Question

Hello Rabbi,
I watched your podcast (with Daniel Doshi), and a number of questions came up for me on various topics. If the Rabbi could answer my questions, I would be very grateful. I am assuming that since the podcast was short, I probably misunderstood some of what you said.
A. Spiritual experiences
You argued that you do not believe in religious experiences. You defined them as an illusion. In the Talmud and the midrashim (and especially in the Hebrew mystical books—about which I would also be glad to hear your opinion), there is a great deal told about revelations and religious and spiritual ecstasies (entering the Pardes, revelations of Elijah, the Book of Hekhalot, which for example is entirely about a metaphysical revelation to Rabbi Ishmael, and countless other examples; likewise in later generations—the Ramchal and the Vilna Gaon, and others). It is very hard to imagine that the Ramchal imagined and deluded himself into thinking that he experienced a religious experience (such as the revelation of a maggid), and on the basis of that illusion wrote the foundational mystical books of our generation. The soul is a reality just like the body, and therefore ostensibly it is quite clear that just as I have empirical experiences that the body experiences, so too, if I have a soul, there is no reason at all why I should not experience a meta-empirical, soul-based experience, since it is a real entity subject to the laws of spiritual experience (if that can be defined that way). Therefore my question is as follows:
A. Does the Rabbi interpret all the Talmudic stories about revelations and spiritual experiences as allegory (similar to Maimonides’ view), or does the Rabbi in fact believe in some kind of religious experiences, and under what conditions?
B. What are prophecy and divine inspiration—are they not defined as a spiritual experience?
C. The claim I mentioned—that if I have a body then it is obvious that I experience bodily experiences, so since I have a soul, ostensibly it is quite clear that I would also experience spiritual experiences. (Of course, on condition that I refine my body enough so that I have the ability to rise to such a level, which as I understand it is the level of the people who merited such an experience.)
B. Rationality and certainty.
I do not agree with the Rabbi’s view that I do not know with certainty that God exists. That is because I do not think the human being is rational (since I am much more a fan of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s path than of Maimonides’ path), and therefore I do not define certainty as intellectual proof. (And intellectual proofs are fundamentally untenable—because first one must prove that logic is necessarily correct rather than assume it as an axiom, as was objected to Descartes, who accepts logic as true because there is a God, but he knows there is a God by means of logic.) My proofs for God’s existence begin with revelation in the manner of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, and not with creation in the manner of Maimonides. Only afterward do I accept logic as true (though certainly not necessarily so), and that only because in practice it does in fact work. That is, I have no rational reason to believe in physics, because I have no sufficient proof that it is true—as Hume worked to show when he refuted the claim of cause and effect, which uproots all of physics from its foundation, and also for the reason mentioned above, that one must first prove that logic necessarily reveals truth to us, which is impossible because the only way to do that is by means of logic. The proof of the truth of physics is not pure rationality, but only concrete, physical experience. Since in practice physics is correct, apparently it is also correct theoretically, which proves that logic is correct, and so is physics. Once I have accepted logic (with limited confidence) as truth-revealing, I can turn to logical proofs for God’s existence—whether a priori arguments like the ontological argument, or a posteriori ones like the cosmological and teleological arguments that the Rabbi presented with wonderful clarity in the podcast, and so on. But my certainty comes only from empirical experiences, because logic can be refuted even though it is correct, since there is no necessity. And indeed—it is also possible to refute the existence of reality and to cast doubt on our very physical existence. But that does not affect anything except my rational certainty—in practice, I have no choice but to live my life in relation to reality, whether it exists or not. And since I am not rational, because I do not believe that the rational approach can be proven rationally, it makes no difference to my certainty that the existence of reality cannot be proven rationally. I am not intellect alone—I am also emotion. Therefore I can define certainty by emotion—if I feel empirically that there is a world, then there certainly is a world. I have no doubt about that (not intellectually, but experientially). And since in the given world I experienced divine revelation—not I personally, admittedly, but my great-great-grandfather who was at Mount Sinai, and there is the trustworthy telling and the tradition—I do not really expect God to reveal Himself every day for someone who is unwilling to believe his father when he tells him he saw God, just as I do not expect there to be another Holocaust for its deniers. Admittedly, I understand that this is indeed not certainty, because who says the tradition is correct. But why is it so obvious to me that the Yom Kippur War happened, even though all I know about it is only from stories and so forth, since I was not alive and did not experience it? הרי זה exactly the same kind of certainty I have regarding God’s existence. From this it follows that God exists. From here one can discuss what He is, which is of course the real question. And that can be defined in several ways—rationally (negative attributes, etc.) and emotionally. I would be glad to hear the Rabbi’s opinion on these matters. I should note that of course I do not reject Maimonides’ rationality—quite the contrary, I admire it and love it very much, but that does not contradict the fact that I follow Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s path.
