Question

Dear Rabbi Michi, good evening and שלום.
Following the elections, and your columns that dealt indirectly or directly with issues that arise from them, several questions came to mind, and I would be glad to hear your opinion on them.
 
One of the most important things I learned from you and from thinkers like Leibowitz, Hume, Kant to some extent, and Sartre (mainly because of his admission of the failure of his method and the uncertainty in it), is the proper distinction between facts, values, intellect, emotion, certainty, and uncertainty in reality.
 
In many columns you return to the principle that if one looks at the essence of most disputes taking place in the realms of ethics, politics, and religion, the disagreement usually does not stem from different values at root, but from an incorrect division and perception of the facts (in your view). Thus in the dispute between the right and the left regarding harm to innocents: in your opinion both sides agree that an enemy and a person who comes to harm you is liable to death ethically and morally, and the whole question is only factual: do the enemy’s civilians identify with and also act actively and mentally in the war (in your opinion, if I remember correctly—yes). Likewise regarding political elections (where in practice, in your opinion, almost 75–80 members of Knesset are right-wing in one way or another, and only a small left-wing minority and the Arab citizens think essentially differently on some issues, such as a state of all its citizens, the Law of Return, and so on). And likewise in philosophy (in your view there is no dispute that there is no certain proof either way regarding the existence of God, and the entire disagreement is only about probability: what is more reasonable). And also in the question of commandment observance and its form (there is no dispute between the Haredim and Modern Orthodoxy that observing the commandments and fulfilling God’s will is the most important value; the only question is whether the Holy One’s will is also that we be moral and accept certain modern principles, or not).
 
The very problem in separating emotion, intellect, value, fact, and experience.
I agree in principle with the claim that indeed only one truth can exist, and even if it has several different angles, contrary to postmodernism (the video in which you appeared at the conference on religious postmodernism also sharpened for me the distinction between several kinds of claims one can fall into in this area). But I have a certain difficulty with the analytic way of thinking of that school, or really a question about that way of thinking.
Mixing emotions, feelings, experiences, facts, and values: is the correct value the one that points to what reality is, or the opposite?
Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, of blessed memory—as I once heard in a lesson by Rabbi Sherki—claimed that the difference between Greeks and Jews is that in Greek culture beauty is truth, whereas among Jews truth is beauty. It seems to me that personally you would connect less to that nice saying, but would agree with the principle that truth is more important than aesthetics and emotion in general.
 
The first mixing of intellect, emotion, and experience; value and fact: the question of utility—Hell or Heaven.
It seems to me that there is no religious literature in the world, not even Jewish religious literature, that abandons the issue of reward and punishment as the primary and intuitive motivation for observing or not observing commandments. It seems to me there is no disagreement that the reason religious education usually does not want to hold an open discussion about the truth of religion is because of this: after all, one can talk about values and meta-values from now until tomorrow night, but if in the end there exists a theoretical reality in which, because of failure on the question, one is saved forever in Hell, then the issue of whether we acted with intellectual honesty or not contributes nothing at all.
In your many books and articles, you return to the issue of reward and punishment and give it a simple answer: one who has no doubts in faith and is satisfied with simple faith—fortunate is he, and this is praiseworthy and good. And you have also said many times that you are not elitist on this issue, and from your perspective even simple and innocent faith is no less quality faith than intellectual and clarified faith, so long as the person acts correctly and does what he ought to do. But if he needs intellectual inquiry, that too is not reprehensible in your eyes, so long as he wants to investigate the truth of the tradition out of a sincere desire to reach the truth and not from improper motives—because in your opinion the notion of commanding a person to believe, and to fear punishment so long as he does not know whether the claim presented before him is true or not, is an unreasonable demand from the outset. (I assume you say this because you start from the premise that the Holy One also does not punish—at least not severely—a person who sinned unintentionally in the same way as a person who sinned deliberately.)
But I would like to present an opposite approach, very similar to yours, and compare them through different concepts (the main question I want to get to is after the examples I bring for the sake of the question):
Does a person constitute his values by means of decision, and on that basis God judges him? Or does God create a person with a certain essence, and according to that essence he receives reward and punishment? About the similarity between Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin, Isaiah Leibowitz, and you—and the gap between you (I am not putting you and Isaiah in the same category for demagogic purposes, but only because on this specific issue I find a similarity between you).
 
