Quotes

~~~ Means and Ends 1 lesson (apparently 1/3/2019) ~~~
Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 6a: “Anyone who regularly comes to the synagogue and one day does not come, the Holy One, blessed be He, asks after him.”
Rabbi Kook: “The comment applies broadly to all paths of perfection that a person, whether as part of the community or as an individual, maintains. Once they have risen to a level of moral perfection, they must strive greatly not to fall from their level and not to lose their precious acquisition. For anything that has already emerged into actuality in its perfection, when it falls back, becomes more lacking than one who never acquired that thing at all. And this is the basis of good customs that require annulment.”

The Rabbi explained in the lesson: That is, the claim is that when a person reaches a certain level, it is important that he try not to descend from it, not to deteriorate from it. If someone is at a certain level—let’s rank the spiritual levels—he is at level 10 and falls to level 8, that is worse than someone who is at level 8. The decline makes the state I’m in more problematic than if I had been there from the outset. (What matters is not only the position but also the derivative.) The need for annulment comes from the fact that if you return to the same level that the other person had always been on, you are actually deteriorating into a worse state—to stop you somehow with that annulment, or with the obligation to continue as long as you haven’t had it annulled.
“And regarding the community, a good custom is very stringent, because when a moral acquisition declines again it causes a greater deficiency than if it had initially been absent.” He says that on the communal level this is even stronger; that is, a community that was in a good state and declined back to a bad state is in a more problematic condition than a private individual.

~~~ Eyeh Ayah lesson on Berakhot 112–113 (23/3/2020) ~~~
The Rabbi: The context is basically a dispute over until when the Passover offering may be eaten. And the Talmud says that the Passover offering is eaten until the time of haste. The question is what exactly is called the time of haste. (“Haste” refers to the Exodus from Egypt, when they left in haste.) When the Talmud enters the question of when exactly this was, it says as follows:
“Rabbi Abba said: All agree that when Israel was redeemed from Egypt, they were redeemed only in the evening, as it is stated: ‘The Lord your God brought you out of Egypt at night.’ And when they left, they left only in the day, as it is stated: ‘On the morrow after the Passover, the children of Israel went out with an uplifted hand.’ What do they disagree about? About the time of haste. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah holds: What is ‘haste’? The haste of Egypt. And Rabbi Akiva holds: What is ‘haste’? The haste of Israel.” Historically, the Egyptians stopped enslaving Israel in the evening (until midnight), and Israel left Egypt in the morning. The whole question is a halakhic one: until when do we have to eat the Passover offering? Rabbi Kook deals here with a description of the redemption itself, this dual redemption.

Rabbi Kook:
Section 112: “Redemption from slavery to freedom, in general, brings about two things for an entire people. One is the inner freedom, when a person feels in his soul an elevation from having left the lowliness of slavery and become free and master of himself. The second is the action revealed in the world, in being a free people living and acting (…)
Therefore the redemptions were divided into two parts: when Israel was redeemed from Egypt, the inner redemption was in the evening, for in this the main thing is not the knowledge and publicity among others, but the good feeling of their inner freedom. And when they went out, they did not go out except by day, with an uplifted hand, visible to all the inhabitants of the world, to indicate their revealed activity in the world, to gain wisdom and do good to all creatures formed in the divine image, to shine with the light of God.”
Section 113: “Indeed, the redemptions were divided into two, the redemption of the evening and the redemption of the day, because they were destined to be enslaved again. This teaches that the bondage would come upon them only to interrupt their effect upon others, but the loftiness of their soul and their intrinsic advantage, which they attained in the redemption of the evening—this remains forever and will never depart from them, for ‘the children of Israel are servants to Me.’” (The Rabbi: the inner feeling of freedom, not the outward influence—that can no longer be taken from us. From the moment we attained it on the night of the Exodus from Egypt, that can no longer be taken from us.)

~~~
The contradiction is that the second bondage leaves the redemption of the evening intact and does not make the situation even worse than the first bondage.

In the second passage here we are not talking about sin and repentance or deterioration. We are talking about a person’s states: freedom and liberty at different levels. In matters of state, what determines things is where you are. Someone who is free is free, no matter how he got there. If a person chooses on his own to deteriorate into a state without freedom, that will be worse than a person who from the outset does not conduct himself as a free person.

I understand the difference between choice (a voluntary decline) and necessity (a forced decline), and thank you very much for the answer 🙂
It also sounds very psychologically plausible to me (maybe one could formulate it by saying that the derivative is not the derivative of the state over time but the derivative of the force the person is exerting. And if an external force overcomes him and brings him to a different state, that doesn’t matter. Someone who runs against the wind will be healthy and fit even if in the end he is blown backward).

But I didn’t understand the first distinction the Rabbi wrote (between an addition of righteousness and freedom), because in the last sentence it says that everything depends on the question of choice. Could the Rabbi please explain it to me once again?

Sorry. I thought you were a man.
Think about a person who climbs some mountain and then goes back down. Is he lower than he was at the beginning? Obviously not, because spatial location is a state, a fact. With facts, it makes no sense to say that the path matters. You are where you are. What I claimed is that if a person is enslaved or free, that is a state, and if he is free then he is free, and if not then not. Everything depends on his present state.
By contrast, Rabbi Kook argues that when a person sins after having been on a high spiritual level, his spiritual state is more degraded. There it is a spiritual state and not a physical state, which, as I said, is a fact. That already depends on the derivative (or on the force he is exerting, according to your formulation).

Now I’m completely confused.
If bondage and freedom are physical states, then why is bondage by force after redemption more successful than the original bondage? (That’s what Rabbi Kook writes in Eyeh Ayah.) The redemption of the evening is a spiritual state, and nevertheless it is not nullified by the return of the bondage.
And what is the relation between the distinction of spiritual and physical states and the distinction of choice and coercion?
I hope it’s okay to ask about old lessons, at least on things that seem general and not some detail among lots of other details. Thank you very much for the effort; it really isn’t self-evident.

I didn’t say physical states; I said states, facts. A mental fact is also a factual state. When a person is depressed or happy, he is in a given state. It doesn’t matter what came before or after. A person’s spiritual state is the result of our decision and judgment about his condition, and here there is room for the reasoning that a decline after an ascent leads to a lower place (not a lower state in the factual sense, but a state that we evaluate more negatively).

It’s very clear that in states the path doesn’t matter. And it also makes sense that in decisions the path does matter.
According to this, the claim that the redemption of the evening is not nullified by renewed bondage means that the redemption of the evening is a decision or an understanding that in this case we ourselves managed to arrive at on our own after the bondage was removed, and therefore bondage by force does not change that decision.
If so, then I think I understand. Thank you very much.

Indeed