Dr. Moshe Koppel: Halacha as a Language

David Bashevkin:

Hello, and welcome to the 18Forty podcast, where each month we explore a different topic, bouncing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host David Bashevkin. And this month, we’re exploring halacha. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas. So be sure to check out 18forty.org, that’s 1-8-F-O-R-T-Y.org, where you can also find videos, articles, and recommended readings. So I’m going to apologize in advance because I’m going to nerd out a little bit. And by nerd out a little bit is usually when I discuss, and this is a forewarning, but I actually think this is how my own relationship to halacha is grounded in so much of our conversation today, but I’m going to nerd out. And I want to talk a little bit about language.

If you had the opportunity to look at the 18Forty opening video to the topic, you may already know some of this. And that is that my entire relationship to halacha, hold onto your hats here, was formed from an article that I read by David Foster Wallace in Harper’s magazine called “Usage Wars.” What is the article “Usage Awards” about? Imagine the most boring article you could ever imagine. Well, what do you think? When people talk about doing something really, really boring, they used to say it would be like, I don’t know, reading the dictionary, reading a telephone book.

So it’s not quite reading a telephone book, but it is a book review on two different dictionaries. And it’s really a work of absolute art. I mean, his writing is somewhat intricate. Can sometimes feel a little convoluted, but the writing of David Foster Wallace and the way he approaches this, like a book review of different dictionaries, is really an absolute work of art and really shaped the contemporary way and my own personal relationship to halacha.

He talks about the introduction to a certain dictionary, which is called a “Dictionary of Modern American Usage” by Bryan Garner. And really, what the entire article is about are the different relationships people have to language. And he divides them up into two camps. One, he calls prescriptivist, and the other, he calls descriptivist. Now, these aren’t totally his words. And if those words scare you, prescriptivism and descriptivism, you don’t have to worry. It’s not important to really understand this, but we’ve met both of these people.

What does it look like to meet a prescriptivist? We know these people. We usually do not get along with them. These are the people who correct “who” versus “whom.” These are the people who troll you on Twitter, when you incorrectly use the word “you’re,” and you miss an apostrophe. They’re the ones who use too much grammar in text messages. Which I’ve always found modern-day sociopathic behavior, when people end one-word sentences in text messages with a period. They’re using grammars and semicolons in their texts. This is not a healthy person, ladies and gentlemen.

We know what that feels like. These are people who are very strict in their relationship to language, as opposed to descriptivists are the people who use language as they like to use it, as it feels organically as it’s used. And whenever they’re corrected, they’re like, “Come on. You know what I was saying? Please, you know the point I was trying to get across. Why did you need to correct my ‘who’ verse ‘whom?’”

This is the way David Foster Wallace describes prescriptivists, those people who correct our language. There are lots of epitaphs for people like this: grammar Nazis, usage nerds, syntax snobs, the language police. The term I was raised with is SNOOT. And SNOOT is an acronym that David Foster Wallace, as he used in his home, for Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time. I have a friend, not going to say who it is, but his first name is Benji. Sometimes I call him The Benj with a capital T. And I one time had a Shabbos meal at his house. And his family has a fair bit of SNOOT-y tendencies, the syntax nudniks of our time. And I remember there was like a 15-minute interlude in the conversation about whether or not a sentence that I had said was correct grammar. And I’m like, “Is this how you make friends at parties? Is this what a normal Shabbos meal feels like in your house?” And he’s absolutely lovely. He’s absolutely nerdy, a self-admitted nerd.

These are people who really understand the rules of grammar. Very often, they are very gifted at mathematics, and there’s kind of this mathematical symmetry that they see in language itself. But not everyone is a prescriptivist, carefully correcting your grammar, the syntax nudniks of our time. Others are descriptivist. And this is how it’s described in the article, “Usage Wars.”

For the pure descriptivist, it’s impermissible to say that one form of language is any better than another. As long as a native speaker says it, it’s okay. And anyone who takes a contrary stand is a dunderhead. Essentially, descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems. Descriptivists want to record language as it’s actually used. And descriptivists operate based on five principles.

Here are the principles: language changes constantly; change is normal; spoken language is the language; correctness rests upon usage; and all usage is relative. There is a very organic relativistic approach to what the correct grammar is because grammar is only a function of how people speak. And if people speak this way, then it becomes okay. Even the very word “okay,” which we use in language, it needs to be okay. And now people use K, or KK, or all of these different usages that make language change and evolve constantly. Now, why do I think this debate is important for halacha? If you haven’t figured it out already, it’s because I think there are two poles with which people develop relationships with halacha itself.

There are some people who are prescriptivists. They only care about the exact correct usage and how it’s done, and they have no problem telling anybody about any minute detail that they get wrong. And I think there are other people who have a descriptivist relationship with halacha. Well, what’s done? How is it normally performed?

In the early 1900s, there was a thinker who’s now quite famous, because there are schools named after him, named Solomon Schechter. And there’s a doctrine that’s not 100% his own. I don’t know that he embraced it 100%, but it’s later become associated with him. And that doctrine, which we discussed briefly on our last interview with Professor Chaim Soloveichik, is called Catholic Israel. Now, before you get upset, it has nothing to do with Christianity. Catholic means universal. The principle of Catholic Israel is basically saying that our relationship with halacha evolves through usage. It’s descriptivist.

What do people do? What’s done naturally in the community? Nobody’s careful about X, Y, and Z. Nobody worries about this specific detail, so that becomes what is the normal usage of halacha itself. Now obviously, that’s oversimplifying it. And there are many people who look at the Conservative movement and the way that halacha developed within the movement and see some of the difficulties the movement has had in preserving certain rituals have undoubtedly emerged from an unbridled embrace in certain circles of Catholic Israel. It can’t just be whatever people do. Because very often, the masses, if there is no authority whatsoever and it’s just based on personal practice, then you could have a lot of practices that evolve that won’t necessarily preserve the intended meaning that halacha is meant to preserve. On the other hand, you can also have issues that emerge out of being overly prescriptivist. If you’re so careful, and we know this, if you have relationships with people who are such rigid, grammar Nazis, I don’t know if you’re allowed to use that term anymore, just because there’s been so much misinformation about the Holocaust and Nazis, and I don’t want to be accused of the same. But so many people who use grammar so rigidly that it ends up stifling their ability to really transmit anything.

The way David Foster Wallace describes it, and I absolutely love it, he calls it hyper-correction. And he writes as follows, he’s quoting Garner in the dictionary, “Sometimes people strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately.” If you are so careful and so mindful about every single little detail, you try to abide by the strictest etiquette, in the process, you could end up behaving inappropriately. You don’t necessarily make the right calculations because there’s no rhythm. There’s nothing organic and natural guiding your relationship to the language itself.

Now in these two poles of language, the more organic usage, what’s said, what’s spoken of descriptivism versus the more rigid, authoritarian, very detail-oriented, what’s right, grammar Nazi type of mindset of prescriptivism, obviously I think there needs to be truth somewhere in the middle. But as poles, I think it tells us two very important things in our relationship to halacha.

Number one, I think there is no better analogy to understand how halacha develops and how halacha works than understanding halacha as a language. What does it mean that halacha is a language? To say that halacha is a language means that halacha is coming to preserve a certain meaning. Language is coming to preserve and transmit meaning. Halacha also is a language that is coming to preserve certain meaning. What is that meaning that halacha is coming to preserve?

The meaning that halacha is coming to preserve can be our relationship to God. The Meshech Chochma, the famous Rav Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, talks about halacha sometimes preserves meaning and a relationship, not only with God, but also with the Jewish people. It can be the current Jewish people who live throughout the world, or it can be the Jewish people as have lived throughout the generations.

Halacha is the ritual that preserves our connection, whether it’s the covenant with God, whether it’s our connection with the Jewish people, or helping discover our own interiority, our own inner religious world. And not allowing us to rely on those moments of inspiration, but capture those moments of connection that we can have with God, with the Jewish people and express them through daily ritual, through daily reminders and allow those seminal moments, whether it’s in the history of the Jewish people or within our own particular lives. And allow that meaning that is transmitted through moments to then unfold through daily rituals, through Yamim Tovim, through Shabbos, and allow that meaning to then emerge throughout the rest of our lives.

So first and foremost, I think it’s really instructive to think about halacha as language. Secondly, why is thinking about halacha as language helpful? Because it really helps you understand how halacha evolves. And I’ve always bristled at the notion of people who are uncomfortable, almost admitting that halacha evolves. Of course halacha evolves. Of course there is something that is stable and there is something fixed within the halachic world. The same way there’s something stable and fixed within the English language. But different generations for sure, have used the English language in different ways. And for sure, halacha over the generations, in a very organic way, has evolved.

