstances do not determine anything at all. On the contrary—the circumstances often determine the opposite. Meaning, the more enslaved you are, the higher you can rise in the sense of being a free person. The more restrictions you have, the more room you have to express your freedom of spirit. Because someone who has no restrictions—then there’s nothing there; he does whatever he wants, and nobody is trying to influence him, and nothing at all, okay?

[Speaker A] “The servant of God alone is free.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, wait, wait—I started with that, you understand that that’s not accidental. Huh? Also from the side…

[Speaker C] Actually, it’s from both extremes. Even when there is absolute freedom, you can get swept into bad actions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, get swept along—so that isn’t called absolute freedom. To be swept along means that something is trying to take you, so you are not in a state of absolute freedom.

[Speaker C] …you can express liberty…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Only because there is no freedom! Only in a place where they are trying to sweep you away… No—where there is great freedom externally, but for me freedom is also internal. Again, your inclinations inside you are also forms of bondage. The good inclination and the evil inclination—both. Then you’re not free either. The lack of freedom can come from outside and it can come from inside; it doesn’t matter. Meaning, influences on you—by the way, this is a very common mistake in discussions about free choice and neuroscience and all sorts of determinism and things like that. People think that if a person acts—this is what’s called compatibilism today. Compatibilism basically argues that there is no contradiction between determinism and free choice. Why? Because determinism means that you do what is dictated to you by your nature. That is called free choice: you yourself chose, and you do what you chose. There is nothing external forcing you not to do it or influencing you to do otherwise. But that is, of course, a mistake, because internal influences are not essentially different from external influences. They are influences too. And what is required of you is to decide by yourself and not let any influence take you—not external and not internal. Nothing. Therefore, from my point of view, when you speak about influences, whether external or internal, that try to sweep you in some direction, that is the measure showing that you are not in a state of freedom. What?

[Speaker A] Do you also take determinism into account?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Also the… internal determinism is… it is argued that internal determinism is also determinism. Yes.

[Speaker C] Fine, but with North Korea, say there are major restrictions there, so liberty… from outside! From outside. He’s saying that even if from the outside—if you live somewhere in the jungle, I don’t know, somewhere with money and abundance and everything—there too you have to develop the capacity for liberty.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: you need to develop the capacity for liberty there only because there too you are not free. You are not free because you have restrictions from within, not from without. From without you’re free, but inwardly those are restrictions too. You have inclinations trying to push you this way and that, and you have to overcome them and decide that you act this way…

[Speaker C] …and that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, of course. The one in North Korea has even less freedom, because he has both the inclinations and the external restrictions. The person outside has only the inclinations and no external restrictions. Therefore the one from North Korea is less free, but for that very reason he can be more truly free in spirit. More—not that only he can be free in spirit, but more. The greater the number of restrictions upon you, the more the sky is the limit—in other words, the more you can be a free person, not less. Right? This is a very important point to understand. Now, if that’s the case, then freedom and liberty are not only not synonyms—they are opposites! They are opposites! In order for you to be a free person, you must not be free. Only in a state where you are not free, and nevertheless act autonomously, can one say that you are a free person. To stand… he gave him a chance…

[Speaker G] …to walk straight, and he walked in a zigzag. The same thing?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, he just gave him a chance…

[Speaker G] …to walk straight, yes, and he walked in a zigzag.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. That’s a wonderful example, right. It’s just—by the way, this is really like that tiny shoelace case in the Talmud, because as you know, in the laws of sanctifying God’s name, if they tell you to commit a transgression during a time of religious persecution, you may not commit the transgression. Right? Even a transgression that in principle yields to saving a life—but in a time of persecution, not so. But even for something as small as a shoelace: if they tell you to wear a red shoelace when the Jewish custom is to wear a black one, you have to give your life for that. Why? Because in a place where the restrictions are stronger, the fight over tiny nuances is itself your liberty. And that is exactly the example you rightly brought from Natan Sharansky, right? They say that when they told him to walk straight, he walked in a zigzag just so as not to obey them. That is exactly the shoelace case. Meaning, the more your freedom is constricted, the more important it is, within the limits of freedom that remain to you—

[Speaker G] …to preserve…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …to preserve it, to preserve what you still have. That is far more an expression of being a free person than someone who has a very broad space and, fine, he does lots of very original and very valuable things and all that. In other words, the quantity of restrictions basically determines the degree of your liberty inversely. The more restrictions there are, the more you can be a free person. Not that you necessarily will be—you can be more of a free person, if you are truly autonomous, okay? Let me maybe give an example.

[Speaker C] It’s harder to be…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …a free person.

[Speaker C] What? It’s harder to be a free person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, and precisely because of that—precisely because of that—your liberty is expressed much more powerfully in such a situation, because it’s harder. That is also why it makes sense to value such a person, whereas there is nothing to value in a free person. A free person is, of course, a happy person, but there is nothing to value in him in the moral sense: he is free. There is nothing to value about the fact that I live here and not in North Korea. I was born here—what does that have to do with anything?

[Speaker C] Those who made the film… huh? Those who made…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Indeed. Right. They went against, as it were… right, completely. I may disagree with them—that’s not the point. I also disagree with a hired killer, right? Right. So these two concepts—the opposition between them—is very strong. Depriving someone of freedom is a negative act. Right? But being free is an asset, not a value.

[Speaker C] Being a free person is a value.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And what about depriving someone of liberty? There’s no such thing. There’s no such thing. You can deprive someone of freedom, you can impose more and more restrictions on him, but his liberty depends only on him. That’s the whole idea. It isn’t even defined—deprivation of liberty. Unless, again, you hypnotize him or train him like an animal, or kill him. Right? He can be even more of a free person than someone outside. In other words, you cannot take liberty away from a human being.

[Speaker A] You can…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …impose more and more restrictions on him, but you cannot take away his being a free person. You can… no, you can’t.

[Speaker C] Not what—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can kill him, you can punch him and knock him out, huh? Education—if he is truly a free person, then he can also resist education and conditioning. So I’m saying: if he is truly a free person, we’ve already seen people who grew up from childhood within a certain framework and nevertheless broke free of it, right? Meaning, there is a question of how free in spirit you are. It’s true that you need to be very free in spirit to express that within a system that is deeply enslaving; therefore there will be far fewer free people there than outside. But whoever is a free person there is more of a free person. Okay? In other words, that is not a contradiction; it’s two sides of the same coin.

