Answer

First point.
There is much to elaborate on here, and I’ll try to be brief. First, I’m not really interested in what contributes and what is useful. I do not subordinate truth to usefulness. And if I were in doubt, then perhaps there would be room to choose the useful path (and even that requires explanation—why not instead follow the laws of doubt, but this is not the place). But I am not in doubt. I needn’t remind you of the story about the priest who told Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz that we should follow them because they are the majority. Rabbi Jonathan answered that only when we are in doubt do the rules for deciding doubtful cases apply.
As for the matter itself—whether the Hardali and Haredi path is more useful—even here I disagree with you (although, as noted, that is not relevant to the discussion). The question is what the ideal model is. You assume observance of the subsections of the Mishnah Berurah, and I assume an entirely different model (which includes education, openness, common sense, genuine faith, morality, and the rest of the package, which are not merely tools but actual values).
 
Second point.
Here it seems to me there is a severe conceptual confusion, though a typical one. There is no decision without intellect. You too only live under the illusion that you operate not according to intellect. It’s just that your intellect thinks that experience has important weight. That is completely legitimate, but it is worth being aware of it. I once gave an analogy of a person wondering in matchmaking whether to follow the heart or the intellect. A student once asked me what to do, and I told him to go only with the intellect. Except that the intellect takes emotion into account as one of the factors in its decision. But the intellect decides, not the emotion. You may say this is just semantics? Not at all.
What that means is that even if you have an emotion, you must pass it through the crucible of intellectual criticism. And all kinds of “soul chatter” and the like are nothing but the refuge of the lazy. Every idol worshiper will tell you he has a strong religious feeling toward Peor, and every Sunni suicide bomber will tell you he has a very strong feeling toward suicide attacks. This is nonsense in syrup, if you’ll pardon me. Emotion is an animal dimension, so long as it has not passed the criticism of intellect and intuition (which in my books I elaborated on distinguishing from emotion).
When people talk about souls and feelings, it is clear to me that they are trying to evade criticism and do whatever they feel like. There is no point in engaging with that. It is simply nonsense.
And by the way, this has nothing to do with science or scientific thinking. It is simply rationality and reasonableness. The premises can come from whatever source you want, not necessarily empirical measurement (and I also elaborated on that). To accuse someone of excessive rationality is an oxymoron. In any case, I admit the facts and deny the charge.
 
In any event, as I wrote, your approach—which prides itself on practical success at the expense of truth (the first point)—is what leads us to the edge of the abyss. In other words, it is not true that it leads to success. The “success” of Haredism and Hardalism is that we manage to keep mediocre and superficial people within religious society (with a lot of inferiority feelings and frustration), while losing the good and upright ones. If that is called success, I prefer failures. That is how a superficial society with wretched thinking is created, and I absolutely do not see that as success.
Moreover, even if they do manage to keep good people in the fold, it is partly thanks to the fact that people like me answer their questions, and that would not be possible if we did not exist. I am the one who meets those for whom Haredism and Hardalism provide no answer. Exactly the same way Haredism succeeds only because there are others who go on to become doctors and scientists and military people and businesspeople, and so on. So even if in your view Haredism is the success story (in my opinion it is not), the credit does not go to them.
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Questioner:
Hello,
 
Thank you for the response.
 
With all due respect, I’m not interested in the question of what interests you as a person; I mean what the Lord your God asks of you. Nothing more. If a person concludes that there is a God, then he needs to follow the path that is most successful in carrying out His will. That is obvious reasoning. To decide on the one hand that there is a God, and on the other hand to continue discussing as if that question were still open and still keep discussing every detail through intellect, sounds strange to me. Intellectually strange too. Nor do I know of any place in the words of the Sages from which one can learn that the principle of working with the intellect on every issue is more important than the result of observing the commandments. True, one needs to think logically about every detail, but as an overall approach, certainly “study is greater, for it leads to action,” and intellect is great because it leads to doing God’s will in the maximal way. If you have a source or argument that even after the initial decision about the truth of faith and the Torah—a decision without which of course there is only intellect to examine what is true—even afterward the importance of intellect outweighs the importance of observance, I’d be glad to hear it.
The same regarding Haredism: I am not saying they are most beneficial to society. Society does not interest me. Society takes care of means, of the material world, and that is nullified and subordinated to the spiritual world, because the main thing is not to make life pleasant for people but that they do God’s will. Part of that is that there should be good in the world, but not only that. Perhaps intellectually what matters most is social efficiency, but again, God’s will is the observance of His commandments. By those measures there is no doubt that Haredism is more effective and more successful.
 
As for emotion, that’s not what I argued. I completely agree that intellect is also needed and is primary and all that. I am only rejecting it as the sole parameter of human conduct. I hope you agree that the overwhelming majority of the great Torah sages, like the overwhelming majority of faithful Jews in the last centuries, also rejected it as the only parameter. I won’t bring proof from Hasidism, but just as illustration: the most intellectual Hasidic school is considered Chabad, and it is based on “Know the God of your father and serve Him,” and yet in all of Tanya there is not a shred of proof for God’s existence—only deepening one’s knowledge of God through cleaving to Him and through a logical understanding of our duty in the world.
My point is not emotion but soul, and the recognition that there is a soul is an intelligent feeling, the feeling of a thinking person. Therefore idolatry and the like are ruled out. But on the other hand, we are not Western people with a Western outlook who also happen to keep commandments. We live in a completely different way. We live in a way in which the soul is primary—the soul as an expression of the spiritual part of man, saying that an essential part of man is spirit, and that spirit is doing God’s will. Such a life will clearly prefer a life of doing God’s word, even if it comes at the expense of endless theological arguments. (By the way, where do you get that every single person has to investigate? If a person sees that his path leads to God’s will and he himself hasn’t examined every detail of the principles of faith, hasn’t dealt with all the questions, but relies on the Vilna Gaon and the Chazon Ish, who presumably were intelligent people—where do you get it from, besides your own reasoning, that he has to investigate, and that his non-investigating but righteous shallowness is worse than the clever person who barely observes?)
Such a life will arrive at faith through an intelligent recognition that there is a soul in man. After all, you yourself wrote in your book on evolution (by the way, thank you very much for it—it’s wonderful) intellectual proofs against materialism, except that you remain on the level of intellect and on that build your entire Judaism. I think that after intellect, together with the experience supervised by it, leads a person to the conclusion that there is a soul and there is spirituality, from that point onward one of the central tools in his life will be the soul. In that way he will deepen his faith, in that way he will advance spiritually, and in that way he will choose a path in life according to what most advances spirituality. In this approach, intellect is not the only parameter in life, but it is the main one. Therefore there are non-rational aspects in our lives. (Maybe this relates to the books of Dan Ariely on these matters, because believers will claim that man is not rational—and not by chance, because he also has a soul, intuition in your terminology—but these things need to be present in our lives.) Therefore we believe in providence and in the efficacy of prayer and so on.
 