Language is not legislated the same way that great halachic decisions have not been legislated since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. It happens extraordinarily organically through a give and take, between the people who remain convicted to the larger mesorah, the larger tradition of the Jewish people, the experts in the language itself, the experts within halacha. But you can’t appoint yourself an expert in halacha. And sometimes the experts of halacha scream at the top of their lungs and say, “That is not the way that you’re supposed to write a sentence. That is not the way that you’re supposed to use the word irregardless.” And the people just don’t listen. They’re like, “No, we’re going to use it this way.” And it ends up being a common practice. And eventually, even the experts say, “You know what? That is correct usage.” There’s something very organic about the way halacha develops over the generations.

It is not legislated necessarily by a court system in the way that we use the legal system to think about how halacha is legislated. Much of that was only during the time of the Sanhedrin, the great legal body that existed in the time of the Temple, but we don’t have a legislative body like that. We don’t have a very clear hierarchical system that decides what is right and what is wrong.

If you look at the last 2,000 years of Jewish history, it is remarkable how the Jewish people have actually preserved our ritual in a fairly consistent basis, evolving in certain ways through the generation, responding to developments in modernity, which we will talk about later on. But the meaning that the language has come to preserve has remained with us through the generations. And I think it’s because of this give and take between the experts, the prescriptivists, and the organic usage of the descriptivists of the nation.

But if you’ll allow me to really nerd out for one second, I think there is a third factor of what makes the analogy of halacha as language so important. And that is how you learn to express meaning through language. If you’re ever trying to teach someone for the first time, a new language, if you ever like me, tried out Duolingo. And I tried out Duolingo for Yiddish. I lasted about five days because all of the sentences were so weird. It was like teaching me how to say, “The zebra is standing by the pyramid.” And teaching me how to say that in Yiddish. I’m like, “I don’t think we’re using Yiddish for the same reasons.” Duolingo was a lot of fun, lasted five days. I wish I knew how to speak in fluent Yiddish, but I do not.

But very often, if you try to teach the language, the most difficult thing is that it’s very hard to teach the rules of language and start with the rules of grammar. The easiest way to learn a new language is through an immersive ulpan, through organic usage. And you see what people do.

Now, the difficulty of that and why some people don’t like it is that you never really understand the why for every specific detail. You’re like, “Wait, so, why do we have to put the comma over there? Why is this word pronounced this way when it’s in plural, but this way when it’s in singular?”

And if you want to know every detail, which is obviously important, but you’re not willing to immerse yourself in that larger first language community, it’s going to be nearly impossible to ever pick up the language. And I find a lot of individuals, a lot of families who are beginning to learn halachic observance, the difficulty that they often have is that they’re trying to learn a language exclusively by reading a grammar book. And I think that’s nearly impossible. You can’t open up a grammar book and just go through all the rules, and hopefully from that, you’re going to become a great writer.

To become a great writer, you have to become a great reader. To become someone who really appreciates a language, you need to immerse yourself in that almost anthropological world, like an anthropologist immerses themselves in the actual, organic, first-person world of the people who grew up with this language and see how it’s used organically. And you will find that a lot of the stereotypes of what we think about how halacha is integrated in people’s lives, when you really look around and think about it, it’s not with that rigidity of a grammar Nazi, not at all. It’s with a very comfortable rhythm that allows people to integrate halacha in their lives.

And I think that people who are struggling or feel suffocated from halacha, and there were points in my own life, as I’ve admitted, many, many times, where my relationship to halacha did not have that comfort. Certainly, when I was single, Shabbos became a lot harder, yontif became a lot harder. The details became a lot harder. I didn’t have the infrastructure. I didn’t have the environment to reinforce the rhythm. So every time I tried to immerse myself in halacha, I felt like I was opening up a grammar book. I felt like I was learning how to write a sentence by knowing the difference between fancy syntax rules and usage and grammar and all this stuff. But it could feel really stunting. And that can be really, really difficult.

But I think anybody who is examining their own observance and relationship to halacha, anybody who is looking how to transmit or even grappling with halacha, I think this analogy of halacha as language can be really, really instructive. And I think sometimes we look at our own observance, and we can get frustrated. Like why do we do this? Why do we do X, Y? We point to one specific detail, whether it’s a detail about Shabbos, whether it’s a detail about prayer, and we can feel frustrated.

And if you look and you put in the work, there really are some very beautiful meanings about here. But sometimes we come to something like, I don’t know why this is important to my observance of Shabbos. I don’t know why this halacha, why this prohibition, why this stricture is so important. And we start discarding things. And I think that could be a very dangerous practice.

There is a paradox called sorites paradox, which I have told many people who are grappling with this kind of more willy-nilly, one of my favorite terms, that I constantly see Rabbi Soloveichik use. Soloveichik loves using the word willy-nilly. I would love to bring back that term.

But sometimes people look at these specific details, that they’re like, “Well, this is just a headache. It doesn’t serve any purpose.” And there’s a paradox called sorites paradox, which basically says the typical formulation involves a heap of sand from which grains are individually removed. You have a big heap of sand, and then you start removing one grain at a time, under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap. The paradox that sorites basically says is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times. Is a single remaining grain still a heap? Anybody who’s going bald knows this is true. You start to see your hair thinning. You look at the mirror, and you say, “Okay, I’m not totally bald yet. I still got hair there.” And you pluck out another hair. Still got some hair. You pluck out a third, a fourth, a fifth. At what point is like that one last strand, the difference between having a head of hair and not having a head of hair? That’s what sorites paradox is examining.

And I think that it is an important lens, when we think about the system of halacha itself. It’s very easy to pluck away one observance and say, “Okay, I could still have Shabbos without this one thing. Then you pluck away another, I could still have Shabbos without this thing. I could pluck away something else. I still have the meaning without this thing.

And you start plucking away the rules of the language, one by one. It’s a dangerous exercise. Not to say that people don’t do it. Not to say that they’re in a more natural way, people sometimes curve out some of the edges of some of the details. But I do think it’s a dangerous exercise to say, “You know what? I don’t see any use to this. If I pluck it away, I’ll still have the overall heap. I’ll still have the bundle.”

We don’t always know where the dividing line is of what creates the halachic experience as we understand it, and which detail can remove and will be left, not with a full head of hair, not with a bundle of sand, or not with a great heap of sand, not with a great bundle of wheat — all different items that are used to explain sorites paradox — but you’re going to be left with a pebble. You’re going to be left with nothing.

And I think that’s something that people are examining and experiencing in their own lives. They look at the way different communities relate to halacha. And some communities pluck. Some communities insist that we need every single grain. And I think different communities are negotiating with how can we preserve the overall meaning that the halachic language is coming to convey while still allowing it, that it should remain organic. It’s something that could be easily integrated within our lives.

Another great thought experiment, and I know I’m speaking too long. The people who hate my intros are going to write letters and absolutely murder me. Once again, just a reminder, you can absolutely fast forward this. But another great analogy that is used is something called Chesterton’s fence. Chesterton’s fence is a thought experiment, which if you walk up to a fence and it’s guarding absolutely nothing. He basically says there exists in such a case, a certain institution or law. Let’s say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or a gate that’s erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up and says, “I don’t see the use of this. Let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer, “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Sometimes we look at the halachic system and we say, “I don’t see. This is not providing me any use in my life. Clear it away, discard it, get rid of it, pluck away the hair, remove the pebble.” And that violates this thought experiment from Chesterton’s fence. You have to first understand why was it first placed there before you remove it. A fence that seems to be serving no purpose before you remove it, it’s even more important to figure out why it was first placed there. Because you don’t know what experience, what type of meaning, what boundary it was first erected to preserve or prevent you from violating.

And I think Chesterton’s fence and sorites paradox both helped crystallize for me the importance of not tinkering too much with the rhythmic nature of halacha. While I do have a rhythmic relationship with my own halachic life, I don’t really have that rigidity that you see, what David Foster Wallace called hyper-correction, the people who strive to abide by the strictest etiquette. I am somewhat mindful not to violate sorites paradox or Chesterton’s fence. Because if you play too much with the language, the concern is that you’re going to be left with words and letters and paragraphs that don’t convey the meaning that they could ultimately convey in the most beautiful, majestic, and dignified way possible. And that is why I am so excited about our conversation with Dr. Moshe Koppel.