Isaiah Leibowitz in many of his essays claims that values cannot be argued about, only fought over. For him, the worship of the Holy One is not a matter of disagreement in facts at all, since the Children of Israel knew of the existence of the Holy One and nevertheless chose to sin with the Golden Calf, and there were kings who were wicked and corrupt even though they lived in an age of prophecy. From that he concludes that serving the Holy One is a value that a person takes upon himself, which cannot depend on circumstances of reward and punishment, nor on knowledge versus lack of knowledge. You conclude, in a somewhat different way and from a somewhat different angle, that this is indeed true only for a period in which there is prophecy and absolute certainty, whereas in realistic reality the existence of the Holy One, the truth of the Torah, and the commandments are indeed things whose reasonableness and unreasonableness can be reached through certain arguments and one can decide what seems more reasonable. But even in your opinion the degree of reasonableness and unreasonableness is subjective and varies from person to person and is not a certain claim.
Rabbi Tzadok in his books Tzidkat HaTzadik, Pri Tzadik, Kedushat Yisrael, and the like brings a very similar claim from a somewhat mystical angle. But if one strips his argument of the mystical elements that may sometimes seem pretentious, he argues as follows:
Throughout the Hebrew Bible, throughout the Mishnah, the Talmud, and so on, one sees essential claims about the people involved, claims that touch the depths of the hearts of the sinners as opposed to those who act properly. This cannot be a superficial judgment that relates only to their external deeds; rather, in his view it must be a judgment that touches the depths of their hearts. The sinner will remain a sinner, even if he justifies his deeds endlessly, because in the end he will fall, since his deep inner psychological motive is a desire for separation from the Holy One; he will eventually sin seriously. Whereas the righteous person, in the depths of his heart, even if he condemns his deeds endlessly, will in the end return to the Holy One, because that desire exists in the depths of his heart. It is a bit like the parable people give today about Dudi Amsalem and traditional Likud voters, who are surely more connected to the Holy One in the depth of their hearts than Bennett, since at the decisive moment they showed that they would not dare harm the budgets for yeshivas / support for the enemies of Israel / uprooting religion.
For Rabbi Tzadok, the categories of Jew and gentile play a strong role, and I would like for the moment to ignore that point because it is not essential to my question. So instead of gentile I will translate his claim into the concept of the natural person as opposed to the person who is God-fearing by nature. In his view—and he repeats this again and again—real free choice exists among people who are naturally God-fearing, who can be Jews by birth, or a righteous convert who was also born, in his view, with a good spark, or one of the righteous among the nations (where in his thought it is not clear whether he belongs to the category of those naturally good or those who overcome their inclination, but I assume from the character of his writings that he belongs to the first category). By contrast, the natural person, deprived of Torah and commandments, will in the end fall into the pit and sin, as we saw in the portion of Balaam, and in the matter of wicked Esau, who by his nature had to exist as a model opposite Jacob (he repeats that in his view, once there is a righteous person there must be a wicked one so that the former will take Heaven and the latter Hell). And divine justice is explained in two ways:
1. In the same way that, in his view, there is free choice in the world of action even though the Holy One knows the depths of His creatures’ hearts and the future of their choices, and therefore the mechanism of reward and punishment is justified, because theoretically a choice between good and evil was possible. (As in the case of Esau, who could have chosen not to sell the birthright, could have received the blessings from Isaac, and served Jacob as “a help opposite him,” in the same sense that evil can turn into good in practice and receive reward if it bends itself toward the good.) Or as in the story of Haman and Mordecai: had Haman theoretically remained a servant to Mordecai, he could have repented by virtue of the sparks of holiness within him, from which his descendants eventually emerged who studied Torah. In the same way, if Adam had not been seduced by the serpent, all the seed of Israel would have come directly from him, holy and pure, teaching Torah throughout the whole world, and only afterward would the nations of the world have come into being through a later accident, and would have suffered the subjugation of kingdoms, exile, and so on by Israel, thereby also meriting purification like Israel. And the serpent too, and all the forces of impurity in the world, would have turned into actual good.