Let me give you some illustrations of this. Once, when I was in Yeruham—we lived there, and I taught in the yeshiva there—there was a monthly gathering of all kinds of people from the area, various study groups and others, to hear a lecture on the weekly Torah portion. Each time some different celebrity would come, whatever. On Thursday evenings once a month, people would come from the nearby kibbutzim, from Be’er Sheva, from Dimona, from various places. Okay, so once a month people came to give lectures of one kind or another. Now once Amos Oz was supposed to come, and he didn’t show up, so they asked me to be the substitute. So I spoke there—I argued with Amos Oz, even though not in his presence; I argued with some article he had written. He wrote an article, “Here and There in the Land of Israel,” I think, in a collection of essays he has, and there he spoke precisely about these concepts of freedom and liberty. He says that Jewish tradition begins with a great explosion, at Mount Sinai, and from there onward it is like a room that we keep filling with more furniture and more furniture and more furniture, and we do not allow ourselves to remove any piece of furniture, until in the end we are completely trapped inside; we have totally lost our freedom, and thus tradition has been destroyed.

[Speaker C] A whole grandfather inside a house full of furniture?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, he keeps adding more furniture, yes. He removes nothing, he removes nothing. And therefore he claims that precisely Hebrew literature is what preserves creative freedom and all sorts of things like that—various things that seem pathetic to me, but never mind; in any case, that is his article. And again, his expressive ability is truly marvelous—one has to be careful with arguments in such a case; I’ve told you that already. And I said to them: listen, I had a whole line of thought there about this matter. I’ll give you an example, okay? Take a chessboard, all right? Now suppose you have one pawn and the board is empty, eight by eight. How many possibilities do you have for placing that pawn?

[Speaker A] Sixty-four.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, any one of the sixty-four squares. What happens if you have two pawns? Sixty-four times sixty-three divided by two, if they are identical, right? Sixty-four times sixty-three divided by two—which is much greater than the number of possibilities with one pawn, right? To arrange them, yes. Three pawns? Sixty—you already know—sixty-four times sixty-three times sixty-two divided by three factorial, right, combinatorics. In short, far more, okay? In the end you reach billions of possibilities. The number of possibilities rises until thirty-two pawns. From thirty-three pawns onward, you already have half the board, right? You have only thirty-one holes left—so think about arranging the holes, not the pawns. Like physicists: there are holes and there are electrons. So you understand that the maximum is reached at thirty-two; it’s a parabola, okay? So what does that mean? That the more pawns you have on the board, the more possibilities you have for arranging them, not fewer. And the more furniture you have in the room, the more room you have for creativity in how to organize it and how to manage within it—much more than someone who has one piece of furniture in the room, or an empty room. With an empty room, what do you have? The room is empty—fine, that’s it. There’s nothing to do; it’s empty and it remains empty, you have no option at all, right? If the room has one piece of furniture, say one item per square, then you can put that piece here, or here, or there. If you have two pieces of furniture—ah, now it gets interesting. You can coordinate them: this goes here and that goes there, and that’s interesting and useful and functional, etc. Then you have another piece of furniture, and you put it there, and that adds aesthetic value; and then another piece of furniture. In other words, you understand that the number of possibilities increases as the number of pieces of furniture in the room increases. Or in other words: if I want to speak not about freedom—well, if I want to speak about freedom, then the amount of furniture is one over freedom. The more furniture there is, the less freedom there is, right? But if I want to speak about liberty, then the more furniture there is, the more liberty there is, not less. I have more room for self-expression, for autonomous action, for creativity—for how I organize all these tools, right? Think of someone who has to escape from a guarded prison. If he has to escape from a guarded prison, he has to be a creative person, right? But if he runs across an open field with nothing restricting him, there is no creativity at all. He is completely free, but there is no creativity, right? There is no autonomous action, there is nothing there you can admire. Therefore there is a very distorted view in the world that identifies freedom with liberty, that identifies liberty with lack of restrictions. Fighting so that I will have fewer restrictions—that is an action of a free person, and therefore it has value. Not because being with fewer restrictions is itself something valuable; being with fewer restrictions is an asset. Someone who fights to reduce restrictions is indeed a free person, but that is not the same thing. It is not the condition of having fewer restrictions; rather it is the aspiration toward it.

You know, just in Hebrew I once thought about this: with freedom, when they describe me as being in a state of freedom, they say I am free, right? But when they want to describe me as being in a state of liberty, how do they say it? That I am “libertied”? There is no word in Hebrew for that, right? What’s the phrase? A free person. Do you understand the difference between “a free person” and “libertied”? What is a free person? Like, say, “one destined for the World to Come.” What is “one destined for the World to Come”?

[Speaker C] It’s…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is always someone who is alive; it is never someone who has died. Right? When you say about someone that he is destined for the World to Come, that is not someone who died and now is in the World to Come. He is in the World to Come. “One destined for the World to Come” is someone who is here, but has some kind of connection, some aspiration to reach a state in which he is not yet found. He has an aspiration to get there; that is “one destined for the World to Come.” Right? “One destined for” something means you have some connection to something that you are not actually in. But yes, something from there is present in you. You aspire to be there—that is called being “of” something, okay?

[Speaker G] Not son-son-son, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Like “a person of Torah.” A person of Torah is not the same as a Torah scholar. No. A person of Torah and a Torah scholar are not the same thing. A Torah scholar is someone who possesses a lot of Torah learning. A person of Torah is someone who conducts himself in a way that seeks to connect to Torah, who wants to be a Torah scholar, who wants to behave according to the Torah. Being “of” something always means something potential, something I aspire to—a distant state I want to belong to, to be part of.