Dr. Moshe Koppel wrote a book called “Judaism Straight Up,” which was published by Koren. But I actually first discovered him from a fantastic work that was published by Aronson, those great old Aronson books that had that fancy little “A” on the spine. My heart would flutter every time I would see one, because I knew it would be on some subversive or off the beaten path subject. Shout out to Jason Aronson Press, which was really, really wonderful and unfortunately shut down. But he also wrote a book for them many, many years ago called “Meta-Halakha: Logic, Intuition and the Unfolding of Jewish Law.”

And what I find so remarkable about his work is that he is a trained, quite brilliant computer scientist. And he allows the world of language, the language of science, the language of syntax, of how you put together computer programming, how language and meaning unfolds in the world of computer science. He allows that world to help shape his approach to how halacha evolves, the authority of halacha where it derives from, and his book “Judaism Straight Up,” which provoked a great deal of discussion and is an imagined conversation between a more modern, liberal type of personality and people who have more, maybe conservative, traditional intuition. And their conversation with each other in many ways is a conversation about how do you preserve meaning through the generations? How do you tinker, can you tinker with meaning through the generations?

And throughout his work, what really unifies it all together is this very notion of looking at halacha not just as a body of law, but halacha as a language. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce our conversation with Professor Moshe Koppel.

David Bashevkin:

It is my absolute pleasure and excitement to welcome back … This is actually the second time that we are speaking together. There’s the lost tapes that may never be shared, but this is the second time that I am speaking together with a thinker that’s influenced me a great deal. Thank you so much for joining us today, Moshe Koppel.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here and I’m sure the second time will be even better than the first.

David Bashevkin:

So, I want to begin with something that you mentioned in the middle of your fantastic book, “Judaism Straight Up,” which we could get to more in-depth. But I want to begin with an analogy that I read in your book that simply blew my mind, and that is halacha as language. And you describe how halacha functions in many ways as a language. I usually think of halacha as a list of, like a rule book, as a manual. Explain to me why halacha in many ways should be seen as language?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. Wonderful question. Really at the heart of my book. Let’s take a step back to one of the objections to halacha by those who were outside it. Halacha is, unlike a legal system, it’s not legislated, it’s not enforced. And as a consequence, it’s not serious, right? And it can’t change because a legal system where you have a legislative process, well, you can respond to some problems that arise, changes of circumstance, by legislating, but halacha doesn’t have a mechanism for legislation, right? And halacha not only doesn’t have a mechanism for legislation but there’s no enforcement. If you’re michalel Shabbos, nobody’s going to come to your house and drag you out and punish you. Right?

David Bashevkin:

We sure hope not. It’s never happened so far. And I try to avoid being michalel Shabbos but any mistake that … I’ve made mistakes, no one has showed up at the door. But just clarify, when you say halacha is not legislative, my immediate thought goes, well you’re obviously talking about post the destruction of the Temple and a functioning Sanhedrin, a great legislative body that once upon a time did legislate and did punish, but we don’t live in that world anymore.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Right. It’s been around 2,000 years since-

David Bashevkin:

It’s been a minute. Yeah-

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

I hope that Mashiach comes soon and the Sanhedrin is reestablished but for the past 2,000 years, and for the foreseeable future, that’s not how halacha functions. There’s no Sanhedrin that legislates and enforces. So, that’s the halacha that I’m talking about. When Mashiach comes, we’ll discuss then, but I’m talking about now. So anyway, that was background that we don’t have. We don’t have legislation enforcement and that’s a criticism of halacha that’s often made by people who are not inside the system, who oppose the system for a number of reasons, one of which-

David Bashevkin:

Do you have someone specific in mind when you think of a critic? I’m just curious.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

I don’t, but as long as you mention it, and this is … I’m opening a parenthesis within a parenthesis here, we’ll close them all soon. In my book, I have two characters, right? One of whom is called Shimon, who’s a Holocaust survivor, a Gerer chasid after the war, without a beard and a bekishe, but a Gerer chasid nevertheless. And my opponent of halacha is a woman I met in Princeton, who I call Heidi in the book. She is a kind of a stand-in for any kind of progressive, who finds halacha to be too tribal and out of touch with the times and so forth. So, I don’t mean any real person, I mean a fictional character named Heidi who’s based on a real person whom I actually met.

So in any event, closing that parentheses now, and getting back to your original question, one of the arguments that I make as a retort, I put in Shimon’s mouth as a retort to Heidi, who says, “Wait a minute, halacha is not legislated and therefore it’s too stogy. It can’t keep in touch with the times.” I say, wait a minute, there is another phenomenon that isn’t legislated, it isn’t enforced, and nevertheless, it works perfectly well, and as a matter of fact, it even adapts as circumstances change. And that phenomenon is the one that you mentioned, which is language. Nobody legislates, right? I mean, you have these language columns, and newspapers, and magazines. People used to be William Safire-

David Bashevkin:

If you look behind me, I have the collected writings of William Safire and my current favorite is somebody named Dreyer, Benjamin Dreyer, who’s a really wonderful, grammar, copyeditor.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Right. So you got these guys, but let’s face it. It’s not exactly like William Safire is like the Shulchan Aruch, right? I mean, he gets to say what he says and you can pay attention to him or not, right?

Now, nevertheless, it’s amazing how language adapts, right? I mean, nobody’s enforcing, nobody’s legislating, and if somebody woke from the dead who died 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago, and you use the word gay, he would go, “Gee, that’s not what that word meant when I was alive.” And what if you use the word woke, that’s not what it meant when he was alive. And as a matter of fact, there are hundreds of other words like that. And words not only change their meaning semantically, they completely change their function, so that the word “well,” or the word, “so,” right now is used, right, in some functional way, it is almost a hiccup in your speech, a weird-

David Bashevkin:

Sure-

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

It used to mean something else altogether. As syntaxes change, language adapts. Language adapts miraculously well, and that’s without anybody legislating it. So, the argument that without legislation, without enforcement, you can’t possibly have a system that adapts and that works is obviously wrong because language is a counterexample. And a good portion of my book is about this analogy between halacha and language. It goes well beyond the fact of being unlegislated and unenforced.

David Bashevkin:

What else … meaning, you said it goes well beyond. Where else do you think this analogy helps us better appreciate the halachic system?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

First of all, the way language works is from the bottom up, right? There’s a collective intuition. You use the language the way that seems sensible to you. You might occasionally use a word in an unusual way or use some weird syntax, right? Or some novel morphology. Now, if lots of people do things the same way, right? Something novel, but they do it the same way it catches on, right? Then that becomes part of the language, right? So if lots of people start using the word “gay” or the word “woke” in a different way than it used to be used, right? Well, that becomes the new meaning of the word, right?

So there’s this collective intuition that makes things happen, and halacha does the same thing, right? I mean, if people start, if minhagim slowly start to change, people start doing things differently than they used to do it. And that happens a lot by the way, we can get into this. Then that becomes the new halacha. And there’s this myth, halacha doesn’t change, right? We got it in Har Sinai, it doesn’t change, but it does. Just like language, it changes, but it changes slowly. It’s not like-

David Bashevkin:

And organically.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

And organically. It’s not like somebody can come and say, “Okay, I’m changing the halacha.” That’s not going to work, but it does kind of just happen, right? So there’s a lot of ways that halacha is like language. But I should add, there are ways that halacha is not like language, okay? I don’t want-

David Bashevkin:

How is halacha not like language?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. So-

David Bashevkin:

Because I have so many follow-ups to just this very analogy, but let’s unpack it first.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Right. Okay. So first of all, with language, we don’t really care if it changes, right? So if somebody woke up, from 100 years ago and discovered that words are used in some different way, even if they discovered that … certain syntactic rules that used to be enforced are no longer enforced, they wouldn’t say, “Oh my God, that’s awful.” They’d just say, “Well, language changes, I guess I’ve got to learn a few new tricks,” right? You’ve got fuddy-duddies who are going, “Yo, kids nowadays, they don’t know how to talk.” Right?

David Bashevkin:

Sure.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

But they just sound like fuddy-duddies. Everybody knows that language changes and nobody thinks there’s anything wrong with that, right? Now, with halacha though, I mean, if you woke up or I woke up 100 years from now and we discovered that people decided that it was okay to smoke cigarettes on Shabbos, right? Or that child sacrifice had suddenly become a thing, right? We wouldn’t shrug our shoulders like we would if we discovered that some word changed its meaning and go, “Yeah. Well, whatever.” Right? We’d go, “No, no, somebody has clearly gone off the path over here.” Right? “Let me go find that sect in Midbar Yehuda where they’re doing it right because these guys are not doing it right.” Okay.