As for answering the perplexed, there is no doubt that what you said in the interview on Channel 7 is distilled truth, and sometimes I feel like screaming at all sorts of “Kooknik” rabbis who go on endlessly about the Jewish people as a whole and all kinds of lofty ideas while their students are confused by such basic questions, and afterward they go out to university and feel that their toolbox is horrifyingly empty. Clearly one has to go deeply and think, and discuss endlessly with pure intellect and logic. But my claim is that this is not everything. In the post I wrote that perhaps your constant answering of all the perplexed has led to an over-focus on intellect, because that is the way one proves things and argues with atheists or the perplexed.
In my opinion intellect is central, but on its own it is not enough and also won’t succeed in convincing everyone. The Judaism of our generation must merge intellect and soul, captivate the youth to the path of Torah by means of good and intelligent spiritual experiences, alongside depth and discussion, so that they will experience with deep awareness the spiritual side of man—and then they will remain with us. I’m not speaking only about songs at the third Sabbath meal. Even the experience of powerful Torah study, accompanied by discourse about the importance of Torah and its sweetness and the loftiness of its value above every other pursuit in life, which is a means and not an end, contributes greatly.
 
And if the concern is for all those perplexed people who see you as the last address before leaving, then from the other side there are, from personal knowledge, many yeshiva graduates—Haredi and Religious Zionist—who have accumulated many “Michi hours,” and your ideas are present in their lives, discussed among them and influencing them, but lately they regret what in their eyes seems to be too much weight given to intellect, which in their eyes is expressed in statements about prayer, the Temple, and providence—as if God forbid “the Lord has forsaken the land.” In terms of intellect these are not the foundations, but in a life of spirituality and a sense of closeness to God as the basis and goal of intellect, they are foundations no less important than putting on tefillin and keeping the Sabbath, if not more so.
(Of course this is not an argument in the debate, only an explanation of the motive for claiming that intellect is important but not everything—and perhaps also a glimpse that just as there are perplexed people who need your logical answers, there are also many, many people in this generation who need you very much as one of the few who provides an answer to Torah learners and lovers who seek more than what the yeshivot have to offer, while also fundamentally believing in the limits set by their rabbis.)
 
With thanks,

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Rabbi:
Let me begin by saying that you keep returning again and again to the soul and emotion as substitutes for intellect. So apparently I need to clarify what I’ve written more than once: there is a soul and there is spirituality. Who said there isn’t? But all of that has no connection whatsoever to the question of intellect and what is beyond it. This is an example of confusion and conceptual fog that logical analysis can dispel.
Now, specifically regarding some of your points.
 
In my estimation, the Lord my God asks of me to be open and educated and to make decisions in a reasonable and logical way, and of course also to observe commandments. The goal is not commandment observance by itself, but commandment observance arising from a correct decision. (On the importance of decision, see Maimonides at the end of chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings, where he speaks about commandment observance on the basis of intellectual determination.)
Ask yourself: if you could program or hypnotize everyone to observe commandments, would you think that was an ideal state? Or at least better than today, where some people choose to abandon that commitment? I think not. But in essence, that is what you are proposing. It reminds me of Smullyan’s dialogue (translated in his book The Silence of the Tao), in which a person asks God to take away his free will so that he won’t sin. In your opinion, is that preferable? Look there—it’s very amusing.
 
Haredism is really not more successful. By my criteria (= my understanding of what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants), it is much less successful. I already commented on that assumption, and there is no point repeating it again.
 
Your terms “emotion” and “intellect” are undefined (perhaps because in this too you use emotion instead of intellect). Intellect is the only parameter even if you deny it. That denial itself is an act of intellect. I do not understand this talk of souls (and in my estimation neither do you. I already wrote that these are expressions of intellectual laziness. When people get stuck and don’t know how to think, they start talking nonsense about emotions and souls), and in my opinion it is just conceptual confusion and nothing more.
 
[As for your remarks about the Vilna Gaon and the Chazon Ish, Einstein was no less sharp and wise than the Vilna Gaon and the Chazon Ish. Ad hominem won’t get you very far—unless of course you relate only to emotion and ignore facts.]
 
I have to say that I really do not understand this entire discussion. If we are conducting a discussion about the use of intellect, with what tool shall we conduct it? With emotion? As I said, all of this is simply conceptual confusion and nothing more.
This whole discussion is very characteristic of discussions by people of emotion and soul. Bring one example and let’s discuss it, and show me there what it means to discuss with emotion and not with intellect. There is no point in repeating these empty slogans.

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Questioner:
You present my words as though I introduced something new—as though talk about the soul was not always part of Jewish Torah discourse; as though there was no Rabbi Nachman, who argued that the path to faith does not pass through philosophical investigations external to the person, but through the person himself discovering his soul by constant conversation with the Holy One, blessed be He—a conversation that makes the world of the soul tangible no less than the material world; as though all Kabbalah and its sages abandoned the path of investigation; as though more than five percent of the sages of Israel in the last centuries followed the path of philosophical inquiry; as though all of Judaism is Maimonides and his approach (assuming Maimonides even held this approach); as though I spoke of mystical experiences of non-thinking people whose spiritual life consists of dough-separation rituals and Carlebach-style jumping around, who evade the hard work that Jewish law demands, and not of powerful spiritual experiences of the kind of deep immersion in the world of Torah in purity and with deep, fulfilling emotional connection to the chain of the Oral Torah and bearing the burden of responsibility for preserving the Torah, and of a thoughtful evaluation that compares the response this immersion provides to human needs with what secularism has to offer.
 
