📋 Shiur Overview
Argument Flow Summary: The Virtues, Their Unity, and the Love of Truth
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1. Opening Question: What Is the First Virtue?
The shiur opens with a provocative framing question: What is the most important thing in the world? This is immediately recast more precisely: What is the first virtue (middah) a child must be taught in order to become a mentsh?
The premise: children are born without good middos — or with bad/unformed ones — and the entire project of Jewish education (cheider) is fundamentally about character formation: becoming a mentsh.
Side Digression: Evolution and Becoming a Mentsh
A humorous tangent: the reason Jews don’t believe in evolution is that we’ve been watching monkeys for a long time and they haven’t become mentshn yet. The common objection is flipped — people say evolution makes humans too small, but actually it makes humans too big, because it claims even a monkey can eventually become a mentsh. This connects to a theme from previous classes: people have unrealistic expectations about the timescales of cosmic and natural cycles.
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2. The Prerequisite of Good Middos for Torah Study
Good middos are a prerequisite for Torah learning. This is grounded in the Rambam (Hilchos Talmud Torah): a talmid she’eino hagun (an unfit student) should not be taught Torah. The proper response is to tell him to do teshuvah first.
Practical question: What if such a person shows up to the shiur anyway?
You give the shiur regardless. The person with bad middos simply won’t understand — it’s a gezeiras min hashamayim (heavenly decree). The truth is inaccessible to someone whose character isn’t prepared for it. This is likened to Pesach being “in your heart” — if you don’t genuinely want to understand, you won’t.
Key distinction:
– Talmid she’eino hagun = someone with bad middos (character deficiency) — this is the real barrier.
– Talmid she’asah ma’aseh ra = someone who did a bad act — that’s simpler: just stop doing it.
Bad middos are worse because they make a person unable to receive truth, and harmful to others.
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3. What Is the List of Virtues?
The central question of the shiur: What is the actual curriculum of middos (virtues) that Jewish education hands a person? What qualities does our culture consider essential for the kind of person we’re trying to create?
Interactive exploration of candidate virtues:
– Patience — accepted.
– Courage — at least a certain amount.
– Attentiveness — possibly.
Side Digression: Is Curiosity a Virtue?
This becomes a substantive mini-debate:
– Big machlokes: Aristotle sees curiosity as a virtue; Augustine sees it as the yetzer hara.
– Curiosity is low on the totem pole in the beis medrash.
– Key distinction: Curiosity as wonder (awe-driven) vs. curiosity as aimless accumulation of facts (no order of importance).
– Aimless curiosity is critiqued as potentially being:
1. A form of rechilus/gossip (e.g., most history is gossip).
2. Accumulation of intellectual riches — hoarding facts like money, with no transformative purpose.
3. Miskabeid b’kelon chaveiro — using knowledge to feel superior to others (e.g., knowing that Rav Yonasan Eibeschutz was allegedly a Shabbetai Tzvi follower, making you feel better than him).
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4. The Central Virtue: Humility (Anivus)
The argument steers toward what is clearly considered the foundational virtue: humility (anivus).
Humility is framed as an intellectual virtue — specifically, an openness to listen.
Other bad middos discussed:
– Ga’avah (arrogance) — the opposite of humility.
– Ka’as (anger) — discussed with some ambivalence. The Rambam is strongly against it. The reason: anger means you’ve lost your mind — you can’t think clearly.
– Kavod (desire for honor) — not so terrible on its own, unless it leads to wanting your opinion to triumph over the truth. That collision is what makes it destructive.
Reference to the Mishnah: *Kinah, ta’avah, v’kavod* (jealousy, desire, honor) remove a person from the world.
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5. The Deepest Virtue: Dedication to Truth over Self (Bitul HaYesh / Hispashtus HaGashmiyus)
The argument culminates in what is considered the real core virtue for learning:
– Interest in truth = hispashtus ha-gashmiyus (stripping away materiality/physicality) as described in Sefer HaKedushah.
– Bitul ha-yesh (nullification of the self): Not wanting *your group* to be right — wanting the truth to be right. Not caring about your party, religion, nation, or ego — only about what is.
– This is identified as mesirus nefesh (self-sacrifice) — giving yourself over to reality.
– Most people, including the speaker and students, can only achieve this through compartmentalization.
Connection to Plato:
This is explicitly linked to Platonic ecstasy (ekstasis) — the truth is outside of you, bigger than your wants, opinions, and biases. Hispashtus ha-gashmiyus was said about this first in the philosophical tradition.
Critique of those who “want to know the truth”:
– People who loudly proclaim they want truth are often the ones who want to use it for their own interests.
– Real commitment to truth has a cost: at minimum, your time (Wednesday nights); more seriously, your desire for comfort.
– The common claim that people are “comfortable” believing what they believed yesterday is challenged — there is nothing genuinely comfortable about that.
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6. The Comfort of Existing Beliefs vs. the Discomfort of Seeking Truth
People commonly say they are “comfortable” continuing to believe what they already believe and therefore resist changing their minds. This attitude seems more like laziness than genuine comfort. One can be *more* uncomfortable suspecting that one’s attachment to existing beliefs is *hiding* the truth than one would be in simply holding onto those beliefs. The discomfort of potential self-deception outweighs the comfort of the status quo.
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7. The Audacity of Claiming to “Want the Truth”
The common posture of people who declare they are “searching for truth” (e.g., people who say their rebbe doesn’t give them truth and they want to find it themselves) is challenged as audacious: “Maybe the truth doesn’t want you. How do you know you’re worthy of it? What do you do for it?”
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8. Truth-Seeking as Practice, Not Mere Desire
The love of truth is reframed: it is not a feeling or a want but a practice — an intellectual virtue that begins and ends in disciplined activity. The practice consists in a specific kind of discourse: never settling for “that’s just what we have to believe,” never giving up because something is hard to think about, always trying to find a way to talk through difficulties.
This is distinguished from merely explaining what someone else said (which is valuable but is not truth-seeking unless done with the expectation that it will reveal more reality).
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9. Core Principle: Love of Truth More Than Self, Teachers, or Friends
The key Aristotelian principle from Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 6: Aristotle says he will disagree with Plato because, as much as one loves one’s friends and teachers, the duty (piety) of a philosopher is to love truth more than friends. This echoes something Socrates/Plato also said.
Critical qualification: This does NOT mean “don’t love your friends.” It means: first you must love your friends, and then, as a philosopher, you must love truth even more. The love of friends is a prerequisite, not something to be discarded.
Reformulated in Jewish-learning terms: “Don’t only love the *chacham* (wise person); love the *chochmah* (wisdom) more than the *chacham*.”
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10. The Moral Danger of Cheap “Truth-Loving” — Why Critics Are Often Horrible People
This is the central ethical argument of the shiur’s middle section:
– The claim to love truth is a moral claim about what kind of person you are — it sets you apart from most people who do not love truth in any significant way.
– Many self-proclaimed truth-lovers get their “love of truth” for free because they lack good *middos*. They don’t actually love their friends, their family, or their community. For such a person, “loving truth more than friends” costs nothing because they never loved anyone to begin with.
– Such a person is not a truth-lover but merely an egoist who cannot see past his own nose. He mistakes his contrarianism and social dysfunction for philosophical courage.
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11. The Social and Filial Duty of Agreement
Part of loving your parents and your community includes accepting — or at least respecting — their opinions. This is an element of filial love and social allegiance.
Side Digression: Modernity and Liberal Societies
Modernity and liberal societies have damaged this understanding of social allegiance, but this point is explicitly not pursued further.
Friendship inherently involves a degree of agreement: “You can’t be my friend and say everything you think is nonsense.” Most people experience disagreement with their beliefs as a form of disrespect. It is possible to give people warmth and generosity while disagreeing with them, but most people cannot separate the two.
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12. The Philosopher’s Special Position — and Its Limits
The philosopher has allegiance to a “higher God,” a higher truth that transcends social bonds. This is what justifies philosophical disagreement.
But even this has limits: The philosopher’s duty to disagree works best among fellow philosophers. Going home and disagreeing with one’s mother may not be the philosopher’s duty. Even a philosopher has a moral duty to his family — to outwardly agree with them (or at least not attack their beliefs). “What do they care what you think in your heart?” The family cares about respect and solidarity, not about inner philosophical reservations.
A person who says “I’m an *ish emes* (man of truth)” and therefore fights with his mother, wife, and children is not a man of truth — he is a pure egoist, a *shaigetz* (boor).
Summary Diagnosis: Why Critics Are Often Bad People
Critics are often horrible people not because criticism is bad, but because many critics lack the social virtues (love of friends, family, community) that would make their truth-seeking *costly* and therefore *meaningful*. Without those virtues, their opposition is cheap — just antisocial behavior dressed up as philosophy.
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13. Illustration from the Akeidah (Binding of Isaac)
The principle is illustrated with the Akeidah: The Torah emphasizes “*asher ahavta*” — “whom you love” — precisely to show that Abraham genuinely loved Isaac.
A Chassidic Rebbe’s teaching: God Himself testifies that Abraham loves Isaac. If Abraham didn’t love Isaac, the sacrifice would be no great feat. It is precisely *because* he loves Isaac that the willingness to sacrifice him is meaningful. This parallels the argument about truth: loving truth more than your friends only means something if you genuinely love your friends first.
Side Digression: Midrashic Detail
In a Midrash, when God says “your son,” Abraham asks “Which one? Also Ishmael?” — showing his love extends to both sons.
Side Digression: Loving Children Equally
The Chovos Halevavos is cited for the principle: whenever someone says “I love both equally,” you know he is lying. However, the halacha is that one should never reveal (*modeh*) which child one loves more — *l’olam y’hei adam modeh al ha’emet* is applied here in a nuanced way. Honesty about inner preferences exists, but discretion is required.
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14. Avraham’s Image vs. Reality — The Danger of “Not Lishmah”
The popular image of Avraham as the boy who smashed his father’s idols is critiqued. Even if that story happened, it wasn’t necessarily *lishmah* (for its own sake / for the sake of truth). Avraham wasn’t “allowed” to do that — it wasn’t the exemplary act people imagine. The real reason we keep returning to Avraham is precisely because his love of truth was genuine and deeply embedded in his character, not performative.
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15. The Difference Between an Opinion and a Thought
A key philosophical distinction:
– A thought is something you do — an active process of thinking in the present moment.
– An opinion is something you have — a stored, pre-formed position.
When someone asks “What do you think about this?”, most people replay a “tape recording” of past conclusions rather than actually engaging in fresh thinking. Real thinking requires *yishuv hadaat* (settled mind) and openness — the right “set and setting.” Most of what people express are not even thoughts but distillations of past thoughts or things others told them. Genuine intellectual engagement (thinking) is rare and requires deliberate effort.
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16. Transition: From Love of Truth to the Broader Question of Virtues
Love of truth is one *middah* (character trait/virtue). But what are the other essential virtues a person needs? This launches the major inquiry of the shiur’s second half.
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17. The Puzzle: Why Is There No Clear, Basic List of Virtues?
A genuine puzzlement: why doesn’t there exist a simple, well-known list of the essential human virtues — analogous to the *Aseret HaDibrot* (Ten Commandments)? When someone dies, the eulogizer (*hesped*) goes through a list of virtues to find which ones the deceased exemplified — but what is that list? Nobody can readily produce one.
