Q&A: Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Right at the beginning of his aforementioned book, the Rabbi attributes to the words of the Hazon Ish, in his parable of the two wagons, deep intentions from the realm of philosophy.
My very life hangs on my question: do you really feel that this is what the Hazon Ish meant, or did I miss the joke?
Answer
That much? (“My very life hangs on my question”) 🙂
It seems to me that I wrote in Two Wagons that I’m not sure exactly what the Hazon Ish meant, but I assume it was something along those lines. The philosophical elaboration I give is only an elaboration of a fairly simple idea: that in the absence of God, there cannot be valid values. I don’t see why the Hazon Ish could not have meant that.
Where did you see a joke?
I didn’t see any joke, just that what you attributed to the Hazon Ish’s intention seemed so strange to me that I said maybe it was a joke. On second thought, maybe one can agree that he thought of it by intuition and not consciously in terms of the terminology you mention. (It seems to me you spoke there about halakhic intuition; maybe there is philosophical intuition too.)