I did not speak of emotion as a substitute for intellect, but as something additional—not only intellect. That is my whole claim: intellect is primary, but not only intellect. And it seems to me that you took it to an extreme place, and that made it easier for you to refute it.
Not only in the approach to faith, but also afterward, as a form of conducting religious life. The discussion is not about using intellect; I fully agreed that it is primary and the basis and most important. But in my view it is a mistake to say that if intellect is most important, and emotion is slippery, and talk about soul is not clearly defined, then that settles it: everything is intellect. Only with that will we operate. There is also a soul, and it contributes greatly to strengthening faith, because an “intelligent” awareness of its experiences and needs is perhaps a necessary condition for remaining a believing Jew in our generation. I do not think that those who leave today leave only because of desires, but maybe they do leave because they did not experience Torah in the right way and did not see a properly built religious world. Had they lived correctly, many of the questions would never have arisen. In my estimation, most of them experienced a crisis of trust in rabbis, and from there the questions came—not the other way around.
There is also a soul, and it needs to be present in our lives alongside the central and important intellect. There is a soul, and it affects our approach to Judaism: whether it is all intellectual, or whether we recognize that in Judaism there are things that are not intellectual—whether prayer and providence, or the desire for a Temple, even though intellect does not necessarily strive for it, because the soul is nourished by spirituality and the core of spirituality is in the Temple. I would even go so far as to say that in order for a person to serve the Holy One, blessed be He, fully, he must adopt for himself non-intellectual elements in his service—marginal and secondary, of course, but present—in order to emphasize the element of blind obedience to God. If a person does only what he understands, then he is serving himself, not his Creator. After a person has recognized intellectually that there is a Creator and there is Torah, he must also know how to bow before the Creator. And if the main thing in man is intellect, then a central part of serving God is also bending the intellect. Not absolutely, but the bending too must be present.
 
Also regarding the claim that our God demands that we think—you presented it in an extreme form, as though I wanted to program people or abolish free will. True, “the greatest transgression is to be stupid” (I don’t remember who said that), and one has to think and all that is true. But nowhere in the words of the Sages does it say that every single person must think, and nowhere does it say that life revolves only around thinking without other elements, and nowhere does it say that if a person is uncertain about a path he cannot rely on smart religious people who did think. In the first stage of persuasion toward faith, you say one must think all the way through. Fine, I accept that. But the debate is after the first stage: after that, once one accepts the established tradition of the great and wise sages of Israel, is one then willing to accept additional elements besides intellect?
In that way perhaps we won’t be Haredi, but we will indeed strive for maximal practical observance and we won’t eternally sanctify only thinking about every detail in Judaism while belittling every success of those we regard as shallow.
I never understand why people choose a side in such an extreme way. Why is it either people who don’t think at all and just go with the flow all their lives, or people who think—and then that’s it, only intellect, everything must be rational, and they’re unwilling to hear even a trace of mysticism and spirituality, and their experiences seem to them like something low and contemptible that belongs to the masses.
“My intellect” reached the conclusion from logic and from the words of the Sages that intellect is primary, but it is not the only thing. There is a soul, there are spiritual sensations, there are important religious experiences, there is prayer and providence, there are feelings of closeness to God that do not pass only through intellect.
The overwhelming majority of the sages of Israel hold this way, and in my opinion there is no reason at all to assume that Maimonides disagreed on this point. So I do not understand whom you are relying on in your approach.

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Rabbi:
This discussion is apparently being conducted through emotion and soul. Because cognitively I do not understand what is happening here.
I asked you for an example of a point on which you disagree with me. If you want to discuss, please choose such a point. All these words that say nothing are a waste.
By the way, the fact that this sage or that sage said something is not important to me at all. I do not make a practice of using ad hominem arguments (certainly not from the Hasidim. Their guarantor needs a guarantor).

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Questioner:
I have examples in abundance. All of them stem from the question whether the Jewish way of life is all intellect, or whether intellect is primary but alongside it there are additional aspects whose core is closeness to God.
 
If everything is intellect and everything is measured by what seems logical, then there are no concerns about consequences, because if it is true, what do we care? We won’t take into account that if we change Jewish laws because we think reality has changed—and in the more complex case, the prevalent worldview has changed (which Rabbi Professor Guttel also did not address)—then tomorrow they will come to make things easier and easier. (And even the claim that the slippery-slope argument also has a slope depends on what bothers a person more: whether to observe something that according to his intellect he need not observe, or whether he will not fear the slope and significant spiritual damage will emerge. The man of intellect will say: in my eyes there is no more serious religious transgression than not acting constantly according to my intellect. But the man of intellect-and-soul, or whatever we call it, will see the danger in conservatism as a smaller problem than the other side of the slope.)
 
If one acts according to intellect alone, then intellectually one may argue that it does not appear to the human eye that prayer now has an effect. But in a spiritual life, where intellect is only one more means of cleaving to God, prayer is an essential part of a person’s life, and it is impossible to turn it into a religious ritual where one has to mumble a few sentences with no spiritual experience connected to the person’s condition, and so on.
If one acts according to intellect alone, then the Temple is an unnecessary building. What is bad about our current sophisticated and critical world, which also contains things that are not reasonable, like the mass, perhaps barbaric slaughter of miserable animals? If one acts in a way where the soul is alive and pulsating, then spirituality is primary, and the essence of spirituality is the indwelling of the Divine Presence in an unconcealed way—and that exists in the Temple.
 