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18. Attempting to Identify the “Top Three” Virtues
The class is pressed to name the top three virtues — not intellectual virtues, but the foundational moral virtues one needs before approaching wisdom (*chochmah she-be-shira*). The rationale: if you’re not a good person first, your supposed intellectual virtues will be fake.
Various suggestions and responses:
– Courage — acknowledged but set aside quickly. “Why? Justify it.”
– Honesty — mentioned.
– Humility — mentioned.
– Generosity/Kindness — mentioned.
– Abstinence/Temperance — suggested as a major yeshiva virtue.
– Consistency — suggested.
– Zrizus (diligence/alacrity) — raised but the student can’t clearly define it.
Side Digression: What Yeshivas Actually Teach
What virtues do yeshivas actually emphasize? The class struggles to answer. This is itself remarkable and telling — people go through years of yeshiva education without a clear, articulable list of core virtues.
Side Digression: The Shidduch World’s Implicit List
The *shidduch* (matchmaking) world has its own implicit top three criteria: (1) Does he learn well? (2) Does he have *middos tovos* (good character)? (3) Does he have money? This is presented somewhat humorously but also critically.
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19. Unpacking “Middos Tovos” — What Does It Actually Mean?
When people say *middos tovos*, what do they actually mean?
– Temperance (*not over-indulgent*) — identified as a primary meaning. This is the first virtue pinned down.
– Kindness/Chesed — suggested, but challenged. What does “kindness” really mean? Is it the same as being helpful? The distinction matters: kindness is vague and “could be plugged into anything,” whereas being helpful (*azov taazov imo* — the obligation to help when you see a deficiency you can fill) is more concrete and action-oriented.
– Humility — also mentioned.
The central, still-open question is framed: Where is this list of essential virtues? What’s going on with the fact that it doesn’t seem to exist in a clear form? Becoming a good person requires all of these traits, yet the tradition (or at least common education) has not transmitted a clear, memorizable framework — and this is a serious problem worth investigating.
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20. Additional Candidate Virtues
Further suggestions from the class:
– Hope
– Positivity
– Perseverance — singled out as “more important than almost anything”
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21. The Inconsistency Problem in Traditional Lists
If one reads the relevant texts (Shemonah Perakim, Hilchos De’os), one finds multiple lists of virtues, and they are not consistent with each other:
– Shemonah Perakim, Chapter 2 vs. Chapter 4: The same list appears twice but changes between the two occurrences — the Rambam apparently “forgot his previous list,” removing one item and adding another.
– Hilchos De’os, Chapter 1: A third list.
– Hilchos De’os, Chapter 2: A sort of fourth list.
Key point (labeled “ba’aya” — a problem): The lists are inconsistent. This is a genuine philosophical difficulty, not merely a textual curiosity.
Side Note:
Some traditions have much clearer, more organized lists — e.g., the Chovos Halevavos, which in its entirety functions as a kind of list of virtues.
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22. Finding Commonalities Across Inconsistent Lists
Despite the inconsistency, a method of convergence is proposed: look at what keeps appearing across different lists, different people’s answers, and different occasions of reflection.
– If you survey many people, or ask yourself repeatedly over time, certain virtues will recur. Those recurring items are likely the ones that are more important, more basic, more central, or more needed.
– Counter-consideration: It’s also possible that the virtues you *don’t* mention are precisely the ones you most need — because their absence is invisible to you.
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23. Two Broad Methodological Approaches to Generating the List
A distinction between bottom-up (empirical) and top-down (rational) approaches:
A. Bottom-Up / Empirical Approach
– Look at what good people do — observe their behavior and try to categorize it into “little boxes” (categories of disposition).
– Look at what goes wrong — observe failures and figure out what excess or deficiency they represent.
– This is messy but possibly the best available method.
B. Top-Down / Rational Approach
– Start from some general principle (e.g., “What is a good person?” or “What are human beings?”) and try to derive the specific virtues from that.
– The challenge: how do you get from the most general claim (“a good person is someone good at being a person”) to a specific list of particular virtues?
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24. The Difficulty of Moving from “Virtue” to “The Virtues”
A sustained dialectical exchange explores whether one can deduce the specific virtues:
– There could be technically unlimited virtues — but not anything can be a virtue. Virtues are categories of human disposition, not arbitrary traits. The question is how to enumerate those categories.
– One *has* to do it empirically — start with what human beings do, then figure out how they can do it well.
– But are there other ways?
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25. Organizing Virtues by Hierarchy of Activities
A student proposes organizing virtues by which virtues are prerequisites for other virtues — a hierarchical/ladder structure. This is unpacked carefully:
– This is really a way of organizing virtues, not yet of listing them. The distinction matters.
– The hierarchy is actually an ordering of activities, not directly of virtues:
– The best/highest activity is contemplation/thinking (the thing good in itself, not merely instrumental).
– Virtues of thinking: how to think well, think correctly — these are one category.
– But to think, you need prerequisites (e.g., material sustenance/money), so the virtue of earning money correctly is temporally prior but less important than intellectual virtue.
Key insight: The hierarchy is not generated by listing virtues first — it’s generated by looking at reality and asking what is needed for what. The organizational structure comes from the structure of human activity and its ends, not from an independent enumeration of virtues.
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26. The Teleological Ordering’s Limitation
The Aristotelian ordering of goods/virtues by what they lead to (the hierarchy of ends) may be *true*, but it doesn’t actually help generate a list of virtues. The reason: some things are good only because they serve a particular step, not because they contribute to the ultimate end directly.
Illustrative example: To be a *Talmid Chacham* (Torah scholar), you need money; to get married, you need *Gute Middos* (good character traits). But the *Middos* that make you marriageable are good *for marriage*, not directly good *for learning*. Each step has its own requisite virtues. So the list of virtues is not a list of steps, nor a list of what’s needed for the *next* step — it’s a list of what’s needed *at each particular step*.
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27. A Third Method: Organizing Virtues by Parts of the Soul/Person
A third approach to generating a complete list builds on the distinction between intellectual virtue and character virtue:
– Intellectual virtues belong to the intellect/mind.
– Character virtues belong to the appetitive/desiring soul.
– One could subdivide further into as many powers or faculties as the person has.
– If you have a complete list of the parts of the person, you can generate a complete list of virtues by assigning virtues to each part.
Key methodological point (top-down vs. bottom-up): Starting from the top (broad categories) gives you a list that is at least *generally* complete — subdivisions can be added but the top-level categories already include everything. Starting from the bottom (particular observed subdivisions) risks incompleteness because you only capture what you happen to notice.
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28. Summary of Three Methods
1. Empirical/bottom-up: Observe people, compile lists, hope nothing important is missed.
2. Aristotelian/teleological: Order virtues by the hierarchy of goods/ends; identify what virtues are needed at each level or step.
3. Parts-of-the-soul method: List all parts of the soul (or body, or society), then determine the virtues proper to each part. This yields at least a *generally* full list even if not every sub-particular is captured.
*Note: Methods 2 and 3 overlap somewhat, since the highest part (the mind) can be both the ultimate end AND a specific part with its own virtues.*
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29. The Critical Problem with Method 3: Virtues of the Whole
A fundamental flaw in the parts-based approach: there may be virtues that do not belong to any single part, but rather to the whole person, or to the relations between parts.
The Table Mashal (Analogy)
– You can list all the parts of a table (legs, surface, screws, corners, paint) and specify what makes each part good (strong legs, shiny paint, precise corners, etc.).
– But having all excellent parts does not give you a good table — it gives you “a bunch of parts” (“That’s IKEA”).
– A table with the strongest possible leg but a tiny, mismatched top is “some weird monster,” not a good table.
– The design, the fitting-together, the proportionality of parts to each other — these are qualities of the *whole*, not of any individual part.
Conclusion: “It is actually very silly to just list parts. You have to talk about the whole thing.”
Side Digression: The Kollel in Gematria
An analogy is drawn to the practice in *gematria* (numerological Torah interpretation) of adding a *kollel* (adding one for the word as a whole). *Rav Pinkus* is cited: just as a word is more than the sum of its letter-values, a thing is more than the sum of its parts — you need to account for the whole.
Self-critical aside: The *kollel* practice is debated — since you only add it when one side doesn’t match, it seems like “cheating.” If you always added one to everything, it would make no difference. The analogy is conceded as imperfect but the underlying point stands.
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30. Virtues Belong to Persons, Not Parts
The deeper philosophical point: the only real virtue is of the whole, because virtues are not properties of hands, feet, or even specific desires — they are properties of people. People are not reducible to their parts. Virtues are *of persons*.
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31. Why “Virtues of the Parts” Are Insufficient — The Holistic Necessity (Expanded)
Virtues belong to whole persons, not to isolated faculties. Just as health of a hand means the hand functions well *within the whole body*, so too a virtue like kindness only counts as genuine virtue when it is integrated with the whole person.
“Too much kindness” is not really an excess of kindness per se — it means kindness that conflicts with other dimensions of one’s humanity or with other people’s humanity. Any single virtue, pursued in isolation, becomes distorted.
Implication: If we need “virtues of the whole,” then in some sense all part-virtues are subservient to the overarching virtue of being a good, integrated person. One might argue we should just drop the part-virtues entirely.
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32. The Counter-Problem: “Just Be a Good Person” Is Too Vague
If we abandon part-virtues and just say “be a good person,” we have *nowhere to begin*. There is no isolable starting point for understanding or cultivating virtue.
Resolution of the tension: You can start with *any single virtue* (e.g., kindness), but if you pursue it fully and correctly, it *necessarily implies all the others*. Complete kindness requires wisdom, courage, justice, etc. — otherwise it becomes distorted. This is analogous to the table *mashal*: a proper leg is one that fits correctly with the whole table.
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33. The Mitzvah Analogy: One Mitzvah Implies All Others
The holistic principle is illustrated through the framework of *mitzvos*:
The formula of *Leshem Yichud*: It says “and the 613 *mitzvos* included within it” — because you cannot properly perform even one *mitzvah* without involving others.
Extended Mashal — The Man Who Only Does Tefillin:
– To put on *tefillin* properly, you need *Guf Naki* (bodily and mental purity) — that’s already another *mitzvah* (correct thoughts).
– The *parshios* (passages) inside the *tefillin* contain content that must be meaningful to the wearer.
– Shabbos problem: If this person doesn’t keep Shabbos, he would put on *tefillin* on Shabbos — but that’s incorrect, since *tefillin* is an *os* (sign) and Shabbos is already an *os*, making it redundant/contradictory. So he must keep Shabbos too.
– He must also say *Krias Shema*, because the Gemara says one who puts on *tefillin* without reading *Shema* is like bearing false witness (and vice versa).
– He must teach Torah to his children (as stated in the *tefillin* passages: *v’limadtem osam es bneichem*).
– And if he teaches Torah without fulfilling it, he’s a liar — so he must keep the entire Torah.
– Conclusion: One *mitzvah*, done correctly and completely, generates the obligation of all the others.
Side Note — The Rogatchover’s Point:
The Rogatchover was right that we shouldn’t reduce becoming a Jew to “put on *tefillin*” — but the deeper truth is that putting on *tefillin* fully *does* mean everything else. Half-*tefillin* is not real *tefillin*.