So, despite everything I said about slow changes and not enforced and whatever. But nevertheless, we do have this notion in halacha that there are underlying principles and that what experts think counts and that there are certain changes that are just wrong. We don’t say any change that happens, “Oh well, I guess it happened.”

David Bashevkin:

There are boundaries to that change. And I guess it’s not so far from language, there are boundaries, I guess from language where we would say, this is no longer the original language or this is now the difference between a dialect versus being incorporated directly into English.

I think I have two questions for you in this analogy and maybe I’m taking it too seriously because I think descriptively of how halacha works and even my own language and my own relationship to halacha in this notion of halacha as language. My first question is, I could hear the voice of somebody I know who says, “Well, if you want to get people to keep halacha then there needs to be a divinity in the process. Where’s God in all of this?” And they’re going to say, “Well, if it’s just a language and it’s just the folk movements, this collective intuition of the Jewish people and it’s not … Whenever I go to a halacha shiur they always try to take every halacha and bring it all the way back to the original source and say, “This is why we do things.”

Now, not every halacha is necessarily stemmed from a biblical mandate for what we call de’oraisa, biblically mandated. But everything wants to be sourced. And my question is if descriptively halacha works as language, then where do you … and I’m asking you, Moshe Koppel, where do you find the divinity in all this? Or is it just kind of like the folk movements of the way that you, I don’t know, sing along to cheers at a stadium at a baseball game.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Right. Fair question. So, the answer for me is as follows. Lo b’shamayim hi, right? I can give you the frum answer by quoting the Gemara, right? But the fact of the matter is-

David Bashevkin:

Lo b’shamayim hi means what exactly?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

What lo b’shamayim means, it’s not in heaven. In other words, the way that halacha develops, right? That was a statement that was made in Tannaitic times already, right? So 2,000 years ago. Already then, they said-

David Bashevkin:

And based on a verse in the Torah?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Right. Exactly. It’s not in heaven. That once God gave us the Torah, the way that halacha develops is by human beings, preferably those who are expert in halacha and understand it, right? Are the ones that decide how halacha works at the margins, right?

There’s some things that we just know that are fixed, but then the arguments are always at the margins, right? You see that if there was a new case, it needed to be … So you had Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael and they would argue it out. And they would argue it out based on their understanding, their human understanding of halacha.

So, the way we see it is that halacha evolves over many generations, over centuries and millennia. And it’s all done as part of a human process, just like language is a human process and we see all this as being an expression of God’s will. God gave us the Torah when he did. And now it gets developed through a completely human process, which is the way that God’s will is expressed.

David Bashevkin:

Through the collective intuition of the Jewish people. Is that what you’re telling me?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Yes, exactly.

David Bashevkin:

So, I’m curious a lot about your own upbringing and your own experiences and how they quite brilliantly color your writings and interests. We’ll get back to your upbringing. You are a computer scientist and a pretty renowned one, no less.

And there is an analogy that I absolutely hate that I have heard several times growing up. And that is when people talk about following the minutia of halacha, they compare it to typing in a URL, www.google.com. And they say, well if you do www, google, com, it will not take you to Google. So if you make even a small error, it will not send you to the correct website. Now, this is an analogy that I always heard, and they said, and that’s the reason why to justify the attention to minutia in halacha.

am asking you now two questions. Number one, how does your role as a computer scientist inform your understanding of halachic minutia? Am I justified in being frustrated by that analogy? It never resonated with me. Halacha never felt to me like a URL, that didn’t seem to me like language. It felt like you’re still transmitting the meaning even if you make a small typo. In language, that analogy does not transmit.

If I make a small typo in the word “friend” and mix up the “i” and the “e”, they’ll still be able to read it. My second question is really to understand … So, what’s your relationship with halacha, Moshe Koppel? The attention to detail, the fastidiousness to halacha. Is that the world that you live in? Is there a way to be fastidious, and careful, and exacting in halacha if halacha is, as you describe, a language? It’s a two-parter.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Yeah-

David Bashevkin:

So I’ll let you go.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

It’s also a trap, but I’m going to try-

David Bashevkin:

All my questions are traps. Only trap questions.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

So it’s true. There are certain kinds of people who are attracted to math and computers because they can, and who are also attracted to a certain way of looking at halacha because that’s what works for them. But do I think there’s actually an inherent connection between halacha and being that kind of person? No, I don’t think there is. And I think your intuition is right. That, yes, we’d like to get it right. If you’re doing halacha, do it right. But there’s a difference between making a small mistake and making a big mistake. It’s not like in computer code that if you’re … It’s very unforgiving, right? I think that halacha is not like computer code, it can be forgiving, all right? If you’re going to-

David Bashevkin:

It’s more like a spoken language or a written language where-

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Don’t make mistakes, but there’s a difference between making a small error and a gross error, right? Like, Rav Meital used to say, right? There a halacha in the Shulchan Aruch that you put your tefillin on your left arm, and there’s also a halacha that tells you that you should tie your left shoe before your right shoe. And they’re not of equal importance, okay? So, not every error that you can make in halacha is of equal importance.

David Bashevkin:

So, let me ask you a little bit. If we look at halacha as language, and maybe this gets into your book and the character that you described named Heidi, and I want to be somewhat sensitive here, but I also want to hear your thoughts on this. Particularly in America, but also in the United States, we do have a lot of communities of practice of halacha that are not Orthodox, and non-Orthodox interpretations of halacha. And I am curious, if halacha is language, then how do you look at nontraditional? I don’t even like using that word. I’ll say exactly what it is, non-Orthodox approaches to halacha. You are Orthodox, all of your sources are couched in a very specific way, but there are other denominations that allow for far more fluidity. Do you look at that as another language? Is it another dialect? I’m almost asking the question. I’m sorry it’s so long-winded. If there is this descriptive component to how halacha evolves, is there any not moral high ground, but almost truth high ground to knowing one interpretation’s authenticity over another?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. So, my book actually deals with that at great length. And my argument is as follows. There are going to be variations in halacha. There are going to be different communities that do different things, and that’s perfectly okay, all right? But each one of them is dealing with the need to somehow balance between keeping halacha constant, solid, not changing too quickly, and on the other hand, adapting to changed circumstances, right?

So Satmar doesn’t look like YU and maybe YU doesn’t look like Hadar or Chovevei and they don’t look like whatever comes after that. My claim is that some of them got it right. And we’re going to know that 100 years from now, but we can’t know it now. We could take an educated guess, right? But some of them got it wrong and they’re just going to disappear, right? So, if we look back 200 years ago, when the Reform movement began, and we say, “Well, you know what? May have looked like a good idea to people at the time, but it didn’t work out. They’re gone.” Right? Those people who adopted Reform Judaism in-

David Bashevkin:

Well, that version of Reform, is early 1800s Reform. It has a very different character right now. And it didn’t achieve the goal that had hoped to achieve in the early-

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Its own ideology did not survive. So the question then is, all right, well, what about now? So, it’s very hard for me to throttle you and say, “No, look, look, look, can’t you see this isn’t going to work out? This can’t possibly survive. The walls you’re building between you and the dominant Western American culture are not high enough for you not to assimilate.” That argument is very, very hard to make. The only thing I can say is here are my arguments for why I think it’s not going to survive, okay? I can’t make a moral argument because that would be circular, right? I mean, if I want to convince you that what you’re doing is less moral than some other approach, you’re going to say, “Wait a minute, but what are your criteria for deciding what’s moral?” And we’re just going to get into a circular argument.

So, therefore, I spend the book making what I think is an empirical argument, which is, “I think that if you’re too this or too that, it’s just not going to survive.” And let me explain why. But I’m only going to win this argument or lose it 100 years from now when we see who did survive and who didn’t.

David Bashevkin:

It’s such an interesting argument that I could imagine some find deeply dissatisfying, but I want you to know personally, I think you’re 1,000% correct. And I always pause, that I think the truth is borne out ultimately in history of what survives and what doesn’t. And I don’t think we’re able to necessarily know it with 100% certainty in real-time. It’s a similar argument that Sam Lebens, who’s a past guest of ours, makes in his book on halacha and halachic change and it really does resonate with me. I’m wondering, you have this beautiful … and I’m sticking with this halacha as language. I’m going to beat this until it’s just people are sick of us, if they’re not already, but I just absolutely love it. You have this really beautiful distinction between halacha as a first language versus halacha as a second language. And I’m wondering if you can describe … And if I followed the book correctly and the earlier articles that it was based upon, it sounds like the model for halacha as a first language was your grandfather, correct?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

My grandfather and his gang.