[Speaker D] How would you explain the wording, as it says in the Passover Haggadah: “Now we are slaves; next year free people”? Right. So what? So how would you explain that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly the… what do I need to explain? What’s unclear? What needs explaining? That is exactly it. “Now we are slaves; next year free people.” Today, when you speak about next year, you are a free person. When you get to next year and become a free person, you will simply be free. When today you are enslaved and you want to become a free person, then you are a free person. Only within the state of “now we are slaves.” If you are there, then you will be free; you will not be a free person. Exactly—that potential language about some future state is precisely the point. Now, when I speak in general—it’s interesting. I don’t know whether this is the correct explanation; I’m not an expert in language and I don’t know if anyone is expert in this, but—

[Speaker A] Freedom is not the opposite of liberty.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Freedom means that you are in a state of freedom. You have no restrictions, or you have fewer restrictions, okay? Liberty—you cannot be in a state of liberty. You can aspire to be a free person. It is some kind of potential state, some kind of reaching toward a state outside yourself. That very desire is what it means to be a free person. Not to be there—once you get there, you’ll just be free. It’s like those crises: you aspire to establish a state; fine, now there’s a state—so what do you do now? Okay, done. So what does it mean today, for example, to be a Zionist? Right? Then everyone loads onto it whatever they want. To be a Zionist means to be left-wing; to be a Zionist means to be right-wing; to be a Zionist means—what?

[Speaker D] No, but the aspiration that is here is—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, you are a free person, but you are not free.

[Speaker D] Already this year you became a free person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course—only this year, not already this year.

[Speaker D] In the Haggadah, “Now we are slaves…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …next year free people”—the meaning is that the aspiration for next year makes us free people today. Yes, that’s what I’m claiming. Again, the terminology itself doesn’t matter to me. I’ll go back to Yehuda Halevi: look, the terminology is not the point. These are two concepts; call them whatever you want. I call this one freedom and that one liberty. Call them whatever you want, call them “deliverance and help from heaven” for all I care. But these are two concepts that it is important to distinguish between, okay? I use this terminology. What?[Speaker A] My grandfather and I, well… How does the article… wait, wait, we’ll get there, we’ll get there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what I basically want to say is that even in the linguistic sense there’s a difference between freedom and liberty, and I think it may be connected to this. Freedom is a state you’re in, but liberty is always a potential state you aspire to. That’s why you are a free person; you’re not “freedom-ish,” or something like that, right? Let me maybe bring another angle on this. There’s an example I often use—I’ll illustrate it through political elections. Okay? Elections in a country. So I’ll give three models. Four, if you like. The fourth is a joke, but three models of elections.

The first model is elections in Syria. Okay? There are elections. You enter the polling station and choose, in a completely free way, the only ballot that’s there, which is Assad—the son, the father, the holy spirit, whoever it is—but it’s always Assad. You choose completely freely, nobody interferes with you at all, the only ballot that’s there, put it in the box, and surprisingly Assad is always elected. And it’s always 99.7 percent or something, I don’t know, somehow there are a few votes there—or maybe they just don’t know how to count. But it always comes out the same, of course. That’s one kind of election.

Now, nobody is stopping you. No problem. You enter the polling station, nobody says a word to you, you choose whatever ballot you want—there’s just only one ballot to choose. Okay? So de facto this is obviously fake freedom; it’s determinism. Basically, the circumstances dictate the result, even though you feel completely free. Nobody is influencing you, but the circumstances dictate the outcome, not you. Your choices have no effect at all. Okay? That’s one model.

The second model is the opposite. There are elections in Switzerland. You enter the polling station—metaphorical Switzerland, okay?—you enter the polling station, and you choose completely freely among several ballots there, and whoever is elected becomes president of Switzerland. Okay? So that would seem to be freedom or liberty at its finest. Except for one thing: in metaphorical Switzerland there are no problems. Why should I care who gets elected? Draw lots. What difference does it make whether you chose Moti or Yanko? They’ll do the same thing because there’s nothing to deal with. Again, in actual Switzerland there are probably things to deal with, but Switzerland as a metaphor for a place with no problems—I think that’s a good metaphor. Okay?

So that’s the second concept. What does that mean? That even though you—this isn’t like Syria. Here you choose completely freely among several options, right? And still something is missing. What’s missing is the problems. Now what does that mean? What, we want there to be problems? No, we don’t want problems, but there are. There are problems. What can you do? There are problems, and once… I’m not looking for problems, but if there are problems, that places a challenge before me. It places before me the challenge of being a free person within the framework of those problems. Okay?

So if we want a fuller model of liberty, then of course it isn’t Syria, but it also isn’t Switzerland. It’s a place where you enter the polling station freely, choose among several ballots, okay, and there are also problems. In other words, if you choose this way there is a price; if you choose that way there is a price. There are costs, and they do not depend on you. The costs are the circumstances. You can decide how to conduct yourself within those given circumstances, and consequently what prices you will pay or what you will gain. Okay?

Fine. What is missing from the picture of liberty—if Syria is determinism, and Switzerland is freedom—freedom is the absence of limitations. You want to do whatever you want, run in an open field, run right, run left, run wherever you want, there are no limits, no fences, nothing. But that has no meaning. It has no meaning because that’s freedom, not liberty. Liberty is a state where there are limitations; within them there are several possible ways to act, good and bad; you choose one of them freely and bear the consequences—the good, the bad, the costs—which do not depend on you. You did not choose the costs. You chose how to act within the framework that includes those costs, but you did not choose the costs. That is the meaning of liberty.

So here we have determinism, freedom, and liberty. There is a fourth model.

[Speaker C] What’s the fourth model?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said it’s a bit of a joke. The fourth model is a place where you enter the polling station freely, choose freely one of the existing ballots, there are problems to deal with, and all the ballots act the same way. So it makes no difference what you chose. It depends which side of the map you’re looking from, but yes, that too.

I have some friend of a friend who once went trekking in Burma—Myanmar today, right? Back then it was Burma. So he went there; there were huge jungles there in Southeast Asia, and at some point he reached some village of huts, natives there who had apparently never seen a person from civilization, or at least that’s how it looked. He entered this village and saw that there was a post office inside the village, some little hut serving as a post office. He got closer—I heard this secondhand, from a friend of his friend—and on the wall there, there was a little postal window and next to it a wall with boxes divided by continents and countries, so if you wanted to send letters you could sort them by continent and country. He was stunned. What is this? A village of huts in the middle of a primitive jungle in Burma, and mail sorted by countries and continents? There’s nothing like this anywhere in civilization.