If one acts according to intellect, one can disagree with almost everyone and strive for first-order halakhic rulings rather than second-order ones, because there is no logical source obligating me to obey later authorities. If one acts according to the result of magnifying God’s word in the world, then one brings into the system of considerations not only the local truth of what seems to us to emerge from Maimonides, but also the fact that the Jewish people need a chain of the Oral Torah and a hierarchy, and that the whole force of our obedience to the Talmud and the Shulchan Arukh and so on stems from the acceptance of the Jewish people as a whole (as explained in Beit Yishai, section 15, among other places—though of course if one does not accept him and those like him one can disagree with everyone, including him). Responsibility for the Jewish people as a whole is the basic condition for anyone who deals in Jewish law and knows that one weighs not only what appears from the Talmud, but other elements as well. (That is why the Chazon Ish, alongside the fact that he was intimidated by none of the later authorities, knew how to balance this with declarations in his letters about the Mishnah Berurah as the final decisor, and so on.) Systematically striving for first-order rulings, especially on explosive questions, very much endangers the world of Jewish law.
 
If everything is intellect, then secular people get along fine without providence, and it also does not appear that there is a difference between religious and secular people in their health and so on, so we will say there is no longer providence. But a person who lives in a way that is connected to the Holy One, blessed be He, will also generally feel providence in his life, in my opinion, and certainly will never arrive at the claim that there is no providence at all.
 
If everything is intellect, then one can critically examine each and every one of Maimonides’ thirteen principles of faith—something that nobody did in the last centuries, and nobody got to that point at all, because they did not live in a way in which everything depends on what seems right to me personally, but there is tradition, and what is accepted, and things that became fixed in the Jewish people—and all these things are no less important than pure intellect.
 
Actually, as I think about it now, not everything is specifically connected to soul versus intellect, but more to intellect detached from implementation, versus intellect connected to implementation and to the results of its conclusions.
Maimonides—the only tree one can cling to for the intellectual approach—spent most of his life dealing with practical implementation, not with the celebrated intellect. Most of his writings and his primary occupation were the Mishneh Torah. The Guide he wrote for some student troubled by contradictions between Torah and science, and even on that the Vilna Gaon claimed that the majority of his leaning was taken from philosophy. The other sages of Israel knew how to balance critical intellect with implementation. Professor Ta-Shma argues that in Spain the approach was study for practical ruling, whereas in Ashkenaz they detached and studied not for practice in order to develop critical thinking—but they knew that one cannot work only with critical intellect because that destroys all of Jewish law, and therefore they exalted the importance of custom very highly. Even in Brisk, where they detached the analytic method from practical Jewish law, on the practical side they were very stringent and also very strict about customs.
There was never in the Jewish people an approach that says: only what seems right to me, that’s it, that’s what matters—without custom, without balancing with a Brisker-type stringency, without balancing of the kind the Chazon Ish did in his role as educator, without considering the result of what changes in Jewish law and leniencies cause over time (whether it is the concept that appears so often in halakhic decisors, that if you change a little it will create a wave of changes, or the words of the Chazon Ish that leniencies should not be publicized because that will lead to more. True, one can disagree on a specific point with this or that later authority, but to disagree in principle with all the later authorities, with their entire approach—that no Torah scholar in Jewish history ever did.)
 
Perhaps Aharon Barak erred on this point, in that he treated law as a universe that operates by itself, asking only what the legal truth is, without considering that one cannot operate that way. He was not interested in the limitations of reality (for example in the way of fighting terror, where the army complained in the past that it is difficult to fight that way according to all Barak’s abstract principles), but everything has to be according to the truth, according to intellect, according to what seems right. That is an outlook that does not exist in Judaism, and even those who highlighted a similar outlook more than their colleagues always knew how to balance it with other anchors.
 
In short, my claim is that we do not work only with intellect. There are elements of soul, and pursuit of spirituality and cleaving to God as the purpose of life, and the examples above are only part of it. There are also other balancing elements—concern for tradition, concern for spiritual damage, concern about undermining the religious world of others when critically examining every single thing. And probably human intellect is not perfect, so even if something seems right to him, when the thing creates spiritual damage for all sorts of reasons, he must bend his intellect before the Holy One, blessed be He, and go in the path accepted in the Jewish people.

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Rabbi:
Now at last there is something substantial to sink one’s teeth into.
Still, this is a lot of substance (and a significant part of the examples is not relevant to our discussion), and it is very hard for me to continue with such a loaded and lengthy correspondence covering many points. Let us focus on one question and try to discuss and understand it. That is much more productive.
 
I’ll open with one general remark. You wrote:
I have examples in abundance. All of them stem from the question whether the Jewish way of life is all intellect, or whether intellect is primary but alongside it there are additional aspects whose core is closeness to God.
It is not clear to me whether you are talking about living with intellect, or thinking and weighing and reaching conclusions with intellect. That is not at all the same thing. In other words: do you think I should reach conclusions different from what intellect says, or are you claiming only that one should not place intellect at the center of our life and experience? These are two utterly different claims, and I mainly deal with the first. (The second seems to me mostly a matter of personal taste.) But the sentence I quoted here says the second, because you speak of “the Jewish way of life.”
 
As the topic for discussion, I choose the example of prayer, because it expresses most aspects of the debate. You wrote:
If one acts according to intellect alone, then intellectually one may argue that it does not appear to the human eye that prayer now has an effect. But in a spiritual life, where intellect is only one more means of cleaving to God, prayer is an essential part of a person’s life, and it is impossible to turn it into a religious ritual where one has to mumble a few sentences with no spiritual experience connected to the person’s condition, and so on.
 
Let us assume for the sake of discussion that what appears to the eye is that prayer has no effect, and according to this it is indeed mumbling. The question now is what to do with that.
 
Option A: to try to offer a different interpretation of prayer and change it accordingly. True, this conception has its risks. There will be people who stop praying, and perhaps a doubt about the entire system will awaken in them. On the other hand, at least I am not doing bizarre nonsense just to prevent risks (assuming that would even prevent them; see below). This is my proposal.
 
Option B: to continue mumbling even though I understand that it does not really help, but to live in denial and crudely ignore what I understand, and hope no one notices that we are engaged in nonsense and doing nonsense. Here there is the risk I pointed to: we are not the only smart people, and there are some other Jews as well (mainly the more talented and upright among us) who notice this and will abandon the system because they are unwilling to live like fools. As I said, this is what keeps the mediocre and less upright with us and causes us to lose the good ones.
 