David Bashevkin:

His friend and his gang.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Yes.

David Bashevkin:

So, tell me the world of your grandfather. Who was he? And I’m leading up to a question because it’s not the world that you, Moshe Koppel, seem to be inhabiting right now.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Right, well-

David Bashevkin:

Let’s first describe your grandfather. We’ll get to that.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

My grandfather davened like all of them. My grandfather and his friends were all refugees from Europe and they were survivors and they were in the West Side of Manhattan. They had a Gerer shtiebel there on the West Side. Wonderful people. They had been Gerer Hasidim before the war, full blown, and then their whole world was destroyed. They came to America, they put together this shtiebel, somehow, and they weren’t quite the same. In other words, they all still kept halacha in the old-fashioned way but almost all of them didn’t have beards, almost all of them no longer wore the spodik, the fur hat that Gerer Hasidim wear, usually it’s called a shtreimel, Gerer Hasidim wear a higher one that’s called a spodik. Then they wear the bekishe, which is the, kind of, long cloak, or whatever you’d call it.

David Bashevkin:

Cloak. That’s a great translation there.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

What would you call it? What do you call a bekishe?

David Bashevkin:

I’m going to start calling it a cloak. It sounds very Harry Potter-esque. I like cloak.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Cloak! We’ll go with it. So, they weren’t there anymore. They had been somewhat disillusioned. But, nevertheless, having lost their families, having lost their communities, they weren’t about to give it all up, right? They, kind of, felt that it was their duty to carry on and they carried on as best they could. And the thing is that halacha, the way they kept it, it kind of looks the same as the way people nowadays do, religious Orthodox people do. They kept Shabbos, they kept kashrus, they kept all those things, but it was somehow different. And the way it was different is, what you mentioned, which is if we’re within the halacha-as-language analogy, for them it was a first language. It wasn’t a second language.

For the people in the Gerer shtiebel, really, what the Mishnah Berurah said was kind of a suggestion. What really mattered was, well, “What’s the minhag here? What do people do? What is the custom?” Right? So, what I mentioned in the book, which certain kinds of people find particularly outrageous, which is very enjoyable to me, that when the Mishnah Berurah would say… And there are many people who do the following and they’re obviously wrong, v’hu rachum yichaper avon, right? And-

David Bashevkin:

God should forgive their sin.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

God should forgive their sins because they’re not doing it right. But he says, “That’s the way they do it.” If you were Shimon, right… Shimon is my hero.

David Bashevkin:

Your grandfather and his friends.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

My grandfather’s friend. Yeah. So, Shimon would say, “Oh, that’s the minhag and no less in authority than the Chofetz Chaim himself, the author of the Mishnah Berurah says that that’s what people do. Well, I don’t need to know more than that. That’s what people do. Good enough for me, The part where the Mishnah Berurah says, ‘He thinks it’s a sin and it’s wrong.’ Well, that just one guy’s opinion.”

David Bashevkin:

Uh-huh (affirmative)

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Yeah. It was a very, very much… They were people who were comfortable in their own skins, comfortable with the way they grew up, comfortable with the traditions that they had in their family and their community. And they weren’t about to get uptight because the Chofetz Chaim thought differently or because, some Brisker had a fantastic chakira in the Rambam that says that, “Everybody’s been doing it wrong for the last 500 years. We should all start doing it the way the Soloveitchik family does.” No, they really couldn’t care less.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah. I think my grandfather grew up in that kind of world as well. He was actually a student of the nephew of the Chofetz Chaim who had a hand in writing the Mishnah Berurah. He was a student of Rav Dovid Leibowitz, the first graduating class of Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim. And it’s interesting having been one of his formative students, I didn’t see my grandfather… He owned a Mishnah Berurah. He learned Mishnah Berurah, but I didn’t hear the rulings from him that frequently. Again, I was very young when he passed away and, maybe, had I been older it would be differently, but it was coming from a different world. But what I’m really curious about is well, we don’t live in that world anymore. We don’t live in the world where we’re able to protect that organic first language, halacha, the way that it was in the shtiebel. We are inundated by information on the internet, on Halachipedia and there’s been a groundswell of halachic information for every question that comes up.

David Bashevkin:

I am in no less than four halacha WhatsApp groups. And I’ll do a sociological study one day on the types of questions that are asked and the answers. And it’s, honestly, fascinating stuff. And a part of me says, “God, bless the Jewish people for being so curious and so exacting and so careful in the world of halacha.” But a part of me looks at it as the way you do — not critically in a malicious way, it’s not terrible — but, it does feel like we are learning a second language now.

And my question for you is, well, what do we do now? We lost the first language. And looking at you, you said you were raised in the YU beis midrash. I don’t know how you raised your own children, but is there a way to reclaim that first language orientation? Are we all doomed to halachic practice as a second language? Where do we go from here? Round of applause for describing so beautifully that first-language Judaism, but none of us are growing up in a European shtetl.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Yeah. You got a point there. I am forced to agree with you. I think that our objective, however, should be not to idealize halacha as a second language, but to try to restore halacha as a first language. Now, that’s not easy. What I argue in the book is not going to be pleasant listening to most of your audience, which is the following: I think that-

David Bashevkin:

They’re used to being offended, so…

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Oh, good. All right. So I’ll pile on then. I’m just going to pile on. It used to be that in the US, there was this middle ground. When I moved to Israel 40 years ago, it was a weird thing because you were either dati leumi, Kook-nik, hesder, that whole thing. Zionism was it. Or you were Haredi, anti-Zionist, Zionism was bad, ma’ase satan, right? It was all bad. And that middle ground, in America, where you say, “Hey, wait a minute.” You could really have it all. You could be somewhere in between Haredi and dati leumi.

You don’t really… It’s not a dichotomist choice, right? That used to be the case in Israel. And now it’s the opposite. In the US it’s really becoming much more of a binary choice and in Israel, because people feel much less threatened, Western culture is here, but it’s not as dominant. It’s not everywhere like it is in the United States. It is now changing in Israel where people are just doing their things. They’re just trying to find their own niche space somewhere between chiloni and dati leumi and Haredi. Everything goes now ,and what this is, I think, most of it is not going anywhere, but it’s people searching for something. “Get me out of these boxes. I don’t want to be in these boxes.” Right? I want to get back to some kind of scalable, comfortable kind of authentic Judaism. They’re reaching out, they’re trying, most of these experiments will fail, but, at the end, what’s happening in Israel is a striving for some kind of organic, authentic Judaism that makes sense.

David Bashevkin:

Well, we both may regret that I’m going to ask this question, but your prognosis or your assessment of the distinctions between US and Israel, let’s leave the US aside for a second. Israel has one issue that is quite difficult to allow the organic development of halacha. And, namely, the fact that halacha, in many ways, is intertwined with the state government. And I am curious… I just read an absolutely phenomenal book that I’m going to plug right now, even though it’s not my own. And my personal practice is only to plug my own books, but I’ll take a brief pause from that. The book is called “The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel,” by Alexander Kaye, which is the story of Rabbi Herzog, the second chief rabbi of Israel and his efforts to create a halachic state.

Israel is a Jewish state and legislates halacha. You can’t get put in jail for not keeping Shabbos but there is a way that halacha legislates and I’m curious… I know you’ve spoken out about this a while ago, and I know your views on this are not all that typical or traditional, but what difficulties does intertwining state-led religion have in our ability to allow a organic relationship with halacha?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Thank you for that question. No, I don’t regret that you asked it. I’m actually happy that you asked it.

David Bashevkin:

No, I might regret it.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

You might.

David Bashevkin:

I think you’ll love it.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Yeah. Okay. I think that the idea that the state is going to enforce halacha is a huge mistake. It might happen one day and it might make sense one day, but that’s when halacha is widely accepted.

Right now, the problem with that is this, as I said, if you want halacha to become a first language, if you want it to develop organically, it needs to develop bottom up, right? I mean, you need to sort of aggregate collective intuitions combine that with expert opinion, the usual process of halacha.

Now, if, if the government comes along and says, “Okay, we’re going to be enforcing this or that, or the other thing,” A, you’ve kind of nipped that organic process in the bud, right? Now, it doesn’t matter what anybody thinks because the government has, kind of, declared itself on the matter.