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34. Application Back to Middos: The Same Holistic Logic
Every *middah* works the same way: You don’t need to enumerate all of them, because doing any one correctly already implies all the rest. But if you push one *middah* to the extreme without caring about the others, you become extreme and fail even at that one.
Worked Example — Humility:
– What is humility? The humility discussed earlier was an *intellectual* virtue (openness, recognizing you might be wrong).
– How does intellectual humility connect to the desire soul (the appetitive/emotional dimension)? It does connect, but requires several more steps to show.
– The problem of excessive humility: “Maybe someone else is right” taken to the extreme becomes: “I never know anything.” This is not humility — it’s being a *shmatta* (pushover), weak-minded rather than open-minded.
– Such a person lets others steal from them and their friends because they “don’t know who’s right.”
– Life and all *middos* depend on knowledge; you can’t function without some confident knowledge.
– Humility requires a counter-virtue: Something like courage or *azus* (boldness). The correct amount of humility requires also having the opposite quality in proper measure.
– How do you know the correct amount? You have to learn *Choshen Mishpat* (monetary/civil law) — as discussed in a previous *shiur* from the *Chazon Ish* — to know who is actually right in disputes.
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35. Honest Assessment: What Does the Holistic Point Solve?
This holistic insight is a true point — each virtue implies all others; you can’t isolate one without the rest. But it is NOT a full answer to the fundamental question.
The Persistent, Unresolved Question:
– Nobody can give a definitive list of the good *middos* and the bad ones.
– Even according to specific *shitos* (e.g., Breslov, which emphasizes *emunas chachamim* and *temimus*): Tell me the actual list!
– The Mishnah objection: Someone might say “the Mishnah has a list.” This is rejected as evasive (*dreiying mir a kup*): saying “there’s a Mishnah” doesn’t help if the person can’t actually articulate what the list is and whether each item is truly good or bad in all circumstances. “Know the Mishnah” is not the same as having a clear, usable list.
– The frustration remains: the holistic point explains *why* lists are inadequate (because every virtue is context-dependent and interconnected), but it doesn’t resolve the practical need for guidance on what the virtues actually are.
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36. The Challenge of Getting a Straight Answer About Virtues
When asked to name the most important virtues, yeshiva students quote sources — specifically the Mishna and Mesillat Yesharim’s famous ladder:
> זהירות, זריזות, נקיות, פרישות, טהרה, חסידות, ענווה, יראת חטא, קדושה
This is not actually answering the question. The question was: *Who is the good person? What is your picture of a good guy?* Responding with a quotation reveals that the most valued “virtue” in yeshiva culture is the ability to quote a Mishna — which is itself a kind of midda, but not a substantive engagement with the question. Quoting instead of thinking is “not interesting.”
Side Digression: Nobody Knows What These Terms Mean
Even the Mesillat Yesharim itself is a *chakira* (investigation) into what these terms mean — nobody actually knows their content just from the list. The list alone conveys no real information.
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37. The Broader Problem: No One Has a Definitive List
The problem extends beyond yeshiva students:
– The Rambam doesn’t really have a fixed list.
– Aristotle doesn’t have a fixed list either — he changes it between books and chapters. This is because Aristotle is a “bottom-up” thinker who surveys salient virtues empirically rather than deducing them from a system.
– Plato does have lists — “correct lists, because he’s a top-down kind of guy.”
This inability to produce a definitive list is described as genuinely annoying (*kasha*).
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38. The Teretz: Unity of the Virtues
The resolution (*teretz*) to this annoyance is the doctrine of the unity of the virtues:
– You don’t actually need a correct, complete list.
– A complete list might matter for *limmud haTorah* (Torah study as an intellectual exercise), but not for becoming a good person.
– Any reasonable list of salient virtues you observe in people you admire will implicitly include all the virtues — because if it doesn’t, you’re describing a bad or unbalanced person (“a weirdo”).
Key Illustration: The Tzaddik Known for One Midda
– When a righteous person is famous for one particular virtue, it usually means they exaggerated that virtue — and that was actually their weakness, their point of imbalance.
– Example: “He was such a masmid — in short, he never helped his wife.”
– Praising a single virtue in someone often signals its distortion rather than its perfection.
– The truly good person — the one about whom people say at the levaya “there was nothing special, he was just a good guy” — is the one who has all the virtues in proper measure, so no single one stands out.
The Rebel and the Conformist
– Even being a rebel must be done in the correct amount, alongside being a conformist in the correct amount.
– The person who does both correctly is simply perceived as “a good guy” — nobody notices the rebellion or the conformity.
Side Digression: Rav Shach’s Famous Kasha About Emes
A well-known question about a figure known specifically for the midda of *emes* (truth) is raised. It illustrates the general point: most people are not complete or balanced.
A student suggests that a person’s “specific midda” might not mean their only virtue but rather their entry point — their way of accessing all the other virtues. This is accepted as possible: if you take any single virtue seriously and don’t use it as license to neglect everything else, it can lead you to all the good things. The tefillin story is referenced — committing to never lying forced someone to become a complete Jew.
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39. Does Balance in One Virtue Transfer to All Others?
A student asks whether the Rambam’s recipe for balance means that habituating oneself to balance in one virtue causes everything else to fall into place.
Skepticism About Transferability:
1. Perfecting one midda requires knowledge of everything else — you can’t perfect *anava* (humility) without knowing how to judge situations correctly, which involves all other domains of life.
2. Skills generally don’t transfer well across domains — being great at Gemara doesn’t make you great at science or at a job; intuitions are domain-specific.
3. The same likely applies to midos: moral judgment is domain-specific and doesn’t automatically carry over.
Partial Retraction of the Unity Thesis:
There is a personal disagreement with the “unity of virtues” position just presented:
– The longer your list of named virtues, the better — because naming things is one of the ways we notice how we should act.
– You need words like *anav* (humble) and *az* (bold) to recognize what you’re doing in the moment — “it’s very hard to realize that without having a word for it.”
– However, having a long list doesn’t resolve the problem of which midda to apply when.
– And you can’t just say “be a good person and figure it out” — you need specific vocabulary.
—
40. Clarification on the Rambam’s “Balance”
The Rambam’s concept of balance does not mean being a “moderate” in the political sense — “the moderate that nobody ever met.” It means being the correct amount in each situation, which is a much harder and less formulaic standard.
Whether finding “the correct amount” is itself a transferable skill remains an open question. The suspicion is that it is not easily transferable, though there may be some transfer — particularly in the context of the *Prishah* (separation/abstinence) and stages of virtue development — but this is deferred to a future discussion.
—
41. Conclusion: The Core Tension Left Productively Unresolved
– Unity of virtues suggests you don’t need a list because all virtues are interconnected and any genuine virtue implies all the others.
– But practically, naming and distinguishing virtues matters enormously for moral self-awareness.
– The truly virtuous person has all the virtues in balance, which is why they appear unremarkable — “just a good guy” — while the person famous for one virtue is likely unbalanced.
– Whether moral judgment and balance are transferable skills across domains remains an open and important question.
– The love of truth — the virtue that launched the entire inquiry — is itself only meaningful when it costs something: when it requires overriding genuine love of friends, family, and community. Those who claim to love truth but lack these social bonds and virtues are not truth-seekers but egoists.
📝 Full Transcript
The First Virtue: Middos as Prerequisites for Torah Learning
Opening: The Central Question of Character Formation
Instructor: Yeah, this is the sheet. Okay, the sheet is like this. What’s the most important thing in the world? That’s a weird question. Okay, what’s the first virtue you gotta have not to become a mentsh [mensch: a person of integrity and honor]?
When you have a little boy and everyone knows that boys are born without any middos [character traits] or with only bad ones or with unformed ones—depending on which framing you like better—and then we go to cheider [traditional Jewish elementary school] and we start teaching you how to become a mentsh, right? I want you to be a mensch, right?
Digression: Evolution and the Mentsh
Today I told someone that I think that the reason why the Yidden [Jews] don’t believe in evolution is because we’re watching the monkeys for so long—I could have mentioned those fiends of the monkeys—and they didn’t become menschen yet. It seems unreasonable.
Evolutionists really believe in Shiva [presumably: in transformation over vast time periods], like you could be a monkey for a million years and then you talk to a person. I don’t know. It sounds unreasonable. It doesn’t sound realistic. The monkeys that I know—monkey noiled, monkey umless—not happening. They’re not becoming mentsh, never.
But the Irish that’s more in Midnham [unclear reference], he thinks that you could become a monkey after a million years, you could become a mentsh. But anyways, not only the Yidden don’t believe it because of this, they claim they don’t believe in the revolution [evolution] because it’s making humans too small. It’s the opposite—it’s making humans too big. It’s saying that even if you are a monkey you could become a mentsh after a certain amount of years. That’s a very obvious next step.
But I guess people want everything to take very fast. That goes back to our previous classes—how people have unrealistic expectations on the cycles of the universe.
The Nekudah [Main Point]: What Is the First Middah?
Instructor: In any case, that’s not our shmiss [topic]. We’re back to the nekudah [main point]. Our nekudah is: What’s the first middas [character trait]? We teach a child first thing is you have to have good middos. If you don’t have good middos, we don’t teach you anything.
The Rambam’s Principle: Bad Middos as a Barrier to Torah Study
That’s another shiur [lesson], right? Why don’t we teach you anything if you have bad middos? Why don’t we teach you anything if you have bad middos? We don’t teach many Torah.
It says in the Rambam [Maimonides], someone comes to my shiur and I see there’s Talmud [a student who is unfit], what do I do? I wait. You have to tell him to have to do the first two of Teshuvah [repentance] and then you can come to the shiur.
And what do we do if there’s someone like that and he comes to the shiur anyways? You don’t know what we do? This is a test on all my previous shiurim [lessons].
Okay. The answer is that we say the shiur anyways. And the guy that has bad mood [middos] is not going to understand the shiur. It’s excited [a gezeirah: a decree]. That’s the Shemra Pesach [the guarding of Pesach]. Shemra Pesach is in your heart. If you don’t want to understand, you don’t understand.
Or if you don’t care enough—that’s my experience also—you can make up a whole different shiur that he thinks that I said. But then it’s not clear how much it’s my fault, or maybe it is a little bit, but it’s not my problem.
Distinguishing Types of Problems
So that’s the point: you have to have good middos. So what are the middos that we tell you to get? If he comes and says what did I do wrong, you say, “Well, you ate chaser [you did something wrong].” That’s not the point, right?
So what is this? What kind of problem could there be? Bad middos—those are the problems. That’s just how much, not how much, he stopped doing it, or he didn’t do it. Well, Shain Shalach [unclear: possibly “one who did a bad act”] means he has bad middos, right?
Someone who has bad middos:
– Not allowed to be shown the truth
– Also can’t be shown the truth
– And also causes harm to everyone
There’s a lot of bad things about that.
Identifying the Essential Virtues
Instructor: So my question, my interesting question is: What is the list of bad middos that we have, or good middos, which are the opposite of the bad ones, that we tell you we hand you—come to come into our smadrish [beis medrash: house of study], come into our culture, right? We educate you. What’s our education? What is our list of medicine [middos] you gotta have? Very important question, right?