C. Morality
The Rabbi said that every person has responsibility for his beliefs—he cannot act on the basis of his belief if it is not sufficiently clear and proven. And from this it follows that if there is a moral dilemma in which belief holds that a person should do horrifying things, he should not do so—because there is no complete certainty that he is right in his belief, and belief is not stronger than morality.
My claim is that there is no morality without faith. That is, faith defines what morality is. The basic concepts used by morality are: good and evil, and in medieval language: proper and reprehensible. But one must define what good and evil are before turning to discuss choosing between them. After thinking about it (quite possibly not deeply enough), it seems that there is no objective and absolute good and evil, but only conventional ones. In order to run a society, we need moral laws, and therefore we invent such laws so that there will be a society in which it is comfortable to live. If so, the definition of good is: comfortable to live with, and the definition of evil is: interferes with my comfort in living. But then we find disagreements even in the definition of what is comfortable to live with, because a person can claim that it is not comfortable for him to live unless he blows up the world with atomic bombs, and I will have no proof to contradict that. And when I say such behavior is immoral, he will ask me, what is morality? And I will answer: choosing the good and rejecting the bad. And he will reply: I think blowing up atomic bombs is good. And I will have nothing to answer him, because I defined good as whatever causes me to live a comfortable life, and he claims that what will cause him to live a comfortable life is blowing up atomic bombs—and therefore such behavior is moral. The only way (that I can think of) to refute his claim is to say that it is immoral because it harms the comfort of other people, but then we have a moral collision—which is more important, his comfort or theirs? And then we would have to refine the concept of good and the concept of evil even further until we reach the conclusion that we do not know what good and evil and morality are, aside from empty expressions that we use in general to manage a comfortable life. And regarding values—I cannot imagine a way to define a value as an objective good.
All this—under an atheistic assumption. But the moment we assume that there is a God, and the moment we assume that He has a will for us, we arrive at a clear conclusion as to what is good and what is evil, and consequently also which act is moral and which act is not moral.  
That is because God is the source of good and His essence is goodness (this is a complex definition that I hope I can make clear. But broadly speaking—God is the source of the cosmos, and therefore the cosmos by its nature strives to return to its source. So too the human being strives to return to his source. Therefore closeness to God is defined as good and distance is defined as evil). And if so, fulfilling the divine will is the definition of good, and failing to fulfill the divine will is the definition of evil.  
Therefore, when there is a conflict between conventional human morality (such as: murder is evil) and absolute divine morality (such as: it is a commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek), it is clear that the divine command is what obligates us, and one must act accordingly—because it is the objective good, and not a meaningless concept that we invented in order to behave nicely.  
Rather, what a person must clarify very carefully before any action he takes is this: is it really the will of God or not? And this is the significant point. (For example: is it really God’s will that we destroy all the Arabs because they are Amalek? It is true that God said we should blot out the memory of Amalek; the question is what that means. And that depends on the definition of the commandment: what Amalek is, for what time the command applies, the boundaries of the command, and so on and so on.) In fact, all halakhic literature is one enormous book of morality—because it is a clarification of God’s will down to the finest details: at every given moment, what is God’s will according to which I am supposed to act, because it is good.  
I would be glad to hear the Rabbi’s opinion on these matters.