Okay, he comes closer. There was a line there. He gets to the window, and here is this wall with the boxes. Behind it there’s one big sack that gathers all the letters. In other words, you send them and sort the letters by continents and countries, but in the end it all falls into the same sack. You get it? I think that’s often our situation. We have lots of problems to deal with, right? We basically have freedom of choice, there are several ballots in the box, we enter the polling station, choose one of them completely freely, and there are problems—it’s not Switzerland, okay? Except in the end, no matter what you choose, it comes out the same. Whoever you choose, in the end they all behave the same way, or at least do the same thing. In the end they all fall into the same sack.

So that’s the fourth joke. Unfortunately it’s a real joke. But the first three—I think they illustrate very well what I want to sharpen here.

Wait, wait. What I want to sharpen is that when you want your choice to have meaning, to have moral meaning—not just that you have freedom, you can do this or you can do that—moral meaning means there is some framework that imposes constraints on you, problems, values, good and bad. Remember Ari Elon? Really, if there is nothing external that dictates what is good and what is bad, then your autonomous legislation of your own path loses all moral meaning. It has no meaning at all. Do whatever you want. If you decide it’s good, then by definition it’s good. So what meaning does that have?

Your choice, or your freedom, gains meaning in a place where it is not freedom but liberty—in a place where you act autonomously and freely within a framework, but the framework is not something you decided on; it is given to you. Then your choices have meaning. Okay?

So if I return to Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, I would offer the following interpretation—by the principle of charity, at least I offer it: “The servants of time are servants of servants.” The free people are servants of servants. Why? Because basically there is nothing external that dictates for them what is good and what is bad, right? “Servants of time”—and the servant of God is the opposite, yes? So I say, there is nothing external. They legislate their own values for themselves. Okay? They are servants of servants. Why are they servants of servants? Because in the end they do what their nature causes them to do; there is no reason not to do it. Okay?

“The servant of God alone is free.” What does that mean? I’ll translate it now into my own language: the servant of God alone is truly free—not merely free in the sense of unbounded. Okay? What does that mean? When there is the Holy One, blessed be He, when there is an external source that tells you what is good and what is bad, and now you conduct yourself freely within that—not that you are coerced and doing it because of your environment, or because that’s just how you are, or some form of determinism—no. You choose independently, autonomously, to act rightly, while the definition of what is right and what is not right is not in your hands. The Holy One, blessed be He, or some external factor, determines it. He alone is free. That has value. Such freedom has value, because it is not mere freedom but liberty.

Okay? He calls it freedom, but I’m saying again, the terminology isn’t the point. I think he means what I’m calling liberty here, not what I’m calling freedom. So that may be one possible interpretation of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s words.

But for our purposes—right—and always, do not read “engraved” but “liberty.” The point is that you carve the letters within the framework of the stone; that is why it is liberty. If there were no framework of stone, then it would not be liberty, it would be freedom. You can imagine letters here too, right? You can imagine letters in the air. After all, as people always say, the sculptor does not really make the statue; he just removes the waste, and what remains is the statue. Right? What do you see? Take a log of wood or a stone that the sculptor works on—what does he do? He removes the waste, and what remains is what was within it, yes, he sculpts what was within it. Okay?

So he doesn’t make the statue, but obviously he does make the statue, right? That’s the only way to make a statue. Try to think: if you try to create letters in the air—letters—if there is no framework of stone against which you struggle and out of which you produce the letters, if you are carving into the stone and producing the letters, then you are free in the true sense. Therefore, do not read “engraved on the tablets” but “liberty.” When you engrave into tablets of stone, that is liberty. But if there are no tablets of stone, if it’s just in the air, it is nothing; it is freedom, it is nothing at all. Okay? It also won’t express anything.

By the way, one of the things I spoke about there—in Yeruham, in that same context, which Amos Oz also dealt with, not only in the moral context but also in the artistic context—is this issue in art as well. People talk about artistic liberty, right? In art, not in ethics. Now, there too there is a huge confusion, in my opinion.

As a child I always wondered why you need genre rules in art. Genre rules. There are certain genres that have rules for how you work, how you make drama, how you make tragedy, how you make comedy. There are three acts, the gun at the end of the first act goes off in the third act, whatever—there are rules for how to construct a play or some other work of art according to genres. And I never understood it. I mean, why are you dictating to me how to do it? Do whatever you want, do what you think is right, everything is fine—why do we need genre rules?

Until I grew up. Until I grew up and understood that without genre rules all art is worth nothing, because then there’s no way to evaluate it. If a person says, look, there are genre rules. I’m now writing a drama. A drama should have five acts, it should be constructed in such-and-such a way; there is a system of eight rules for how to build a drama—just as an example. Now I cut a corner a bit on the seventh rule. Well, then there’s room for appreciation: I found some creative solution here. But if there were no eight rules, then how could one evaluate what you did? It has no meaning. Do whatever you want—that’s total freedom. In total freedom nothing has any value.

Very often people also do not properly understand the importance of modesty in this context. The importance of modesty is not only to cover, but to give meaning to revelation. When you reveal something, it has meaning if the norm is to cover. But if there is no norm of covering, then who cares? Walk around naked—it won’t do anything to anyone, it won’t change anything.

When you want to protest against something, you need to break rules. But if there are no rules, there is nothing to break; you cannot protest in a world where there are no rules. Therefore when you protest—in art, in the state, anywhere—protest is walking a tightrope. It is always something that bends the rules a little. At least sharp protest bends the rules a bit. But you have to be very careful not to break them, because if you break them, the protest also loses its meaning. It has no meaning.

You know, in a world where there is no problem at all with dressing however you want, then the most provocative performance on stage won’t do anything to anyone. What would it say? It wouldn’t say anything. Okay, you dressed like this, he dressed like that, he wore no clothes, he wore clothes—what difference does it make? Do whatever you want.

In a world where it is forbidden to reveal anything, if the women wrapped in shawls put on a performance and their eyes are visible, someone there would explode—there is an insanely provocative protest here. Okay? You have many more possibilities for expressing something when you are within a framework of rules. If you are not within a framework of rules, you cannot express anything.

That is why, even when you break rules or round off the corners, you must be very careful not to smash them completely, not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. And I think this is a very important point in our context, because liberty is very often a struggle against chains, against bondage, against limitations. You have to be very careful with that struggle. If you shatter all the chains, then no meaning remains in your struggle.