You know what was the list?
Student: Patience.
Instructor: Patience. Okay.
Student: Courage.
Instructor: Courage, certain math at least [a certain amount at least]. Okay.
Student: Attentiveness.
Instructor: Attentiveness, if that’s a virtue. Virtues are what we—it’s the opposite, right? The things, the qualities that we think are important for whatever kind of person we’re trying to create. Those are the virtues, right?
Student: Like the truth better than your opinion.
Instructor: Oh, those are from my class. Okay, that’s what we asked.
Student: No, yeah, I guess I have to start somewhere, man.
Instructor: And for some being a good guy in society, what are the virtues?
Student: Is curiosity—it’s curiosity a virtue?
Debate: Is Curiosity a Virtue?
Instructor: Yeah, it’s a bit much. Lucas, that’s a quote who and who—like Aristotle and Augustine or something like that. Augustine says that curiosity is the answer to how to alliance [the yetzer hara: evil inclination], and Aristotle seems to think that curiosity is the answer to how to alliance [virtue].
So that’s a very good question: What kind of society do you like? Do we hold of curiosity in our madrash [beis medrash]? I don’t think so. Low on the totem pole. Depends on what you mean by curiosity.
Student: Number one thing. What do you mean by curiosity?
Instructor: Not as far as I’ve done that. Curiosity meaning you want to know the truth or curiosity—wonder. You don’t have to know a random thing. You and I hear of some curious person, I think of like, “I was curious like how many legs a caterpillar has.” Right.
Student: Okay. In wonder. I was curious. You know, what’s down? Like, okay.
Instructor: The curiosity to me is a search for a search for things that has no organization in order of [no order of importance].
Student: No, but I think you spoke about that once. He’s talking about something else.
Instructor: Right. You’re talking about two different things.
Student: Yeah. You spoke about that once. Yeah. But you spoke about that once in a shiur. Like that’s called curiosity.
Instructor: Right. That’s something like—I think it’s either a form of a Rechilis [gossip], I don’t know how you say Rechilis, gossip, like liking gossip. Like most Testerish Yerim [history books] about gossip, going to me, and I like it. That’s why I read them, because everyone, human beings like gossip. But that’s what it amounts to.
Or it’s a kind of accumulation of riches, like I have so—I have $20 in my back [pocket].
Student: How about prioritizing surprising things?
Instructor: It’s not something that’s going to affect the change of your character.
Student: Yeah, exactly.
Instructor: Or it’s a Muska with Bekler Havayrei [miskabeid b’kelon chaveiro: honoring oneself through the disgrace of one’s fellow] situation. It’s all about you knowing that you’re a smart guy. You know the business and the action [the story] as well as the chapter of the Tzvinik [Shabbetai Tzvi follower], but you’re not. You’re better than him. You’re not. So that applies to you, okay? Then you’ll be better than him.
Anyways.
The Core Virtues: Humility and Truth-Seeking
Instructor: Yeah, so that’s one. Okay, but what are the more basic virtues? We’re getting guys started, no virtues that are necessary for intellectual progress, because we’re supposedly trying to do that. But when you teach your children, what do we teach them?
Student: I think we can’t jump, I think we also can’t jump.
Instructor: Thank you very much. You know that I’m trying to get there, but I’m looking for a way to get there. You’re cheating. You’re like the chat that knows what I want to say.
Student: Humility?
Instructor: For intellectual virtue? For us, yeah. A kind of humility, which means an openness to listen.
The Problem of Anger
What are the worst things?
Student: Oh, anger.
Instructor: Anger?
Student: Yeah, anger.
Instructor: Why? I don’t know why I was so against anger, honestly.
Student: What’s the God that you’re angry at?
Instructor: Oh, because I think it’s like you lost a mind, then.
Student: Yeah, exactly.
Instructor: No, I’m not talking about that. It doesn’t say Kass [anger] on that Mishnah [teaching].
Student: What can I mean at least the Rambam said—
Instructor: No, the Rambam says it’s against kass [anger], that’s true. But I don’t know if there’s that—
Student: Yeah, nothing covered.
Instructor: Yeah, what does it mean like—like some of the ones on, right? I guess it’s the same thing. I don’t see that that’s such a bad thing honestly.
Student: Okay, now we’re going to my opinions.
Instructor: Oh, because then it would then would bump into wanting—
Student: Okay, okay, over the truth.
Instructor: Okay, that’s what he said.
Student: Yeah, generosity.
The Central Virtue: Dedication to Truth Over Self
Instructor: Just to be clear, but that’s one thing. That’s one very important thing. All of learning, learning means having an interest in the truth, which basically means especially gash [gashmiyus: physicality/materiality] means, right? I mean, it says in school meditation [Sefer HaKedushah: the Book of Holiness] that’s what it means, right?
Well, that’s one of the things it means. It’s like, yes, it was a bit like, yes, but I don’t want to be right. I want the truth to be right, right?
Just being interested in intellect means not caring about yourself or about your part [party] or about your religion or about your nation or anything—only about the truth, about what is. It means that you’re dedicated, you’re giving yourself over to what is. And then that’s pesiris neifis [mesirus nefesh: self-sacrifice].
Most people are not really ready for that, even us. We only manage to live by compartmentalizing. That’s what you’re talking about, especially the gospels [hispashtus ha-gashmiyus: stripping away physicality] and the scriptures.
Student: No, yeah, maybe in some sense first. I don’t know.
Instructor: We’re jumping around here because we’re trying to grapple.
Student: It’s one reasoning.
Instructor: Yeah, it’s definitely one point. Then I’m supposed to—now I’m going to make all this chat this Plato’s chat, like ecstasy [ekstasis: standing outside oneself], which means was said about this first.
The Truth Is Outside of You
The truth is outside of you, right? It’s bigger than your wants—you in the sense of not in the sense of your capacity to grasp the truth, but in the sense of your wants and your opinions, your biases, all these kinds of things—and wanting to know the truth.
When someone says, you know, when someone comes and says, “I want to know the truth,” who will they have that want to know the truth? Oh gosh, you want to know the truth? These are the ones wanting to use it for something, for their own interests.
Student: Yeah, I guess.
The Cost of Truth
Instructor: Who wants to know the truth? How much do you want to pay for it? What do you pay on Wednesday nights? Ah, first things. First you have to come every Wednesday and give away your time.
But more seriously, you have to give away your desire for like comfort. People for some reason claim that they’re comfortable and believing the things that we have no idea what’s so comfortable about that, but—
The Practice of Truth-Seeking: Love of Truth vs. Love of Friends
The Discomfort of Changing One’s Mind
Instructor: You heard the people saying this? “I’m comfortable believing what I believed yesterday, so I don’t want to change my mind.” You heard people saying that?
Student: Yes.
Instructor: It’s for sure kind of yes. I also don’t have what’s so comfortable about it. It’s like, it’s just, it’s laziness, I guess, but like comfortability, I don’t know. I’m more comfortable finding out like how things are really, I don’t know. What’s wrong about that? Mostly I don’t know, but okay. I don’t know if you have to have more comfortable in that. You’re okay being not comfortable as long as the truth is going to come along with it.
Student: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s okay.
Instructor: Or you’re more uncomfortable not knowing the truth than believing what you said yesterday. It’s uncomfortable. So you’re pretending to know the truth, but that’s not…
Student: No, meaning…
Instructor: For me, it’s also comfortable to continue believing what I already believe, but it’s even more uncomfortable to believe that my devotion to that is hiding the truth from me.
Student: Okay.
Instructor: I’m just having a great discomfort.
Student: Yeah, it’s just a game of words now.
The Audacity of Claiming to Seek Truth
Instructor: I don’t know, do you know people that go around saying that they’re looking for the truth? The Rebbe doesn’t give them the truth, they want to know the truth, is that your thing? People say that stuff?
It seems to me to be a very great, like, how do you call it? It’s very audacious to say that you want the truth. Firstly, maybe the truth doesn’t want you. How do you know you’re worthy of it? What do you do for it? How would the truth want you? You want the truth? You do?
Truth-Seeking as Practice, Not Mere Desire
But you see, this is now I’m talking about it as if it’s like a middah [character trait], as if it’s like a want. It’s not really a want. It’s a practice, right? There’s a practice to this. Like we say, everything, even intellectual rituals begin and end with a practice, right? There’s a practice.
The practice of search for truth is this kind of discourse, this kind of discussion where we never say, “Oh, well, that’s what we’ve got to believe.” Or we never say, like, “It seems to be too hard to think about.” Okay, if it’s hard to think about, then we’re stuck. Let’s try to find a way to think about it or to talk about it. But it’s a practice, right? It’s not a, should I say so? Not saying like you don’t want it—what do you do? You practice the search of truth or the practice the explanation of what someone else said, which is a nice thing to do, but it’s not searching for truth unless you’re doing that because you think that that’s going to reveal more reality to you. Okay, that’s anyways that’s one middah [character trait], very important middah.
The Aristotelian Principle: Love of Truth More Than Friends
But love of truth—love of the truth more than yourself, love of the truth more than your teachers, more than your friends, right? Remember? If you don’t love your friend, you see? Now you understand one reason why many of the critics are the worst people. You understand why? There’s one reason, sometimes. Not all of the cases, but there’s a reason why. Why are critics the worst people?
Because remember Aristotle said in the beginning of the Ethics, in Book 1, Chapter 6, that we are going to disagree with Plato, even though it’s like an uphill climb to disagree with him. Why? Because as much as we love our friends, our teachers—he calls everyone friends, kinds of love. Philia [φιλία: Greek term for friendship/love], you must love—it is the duty or the piety of philosophers to love the truth more than their friends.
That’s something that Plato said also, or Socrates said, says that about that thing. What this means is first you gotta love your friends and then you’ll—you love your friend. If you’re a philosopher, if you’re some person, then you should probably just love your friend. You don’t even know what loving truth means. But if you’re a philosopher, means you have a love for wisdom, you have a love for truth, then your duty, maybe including your duty to your friends, is to love that more.
So don’t say we’re going to defend this opinion because it’s an opinion of our friends if it doesn’t make sense to us, if you don’t understand it. We’re going to hack on it, we’re going to deny it.
Student: Maybe only philosophers have to love their friends?
Instructor: No, everyone is supposed to love their friends.
Student: Why that way advice that’s part of there’s no one friend?
Instructor: No, no, that’s—there’s such a kind of love. Of course the philosophers like to say that they’re the only one that really like their friends, but everyone should love their friends. And philosophers should love also the truth more than their friends—not not love their friends. I said it doesn’t follow, it doesn’t follow.
Meaning, don’t only love the Chochem [חכם: wise person], love the Chochmeh [חכמה: wisdom] more than the Chochem. That’s basically how I would say what he’s saying.
Student: But if the friends are not Chochmem [wise people], then there’s no continuation.
Instructor: What does loving your friends mean? Don’t love them as your wife, love them as you love the truth, like with Shaykhs [שייכות: connection/relevance]. Right?
Student: No, there’s Shanaim al-Ashaykh [שנאים על עשק: hatred based on oppression], but wait, there’s Shanaim al-Ashaykh, isn’t there?