That’s problem number one. But I think problem number two is that the minute halacha becomes a matter of Israeli law, you have invited the entire Israeli legal process into it, which means that the Israeli Supreme Court, bagatz … they are going to be ruling on halachic matters. They’re going to say, “Wait a minute, if the rabbanut is in charge of kashrus, well, in that case, we think that you have to allow the heter mechira on shemittah, right?” Some special loophole that allows, every seventh year, the produce to be used in a particular way.

Now, that actually happened. I didn’t make up that example as a hypothetical. That really happened. Somebody sued the rabbanut for not allowing the heter mechira in particular localities. There was a lawsuit, it came to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, “No, you have to allow that particular loophole.” Now I may use that loophole myself, okay. I’m not arguing that it doesn’t work. It’s irrelevant. The last thing that I want is a bunch of secular judges — they’re not all secular, but many of them are — making halachic decisions. That’s the last thing I want. It not only changes the way halacha evolves, it not only makes it less organic, but it gets all kinds of actors involved in the game that should not have anything to do with all this.

David Bashevkin:

Let me play devil’s advocate for one moment and then I want to go to a new subject, but I do find this quite fascinating. And I never did. It’s really from reading this book by Alexander Kaye, “The Invention of Jewish Theocracy.” I guess, on the other side, there have been efforts. A lot of them have been led by, really, leaders, who I admire greatly, since the founding of Israel, that in order to preserve Israel’s Jewish character, the most contentious issues — who is a Jew, who has access to the Kotel — all of these super hot button issues, we need to legislate them or the very Jewish character of Israel will not be able to be preserved in an authentic way. Are you saying that religion should, therefore, have no role? I mean, these are issues that people cannot speak about without demonizing one another and we’re either demonizing the Orthodox Rabbinate for having this stronghold on the Jewish people and having them by their necks on the definition of what Judaism is and how it should be practiced or we are demonizing people who do not affiliate as Orthodox and saying, “What you do is simply not a part of our religion.”

And it’s an issue that I deliberately, as an avowed and passionate centrist who is also a people-pleaser, I avoid talking about this like the plague. I don’t know why I’m doing it now. I think it’s because we see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues. And I’m curious, how you think, what should the position be of somebody who wants to see the restoration of first language Judaism? What should the position be of somebody like myself on these very contentious issues? Should the state not be involved at all? Then where are we going to be left? What’s prayer at the Kotel going to look like? What’s marriage in Israel going to look like? What is the number one, most hot button issues, since the founding of the State of Israel? Who is a Jew going to look like?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. So, now let me attack from the other direction. Okay. Before I said that I think that for halacha to develop organically, the most important thing is to keep the state out of it. But, there are three exceptions to that, okay? The first is the state needs to decide certain things because it’s the state. All right. So, for example, the state decided — it didn’t have to do this, but every country does — the state decides who’s married. Okay. Why does the state even need to know who’s married? Right? The answer is that for tax purposes and other legal purposes, the state assigns to certain people the status of married. Right? Okay. So now you get to file joint tax returns, for adoption. There are many legal consequences to being married or not. Now, once the State has decided, for better or for worse… I’m not saying the state should have decided that it wants to be involved in the question of who is married. Okay? Once the state has decided that it wants to be involved in that issue, it does need to decide what are the criteria for marriage, right? So, it’s unavoidable. I can say from today till tomorrow that I think it’s great for the state not to get involved in halachic matters, but I understand that there are certain definitional issues that the state is already involved in and it can’t avoid. So it needs to decide whether somebody who is married by a non-recognized rabbi, that is not recognized by the rabbinate, are they going to regard that person as being married or not? Okay? That’s unavoidable. Right?

David Bashevkin:

Uh-huh (affirmative).

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Now, it’s the same thing with who is a Jew. Now, my preference would be, why should the state decide who’s a Jew? The state should decide who’s an Israeli. It’s none of their business who’s a Jew, right? But the state has the Law of Return, chok hashvut, that says that anybody who’s Jewish gets to come to Israel, right? That they have to allow you in. Now, therefore, the state has to decide who is eligible for the Law of Return, right? It’s just unavoidable. Now the state could say, a person is eligible for the Law of Return if they have undergone a conversion that meets the following criteria, which might include Reform conversion. They don’t need to say that that person is Jewish. They could just say that person is eligible for the Law of Return, right? So you could play games, but, nevertheless, exception, number one is those matters where the state has simply decided that it cares who’s married and it cares who’s Jewish. The state is going to use some criteria to decide who’s married and who’s Jewish.

David Bashevkin:

Do you think there should be a separate track that would allow, meaning not exclusively a religious marriage, but civil marriages? I might edit this whole thing out because it’s so contentious and I’m, literally, I’m walking on eggshells. I’m just curious.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. I’ll answer your question. I’m not embarrassed to, or afraid, to deal with these issues. Okay? The answer to your question is that the reason that religious Jews and the rabbinate legitimately care about marriage is they want to avoid mamzerim. They want to avoid people who are regarded as illegitimate children, that is children of a woman who is married to somebody else and had a child with somebody who is not her legal husband, right?

Those people, according to halacha, can’t get married. And we want to minimize that number of people because not being able to get married causes a great amount of heartache. And if the state isn’t keeping track of this, the rabbinate would start keeping track of who is a mamzer that can’t be married.

We don’t want to be there. Right? And the fear is that if people get married and divorced as they wish using all kinds of methods that are not recognized by halacha, I think we may end up having more mamzerim. Now, the best way to minimize the number of mamzerim is not by having a state monopoly on marriage. It’s by having a monopoly of the rabbinate on divorce so that anybody regarded as halachically married would have to get a halachic divorce. So, you should let people get married, non-halachically in such manner as they would not be regarded as married by halacha–

David Bashevkin:

Fascinating. That’s a fascinating proposal. I’ve never heard that before, but that’s quite fascinating. I hope everybody was holding on tight for that fairly contentious discussion. I want to come back and really this is-

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

To be fair, I said that there were three exceptions to where I don’t want the state involved in halacha and I only mentioned one of them. Can I quickly-

David Bashevkin:

Give us the other two. Yes. Give us the other two, I’m sorry.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. Another one is, there were matters, not of religion, but of nationality. So what is the state flag? I want the state flag to be the Israeli flag, which has the magen david on it, which is a Jewish symbol. What’s the national language? I want it to be Hebrew, which is the language of the Jews. What is the immigration policy of Israel? I want the Law of Return to be on the books in Israel as a Basic Law, right? I want all the symbols of the State of Israel, I want the days of rest and the calendar to be the Jewish calendar. None of these things are very specifically halachic, right? But they’re just symbols of the Jewish people. And I don’t think that it does any harm to the development of halacha to have all of these things, right? These are Jewish symbols, they’re national symbols, and there’s no harm in it. These things are all in the Nation-State Law that passed several years ago, which I was privileged to write most of the drafts of before it actually passed.

David Bashevkin:

Wow. That was so contentious when it came out,

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

It was. It was less contentious when we started moving it forward, when all the people who claimed to be against it, when it finally passed, actually were supporting it back in 2011. But let’s not get into that. The third thing I want to say is that if you can use the green ideology as a basis for legislating, if you can use any ideology in the world, progressivism or conservatism or whatever ism it is that you want as a basis for suggesting legislation in Israel, there is no reason that the Jewish religion should not be a legitimate basis for legislation in Israel. So, that’s just a principled point. Okay? I don’t want somebody to come and say, “You know what? No, we’re in favor of separation of religion and state. If that’s a religious matter, then you have no right to use that,” right? Rawls called that a comprehensive doctrine. You can’t use comprehensive doctrines in public debates about-

David Bashevkin:

Could you just unpack, give me a few sentences. What’s that Rawlsian principle of comprehensive doctrine?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Rawls meant that in the debates about what should be law and what shouldn’t be law, what should be legislated and what shouldn’t be legislated, well, we should use the kind of arguments that everybody has equal access to or equal attachment to. But, for a Christian person to come and argue on the basis of Christianity, right, well that — he says Christianity, he wants to give it a fancy name instead of calling it Christianity or calling it religion — he said, that’s a comprehensive doctrine, by which he means, well, some people have that and other people just don’t relate to it so leave that out of public debates.