If you say: no, no, I accept these chains, but within them I carve out for myself an autonomous path, my own path—that is a free person. That is someone whom there is room to appreciate.

That is why I said there that what… let’s say he spoke there about dealing with the Holocaust. He said religious thought is not really dealing with the Holocaust; it is just justifying the judgment or something like that. Hebrew literature is what truly grapples with the Holocaust—that’s what Amos Oz said. What does it mean to grapple with it? If you do not believe in God, then what do you have to grapple with? Fine, there was a Holocaust, very tragic, very painful—what can you do? What is there to grapple with?

You only have something to grapple with in a place where you believe in God, you think He is good, you think He runs the world, and the Holocaust happened. What do you do with that? That is an immense confrontation. I don’t know, you have to think about how to deal with it, what to do with it. Okay—but that is a confrontation, because you accept the system of chains or rules, and within it you try to carve out a path for yourself.

But in a world where there is no such system of rules and chains, you do not believe in it—then what does it mean to confront? That is just freedom, not liberty. You are not a free person in the true sense; you are just unbound. Once they used to call a secular person “free,” right? That’s exactly the point. So what? It has no meaning. If you are inside the system and carve out your own path, find a special, correct, persuasive way to deal with a real problem within the system, then you are truly free; you created something meaningful.

[Speaker C] Yes, but if you live inside a religious system, for example, and then you decide, as a free person, that as far as you’re concerned desecrating the Sabbath is not a problem—they excommunicate you. Fine.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then you would be even more truly free if you kept insisting, because they excommunicate you.

[Speaker C] About that Haggai Elon guy, I don’t know, I don’t know him. Moti Elon I know.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] His brother?

[Speaker C] His brother, heaven forbid. So… anyway, that’s what he supposedly cries about. Fine, what… I think the system is…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I’m saying…

[Speaker C] …not tolerant of people who…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] About that I cry too. But he cries about it from outside the system, and I cry about it from within the system—that’s the difference. The difference is that he does not recognize that system, so what do you have to cry about? I say: I do recognize that system, and it annoys me—so what do I do? I struggle with it. That is called struggling.

But someone who says, “I do not recognize this system,” okay, then there is just a collection of crazy people here, wicked people, I don’t know what, all of whom I think are idiots—and that’s it. That is not called grappling; you left. And fine, that is what he believes; I’m not blaming him. But that is not called grappling, do you understand?

When you are inside the framework, committed to the framework, and there are problems within that framework, and you try to struggle in order to see what to do with those problems—that is where the fact that you are truly free can come to expression, the fact that you are grappling, that you are finding, carving out some path of your own.

And if you do not recognize the system, you are not committed to it, there is no system, you are without chains and without anything, then there is nothing. It’s…

[Speaker H] You need something to hate. Huh?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. That reminds me—there once was here, I don’t know if he still teaches, some lecturer in mythology, a Haredi man with sidelocks like that, I think his name was Pas, many years ago, from Bnei Brak. So Shulamit Aloni was then minister of education, and she said: they don’t teach Prometheus Bound and the masterpieces, yes, the classics. So he chuckled—I once heard him speak and we talked about it then—he chuckled: the only person this year who taught Prometheus Bound was me. Well then, what can you say—from the sidelocks and all that. Yes, of course that’s simplistic dismissal, but never mind.

In any case, Prometheus Bound—yes, that’s exactly the point. If he were not bound, he would not be Prometheus. You can grapple with the system if you accept the framework upon yourself, and within it you try to deal with problems. Someone who does not accept the framework—that is not called grappling. He is simply free in the loose sense. He is not truly free.

And therefore, “There is no free person except one who engages in Torah,” or “The servant of God alone is free,” basically, I think, comes to express this point. And this is not an Orwellian event, like what I said earlier—that they are trying to pump into my head that I am free even though I am not free. No. I am not unbounded, but I am truly free—that is the point. The point is that precisely because there is such a framework, which dictates to me what is right and what is wrong, what is permitted and what is forbidden, what is good and what is bad, and within it I grapple and try to understand how to conduct myself properly and in the way I believe in—then I really am free.

If that system did not exist—without Mount Sinai, if we had left Egypt and there had been no Mount Sinai—we would not have become truly free; we would merely have become unbound. And we would no longer have Pharaoh, right? There would be—how does the midrash put it? We were Pharaoh’s servants, and now servants of the servants of the Holy One, blessed be He. “We are still servants of Ahasuerus.” In other words, you left the bondage of Pharaoh for the bondage of the Holy One, blessed be He—so what did you accomplish? The point is that I moved from slavery to liberty, not to mere freedom.

And in order for me to be truly free, I need the Holy One, blessed be He, whose servant I am, because otherwise—without there being a source that determines what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is not right—my freedom has no meaning. It is freedom, not liberty. Okay?

Why am I saying all this? Let’s return to our line of thought; I’m closing the parenthesis. Because up to now I have basically tried to explain that being a penitent means returning to being a chooser. Returning to being a chooser. Becoming truly free, yes? Taking hold of the reins, not dropping them. Okay? That is what it means to be a penitent. And that is why Maimonides places his discussion of choice in the Laws of Repentance. And that is why there is no commandment of repentance and no commandment of choice—all that I explained.

Now I’m adding one more piece to this puzzle, without which it is completely incomplete. And that additional piece is that you also need to be committed to a certain system that determines what is good and what is bad. Then, if you are autonomous and truly free and a divine soul and all that, it has meaning. Because otherwise, without the external system that dictates what is good and what is bad, you are free in the loose sense, not truly free.

Therefore it is not enough to be a person of divine soul in the sense that you hold the reins. The two paths must also be defined as good and bad, and you, with the reins, direct the horses toward the good path. Because if there are not two such paths, why should I care that I am holding the reins? I might as well draw lots over where to take them.

Okay? Therefore it is not enough to be a person of divine soul in the sense of being autonomous, choosing, independent. One must also accept the authority, or the commitment, of the framework—of the Holy One, blessed be He—who determines what is good and what is bad.