Option C: to conclude that intellect and cognition are not right, to work on myself to become convinced of that, and to try to go on believing that prayer does help. Why? Because it is dangerous to believe otherwise. I’ll leave you to think about what that does, who stays and who leaves.
 
The two possibilities I pointed to at the outset are basically B (to live differently) or C (to think differently). As I said, from your wording it is not clear which of them you mean (see my opening remark). I assume you mean this latter option, and therefore I will continue examining it.
 
Option B is at least consistent (there is no contradiction in someone who lives in a way that he himself thinks is foolish or unreal for reasons of utility), though it is of course foolish and it does not prevent risks but creates them. In fact, it prevents the risk of losing mediocre and non-upright people while creating risks among the wise and upright, as I wrote in my column and interview. Therefore I see no reason at all to adopt it. It is both foolish and not helpful but harmful. It combines the disadvantages. Even if it really were useful, I would not adopt it, because I do not do stupid things for no reason. You may call that living according to intellect (in the sense of living differently, not thinking differently).
As I said, by the principle of charity I assume you mean option C. But that is really not clear to me. What are you proposing? To ignore my logical and empirical conclusions simply because it cannot be otherwise? Why can it not be otherwise? Because that is how I feel? I also feel an urge to speak gossip. If someone feels that he cannot possibly be sick, is he therefore not sick? If truth is difficult for you, that is no reason to abandon truth—at most it is reason to try to cope. Why should these or those feelings be a more reliable instrument than my empirical and logical conclusions? Here too there is living in denial.
If you had said that the Torah says otherwise, or that you trust the Sages and therefore continue believing in prayer—fine. That is at least a substantive argument, even if I think it is mistaken. But to justify it just because it cannot be otherwise is simply self-delusion and repression. In essence, intellectual laziness. You are in a given situation, and because it cannot be otherwise, you decide that really you are not in that situation (because after all not everything is intellect), without reasoning and without examining the matter. Your gut takes you where your intellect should.
I’ll tell you more than that. Conduct like this means that you do not really believe in prayer; you are only working on yourself so that you will feel comfortable with it. In the same way there are those who, by this very mechanism, believe in God (because that is how they were educated, and they cannot see themselves living otherwise). In my eyes these are atheists in disguise. Of course, if they were to say that the very fact that one cannot live otherwise means that maybe this is not the truth, that would be a substantive consideration that should be examined. But simply abandoning intellect is foolishness.
 
You can of course claim that you have a strong intuition that the intellectual/empirical consideration is mistaken. That certainly can happen, and sometimes it happens to me too. But in such a case you must make the effort to examine it again and find what is wrong in it. Declarations that the thing cannot be are not enough in order to abandon the conclusions of intellect. By the same token, someone else might declare that there cannot be a God and therefore he will not observe commandments, even though it is clear to him that it is true. Would you accept that as a legitimate consideration? Again, of course there are people who behave that way, but the question is whether in your opinion that is a correct and acceptable consideration. After all, that is exactly what you are proposing that we do, only on the other side. If someone decides there is no law of gravity because it cannot be that all masses are drawn downward—they must ascend upward toward the spirit—would you accept that and ignore the empirical scientific findings?
Moreover, if indeed you prefer intuition to scientific findings, then you should at least draw the conclusions required by that mode of thought and act accordingly. For example, not take medications or undergo surgeries tested in controlled medical experiments, since the experiment ignored the effects of prayer on healing (which itself, by the way, has probably never been proven in an empirical experiment, certainly not on Jews). If in your opinion the one who runs the world is the Holy One, blessed be He, and He does not conduct it naturally according to the laws of nature—then there is no point taking medicine or going to war. Just pray, and that’s it. (And please spare me the nonsense about the obligation of human effort and the like.) But of course, if you act according to emotion and not intellect, and simply live in contradictions, then there is no point in this whole discussion. And in general, everything I wrote in my article (the latest one on my site) about the law of small numbers is, according to you, acceptable. After all, people act according to their feelings, even though that is utter nonsense.
 
I’ll only add in conclusion that it is somewhat difficult to discuss the question whether to act with intellect, because in this very discussion you can always say: true, that is what intellect says, but it seems otherwise to me. In other words, with what tools shall we conduct this discussion itself—emotion or intellect?

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Questioner:
Hello Rabbi,
 
Thank you for the detailed response.
 
You did indeed succeed in convincing me that given the assumption that prayer does not help, then option A (your proposal) is the most reasonable logically.
 
Still, I want to propose two other options.
One option: since the proper Jewish way of life (in my view) is that a person becomes convinced intellectually that there is a Creator and that his purpose in the world is to know Him, as Maimonides wrote, therefore after this intellectual recognition his way of life is a search for maximum spirituality and closeness to God—obviously not by neglecting intellect, especially since a central part of the path to closeness is analytical Torah study. Therefore he will see prayer as not at all an option for attaining wisdom or livelihood. The words of the Zohar about “those dogs who cry ‘Give, give’” illustrate this very well. The main purpose of prayer is to attain the central experience in the life of a Jew who has become intellectually convinced of the truth of faith: closeness to God, which is expressed powerfully in the fact that a person stands and says: I stop my personal efforts and recognize that there is a Creator and He is the source of everything; He created everything and everything is from Him. And this very standing before the King, which is the central idea of all the laws of prayer, brings him closer to his purpose and is no less important than the question whether, when he prayed for success on a test, the teacher suddenly came down with angina.
 
Second option: to challenge the assumption that prayer does not help. True, it seemingly appears that prayer does not always help, but that is because the Holy One, blessed be He, deals with a person according to his way. Most non-Haredi religious people today do not really feel that the Holy One, blessed be He, runs the world. They live in their consciousness like secular people. At best, in a time of trouble they pray from the depths of the heart—that is, by reaching a mental state in which they truly feel that only God can help. Therefore such people’s prayer really will not help. But that is because “The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth.” That is: they call in truth, out of an entire way of life that feels that the Holy One, blessed be He, runs everything, and everything is by His merit and for His sake, and from such a psychological approach they come to prayer. According to this option, someone who lives correctly—that is, in my way, where intellect does not run his whole life but leads him toward spirituality and toward seeking connection with the Holy One, blessed be He—will merit having his prayer accepted. The reason we do not see this is because most human beings do not really pray from this inner stance, and therefore their prayer is not accepted.
 