Instructor: That’s where I was going, right?
The Problem of Cheap Truth-Seeking: Why Critics Are Often Horrible People
There’s many people that turn, that claim to love the truth and they say it’s easy for them to love the truth. They don’t realize that claiming to love the truth is making a claim on your moral worth and what kind of person you are. You’re setting yourself apart as a person from most other people who do not love the truth in any significant way.
And those people say, “What do you mean? But this guy’s my whole society. Everyone is living in falsehood. They all believe all kind of nonsense. And I’m the first one or the last one that discovered this. And therefore I’m going to, I don’t know, write blogs on the internet against them, and so on.”
And this guy, he thinks that he’s got this love of truth for free. The reason he’s for free is because he doesn’t have good middos [character traits]. He just hates his wife. He doesn’t love his friends. Therefore, for him, there’s no chachma [חכמה: wisdom] to love truth more than his friends, because he’s a horrible human being to begin with. He’s just a great egoist who doesn’t even see past his own nose.
If you’re a guy who doesn’t see past your own nose, and you call that loving your truth more than loving your friends, you’re not a guy that loves truth more than loving his friends—you’re just a horrible person. And I’ve been zoicheh [זוכה: privileged/merited] to know many people that are like that. They pretend to be the ones that love the truth, but really they’re just ones that cannot see past their own nose.
The Social Duty of Agreement
And therefore, whatever thought he has, as opposed to anything that anyone else told him—loving your friends means also accepting their thoughts. Maybe not as truth, because you don’t know what truth is, but their opinions. Part of filial love, part of your allegiance to your society. This is very important. I think that modernity has ruined this by creating societies that are liberal and so on—we shouldn’t get into this.
But in reality, part of allegiance to your friends is agreeing to their opinions. And you know, within most limits, that’s just what friendship requires. You can’t be my friend and say, “Everything you think is nonsense.” I’m going to be very upset at you. Not me. Because I’m a crazy guy. And somehow I have figured out a way to give you kugel [a warm dish; metaphorically: warmth/generosity] while you say that. But most people, that’s the whole thing. That’s what we have to give kugel, you have.
But most people, that’s like, “Why are you eating my kugel if you don’t respect my beliefs?” And therefore, the people that do woe against that are usually bad people. And it’s a bad act to do, even as a philosopher.
The Philosopher’s Duty and Its Limits
The philosopher, his allegiance is to a higher God. He has a higher truth, a higher value that’s beyond that, and how that works within other people in society, you’re right. It works much better when he disagrees with his philosopher friends. If he’s going to go and disagree with his mother, that might not even be the duty of a philosopher. You understand?
It might be that even someone who is a philosopher, his piety to his duty to—I’m using piety as duty to something, right? His duty to his family is to agree with them. Not to agree with them for real, but to say that he agrees with them. That’s what they care about anyways. What do they care what you think in your heart? It doesn’t make any sense. But that’s a real duty. That’s moral. Otherwise, you’re a horrible person.
What kind of a good person are you? Like I can give you—I don’t know who you want me to talk about now—but like what kind of a person are you if you’re like, “I’m an ish emes [איש אמת: man of truth], I’m about the truth and therefore my mother, my wife, my children…” That’s not ish emes, it’s just a shaigetz [שייגעץ: Yiddish term for a boor/uncouth person]. And that’s one of the reasons why critics are often horrible people. Not always, but sometimes. Some of them are just the people that haven’t been socialized. They don’t have the social virtues. They don’t like their friends. And therefore it’s very easy for them to say opposite. But they don’t have the love of truth which goes beyond that.
The Akeidah: Illustration of Love Preceding Sacrifice
Which it says—which says I do very much love you, that’s a real thing. And right, if Avraham [Abraham] would be just a guy that doesn’t care for his children, that kind of Akeidah [עקידה: the Binding of Isaac] would be interesting, right? That’s what it says. I’m going back to saying that’s why it says in the Pasuk [פסוק: verse], “Where can we find a greater witness, a greater proof that someone loves his son, if God himself says you love him?” The Torah says, “You love Yitzchak [Isaac].” And this kid you should be mad—if he was just a guy, he wouldn’t be a chachma [חכמה: wisdom/feat]. He doesn’t really love him. If he loves Yitzchak, then it’s a chachma.
Student: No, but he does love him.
Instructor: Yeah, and you know what’s interesting? Avraham says—Avraham says things in a Midrash [מדרש: rabbinic commentary]. It says in a Midrash, in a Midrash, whenever someone says “I love both equally,” you know he’s lying, right?
The Search for a List of Essential Virtues: From Avraham’s Test to Contemporary Confusion
The Akeidah as a Test of Love Versus Truth
Instructor: I think so. What do you like best?
Student: Both.
Instructor: Okay, you mean to say you’re not telling me the truth. You don’t have to tell me the answer. I’m not saying it might be wrong to say the truth answer. I mean, I’ll tell anyone, even yourself, I’ll tell me which of each of you you like more. But it’s always true that someone likes their children more. One child or the other.
Student: Yeah.
Instructor: Or maybe almost always true. Unless you just don’t love, which is one excuse.
It’s time to just… The *Chovot HaLevavot* [Duties of the Heart, an 11th-century Jewish ethical work by Bahya ibn Paquda] says that it wouldn’t have been such a *nisayon* [test/trial] if Avraham wouldn’t have did the *Akeidah* [the Binding of Isaac] without love. Meaning, like what you’re saying, the love for truth more than the love for friends.
Student: Yeah, for sure.
Instructor: If he would be a bad guy…
I found that astounding when he said something like that.
Student: What do you mean?
Instructor: You’re obviously trading the love for your kid for the love for truth and now that you’re saying that yeah you have but that’s mine we sometimes that’s why we keep on talking about *Avraham Avinu* [Abraham our Father] for this purpose right because people have this like imaginary stove of you know as the guy that or going around this father’s father store I’m breaking the breaking the *gatchkes* [idols/trinkets] which might have happened but was *naaseh lo lashma* [was not done for its own sake] was not allowed to do not let it do that right so then a kid is that this is a *middah* [character trait/virtue] but this is like it’s a great thing of someone to claim to himself to love the truth we could talk about the practice that’s why it’s easy to what the practice of of searching for truth otherwise when I am learning nothing means that you it’s not an opinion right.
Opinion Versus Thought: The Difference Between Having and Doing
What’s the difference? One big difference in an opinion and a thought. I thought something you do, an opinion something you have, right? Whenever someone asks you a question you could say like what do you think about this, you mean to say I should think with you now about it or you mean to say I should give you a tape recording of what I thought about it yesterday? That’s what most people do.
Usually I don’t have an opinion about it. Okay let’s learn about it. But that requires the requires this set and setting ready requires the issue of *yishuv hadaat* [settled mind/mental composure] requires the openness to be able to do that. Now usually you’re just saying not even thoughts like the distillation of thoughts that you had in the past or that someone told you in the past.
Okay, this is one *middah*.
The Missing List: What Are the Essential Virtues?
What are the other *middos* [character traits/virtues] that we need to have in general as a human being? Why don’t we have, you see this is really weird, why don’t we have like a very basic list of like these are the things that you need to do? Generosity?
Student: Nobody knows.
Instructor: There’s like a *sefer zeh devoros* [such a book of things], isn’t there? What do you say on when someone dies like you go through the list of virtues and you find which one he did right for his *hesped* [eulogy]? What are those? What are the list?
Student: I don’t know.
Instructor: What’s wrong with generosity?
Student: I’m not saying that’s wrong with that one good thing.
Instructor: Honestly?
Student: Yeah.
Instructor: Okay. Okay, let’s try to make life easier. What are the top three?
Student: Finish?
Instructor: What are the top three?
Student: No, for intellectual…
Instructor: No, for the intellectual thing.
Student: Humbleness?
Instructor: Before what we need specifically to come to *chochmah she-be-shira* [wisdom in poetry/song]. Because remember, that’s what I was saying. If you’re not a good person and you come to the *chochmah*, most of your supposed intellectual virtues are fake also, right? So first, being a good person. What are the three top things that you need to do?
Student: *Gevurah* [courage/strength] is a *middah* [virtue] there.
Instructor: Why?
Student: Well…
Instructor: I don’t know. I’m going to make you justify things now. What are the three top virtues? For Lakewood, for Howell, I don’t know what, whichever.
Student: It just means doing everything in the right way.
Instructor: Everything just means everything in the right way. We’re trying to speak in more detail than that, right? What are the three top virtues? You can learn a lot about a person or a society by asking them this question. I don’t know if you’ll ask them directly, they usually lie, but you’ll find out. What are the three top things people are praised or blamed for in your classroom?
Student: Well as a bad thing the bad is least opposite of the good right.
Instructor: In the New York Times what are the three top good and bad things?
Student: I’m the better work and this better work for materialistic and pleasure-seeking.
Instructor: That’s the good thing?
Student: Not a good thing, that’s a bad thing.
Instructor: I’m going to do it to you according to most people. I mean most people that’s not a virtue, that’s like a characterization of like what are virtues like kinds of people right or specific parts of kinds of people right.
All right, okay. You all went to yeshiva and then yeshiva what what *halo* [behold] that’s still and there yeshiva over the three top virtues discussed.
Student: I don’t know.
Instructor: I’m just gonna give honesty, honesty, humbleness, and generosity, abstinence. Is that true or you just saying?
Student: Oh you just make up a list you’re not recording.
Instructor: Why would those be three be the three like top things?
Student: I would say abstinence.
Instructor: And the yeshiva or in here in the yeshiva?
Student: Okay, number one, number two, consistency. Okay, number three, abstinence again.
Instructor: That was the same one I already said it.
Student: And *beis* [second] in the top drive with this toy but this is what I do.
Instructor: How do you say his reasons in English? I don’t know what it is mean.
Student: What does it mean?
Instructor: I explain what you mean enough to have a word you can just say what you mean that’s fine.
Homework Assignment: Identifying Core Virtues
What are the three top *middos tovos* [good character traits]? This device meshed go do homework. We’re gonna give up homework sheets and everyone should brainstorm about it. Isn’t it weird that nobody has an answer here? You know what I say this I did it sorry we don’t learn about this and she.
Student: What do you learn about?
Instructor: Well you don’t learn about it but it’s all they do maybe not explicitly in the way of like giving you all this to memorize okay but you do like they do give over kind of life which basically can be defined in some such a way.
What’s the top three things that they tell the guy by the *shidduch* [matchmaking] information? I know those top three things. How do you say *teche kebare* [unclear Yiddish/Hebrew term] in somebody’s real not fake? Is that something they hold up in the yeshiva?
Student: Well that’s not the yeshiva’s portray but I mean could be they preach it.
Instructor: They do could be I don’t know I’m not really sure it would be called something like I went to nowadays not the yeshivas I went to but maybe some do I don’t know to give the benefit of the doubt maybe but in yeshiva they hold of three things kindness kindness is for sure in the in the *shidduch* world it says does he learn well does he have business and does he have money.
Is there anything else that the *shadchanim* [matchmakers] don’t know?
Student: That’s so funny.
Instructor: With this service, what does it mean?
Student: That’s a good question.
Instructor: Because that was a trick question now. It’s overindulgent. What’s the word for that? What’s meant indulgent?