And I think the process of the Ten Days of Repentance—where am I getting to with this season—reflects this very well. Why? The Ten Days of Repentance begin with Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah is the kingship of the Holy One, blessed be He—kingship, remembrance, and shofar blasts, “so that you shall crown Me over you,” and so on. What is this coronation? What is a king? A king is someone who determines for you what must be done; he determines the law, right? That does not mean I have no choice. I have a choice: I can obey the law or not obey it, and I will be punished, whatever—but I can choose. But the one who determines the law is not me; it is he.

Okay? There is some factor that is responsible for determining what is good and what is bad. Now, a king determines the law, which is not necessarily the same as good and bad, but the King of the world determines what is good and what is bad, or what is right to do and what is not right to do. Okay?

And without some framework whose authority I accept, what good would all the repentance of the Ten Days of Repentance do for me? I would return to being a chooser. Fine—and now what? What am I choosing? If I do not accept commitment to the system that determines what is good and what is bad, repentance has no meaning. Therefore the Ten Days of Repentance begin with Rosh Hashanah. They begin with Rosh Hashanah. First of all there is a framework: this is good, this is bad, this is what must be done, this is what is forbidden. Now the next stage is to take the reins into my own hands, to be autonomous, and to decide on my own to do the right thing—the thing the framework defines as right.

Part of my autonomous conduct within the framework is also interpretation of the framework. This framework can bear various interpretations; there are different paths. There are so many differences among people who are all committed to Torah and commandments, and so many differences among them. That means that within this framework of commitment to Torah and commandments there are very, very many possible ways, exactly like the moves on a chessboard.

We have a framework that seems incredibly detailed, telling us what to do from head to toe, from the moment we get up in the morning—right shoe, left shoe, washing hands. There isn’t a single dull moment; there isn’t a single moment when you can breathe. And precisely because of that, look how many ways there are to be religious. How many options. Because there are many limitations, not despite the fact that there are many limitations—it is because of that. Because the way to organize the limitations, interpret them, understand which comes first and which does not, what I focus on and what I do not—that is far richer when there are many limitations than for someone whose world has no limitations.

Someone whose world has no limitations does whatever he feels like. How many kinds of nobodies are there? One. That’s it. In other words, I’m saying: if you don’t believe in this, then you don’t believe in it, fine. I have no…I’m not to blame there. I’m only saying that this view, which says that these limitations dictate things to you and take away your freedom, is simply a complete misunderstanding. That’s exactly what gives your freedom value. Without that it would have no meaning at all. No meaning at all. Without Rosh Hashanah there would be no meaning to the Ten Days of Repentance. When we repent during the Ten Days of Repentance, that only comes after we have accepted the framework upon ourselves on Rosh Hashanah. To crown the Holy One, blessed be He, means that He determines what is good and what is bad. God—we talked about this, or maybe we didn’t, I don’t remember—“elohim” in the Torah means judges. “And the master of the house shall be brought near to the judges” (Exodus 22:7). “Elohim” means judges. Why? Because “elohim,” the meaning of the concept, is a factor such that whatever it says, I do. Because it said so—not because it’s correct, not because that’s what should be done, but because it said so, that’s it. In other words, this is some authority that determines the framework of good and evil. I can’t judge it and say, wait a second, if it’s good then I’ll do it, if it’s not good then I won’t. It determines; it is the king, yes? The king in a broader sense. Therefore, crowning the Holy One, blessed be He, on Rosh Hashanah is the establishment of the framework. The Ten Days of Repentance are the return to managing myself within it. Returning to being one who chooses, to being a penitent within it. And the conclusion is on Yom Kippur, when if we did everything properly, then it is also atoned for us. We really do become different people, as we talked about in connection with the greater repentance, because we really returned, we took the reins into our own hands, we chose מחדש to do what is right to do, and so now we are atoned for. That is Yom Kippur. There is Rosh Hashanah, the Ten Days of Repentance, and Yom Kippur. And I think they express exactly this whole process. But I want to conclude by going back to the Laws of Repentance, to Maimonides. And I think the Laws of Repentance reflect very deeply the picture I’ve described up to this point. So about some of these things we already spoke. Right? I said that repentance is returning to being one who chooses; that’s why the discussion of choice is in chapters 5 and 6 of the Laws of Repentance and not in the laws of redeeming a firstborn donkey. And also, a great deal of the Laws of Repentance are not really laws at all. They’re not laws, because all the Laws of Repentance are basically meant to build the kind of human being you can speak to. Only then can you command. Yes, there are commandments, there are instructions here and there, but the subject of the Laws of Repentance is not law. It is the framework within which it becomes possible to begin speaking with us. After we become penitents, then you can start commanding us—to say blessings, to honor parents, to observe the Sabbath, not to steal; all the commandments come afterward. First of all, be commandable, be a human being. Where do you see this in the Laws of Repentance? So first of all, we saw it in the opening chapters. The Laws of Repentance: “I am not the same person,” right? The person who says, “I am not the same person,” changes his ways, and all sorts of things like that, the lesser repentance and the greater repentance and so on. After that come chapters 5 and 6, which are the discussion of choice, free choice. Then chapter 7 has various poetic passages in praise of repentance. Okay? Yes: “The Torah has already promised that in the end Israel will repent, as it says: ‘And you shall return to the Lord your God’” (Deuteronomy 30:2). We talked about how Maimonides does not interpret this as a commandment but as a promise or a prophecy or something of that sort. But what is that chapter doing there? That chapter comes to persuade us to repent. Why is there no chapter that comes to persuade us to recite Grace after Meals in the laws of blessings? About how great is the status of someone who recites Grace after Meals, that if he recites Grace after Meals then he will—I don’t know what. Why isn’t there anything like that there? Why here does Maimonides go on at length with poetic descriptions of the greatness of repentance?

