Question

Hello Rabbi Michi,
First of all, thank you very much for the interesting lectures.
I wanted to ask about the line of argument you presented in the lecture following the demonstration of the text generator.
Let me preface this with a remark: I am not an expert in, or particularly well-versed in, the writings of Rabbi Kook, and yet I immediately identified the authentic passage. The main reason for this (alongside more minor issues of syntax and structure in the earlier passages) is my ability to discern a clear conceptual structure in certain sentences in the fourth passage, following my recent reading of Rabbi Yosef Avivi’s book, which deals with uncovering structures (mainly in a kabbalistic context) in a very large portion of Rabbi Kook’s thought. His project is based on a very deep and broad familiarity with the full scope of Rabbi Kook’s thought, and with the breadth of kabbalistic thought, familiarity by means of which he is able to find consistency, verbal connections, and conceptual structures; and on that basis he builds an interpretive framework grounded in the text alone. (One can of course agree with it or disagree with it.) My question is whether one could in fact say that your identification of certain kinds of texts as Rorschach blots is problematic because it is not based on sufficient familiarity with a certain form of formulation, specific content on which the author relies, and a style with a structure that can be discerned over a wider range. For the sake of argument: passages by Rabbi Akiva Eiger, or articles written in the style of your own essays, would be easier for you to understand directly as falling under prose text, because you are more deeply rooted in their world of content, in their mode of formulation, in their conceptual contexts, and so on. That is unlike many other texts which, to experts in a specific field, would appear that way, but to people limited by knowledge / expertise / familiarity would appear “Rorschach-like.” For that matter, a secular person trying to read a text by Rabbi Akiva Eiger would lack the ability to understand its prose meaning directly, but depending on his talent could use it as a Rorschach blot. On the other hand, in your reading of Hasidic texts / Rabbi Kook / (perhaps even poetry of a certain type), and so on, you would not be able to extract the meaning that an expert like Rabbi Avivi could extract from a random paragraph of Rabbi Kook, that a good scholar of Bialik could extract from one of his poems, or that someone with a sufficiently high level of knowledge, experience, and expertise could extract from a text of Rabbi Nachman, and so on.
I would be glad to hear your response, and again thank you for the lectures and the articles.