Student: It’s indulgent.
Instructor: What is that? How do you say it in *shadchanus* [matchmaking]? English, I don’t care. English temperance.
Attempting to Define the Essential Three
So temperance is number one. So yeah kindness I don’t know like *chesed* [kindness/loving-kindness] like ready to do you’re asking me personally I tell I and humility.
Student: This is my kindness, kindness is ready to do someone else favor not only only someone else to be kind to yourself to develop to the to do good not good in Aristotle’s good but as it has it be more those type of things.
Instructor: Yeah whatever you see these are soon you can *mamash* [really/actually] on your dear but you think what’s it up so I think was he hot yeah my world no thoughts about this kindness no tell me what was the thought about kindness kindness you could plug it into anything for you right because what you’re talking about is something like helping being helpful, right? Not the same thing as kindness.
Student: That’s right. Maybe that’s what you mean. I’m being helpful.
Instructor: Yeah.
Student: And what she said that it was he was just saying random stuff.
Instructor: Yeah, I was just throwing it out there. What is really the things? Wow, okay?
The Fundamental Problem: Where Is This List?
So I have a lot of discussions here a lot of *Torahs* [teachings] to say but I’m asked like this. Firstly, there’s a serious question, where’s this list or what’s going on with this list? You remember that to become a good person basically means all these things.
The Problem of Listing the Virtues: Methodological Approaches to Cataloging Human Excellence
Opening Question: Can We Create a Complete List of Virtues and Vices?
Instructor: Does anyone have a list? A complete list of all the good things and the bad things? Not the good things, the good virtues and the bad virtues, and the opposite of virtues, right? The vices.
Student: Hope.
Instructor: Not exactly what you mean.
Student: Preservativity.
Student: Perseverance.
Instructor: Perseverance, that’s it, which means it’s very important that if you’re almost anything.
The Inconsistency Problem in Traditional Jewish Philosophical Lists
Instructor: So we could read a little bit if you want, or I could talk to you about what things say in the books. If you read the books that we’re reading, like the eight chapters [*Shemonah Perakim*, Maimonides’ introduction to Ethics of the Fathers], you’ll find there’s various lists of these things, various lists. I wonder if you read the *Shemonah Perakim* and *Hilchos De’os* [Laws of Character Traits, from Maimonides’ *Mishneh Torah*], or if you read, what else should you read for such lists? Anything you will read, you will find that they have various lists.
And one thing you’ll find specifically in places like the Rambam [Maimonides] is that they do not have a list, not a very clear list, if you notice that. And if you care about *mar mikomos* [checking sources], you could look in *Hilchos De’os* Perek [Chapter] Beis and Perek Dalet, where there’s the same list twice and it changes in between. He forgot his previous list. He took out one thing and added something else or something like that. You could look at *Hilchos De’os* Perek Alef where there’s a third list, or *Hilchos De’os* Perek Beis where there’s sort of a fourth list. And you see that the lists are not consistent.
That’s one problem. And if I ask you, I’ve got so many different lists and I don’t know what’s going on.
Student: Sounds interesting.
Instructor: There are some traditions with much better lists, much more clarity about what their list of good and bad things are. Even a book like the *Chovos Halevavos* [Duties of the Heart, by Rabbeinu Bachya ibn Paquda] is in its entirety kind of a list of virtues, right? That is one problem.
Finding Commonalities: A Convergence Method
Instructor: One interesting thing that we can use here from these lists is to notice that there are commonalities, things that keep on popping up. So if I will do this kind of survey or kind of discussion with more people and really wonder what happens, what becomes the things that people keep on saying, or if you ask yourself five times a week or five times, see what your list of virtues are. And of course, some of them are going to change and some of them won’t change. Some of them will keep on coming up again and again. And that’s how you find out which are the ones that are more important, or more basic, or more central, or more needed. Right? Make sense?
Or maybe the ones that you don’t talk about, those are the ones that you need, and we don’t talk about them because it’s also possible, right?
Two Methodological Approaches: Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down
Instructor: There will also be many different ways of deciding to make such a list, right? One way would be what I just told you. Let’s try to think of one of the most salient things, what are the things that are most obvious, what are the things that most pop out to you when you look at people and look at what you’re trying to teach them, and you find this is the list.
A more rational way would be somehow to figure out how to make this list, right? How would you, what would be the correct way to make such a list? I don’t know. Can you think of some correct ways? What is the correct way to make a list anyways?
Student: What’s needed for it.
Instructor: What’s needed for one.
Student: For the next step.
Instructor: What stops, what are stops, what do you mean by steps?
Student: Steps of it. It’s the step, this list is the step before the intellectual virtues, right?
Instructor: That’s it, I don’t know. Or if you don’t have these then you can’t get to that, right?
Student: Okay.
Instructor: Let’s say. So then you would have to figure out like what is needed, but it’s not the only thing, it’s not the only way, you know, I can make the list, right? Just to be clear what, look at what good people do, look at what people do. That would be the first way. It seems like a very messy way to do things. Maybe it’s the best way, but it’s a messy way. Let’s try to, let’s try to like put all the things they do or the ways they act into like little boxes. And you can do the inverse, you can see what goes wrong in the world and figure out what it’s an excess of.
Student: Yeah, yeah, we could do that also.
Instructor: But there should also be like more rational ways of doing things, right? Like more top-down ways of doing things. That would be another way of looking at the particulars first, right? Starting from the bottom. Or the ways of starting from the top.
Student: I don’t like what you’re saying, what is the next move, because like that’s not all that makes the, assuming firstly you’re already put in a whole assumption.
Instructor: What’s good about people?
Student: Yeah, yeah, I get that, but that’s like, so how do we start?
Instructor: And then you could just say what’s good about people is being good people. What are people? Yeah, yeah. That’s the most general thing. Now we’re talking about something a lot more specific, right? We’re talking about specific lists of ways, very specific ways in which people are good and bad. So how would you get from there to here? Is there a way? How would we get from what you’re saying, for example? What?
Student: How to get from virtue to the virtues?
Instructor: Yeah. Is there a way to do that?
The Challenge of Moving from “Virtue” to “The Virtues”
Student: Thing like we say a good person, someone that’s good at personning.
Instructor: Okay, and how do we get from that on your list before? I mean there could be technically unlimited virtues, right?
Student: Why?
Instructor: Because what virtue is, that something is a golden mean, meaning it orients a person towards his purpose.
Student: I go to me though.
Instructor: No, a golden mean is just a way of giving you a structure for the virtues, but it doesn’t tell you which ones they are.
Student: No, right, that’s what I meant, that anything could be a virtue.
Instructor: So now we’re talking about which ones they are.
Student: No, not anything could be a virtue. These are categories of human disposition.
Instructor: Okay, so how are we going to list these categories? We’re going to generate our list.
Student: You have to do it empirically.
Instructor: I have to?
Student: I think so.
Instructor: Yeah, you have to start at what human beings do, and then figure out how they can do that well. How else would we do it?
Instructor: How else would we do it? I can think of other ways to do it. What would be another way?
Student: Yeah, I mean, what’s already thought, already of another way?
Instructor: No, the problem with that would be something like, like just to be clear, what you’re already, what you’re doing is already a list of virtues, right? You’re just talking about how to subdivide that list, right? In other words, if you’re, you already told me an answer and then, yeah, I’m really still before that answer, right? That’s the first problem, not a problem. It’s just some step that has to be built up.
Organizing Virtues by Hierarchy of Activities
Instructor: Like you told me, there are virtues that lead to other virtues. And we call these higher for some reason or closer to the real end goal, right? Okay, so that’s one way of organizing them already. Before you kind of do your next step, you jump very quickly, right? One way of organizing them is to say something like, there is the best end, best meaning the thing that more things lead to or more of an end, and there’s sort of a ladder or like a step to get there, right? And that’s one way of organizing the virtues already.
We could call it, in the sense of, it’s not only organizing the virtues, just to be clear, it’s really organizing what are we really organizing here? The activities, the things that you do. If someone says something like the best thing to do in the sense of the thing that is good in itself or it’s more good in itself than other things. Other things are good because they lead to that, and that’s not good because it leads to other things.
The best thing to do is to think, contemplate, right? In order to contemplate you need to list some things, you need to have humility. So, here’s a way of ordering the virtues, here’s a way of organizing them by the kind of activities that they’re about, right? The best activity is thinking and there are some virtues of thinking, how to think well, how to think correctly, what is needed to think, for thinking correctly and so on. Those would be one kind of virtues. We didn’t yet discuss how to cut those up, right?
But then in order to think you need to first have money, okay, a certain amount of money. So therefore the art and the virtue of making a certain amount of money correctly is prior to that in time and less important than that in importance. So you already gave me a way of organizing it, although not of listing it, because it seems like what you’re listing is not entirely the virtues, but your hierarchy, so to speak, is not created by listing virtues, it’s created by looking at the reality and saying, what is needed in order for this to work?
The Problem of Generating a Complete List of Virtues: Parts, Wholes, and Relations
The Limitation of Teleological Ordering for List-Making
Instructor: And then when you tell me what is good is what leads to that, that might be true, but that doesn’t help me make a list, right? And there also might be things that are only good because of one step, not because of the next step, right?
In order to be a *Talmid Chacham* [Torah scholar], you have to have money, okay? You have to get married. That’s one step in the Mishnah or whatever, and then you get married, you have to have good *middos* [character traits], because otherwise nobody wants to marry you. What makes having the kind of good *middos* that makes you marriage material good is that they’re good for marriage, not that they’re good for learning.
Just *lesheraida* [for its own sake], since we have bodies and we have these needs and so on, so having a good life includes getting married and having the virtues that apply to marriage, and therefore here for then being able to think. So we could organize the virtues if you want this way, by sort of like what is needed at this step, what is needed at that step, and the steps being organized logically by what is better.
But we don’t really get a list out of the steps. The list is not a list of steps, and it’s also not a list of what is needed for the next. It’s a list of what is needed for this one. You get what I’m saying?
Third Method: Organizing Virtues by Parts of the Soul
Instructor: There’s another way of ordering them, which is basically this, but in a slightly different way, which is we already did that, right? Like when we discussed the concept of intellectual virtue versus character virtue and things like that, right? Which is what? It’s dividing them—I’m going to tell you the answer you should have known it, you should have figured it out yourself—it’s dividing them by the things they’re about, by the parts of the soul they’re about or the parts of the person they’re about, right?
We say intellectual virtues are the virtues of the intellect or of the brain or the mind. And character virtues are the ones of the desiring soul, remember? Appetite of soul, something like that. So this was, and if you want, you can divide that into as many kind of things that it does, which we could sort of say are different parts of it, different powers of it. And then we would have a way of having sort of a complete list if you know the complete list of the parts of the person you can just generate a complete list of the virtues by doing that.
Student: Well that makes sense.
Instructor: No, no, or not?
Student: But no, because these things have subdivisions and subdivisions.
Instructor: Meaning, do you—but desires apply themselves to the even experience. But when I do—just be very clear—when I do subdivisions, you see, like, there’s—depends what you’re looking for when you look for a complete list. One way of being complete is at least whatever I say already includes everything in it. And if subdivisions don’t bother me, you can subdivide as much as you want, I still have a complete list. If you start in the bottom, then you end up with an incomplete list, because you just started from the lowest subdivisions that you happen to notice. If I start from the top, I have a better list, because I could subdivide it, but I still have the top-level rule, which includes everything.