[Speaker D] No, it’s more than that,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rather, with repentance there is no commandment to repent. In a place where there is a commandment to repent, Maimonides doesn’t need to persuade. There is a commandment—do it because you have to; if you don’t do it, you’ll get punished. That’s all, there’s no need to talk to you. In repentance there is no commandment to repent; that is Maimonides’ whole position. He has to persuade us to repent, to show us how important it is, how foundational it is, to explain it so that we understand on our own that even though there is no commandment to repent, obviously we need to do it. That is the meaning of chapter 7, okay? Then there is chapter 8, which speaks about the World to Come and reward and so on, which is a continuation of the same idea. You weren’t convinced by the greatness of the penitent and all the poetic descriptions of chapter 7? Chapters 8, 9, and 10 explain reward and punishment—you can come to it even not for its own sake. From here I come to chapter 10. Chapter 10, it seems to me, brings this process to its peak. Chapter 10—Maimonides basically constructs it like this. Yes, in chapter 9 he talks about the reward for commandments, the World to Come, paradise, Gehenna—again, why is that here? What is it doing in the Laws of Repentance? Just some kind of philosophical book, I don’t know, about the World to Come—what is it doing here? Again, it is part of the same effort to persuade us to repent, because there is no commandment. He can’t tell you: say Grace after Meals, because it says, “And you shall eat and be satisfied and bless” (Deuteronomy 8:10); if you don’t bless, you’ve neglected a positive commandment and you’ll get punished. Okay? There is no commandment here, so he has to persuade you, and so he persuades you with a stick and a carrot. He says: look how great repentance is, and the penitent, and how close he is to the Holy One, blessed be He—that’s chapter 7. Still not convinced? Chapters 8, 9, 10: a stick. Not just a carrot, there’s also a stick. Yes—love and fear and everything, and reward, and the World to Come and all that—that’s all chapters 8 through 10. Chapter 9 is the World to Come, and in chapter 10, let’s look a bit more closely at what happens there. So in chapter 10 Maimonides says: “A person should not say: I will fulfill the commandments of the Torah and engage in 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 myself from the transgressions against which the Torah warned us in order to be saved from the curses written in the Torah, or so that I will not 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 wise. And only the ignorant, women, and minors serve God in this way”—excuse me—“for they are trained to serve out of fear until their knowledge increases and they serve out of love.” Okay? What does that mean? So Maimonides says one needs to serve for its own sake, right? In other words, not in order to escape punishment in the World to Come, not in order to receive reward in the World to Come, but out of love. Now what is love? Sometimes—well, love is some kind of emotion, longing, right? Fine, let’s see. Law 2: “One who serves out of love”—and he defines what serving out of love means—“occupies himself with Torah and commandments and walks in the paths of wisdom, not because of anything in the world, not out of fear of evil, and not in order to inherit good, but does the truth because it is truth, and in the end the good comes because of it.” What is one who serves out of love? Someone who does the truth because it is truth, not for any other reason. That is called serving out of love. Okay? “And this level is a very great level, and not every wise person attains it. It was the level of Abraham our father, whom the Holy One, blessed be He, called ‘His 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 says: ‘And you shall love the Lord your God’ (Deuteronomy 6:5). And when a person loves God with the proper love, he immediately performs all the commandments out of love.” Okay? So up to this point it seems…

[Speaker C] What? Yes, yes, why not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Indeed, don’t think that I erase chapters 8 and 9. There is a World to Come, there is reward, there is punishment, there is everything. I’m only saying: that is not why you should serve. If you do serve, you’ll receive it, but that should not be your motivation for serving, obviously. So in law 2 he is basically defining what serving out of love is. Right—serving out of love doesn’t look here like anything emotional. Doing the truth because it is truth—something very cold, right? Very rational, very cold, very… In other words, doing the truth because it is truth, or in other words, taking the reins in hand, right? In other words, doing what you decide to do, what you really think is right, not weakness of will. Huh? Anyone can achieve that. No, why not? On his own level, huh? Fine—reach your own conclusion about what your truth is and do it. That’s what is required of you: to do the truth because it is truth.

[Speaker A] What do you mean, decide what the truth is and do it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What else could it mean in day-to-day life? Decide what is right and do it, what do you mean? If you think what Maimonides writes is right, then do what Maimonides says. But do it not because he said it; do it because you think that is the truth. Now this description by Maimonides seems like a description that is overall very cold, rational, about decision-making, doing the truth because it is truth, right? The term love sounds to us like something that belongs more to the world of emotions, right? Let’s move to law 3, yes? “And what is the proper love? It is that one should love God with a very great, exceeding, powerful love, until his soul is bound up in the love of God, and he is constantly obsessed with it, as though he were lovesick, whose mind is not free from love of that woman, and he is constantly preoccupied with her, whether sitting or rising, even while eating and drinking. More than this should the love of God be in the heart of those who love Him, constantly occupied with it, as He commanded us, ‘with all your heart and with all your soul’ (Deuteronomy 6:5). And this is what Solomon said by way of metaphor: ‘For I am sick with love’ (Song of Songs 2:5), and the entire Song of Songs is a metaphor for this matter.” What is this here, love? This is super-emotional, right? Some kind of, you know, love of a woman such that you can’t free yourself from it, you are entirely gripped by love of God and constantly cleave to Him, and the whole Song of Songs, which is the height of this love, is a metaphor for this matter. How does that fit with one law earlier, where he says to do the truth because it is truth? What—I don’t understand—what do you want now with all this emotional turbulence? It’s here, not there.

[Speaker I] So what, eh?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay.

[Speaker I] It’s a bit

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] strange,

[Speaker I] because

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] basically, he says that love is the reason that gets you to doing the truth because it is truth, and not the result of doing the truth because it is truth.