2. In the same way that sin, evil, and punishments are also the handiwork of the Holy One. Sinners such as Amalek and the wicked of the other nations were created as a counterweight to the forces of holiness intentionally, so that the righteous person would know how to contend with them and receive reward. Their punishment comes not as a sanction but because through that punishment the name of the Holy One, His honor, and His will are sanctified. (And I do not know which approach he ultimately adopts, because not all his writings on free choice are consistent.) Whereas with the righteous, reward comes from the opposite direction: because the Holy One desires them to praise Him, serve Him, and extol Him, He causes them to walk in the good path. They can indeed sin, but the Holy One arranges events in the direction in which even from those sins they can rise and attain the level of repentance.
The second mixing between intellect and emotion: the issue of human morality, natural instincts, intuitions, and subjectivity.
1. I noticed that many of the disputes between moderns and conservatives also touch on the question of subjectivity, the individual versus the collective, and several ethical difficulties that can arise from this. The Torah-conservative can claim that the laws of the Torah—613 commandments for the people of Israel and 7 commandments for the children of Noah—are eternal laws that do not change under any circumstance; that what was defined in creation as evil is evil because of the Holy One’s decision, and what was defined as the right and proper act is proper and right. There is almost no room for pragmatic considerations on this issue. Some will say that indeed the rules are universal and apply, but judgment of a person changes from person to person according to his circumstances. Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler in Michtav MeEliyahu writes about the point of choice that each person (or each Jew for that matter) has, and says that one who was born into a crime family and criminal society will be judged according to the challenge of not murdering, and if he succeeds, Heaven will bring him around also to the challenge of not stealing, and so on. There is also a midrash about Naaman who was a resident alien, in which it is said that according to the circumstances of his life he was permitted to engage in idolatry in partnership and to transgress the 7 Noahide commandments in order to be saved. I assume others would write differently. But Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman writes that even a shepherd who lived all his life in an isolated civilization will be held accountable for the fact that he could have learned and did not.
In the two examples I brought, about the tension between the individual and the collective and between law and life circumstances, and also in the second example about the tension and dispute between free choice and primordial decree, I essentially want to ask you two questions:
1a. In your opinion, is there room for the hypothesis of a primordial decree that transcends free choice? (As one can find in many sayings already in the Sages: He created righteous people, He created wicked people, He created darkness, He created light. And also from perhaps a simple line of reasoning: if there are so many human beings in the world, then even if theoretically certain generations would choose good, wicked people would have had to pop up at some point.)
1b. Assuming there is no free choice, at least not in essential and fateful matters, can one in your opinion infer from that anything about the covenant between the Holy One and a person who has no free choice in his life (whether this is someone who was the son of wicked people, a person hot-blooded by nature, intellectually or mentally impaired because of trauma, and so on)?
2. And this is really the main question: in all discussions of values, facts, probability, and improbability, is the proper way to learn, in your opinion, first to validate intellectually and intuitively whether a principle, value, or fact we have learned is correct—or must we be open to accepting, at least theoretically, even completely absurd situations that could turn out to be true? And not only in matters of free choice and determinism, but also in matters such as the existence of two independent authorities, or the thought that perhaps even within the Creator there was hidden some point of evil that in the course of creation He wanted to cast off from Himself, and thereby all evil was created—as people bring by way of parable. I stress: a complete parable, as I understand it, so as not to slander the kabbalists. Ideas like viewing creation as a cynical amusement (as appears in The Divine Comedy and among the kabbalists of Italy), and in general openness toward schools of thought that are considered taboo in classical ways of thinking?