That would be a different way of doing it, a very different way of doing it, right?
Summary of Three Methods
Instructor: I want to tell you one reason why it’s not going to be enough, and it’s going to be a *ba’ayah* [problem]. Meanwhile, we have three ways of doing this list:
1. One way is to do the empirical research kind of way and like look at all the people and make lists and hope that we don’t miss anything important, the totally bottom-up kind of way.
2. Another way would be to do Adi’s way, which is to order them by the order of goods, then talk about what is needed or maybe what certain, at each stage as we call it, or each level or each step would be needing certain virtues to make it work well.
3. The third way would be, which is somewhat close to the second way, because the second way, sometimes it’s said, to be like the best thing is to act with your mind. So that part is also the end goal, also the best thing, but it’s also the virtue of a specific part. And then we would just list all the parts of the soul, all the parts of the body, all the parts of the society, and assign or figure out what the virtues are for that. Maybe we could need to subdivide them, but at least we’ll have a full list—a full list, or a generally full list, even if we don’t have all the particularly full lists, right?
That was the third way to do things.
The Problem with the Parts-Based Method
Instructor: The *ba’ayah* with the third way is what? The *ba’ayah* is that everyone is tired and wants to sleep. But besides that, yeah, there’s a virtue of sleeping enough. Very important.
The *ba’ayah* with this is, what are these virtues that are not of a part? Then we’ll have to add more things. Maybe there’s virtues about relations of parts, about the whole thing.
Student: I just said that.
Instructor: I just said that you might have that. You might make a list of virtues by listing all the parts and then saying what is good for each part and then we have a full list. But that seems to be very obviously wrong because—what if they’re pretty sure there are virtues that belong to the whole thing or at least mediation between the parts or to the relation between this—
Student: No, I need to think what’s wrong with this emotional something that is about organized.
The Table *Mashal* [Analogy]
Instructor: Well, I could give you the *mashal* [analogy] of my table, right? Remember the *mashal* of the table? How many parts does the table have? How many *ma’alos* [qualities/virtues] does the table—start listing them. Let’s do the same game. Are you against it? I’m asking you. List it. Are you against it? Start doing it and let’s see.
Student: Sturdiness.
Instructor: Well, it needs to be—no, we just have to do it. The way to do it is to cut it up into parts and look at each part, right? Very good. So it needs to be made out of—
Student: No, no, no, that’s the original.
Instructor: The paint needs to be shiny, the legs have to be strong, the cuts need to be straight, the—I don’t know what other parts—have to be precise, the corners have to be aligned and so on, right? Those are—when we finish listing all the—the screws have to be made as pointy and strong and so on, right?
Now we finish all of that. Do I have a good table? I have a bunch of parts, right? That’s IKEA, right? Now you have to come out and put it together, right?
Now I’m not going to just put an actual act of going together, also the act of designing it or creating it means thinking of how all these things are going to fit together. If you have a very strong like—it’s *halaila* [for example], is the strongest leg it can possibly be, but the table, the top, the top shelf of the table is even stronger, even heavier, more, even heavier than it, or the top still, it’s—I can have like an aesthetic problem or like a functional problem. The top step is very small, so you’ve got the strongest leg because you’re going to need the strongest thing possible, but your top is like tiny, it’s like a toothpick. Then you don’t really have a table, you have some weird monster, right?
So it’s actually very silly to list parts. You got to talk about the whole thing.
Digression: The *Kollel* [Adding One for the Whole] in *Gematria* [Numerology]
Student: That’s we have a *kollel* [adding one for the whole in gematria], right? I don’t want to do all the math and make a *kollel*. Why? Because, like, yeah, I have a word I’ve wanted to.
Instructor: Okay, but that’s not a word, right? You’ve got to do the whole word, too. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. That’s a Torah that I heard from Rav Pincus once.
Student: Ah, so then it would be all *kollelim* [plural of kollel], good.
Instructor: No, because the *kollel* got a *meh-meh* [something] or something.
Student: No, but only the math is that’s what the *kollel* is. It was the only one that I cracked. All the other ones are *shrak ha-ma’aseh* [nonsense].
Instructor: The problem is, when you’re making *gematria* with a *kollel*, you’re always cheating, because the reason you do it is because the other side is without a *kollel*.
Student: Perhaps. This is not a *gematria*. Think about it. It’s dumb. You always need a *kollel* that’s back in the same place. The only time we need a *kollel* is when you’re using one and not the other, and that’s the problem with it. If you just add one to everything, it doesn’t make any difference. So kids around us, as long as you’re consistent, then you’re not interested. The problem with the *kollel* is always when it doesn’t really work.
Instructor: Anyways, that’s why this is not enough.
Virtues of the Whole Person
Instructor: You might have to ask, and virtues of the whole, or the relations between all kinds of parts, and so on. And then someone might even come and say that that’s the only virtue. Because that’s what, remember, virtues are not of hands and of feet and of even specific wants and needs. What are they of? What are they of?
Student: People.
Instructor: People, very good. Are people hands? No, people are.
The Holistic Nature of Virtue: Why Individual Middos Cannot Stand Alone
The Insufficiency of Isolated Virtues
Instructor: Anyways, that’s why this is not enough. You might have to ask about virtues of the whole or the relations between all kinds of parts and so on. And then someone might even come and say that that’s the only virtue, because that’s what—remember, virtues are not of hands and of feet and of even specific wants and needs. What are they of? What are they of?
Student: People.
Instructor: People, there you go. Are people hands? No, people are people. So there’s no virtue that really counts unless it’s part of the whole. Unless it’s counted or understood in the context of the whole person. Right? Okay. Make sense?
Student: Yeah.
The Problem of “Too Much” Kindness
Instructor: No. Is that true? There isn’t such a thing as kindness. Because, like we say, you can be too kind. Right? And what does “too kind” even mean?
Too kind just means that your kindness conflicts with your other parts of your humanity, right? Or with other parts of other people’s humanity. And that’s why it’s not good. It’s a way of saying like, you can’t only have healthy hands, because healthy hands means hands that work well with the rest of the body. And same way you can’t have healthy kindness without having any other part of your virtue in alignment.
Student: Exactly.
Instructor: So if we understand that we need virtues of the whole, we might as well drop all the part virtues, in some sense, because they’re all subservient to this one. But on the other hand, no, what’s the other hand?
Student: The other hand, there’s no way to approach it in any way that we can isolate something to understand it. You’re still going back there. Just a good person.
Instructor: Yeah, right. That’s the problem.
Student: I mean, the problem is that you have nowhere to begin.
Instructor: Exactly.
Starting with One Virtue Implies All Others
Instructor: Okay, so what if I’m a kind person? Now what does complete kindness consist of? Kindness that’s… Okay, so let’s not just say we’re a good person. Let’s give you one virtue: kindness. Very good, that’s a part. To be completely kind, what’s the problem with people to be kind?
Student: Very good.
Instructor: So what? In order to be fully kind, what do we need?
Student: Everything else.
Instructor: Thank you very much. So if you have a problem with me telling things that are too general, I could just tell you any example. But any example, if you think about it enough, if you do it enough, means everything else also. Right? Even in the *mashal* [parable/analogy] of the table, totally like that.
Student: Yeah, if you think—if you want to think that way, maybe.
Instructor: Yeah, because a normal leg means a leg that fits correctly with it, exactly. So it’s enough for me to tell you one thing. Right?
The Principle of *Leshem Yichud* [For the Sake of Unification]
That’s why when we say *Leshem Yichud* [the formula recited before performing a mitzvah], it says [the phrase about the 613 mitzvos being included], because you can’t do even one *mitzvah* [commandment] without involving other *mitzvos*. Because if you do, then you’re a weirdo. Because there’s no *mitzvah* to do just that *mitzvah*. If a *mitzvah* is a part of life and something that actually is useful for a human being.
The Tefillin Example: One Mitzvah Generates All Others
Instructor: All right, I’ll tell you a *mashal*. Does this—was he that I missed that film? Okay, doesn’t care about any of them. It’s just—just wanted to go out film. Okay. Now I have a question for you. That’s it. We get everyone to be very into *mitzvos* of putting on *tefillin* [phylacteries], right? Now there’s still—by—I decide whatever said there’s a *biyur* [clarification]. Because when you put up the *tefillin* the correct—it’s not correct.
Some *tefillin* has a meaning. I’m putting out *tefillin* means you have to have correct *kavanos* [intentions]. So it’s not just putting it on. So it’s *Guf Naki* [bodily purity]. You have to have purity of your body and purity of your mind. If you’re putting on *tefillin* and thinking of an *avodah zarah* [idolatry], you’re probably not making it into a *tefillin* or maybe you’re doing something even bad. And complete. Maybe a *yotzei b’dieved* [fulfilling the obligation after the fact], but the ideal *tefillin* is not that, right?
So it’s *merambah* [expanding]. A different order from the *tefillin* you already have to have another *mitzvah* of *chavar shafan* [proper thoughts] and *karek* [correct] thoughts, right?
The Shabbos Problem
Not only—and also of course if you think of that doesn’t make any sense, the fact that the *tefillin* might not even mean anything. Now I have another thing for you. This year they’re only putting out *tefillin*. Should you put out *tefillin* on *Shabbos* [the Sabbath]?
Student: What is the correct way of putting out the *tefillin*?
Instructor: *Shabbos* you don’t put out the *tefillin*. But if you don’t keep *Shabbos* the correct way of putting out the *tefillin* is *Shabbos*. But that’s not a *shkite* [correct way], that’s not the correct way of putting out the *tefillin*. So, it’s stuck.
This guy that’s putting it only in the *mitzvos* of putting out *tefillin*… You like examples, I’m giving you examples. This guy that’s only doing the *mitzvos* of putting out *tefillin*, he’s got to start putting out, keeping *Shabbos* also. Because otherwise, he’s a weirdo. He’s putting out the *tefillin* on *Shabbos* because the *Shabbos* are the *os* [sign] and it doesn’t make any sense.
The Cascade of Required Mitzvos
And if you want to keep *Shabbos*, no, I don’t even have to go like that. What else does he have to do? Firstly, he has to *alein Krias Shema* [recite the Shema], because I could have *Krias Shema*, but I couldn’t, so I had to shake. And also, I’m going to have to teach the children the Torah, because it says in the Torah [in the tefillin passages], and if you teach the Torah, you’re not going to get it, you’re going to have to do the whole Torah, not just the Torah.
Right? Because it’s him—I did one *mitzvah* generates all of them. It really does.
Student: Exactly.
Instructor: Right? That’s not *tefillin*, right? So you could—we don’t have to talk instead. The logic was right that we shouldn’t say we’re coming—what does that mean, put on *tefillin*? But we’re not—*tefillin* means everything else also. Otherwise they’re doing a half *tefillin*. Okay, half a *tefillin*, neither. But we want of the whole *tefillin*, right?