Now the atheist will come and say: you dodger. I show you that prayer does not help, and you evade it by saying, yes, because he didn’t really pray. And if I prove it regarding a righteous innocent man, you’ll say: yesterday he glanced at a secular newspaper and defiled his pure soul. I agree. I am not trying to prove that prayer helps, but only that there is no contradiction to intellect from this—and when there is no contradiction to intellect, and the spiritual experience says that prayer is definitely central both in its very performance and also sometimes helps someone who comes from the proper approach, then there is no obstacle to living in the way I propose. (By the way, not every prayer and every request has to be answered; after all, the Holy One, blessed be He, does not work for us. It is enough that from time to time a person feels that prayer helped. I think most non-intellectualist religious people could testify that several times in their lives they felt that prayer was effective. At least I can testify about myself that this happens to me, and I am far from being some exalted “man of prayer.”)
 
As for the direction I’m aiming at: I’m aiming at the idea that intellect is the main thing, but not the only thing—and this is expressed in two respects.
 
A. One’s form of life and conduct is not only intellectual, but a form that seeks spirituality and aspects not necessarily rational, because one’s intellect said there is a Creator, and therefore our purpose is to draw close to Him and feel Him, and that is not necessarily an intellectual thing but an emotional experience of the soul, and so on.
B. The way of strengthening faith and preventing its weakening after the first stage of intellectual recognition is done in a way that combines experience. Not a stupid experience, not an experience that contradicts intellect, but an experience that passes the criticism of intellect, while itself not being rational but mystical.
 
As part of the first point, I argued that in the proposed form of life one gives great weight to the result—what draws one closer to the Holy One, blessed be He—after intellect has taught us that He exists, and therefore there is great emphasis on action. I think you too would agree that we do not conduct ourselves in our world in such a way that the single most important thing is only intellect, but we admit that action is no less important. A reasonable person would prefer someone with average abilities and below-average philosophical skill but with a broad heart and concern for others, over someone who is insanely brilliant but whose character traits are rotten to the core. That preference is not only on the level of the result—what is good for society—but also as a way of life, what is more proper to be. So even in the non-believing world, the emphasis is more on action than on intellect. We prefer an average person with lofty moral character over an evil genius. So my claim is that religion also tells us to live that way: emphasis on the world of action, action that is the doing of God’s will, after we have reached the intellectual conclusion that He exists.

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Rabbi:
The question of how one decides whether prayer helps or not: with intellect?
 
As for the first option: I do not understand what connection everything you wrote here has to the question whether prayer helps or not. I am not talking about prayer in general, but about requests and thanksgivings that speak of interventions by the Holy One, blessed be He, in the world. The fact that there is a Creator and your purpose is to know Him has nothing to do with the question of what prayer does. That should be discussed according to logical considerations and various sources. One can stand before God in prayer all day and recite His praises endlessly—I have no problem with that. (Aside from the fact that it sounds to me boring and fairly pointless. But that is of course a personal matter.) The question is what place requests and thanksgivings have—especially requests, because one can give thanks also for the laws of nature, not necessarily for an intervention He is making now.
 
As for the second option: here you enter with the excuses, and for exactly that, see the new article (from today). In general, I referred there somewhat to the things we exchanged here. As long as I have no indications that this works, I have no reason to adopt hairsplitting of this kind. It is possible, of course (as I wrote there), but not at all convincing (as the atheist says). In any event, the consideration you raised here is intellectual and logical (though in my opinion unsuccessful), not emotional. So again we return to the fact that emotion has nothing to do here. In factual questions, one decides with intellect, not with emotion. Emotion can want things, but what one wants has nothing to do with what is. Only children determine what is according to what they want.
 
The basic point is that if I had a clear source from the Torah that this is the case, perhaps I would adopt these strained excuses. The question is why do that at all? What forces me to ignore common sense, which even you agree says otherwise? After all, I offer the Torah a different interpretation that fits reality. The Sages and the medieval authorities did not know more than we do about this, and they have no authority in the realm of thought. Therefore I argue that this is merely conservatism and nothing more. It seems to me that this is the important point here.
 
As for your sense that prayer helps you personally—first, see what I wrote in the previous article about the law of small numbers. Second, I asked in the latest article whether you are willing to put this to an empirical test, or whether you prefer to evade dealing with what you yourself understand is not true. I promise you that if you become convinced that standing on one leg helps you, and you stand every day three times on one leg, you will feel that sometimes it helps you. (Beyond cognitive dissonance syndrome, this is simply the placebo effect.)
 
Bottom line: you raised considerations of logic and intellect. Therefore I’ll say two things: 1. This is not a discussion of emotion versus intellect, but of intellect versus intellect. 2. The considerations seem to me evasive and unconvincing, and I also see no reason at all to force matters.
 
As for the direction you are aiming at, here you pulled the ground out from under the whole discussion. There is a colossal misunderstanding here. When I speak about the role of intellect, I mean in making decisions about what you think and believe. How you live, and how much you focus on experiences—that is a matter of personal taste, and I am not arguing about it. Therefore the two points you brought here regarding the meaning of emotion are irrelevant. That is only a matter of taste, and there is nothing to argue about. The question is how one should formulate a worldview—if not through intellect, then how? About that you need to say what you think, because that and only that is the debate. That is why in my previous message I prefaced with the inquiry into your words.

———————
Questioner:
Good morning Rabbi,
 
It turns out I wasn’t understood correctly.
 
Again and again I repeated that intellect is primary, and that even if I strive for a spiritual experience that satisfies the soul—a more precise word for this discussion than “emotion”—everything must pass through the test of intellect and criticism. I wrote “an intelligent experience” several times.
So there is no connection between what I argued here and a life in which experience does not pass the test of common sense.
The easiest thing is to put everyone who claims that intellect is not everything in life—which in my claim is the overwhelming majority of Torah-observant Jews in all generations, including plain street-level Rashbam-type people—into the same basket as Breslovers of the kind in that film (who of course do great damage to religious people of the kind I represent here), and bundle us all into the exclusive club of the weak-minded.
 