Now, the fact of the matter is, that’s a specious argument. You could say that caring about certain progressive values or environmentalism or whatever, those are also comprehensive doctrines. All right? The difference between a comprehensive doctrine and every other ideology in the world is not exactly obvious. And it’s just a fancy way of saying, “Okay, every ideology in the world gets to say what they want, but the Christian should stay home and argue on the basis of stuff that we can relate to.” Okay? Now, I don’t buy that. I think that religion is as legitimate a basis for legislation and for public arguments, as any other. Having said that, with the exception of cases that I mentioned before where the government needs to be involved or where it’s just a matter of national symbols and what it means to be a Jewish nation-state, I think it’s just a bad idea from those who respect and care and love halacha. I think it’s a bad idea for them to get the state involved, but I don’t think that it’s ideologically objectionable.

David Bashevkin:

You are one of the smartest people I have ever spoken to. There’s no question about that. I’ve been reading your stuff really for well over… I don’t know when this book came out, “Meta-Halakhah: Logic, Intuition, and the Unfolding of Jewish Law,” but you contend a lot with the works of Rav Zadok HaKohen of Lublin, that was my master’s thesis, was focusing on his thought and really animate so much of what I do and you brought him to the fore. I kind of want to end our conversation on two notes, kind of coming back to the United States scene. I think, one of the things I struggle with in your book, and you admit it from, really, the outset, that it’s much more descriptive. It tells you, it tells you the lay of the land. This is how things have evolved and how things are. If somebody were to come to you, who is enamored by Western culture, who is enamored by the world of the university and the academy, the world which really you emerged from – you are Ivy League-educated, worked with high-powered companies and do all sorts of fascinating work — but they wanted a reason to adopt halacha as a first language. They wanted a motivation. Why change lanes? You could tell me outside of the argument that I find least satisfying, which is continuity, continuity, okay. Continuity, continuity… You could append continuity to convince anybody of anything. What else? Why would somebody change lanes? You’ve painted a beautiful portrait of this world of an organic first language, confident relationship with Yiddishkeit, with Jewish practice, with halacha and the world that is enamored with a different set of values. Is there any argument to be made for why would somebody switch lanes?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. So the objection that you raise, which is a legitimate one, is that my book is entirely descriptive and not prescriptive. It doesn’t grab you by the throat and say, “Do this,” right? It just says, it says, “Look, I think that certain kinds of societies have certain kinds of properties,” right? So that if you’re traditional and you respect different kinds of morality, different flavors of morality, and if you are sufficiently conservative and if you have certain kinds of beliefs, then you will survive, right? So it’s really a descriptive claim. It’s empirical and so forth. But I just want to point out to you that this dichotomy between descriptive and prescriptive, it’s kind of slippery, right? It’s not really a dichotomy.

If I say in the book, “If you do X, then the consequences will be wonderful. But if you do not X, then the consequences are going to be catastrophic.” Now, that’s entirely descriptive. I haven’t told you what to do, but you understand that really it is prescriptive, right? Really, what I’m saying to you is, “You probably want to do X. If you want to be part of a society that has a future, that’s going to survive, that’s going to do good things, that’s going to meet your own criteria for goodness and morality and so forth, then you probably ought to be doing this rather than that.” Okay?

So I don’t really buy that distinction between descriptive and prescriptive. What I was trying to do in the book was to use the best arguments I could to persuade you that the traditional way of life is going to lead to certain good consequences. And my hope is that if it resonates with you, if somehow emotionally, you respond to that by going, “Yeah. I want to be part of that process. I think, yeah, that’s where I want to be headed,” then it will slightly shift you in the direction of more attachment to that kind of traditional life.

David Bashevkin:

What are those good consequences? What do you get from it?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

What you get from it, you get to be part of a society that is going to long outlive you. Okay? You are going to be part of a society that’s going to grow and it’s going to flourish in the future, that the values that you hold dear and that the social norms that you accept, embody, they will continue long into the future, so that even after you are gone, they will still be alive in your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren. That’s what you get.

David Bashevkin:

I have a final question before the rapid fire, and it’s uniquely where you are situated as a computer scientist. It’s something that I’ve addressed in previous series that we ran, particularly on rationality. There is a growing movement of a real commitment to rationality and sequential thought, altruistic giving, all sorts of really… communities that have emerged together surrounding ideas about what AI and the singularity, artificial intelligence, the future of computer science, is going to be able to do in liberating human thought and creating, and almost proposing this utopian future, where we have this singularity, trans-human community where we’re no longer shackled by these cultural differences, these particularities that we’ve inherited from our grandparents. And I’m curious for you, as a computer scientist, and no doubt some of these names I’m sure you have either interacted with or know personally, the Eliezer Yudkowskys of the world… I don’t have to go through the whole list. Slate Star Codex, which is Scott Sandage, I believe. I may have gotten his name wrong. Scott Alexander, I’m sorry. And there is a proposition, which is trying to urge people that the only guiding measure for how to live their lives should be this kind of rationality that should guide our lives, and all of these cultural particularities that we’ve inherited only bias us away from a more enlightened life and future. You are a computer scientist. Dare I say, of the highest order? I don’t know if you would describe yourself as such. I know you had some lawsuit with Google over there, very search engine.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

It wasn’t a lawsuit. It wasn’t a lawsuit, but I hold a patent that is identical to their very first search patent. There was never a lawsuit.

David Bashevkin:

Okay. But you’ve achieved more in computer science than your average computer programmer. I think that’s fair to say. You’ve been in this for a long time. How do you look at this trends towards this utopian universalism? And how do you make a case for the particularism of religion without falling into all of the negative cliches of just cultural tribalism? Even when you made the case for what should motivate your Judaism, it felt a little tribally for me. Is there a way that we could make the case for that, of that very specific love, rather than that universal appreciation for all of humanity and building that singularity, that kumbaya moment, where we’re all on equal footing?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. I just want to tell you that, yes, I do know a lot of these rationalism people, and to put them and kumbaya in the same sentence, it would shock them greatly. They are the most un-kumbaya people you can imagine, but let me just say the following. I really enjoy these guys, and I probably read these kind of nerdy rationalists, you mentioned Yudkowsky, but Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen, and all of these… I love them all. They are wonderful. I find them extremely, extremely enlightening to read, but I think of them the same way that I think of you Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, many of your listeners will be familiar, the late philosopher, doctor, biologist, et cetera, who had a very extreme view on separation of religion and state in Israel, much more extreme than my view on religion and state in Israel, and on the nature of religion as not serving any human purposes and so forth.

And I find guys like that useful because they take one particular angle and they take it to the extreme. So I’m not an extremist, but I find it very useful for the purposes of sharpening my arguments, or determining what my views are on the things by saying, “Well, let me see where I think these extremists have gone wrong,” but you really always need to measure your views against their views because they’re extremely precise, they’re extremely extreme. They are right out there. They say, “No, I’m going to take this one angle and I’m going to take it all the way to the end.” And it’s extremely useful as a device for determining what you really think. And these guys really are challenging. So if you take the Peter Singers of the world and you take these guys who are extreme, I find them very challenging and very useful.

However, they always go wrong somewhere. The place they go wrong is that rationality is a wonderful way for figuring out. It’s a generic term for saying, “Figure out how to maximize whatever it is you want to maximize. You want to maximize altruism? Figure out how to do it, and I’m going to show you how to do it.” And computer scientists, if there’s one thing they know how to do, it’s to maximize whatever it is you want to maximize. That’s what they’re good at. But in the end, we’re human beings. And the only way that we could figure out not how to maximize, but what it is that we’re trying to maximize, is to just use our intuition. We need to stop and think, “Wait a minute. What is it that we’re trying to maximize here?”

The nerds can come in once we’ve decided that and say, “What you want to do is save lives, what you want to do is have more happiness, what you want to do is have more continuity. What you want to do is have more loving communities and more social capital, well, let me suggest some ways that you could do it.” But the problem is of course, that you need to first figure out what it is you’re trying to maximize, and no nerd is going to answer that question for you. What might answer that question for you is your tribe. If you belong to a tribe that’s been around for a few thousand years and been working on these kinds of problems for a few thousand years, they may have figured out some of the things that you ought be doing and what are those things that you’re trying to maximize. They may have solved these problems for you. And society might be too complicated for some nerd to come in and solve it for you. All right?

David Bashevkin:

I need to ask. When you use the term nerd, are you including yourself?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Oh, totally. Totally. I live in multiple worlds. I live in a very closed tribal world that’s very conservative and lives on values that have been around thousands of years, and I live in a world of nerds that are writing algorithms for optimizing and for maximizing. I find both of them necessary. A good economist like Hayek or Friedman will tell you society is too complicated for you to just sit there and solve every problem using some algorithm. Sometimes the only way to do it is to depend on tricks of the trade that have been around for thousands of years, that have evolved over thousands of years, societies that have survived because they were the ones who got it right, and all the other societies that got it wrong, disappeared. So let’s not be so arrogant and think we can figure everything out. We can’t. Okay? The nerds are good for some stuff, but they’re not enough.