[Speaker H] I think that… okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So these are two different things. So if they are two different things, then it’s not an explanation. But he says, “And what is the proper love” that I spoke about in law 1? “That one should love God with a great love.” So it is an explanation, not another aspect of love. Look, I think that… I think there is here a very common mistake in the way we relate to metaphors. Let’s say you take the metaphor of love between spouses, romantic love, okay? You say: this is familiar to us, so we know what it is—constantly preoccupied, and so on, and it occupies you all the time, and you are devoted to your spouse, and so forth, right? That’s the metaphor. The referent is love of the Holy One, blessed be He. Now the question is: what do I take from the metaphor over to the referent? That is always the question. When I take a metaphor and use it for something, I can say: yes, but in the metaphor it is this way and that way. That’s a misunderstanding! I’m not claiming that the metaphor is one-to-one with the referent. I want to take a point that is present there, the metaphor sharpens it nicely, and use it to illustrate the referent. I’m not making a full comparison here. Therefore all kinds of silly little questions people ask—wait, but the metaphor isn’t similar because it… that’s nonsense. I mean, only if you say that there is a problem at the very point I wanted to illustrate—that would be a good objection to the metaphor. But if you say there are other aspects there, that is irrelevant. Now here, I’d say it seems to me that this metaphor really—yes, love between man and woman also has many dimensions of emotion and feeling and so on, but that is not the relevant aspect. That’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about intensity. In romantic love it is very easy for us to understand that we are basically in it all the time, constantly preoccupied with it, constantly there, always occupied by it, completely devoted to the matter, and so on. “Obsessed with it” in that sense. “Obsessed,” but not in the sense of making a mistake—constantly preoccupied means thinking about it all the time. So that is the metaphor. And the referent is love of the Holy One, blessed be He, which is something completely non-emotional, not emotional, not experiential, nothing of the sort. But the devotion and the intensity of it need to be like in the Song of Songs, like the love of man and woman. That’s how it seems to me. I don’t know whether I’m right, but that is how it seems to me. And then law 2 and law 3 are moving along the same track. Law 3 is not saying that you need to have emotional love toward the Holy One, blessed be He. I don’t really know how one gets to emotional dimensions here, and if someone does, then maybe it’s just because that’s how he is built, I don’t know. It could be. I once wrote on my website specifically about the Brisker experience. In other words, it is an experience, but one that is entirely on the intellectual plane. It does not involve the emotional parts of the soul. So you are constantly preoccupied with it, but not because of some emotional or experiential storm that accompanies it, but because your intellect occupies you all the time. But I claim that this is what Maimonides is trying to say here, and when in law 3 he brings this metaphor of romantic love, he does not mean to say that this too is what should exist in relation to the Holy One, blessed be He. Rather he means that just like the intensity you know from there, that is what should characterize your relationship to the Holy One, blessed be He. “I have set the Lord always before me” (Psalms 16:8) is an intellectual matter, not an emotional one. I need to stand before the Holy One, blessed be He, always understanding that this is what determines what is right and what is not right, always measuring myself against this right and wrong, and that it should be as intense as the emotional dimensions we know. Fine, so this is a kind of utopia that each person—

[Speaker A] As much as he can manage, okay?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As much as—each person as much as he can manage. But they set before you some model that you can strive toward. We talked about a free person, right? A free person is someone who wants to be in the right model, not someone who is already there. If you are striving for its own sake, then you are already okay. In other words, you are striving there—that is what you want, okay?

[Speaker F] Not how to get there, but what one should get to. Yes. How, indeed, and what is the proper love? That one should love

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the Lord with a very great, exceeding, powerful love, until his soul is bound up in the love of God and he is constantly preoccupied with it, as though sick with love. Like those who are lovesick, who are also constantly preoccupied with it. Now yes, for them it is an emotional matter, but here not necessarily. And therefore, to think that what can enter there—

[Speaker C] Yes,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] no, however you want to call it,

[Speaker C] love of the…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It may be that this will express itself on emotional planes, it may be. Each person according to the way he is built. But that’s not the point. Whether it expresses itself that way or not that way, that doesn’t matter. What matters is your devotion and your loyalty to this system, continually. Will that express itself in emotional turbulence? If you’re built in a certain way, then yes; if you’re not built that way, then no. That’s not the point. At most it can be a sign, if anything. It’s not the thing itself; it’s an indication. Okay? Now, the continuation of the chapter as well—I don’t have much time—but the continuation of the chapter also talks about studying Torah for its own sake, and not in order to receive reward. In general, serving God for its own sake. Yes, he says: to serve—the whole subject of the laws we just read is serving out of love and out of fear. Why is that found in the Laws of Repentance, in chapter 10? It concludes the Laws of Repentance. Because after all, love of God and fear of God are two counted commandments; they appear in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah. There you have the details of the laws of love of God and fear of God, so why does he return here to love and fear of God? Because here he is not dealing with the commandments of love of God and fear of God—that belongs in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah. Here he is dealing with love of God and fear of God, not the commandments of love of God and fear of God. It’s not the same thing. Here he is talking about serving out of love and serving out of fear as motivations for service, not as fulfillment of the commandments of love… You can fulfill the commandments of love of God and fear of God, and your service will not be out of love or fear, but because of something else. You can serve out of love and fear, but I don’t know whether you will thereby fulfill the commandments of love of God and fear of God—maybe there are some details there one way or another. Therefore what is discussed here are non-legal aspects of love of God and fear of God, but foundational aspects, the aspects from which your service of God emerges. And therefore it belongs in the Laws of Repentance; that is why it concludes the Laws of Repentance. The same is true in Torah study. In Torah study, when you talk about studying Torah for its own sake, then you are talking about studying Torah out of the recognition that this is what is right to do. That to cling to this is basically to be attached to… love of God. Love of God not in an emotional sense—love of God simply means studying the Torah that expresses what He tells us. Okay? That is called love of God. And so, in fact, this concludes the Laws of Repentance, because the whole concern of the Laws of Repentance is not at all to detail laws; that is not the point at all. The role of the Laws of Repentance is to build a person, okay? So that he will be capable of being commanded, and then it becomes possible to start speaking with him about law, okay? But this is to build the foundation upon which one can begin speaking at all about commandments and law. And that is why it is called the Laws of Repentance—because it is in the Mishneh Torah—but it is at the beginning of the Mishneh Torah. It is something that begins. There are the Laws of Character Traits, the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, which are basically the intellectual foundations, yes, the Book of Knowledge, these are the basic foundations; and the Laws of Repentance are to build the person who, in light of that foundation, can begin to serve. Then come love, times, and the other books—there you already have the details of the laws, what you are supposed to do, what is right, how to determine what is right and what is not right. Here they build the person so that he will be ready to commit himself to what is right and what is not right. Afterward they will explain to us what is right and what is not right, okay? Therefore I think the Laws of Repentance are also located where they are located in Maimonides, because there he is basically building the foundation of the service of God, and the essence of the Laws of Repentance is to build the person who serves God. And these are not commandments—there is no commandment here at all, except confession, which is a technical detail, but it’s not… okay, so I’ll stop here.

[Speaker C] May you be sealed for a good final judgment.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] May you be sealed for a good final judgment.

[Speaker C] Next year, does the Rabbi have one class here? What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Next year there are two.