For the sake of the discussion, I’ll allow myself to feel offended by the identification with Breslov and move a bit from defense to attack.
Suppose we began working with intellect and reached the conclusion that prayer probably doesn’t help, and that biblical criticism has indeed raised some weighty claims. We reached the conclusion, let us say, to be secular or Christian. Now I want to challenge their logic. Is there really any intellect in the world that can explain that a person lives only for material pleasures? What exactly does the other side have to offer? “An empty wagon” is a compliment for them.
If religion is opium for the masses, then in my eyes secularism is an exit route for the weak—people who still have not attained the basic things in life, money, love, family, and so on, and therefore are occupied with nothing but that all day. An ocean of energy, and by age 55 they all—the partygoers, careerists, and “glamour world” people—arrive at the conclusion, spilling out of every celebrity interview in the center pages of the weekend papers, that “family is the most important thing,” a conclusion that the local wrinkled, dark, weak-minded religious people reached at age 20, and so now they have families ten times bigger than that secular genius who suffers from a delayed ignition and zero ability to think ten steps ahead. And I haven’t even said a word about violence, drugs, prostitution, cheating, teenage insolence, alcohol, and the like—a chain of words present in the life of every parent of a secular adolescent, and in the life of my Haredi father-in-law nonexistent even in the newspaper.
 
Let us ask secular people “intellectually”: what will happen if all humanity has everything—what will you do then? You’ll party for five years, squeeze the world dry. And then what? Is that all the world has to offer? You advanced everything that could be advanced through science, all the technology has been developed, all medicine upgraded. What next? Where are you taking humanity? What do you have to offer me besides the most basic and lowest level of human existence? I appreciate secularism for building Maslow’s dear pyramid so nicely, but according to that very pyramid we now need to move to the next stage—the religious stage, the stage that combines religion with science as Rabbi Sacks beautifully described in his book The Great Partnership.
Any married Religious Zionist who is not thinking of cheating and lives at a reasonable standard of living—secularism has almost nothing to sell him. It gives him no reason to get up in the morning except for unthinking people who see satisfaction in raising a family and purpose in work, and did not ask themselves: if life itself is not a purpose, then why is bringing more such lives into the world a purpose? (And there are quite a few people who really despaired of the world because of this and call not to bring children into it. Just yesterday I read such a column on the Haaretz website. I would title it “secularism as a recipe for self-destruction.”)
 
Psychologically I can understand that way of life, because it really does satisfy a non-thinking person, but philosophically it is a resounding “logical” failure. If one accepts the obvious fact that a person seeks meaning, and anyone who has not reached the stage of seeking meaning in his life is only someone weak who has not yet attained the basic needs of existence that secularism offers—whether for himself or for society at large (and then he finds satisfaction in humanitarianism and did not think to ask himself: if satisfying my own material needs does not fill me, why would satisfying the needs of others fill me? And what will happen when everyone has everything—what will we do then? Not that the future fascinates me, only that as a test of a path it proves that secularism is a temporary state that has nothing to offer in the long run). Then one looks for a logical answer to meaning. Frankl offered various absurdities—that a person will find meaning in helping others—and did not ask himself, because he was a doctor and not a philosopher, what the ultimate purpose of that is.
Only religion has the ability to provide meaning, and if in the past, when religion was backward and less morally developed, there was room for secularism, today—when secularism has made its contribution to criticism of religion, as Rabbi Kook wrote, and given humanity what it has to give—it has no eggs left to sell. From here onward, faith is a must.
 
Now I want to discuss logically which is more plausible. Among all thinking people it is obvious that secularism is pure and refined intellect; after all, in their lives there is nothing irrational at all, and religion is the one challenged on the level of thought. Obviously the secular are the thinking people and religious people are, by default, stupid—unless someone finds them a savior who redeems them from the miserable formula of either righteous fool or wicked wise man. And I say: it is a crooked way of life to arrive at such a conclusion. Intellectually! Because if someone thinks that the logical flaws one may perhaps find in the tradition of the Oral Torah come anywhere close to the enormous logical flaws in secular life—a life with not a shred of logic in it, all of it just temporary weakness for those who have not yet attained the needs of existence, either for themselves or for society (and then they find satisfaction in humanism, without asking themselves if satisfying my own needs does not fill me, why would satisfying others’ needs fill me, and what happens when everyone has everything, what then?)—not that the future itself fascinates me, only that as a test of the path it proves secularism is temporary and has nothing to offer over time—then he has a serious problem in logic.
Personally, in the middle of my high-school matriculation studies in math and physics I developed an aversion to that kind of thinking. A few years later I even kicked my chess habit. I asked myself: okay, I thought—so what? Pleasure from thought itself I can get also from Torah study, which I do to this day, if only because I have not found any other sane reason to get up in the morning. Pleasure from the result of physics, that is, developing the world—that is the pleasure of weak-minded people, people who did not think about the future and did not say: okay, suppose all of physics develops without limit and all improvements to human life are achieved—what next? Is that what I need to dedicate my life to? Is that the purpose of the world and the reason it exists? There is not a shred of logic in that.
 
A large part of my surroundings are working people who are successful in their fields, and I always say to myself: okay, suppose you won the lottery now—what is in your life? Nothing with garlic sauce. Everything is just a means to money, which is a means to materiality. Someone who already has that cannot logically be secular, and it follows that secularism is a temporary state. That is what logic says—but it is the logic of life, not the common kind of logic that always produces a picture in which religion is less logical than secularism, when the truth is that there is nothing logical at all in the secular way of life, and it is preferable—logically!—to swallow dozens of difficulties about the Sages, hundreds of shallow rabbis, and thousands of yeshiva boys with no logical answer to the claims of academia, than to arrive at the secular conclusion and the illogical way of life in which most secular people live.
  