David Bashevkin:

There’s a beautiful analogy, and I just want you to say it quickly because I did find it quite moving before we really wrapped this up and I’ve had you for quite a bit of time and this has been absolutely enlightening, you have an analogy about looking at particularism versus universalism as different models of how you could bunch up sand together. Do you know what I’m referring to? Tell me that difference and tell me in just two or three sentences that case for the particularism. I found that imagery quite moving and resonant for myself. Tell us how that imagery for you is a defense, or at least a guiding reason for why particularism should not be discarded.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Right. So the argument is as follows: you can either love your family and love your tribe, and try to help-

David Bashevkin:

Start with the imagery of the sand.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. The sand–

David Bashevkin:

Because I love it.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

If you have a certain amount of sand, sand I’m using as a stand in for your time, for your energy, for your resources. You’ve got a finite amount of all those things. Now, you can either say, “Look, here’s a little pile of sand. The people who are close to me, my immediate family, those are the people at the center of this pile. Those are the ones I’m going to help the most. As I get further, my extended family, I’m going to help them a little bit less. My tribe, I’m going to help them a little bit less, but I’m going to help them.” And as you go further out, you help them less and less. Okay? But you’re going to be helping people. Now, supposing I say, “You know what? This whole idea of tribalism, it’s evil. We shouldn’t be loving people who are closer to us, people who are in our tribe more than we love people who are outside our tribe. We should be loving everybody in the world equally.” Well, then you might as well just take that sand pile and spread it flat and thin, covering the-

David Bashevkin:

One grain deep.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

It’s gone. It’s shallow. It’s not there. There’s nothing there. You spread your finite amount of sand over a radius of a million miles, and there’s simply nothing there. So I’m saying the whole world would be better off if everybody would care for their family, their extended family and their tribe. That way everybody would have somebody taking care of them than if everybody would simply say, “You know what? All I care about is the whole world. I don’t want to love anybody more than I love anybody else.” The people who want to love everybody, well, truth is, they love nobody.

David Bashevkin:

This has been absolutely illuminating. And your book, “Judaism Straight Up,” and your earlier work, “Meta-Halakhah: Logic, Intuition, and the Unfolding of Jewish Law,” I found them extremely engaging and provocative, as your thought always is. I always end my interview with a little bit more rapid fire questions. If there was book that somebody wanted to read — not your own, so we’ve already plugged your books — that introduced this world of birth language halacha, somebody who wanted to understand the halachic system and how it works, again, you have written about this and I would recommend yours, are there any other books that you would recommend for somebody to develop this organic approach, whether it’s to halacha or Jewish life as a whole?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Halacha, that’s a difficult question on halacha, but if I had to recommend a book that covers a lot of the topics that are covered in my book about morality in general and tribalism in general and universalism versus tribalism, I really recommend Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Righteous Mind.”

David Bashevkin:

A past guest on 18Forty.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Seriously, you got Jonathan Haidt on 18Forty?

David Bashevkin:

Absolutely.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

You’re the man.

David Bashevkin:

He came on special because it was a tribute to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

How wonderful. Anyway, that book, without mentioning halacha once, without mentioning Judaism once, and in many ways, being completely orthogonal, if not opposed to my view, but when it comes to the question of the scope of morality and the difference between tribal thinking and universal thinking, it’s just such an enlightening book.

David Bashevkin:

I loved it as well. It’s right behind me if you could see on the Zoom screen. It’s in the top corner somewhere over there, one of those three. My next question; if somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical or however long you needed without any professional responsibilities to go back to school and study a new discipline and get, dare I say, another PhD, what topic and subject do you think your dissertation would be about?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

My guess is that it would be something in economics, something in between behavioral economics and game theory, something in that area. It’s an area that I didn’t study in school and I’m very fascinated by. I read a lot about it now. I’m not sure that doing a doctorate in it would really matter. I could just read the books. But nevertheless, that’s an area that really fascinates me.

David Bashevkin:

What did you get your PhD in?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Theoretical math.

David Bashevkin:

Title? What was the title of this dissertation. You remember off hand?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Decidability, problems and number theory. It was about Hilbert’s tenth problem, diophantine equations. I assure you that the vast majority of your audience really couldn’t care less.

David Bashevkin:

No, we spoke about Hilbert’s early conference in the early 1900s to introduce our rationalism series. And you could check out that video on 18forty.org. My final question is I am always interested in people’s sleep patterns, particularly people like yourself. What time do you go to sleep at night? And what time do you wake up in the morning?

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

Okay. This is really embarrassing, but the honest truth is I go to sleep really, really late, sometime around, maybe after one in the morning usually, sometimes after two. And I get up, let’s just say, after shacharis.

David Bashevkin:

A man speaking to my heart.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

The 8:30 to 9:00 area, let’s say.

David Bashevkin:

Okay. Let’s say for arguments sake. I cannot thank you enough. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Moshe Koppel:

The pleasure’s been mine, David. Really, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much.

David Bashevkin:

It shouldn’t come as any surprise. I absolutely love language, but part of my love for language is that I began to pay more attention for the way I write in different mediums and platforms. I currently write a column on Daf Yomi. I write an essay for Tablet Magazine at the end of every tractate as we complete them with the Daf Yomi process. I used to write for Mishpacha magazine. I’ve written for blogs. I had an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. I’ve written books. And different audience, I text a lot. I tweet a lot, but what I started to pay attention to is the way I write in different contexts. And what I began to realize is that depending on your audience, you can very often write in different ways. And I think there’s an analogy for the way we express and our relationship to halacha in different venues.

I think we have one relationship of halacha when we are writing down what is the halacha, you reading a book that collects all the rules of halacha. That’s like you’re writing an official book to have it published. I think sometimes in our homes, our relationship with halacha, I would compare it to a well-written email. It may still have some typos that creep up in there. It may still have a couple errors if you had a copy editor in there, but look, we’re doing it every day. You have to write an email. You can’t send everything to be copy edited right away. And sometimes there are certain homes where the writing, so to speak, the halachic language is expressed almost like a text message. And I think it’s really important that we pay attention to the quality of our writing in different venues.

Sometimes it’s almost inappropriate to write with a highfalutin, very careful grammar in a text message. When you’re in your own home and you’re talking to your children, you don’t necessarily want the rigidity of a copy editor, but you certainly wouldn’t use the language that you use for texting when you are emailing your boss or you are writing a cover letter or a resume or publishing a book. And I think what’s really important is to have a certain versatility of language, so that the meaning of halacha is able to be expressed in different venues while ultimately preserving the language itself and most importantly, preserving the meaning that halacha is coming to represent. And that’s what I think we’re all doing and negotiating within our lives, finding out the type of language that we are best equipped to write and represent and to convey to others.

There’s some people who write so eloquently, so crisply, so clearly. There are other people who are kind of maybe like a little New Age-y, a little bit more highfalutin, a little bit more narrative driven, like these really imaginative sentences, but the writing isn’t necessarily as crisp and succinct as other peoples. And there’s some people who they’re still learning. They’re still writing their essays and it looks the same as a text message. But I think this analogy for halacha as language gives you an appreciation for the way different people are still learning and all of us ultimately are learning how to express, preserve, and convey the meaning that the greater halachic system is ultimately coming to preserve.

So thank you so much for listening. And it wouldn’t be a Jewish podcast without a little bit of Jewish guilt. So if you enjoy this episode or any episode, please subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends about it. You could also donate at 18forty.org. That’s 18forty.org/donate. It really helps us reach new listeners and continue putting out great content. You could also leave us a voicemail with feedback or questions. And don’t worry, you don’t have to leave your name. You could email us afterwards, like somebody just did. They left us a long voice note and then they expressed regret. They said, “No, don’t share that voice note, too much information there.” So please, leave us a voice note. We love hearing from our listeners anonymously or otherwise. That number is 917-720-5629. Once again, that’s 917-720-5629. If you’d like to learn more about this topic or some of the other great ones we’ve covered in the past, be sure to check out 18forty.org. That’s the number 1-8 followed by the word forty, F-O-R-T-Y.org, where you could also find videos, articles, recommended readings, weekly emails. Sign up. Join now. Thank you so much for listening and stay curious, my friends.