That is the kind of intellect I am talking about.
An intellect that does not discuss in the laboratory, weigh things on scales, and conclude that pure rational secularism has no logical flaw while religion has claims of flaws. I want an intellect that lives life and argues logically that secularism has nothing to offer, and therefore by way of elimination there is no logically reasonable path except being a believer. (Now one can discuss among the religions—but Christianity was buried after the Six-Day War, because its claim about the abandonment of the Jewish people was refuted with a thunderous crash after the Holy One, blessed be He, in His great kindness fulfilled all the prophecies of the prophets in a way no one dreamed would happen, and said to the Christians: my dear ones, you claimed that I abandoned the Jewish people and the prophecies do not refer to them? Come to Jerusalem and drive along Begin Boulevard from one end to the other and see the fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy and more; drive on Highway 6 from one end of the country to the other and understand how ridiculous you are. And as for Islam, it falls into all the same flaws they accuse Judaism of, plus several others.) This may be a different kind of logic, but it is the logic of life itself, which in my eyes is far stronger than the logic detached from application—the logic of the laboratory.
I want to take that same kind of logic and intellect into religious life. A life in which, after a person has been intellectually convinced that faith is true, he then lives it as an experience and not only as intellect. By the way, my claim is not that intellect says to live a life of spiritual experience, but that religion demands it. The argument is about understanding religion. I claim that religion tells us: after you become intellectually convinced there is a Creator, live a spiritual life in which religious experience is present, and not only intellect. Of course intellect critiques the experience so that we will not become some mindless Breslov bride—but my way of life is closer to Leibowitz than to her—yet the religious experience is very much present. In the end you wrote that if that is what I meant then there is a colossal misunderstanding, but that is exactly what I meant, and from the beginning I wrote that intellect is primary and I am talking about the Jewish way of life. This is not at all a matter of personal taste, but in my eyes the only path for religion: a path that after intellect makes the experience present in life, and thanks to that avoids all the religious failures I pointed to in the examples.
 
When the approach to religious life is purely intellectual, then one examines: wait, I pray in order to obtain something, because there is nothing else in the life of the intellectualist, and if it does not help then prayer is nonsense and all of Judaism until my day is a failed mistake fed by stale conservatism that brave rabbis have not yet shaken out of our enlightened lives. But when the approach is intelligent experience, and seeking a feeling of closeness to God is a central part of what a religious Jew pursues, then we will not arrive at that question, and even if we do, we will find satisfaction in the very standing of prayer, or sometimes feel an answer. (Certainly not something empirical, because after all the Holy One, blessed be He, runs the world by way of nature, so it is always all on the borderline and can also be explained “secularly.” But for someone who lives the way I propose, that will satisfy him, or at the very least will not contradict intellect. And when there is no contradiction to intellect from spiritual experience, then that too is important—in contrast to someone who continues with the initial and primary intellect all his life.)
 
I do not know what in my words above classified me together with all those emotionalists who cast off intellect. (That quote from Rabbi Nachman? It was only to illustrate that my positions are present in Judaism, so I should not be presented as if I invented something. The only non-rational thing in my life, besides prayer, longing for the Temple, personal providence, and the like, is one logical conclusion I reached: to take one “Sephardic segulah” and carry it out meticulously, in order to illustrate to myself that in my religious life there is also an element of suspending intellect for a moment before faith.)
 
If I may for a moment take the spear from the Rabbi’s hand and use the favorite weapon of agreeing with everything but disagreeing with the conclusion—then I agree with the Rabbi on all the arguments in the article on the site. Every emotion and every spiritual experience and every life of soul must be supervised by intellect. I wrote that already from the start. Nothing may be allowed to contradict intellect. But the intellect that reached the conclusion that there is Torah must continue making an effort, and thus it will arrive at the logical conclusion that religion includes spiritual experiences that satisfy the soul—which, logically, exists according to religion—and therefore the form of religious conduct includes giving place to those experiences. Not as personal taste, but as an integral part of Judaism without which it is impossible altogether.
 
To take a scientific-minded intellect and reach with it the conclusion that faith is true, but then keep working only with it instead of internalizing that this faith demands a life in which intellect is primary but not everything—that, in my eyes, is both a logical and religious failure.
 
In this form of life one avoids all the failures concerning providence and the Temple and prayer and undermining tradition and questioning the thirteen principles of faith and so on, and it is the only religious form of life. (One can argue about dosage, about the spectrum between the Vilna Gaon and Rabbi Nachman, but as I understand it all ends of Judaism agree with my claim that religious life is not only intellect, and that has major implications.)
And if we return for a moment to the subject of formerly religious people, I have no doubt that if one wants to prevent people from leaving, a life of pure intellect will not help at all. You need intellect in order to persuade; you need to keep the arsenal of intellectual arguments close to your chest. But without advancing to the next stage—a reasonable life that also includes mystical-spiritual-soulful experiences, and so on—the problem of those who leave will never be solved.
 
Sorry for the length and repetition in my words.
Forgive me if in the heat of the discussion I overstep the proper form in which one should speak with a Torah scholar.
Thank you very much for the willingness to answer at length and patiently,
And have a peaceful Sabbath :)!

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Rabbi:
Everything is fine, and there is no need to ask forgiveness.
You keep returning and mixing together the two planes that I asked you to distinguish between (and only about one of them am I willing to argue). That very mixture itself puts you in the Breslov category, despite your protests.
I asked you to focus on the discussion of prayer, because unfortunately I cannot address all this length here and conduct dozens of debates in parallel just in this one thread. You surely understand that this is not practical (especially when I have dozens of other parallel threads).
I’ll just say that there are quite a few mistakes and confusions in your words here, and definitely also some things I agree with and never argued against (and I already wrote that), and it is a shame to pour everything into one pile here. The debate between us, if there is one, is only on the plane of making decisions and forming beliefs. Lifestyle is a matter of personal taste, and there is no point discussing it.
It seems to me that we have exhausted the matter. All the best.

———————-
Questioner:
Good week, Rabbi,
 
Thank you very much for the correspondence. I enjoyed it and learned from it.
On the Sabbath I regretted the last email, because a large part of its content and most of its tone were out of place. Perhaps on another occasion, or more briefly, on the site, or when the Rabbi has fewer parallel threads to manage, we’ll get to discuss it again.