The Universal Principle Applied to All Middos
The same thing goes with every *middah* [character trait]. You end up not having to talk about all of them because it’s enough to talk about one. But if you do that one correctly, it already includes—implies—basically all of them. Unless you’re not—like things that we could just do, push this *middah* all the way to the end and without caring about the other ones, which just means you’re going to be extreme and then you’re not going to do it.
The Case of Humility
So that’s a humility. I’ll just—let’s take *anavah* [humility] in the middle. Let’s say humility. How humility… I don’t know what humility is.
Student: What?
Instructor: First you have to tell me what it is. And why it’s good.
Student: I thought you were already enough on that one.
Instructor: Okay, what is it?
Student: I don’t know. Let’s go again. Let’s go with… Which one is for sure that you agree with? Because I don’t want to get into the whole rabbit hole with humility.
Instructor: The whole point is you always get into rabbit holes. That’s what I hope is.
Student: Okay.
Instructor: No, like how does humility—
Student: Humility, let’s say…
Instructor: Of course it does. I told you about kindness.
Student: What you’re calling humility is like a…
Instructor: Humility, well, the humility that we talked about before was just an intellectual virtue. I’m not talking about those. Those are also like this, but we’ll have to connect that to the whole…
Student: Ah, so it doesn’t have to do with…
Instructor: No, it does have to do, but we’ll take a few more steps. Of course it does. What do you mean it doesn’t? Of course it does.
Student: It does, okay, so then that’s what I’m asking. That’s the question. I don’t even know how it does, though.
Instructor: How does connect to what?
Student: To the *nefesh ha’mitaveh* [desire soul].
Instructor: To the what?
Student: What do you mean?
Instructor: Well, humility is about…
Student: No, your humility that you talked about was a kind of intellectual habit. It doesn’t belong to desire.
Instructor: That’s not the point. So how you can’t have that correctly without having the other ones correctly? And it’s because of what we already know.
Humility Requires Knowledge and Other Virtues
You can’t—you can’t learn without having good *middos*, right? So you’re a kind of person not one mean correct. So you are what we called—what did you say you call the *middah*? Can you not—you don’t think they—you know everything guy would that be equally humility if like you—so that’s all why didn’t you help the case of now I’m the guy you know can’t do anything that’s very good home it does maybe the other guy is right.
Humility says maybe someone else is right. So therefore you can’t even learn anything. By the way, even in learning there must be an opposite middle which is called something like courage or *azus* [boldness]. Let’s say, let’s call it like that. It’s a weird thing. Let’s call it like that for now. There’s an opposite middle like, “Oh, so I never know anything because I also never know.”
Student: Very good.
Instructor: So I also never know anything. Knowledge, by the way, works—our life lives on knowledge. All our *middos* live on knowledge. Right? Can I know? There’s some—like you said, there’s some big enough of them that let anyone steal from them and from their friends and from everyone else because they don’t know who’s right anyway because they’re so open-minded, right? So they’re kind of humility not open-minded—they’re like weak-minded, right? But that’s not humility. That’s just that—maybe you could call extreme of an extreme of *middah* humility which is not humility anymore. It’s just being a—yeah, pushover, exactly.
The Need for Balance and Choshen Mishpat
So you gotta have the correct amount of humility, which means you also have to have another middle which is opposite—you could call it that way, maybe. Or the correct amount. But how do you know what’s the correct amount? You have to learn *Choshen Mishpat* [the section of Jewish law dealing with monetary and civil matters], like we discussed a few weeks ago from *Choshen Mishpat*, to know who’s right in most fights. See, I’ve told you it’s *Choshen Mishpat*. And so on and so forth.
Honest Assessment: What This Does and Doesn’t Answer
This is not a real *teirutz* [answer], like to all the *kashas* [questions/difficulties] that I said, but it’s a true point. Like, to which *kashas* is it not a *teirutz*? Let’s do all the *kashas* and let’s see. What would I want to ask in the beginning of the *shiur* [lesson]?
I’m very bothered by this idea. I’ll tell you what it does answer and how much it doesn’t answer. I’m very bothered by the question that I asked today. Technically I asked different questions, but practically I asked this question.
The Persistent Problem: Where Is the List?
Very bothered by the fact that nobody can give me the list of the good and the bad ones according to *shittas* [the approach/system of] Breslov. I don’t care—tell me that *keket* [such and such] thing. You can tell me certain things Breslov there for about a minute and about two minutes a regular average he could do.
Student: He could?
Instructor: The *mitzvos* and the list—don’t tell me—tell me the *Mishnah* has a list, tell me the list. But that’s just *dreiying mir a kup* [spinning my head around/confusing me], the *Mishnah* has a list, you know, it’s like, can this be a good thing or a bad thing, that’s not really a good thing. Tell me the list, tell me the list.
“Oh, a regular guy knows the *Mishnah*.” He doesn’t know the *Mishnah*, if he says there’s a *Mishnah*, it doesn’t help. What does he say? *Davka* [specifically], tell me the list, know the *Mishnah*.
The Unity of Virtues: Why Lists of Virtues Are Both Necessary and Insufficient
The Problem with Quoting Instead of Thinking
Instructor: Don’t tell me the Mishnah has a list. That’s what they would tell you. But that’s just trying me a comp. The Mishnah has a list. You know, it’s like, can you tell me the Mishnah has a list? Tell me the list. He doesn’t know the Mishnah. He doesn’t know the Mishnah. If he says there’s a Mishnah around, it doesn’t help. He knows that the Mishnah has a list. What does he say? Tell me the list. No, the Mesillat [Mesillat Yesharim: “Path of the Upright,” an 18th-century Jewish ethical text by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto]. What’s which, which? Give, give the top three. You wouldn’t know what.
That was one way of asking the question. So in your yeshiva [yeshiva: traditional Jewish academy focused on Torah study], that’s the thing that they mostly emphasize, which one of them are the most important. What I mean to say is, you’re telling me, no, no, people that quote instead of answering, you’re not interested. In other words, you’re saying to me like this, the most important virtue is being able to quote. I agree with that. That’s one of the most important virtues in yeshiva. Instead of thinking, quoting. Instead of answering my questions, quoting at me. No problem. That’s what you did. You didn’t answer my question though, right?
You’re not even talking with me. As long as it’s like the Mesillat, I’d ask you a question, right? Very good. Hello. Nobody knows. Nobody even knows what these things are, right? This will show them as a chakira [chakira: investigation, inquiry] what it means. Nobody knows. That’s not an answer to my question, right? I’m telling you that virtue is just a way of saying who is the good guy, right? What is your picture of a good guy? And you tell me a Mesillat. State the Mesillat. So your picture of a good guy is someone that says, state the Mesillat. I think that’s true, but you didn’t tell me any, have more information. Maybe there’s such a middah [middah: character trait, virtue] one made the cold state in Mishnah. No problem, no problem. So the middah is called being able to quote a Mishnah. What’s that matter? Is there anything else good in life? Fight for that. No, okay, no problem.
What about chesed [chesed: loving-kindness, compassion]? Not about state Mishnah?
Oh, so it’s two middos [middos: plural of middah] already. Knowing the Mesillat, I’m doing a chesed. Anyways, he wanted me to tell you about the kasha [kasha: difficulty, problem] in the credits.
The Frustrating Absence of Clear Lists
So I was bothered by the inability of people to give me this list. Not only do people need to see if they can’t give me this list, or if they have a list that’s very weird, and not only people on my table can’t give me this list, or maybe they couldn’t, but they’re very tired, but also the people that we read their book can’t give us the list.
Does Rambam [Rambam: Rabbi Moses Maimonides, 12th-century Jewish philosopher] have a list? Not really. Does Aristotle have a list? Also not really. He also changes the list between his books and between his chapters. Does Plato have a list? Yes. Plato has lists for everything. Correct lists, because he’s a top-down kind of guy. But Aristotle’s more of a bottom-up kind of guy. That’s one that’s the pushut pshat [pushut pshat: simple, straightforward explanation] why he doesn’t have a list. Because he holds on to Shmueli’s mahalocha [mahalocha: approach, method] of just looking around. Tell me the most salient ones, might be some that I missed, so we’ll talk about that next time.
That’s kind of annoying. This annoyance is something called unity of the virtues, which I’ve led you to in one way now.
The Teretz: Unity of the Virtues
I’m just saying that we don’t really have to have a list, it’s not important to have the correct complete list. It might be important for shtuk l’chtoireh [shtuk l’chtoireh: for the sake of Torah study], but it’s not important for becoming a good person, because any kind of list, which is always picking out some of the most salient virtues that we see in the people that we like and we hold dear to the people, is going to have to basically include all of them. Otherwise, he’s describing bad people.
Student: Yeah. He doesn’t know it? He does. He does. He has different. It’s not like. It’s the opposite. Because of that, he has. His lists are just categorizations. They’re not really lists. They’re not this kind of lists. Or whenever he talks about one virtue, he tries to explain that that virtue is really just knowledge, and therefore everything is only one thing, which is called knowledge. It’s different. Just history.
Instructor: What I’m telling you is that in reality, even if we look at it as a way of like, look, give me the top three middos of the people that you hold of, you end up having to describe or you end up implying everything, including some of this that we don’t even have a name for. Yes, because we didn’t discuss them at length, but they’re applying everything. Otherwise it’s kind of weirdos.
The Tzaddik Known for One Middah
That’s why every tzaddik [tzaddik: righteous person] that has what, one middah that he’s known for, usually it means that he exaggerated that middah and that was actually the thing that he was also bad at. Only bad at, maybe. The real tzaddik, the people that by the levaya [levaya: funeral], people say, I don’t know, there’s nothing special about him, he’s just like a good guy. The ones that are the weird ones, he was mama’s shmir [masmid: diligent Torah scholar], and I’m, I could say, a shlug mensh [shlug mensh: literally “beaten person,” someone downtrodden], right? Or he was such a masmid because he never helped his wife. You understand?
You already know that because usually when people praise a virtue, they mean to say the exaggeration of it, which is not good. In other words, they don’t have the other middah of helping your wife or the seichel [seichel: wisdom, common sense] that tells you how much, and so on. And maybe the same thing with the guy that’s a rebel. You have to have a rebel be a rebel in the correct amount and also be a conformist in the correct amount. And the guy that does that correctly, nobody realizes that he’s a rebel or a conformist. He’s just a good guy. You start that’s my sheet [sheet: lesson, teaching] for today. It’s more than enough.
Discussion: The Famous Kasha About Emes
Student: This is famous culture that the world asks. I think one of Shachar’s masters, he said that he had the thing of emes [emes: truth]. He said, what do you mean, what’s with all the other middos?
Instructor: This is how he’s going to say it. That’s true, but that’s because most people are not complete people. Most people are not balanced. Most people don’t have the different things.
Student: You’re saying in that world, in that type of thing also?
Instructor: I don’t know what that means. What does it mean? Let’s say there’s such a thing.
Student: No, I actually think that could mean the opposite. It could mean sometimes that someone says, what’s that person’s specific middah? It could mean, what’s his way of getting all the other middos?
Instructor: This, right? Like how does he get into all of them? Say I’m gonna focus like, is this story like they told the guy just never say a lie or something like that and suddenly, like I told you the story with this tefillin [tefillin: phylacteries, ritual objects worn during prayer], you suddenly have to become a whole Yid [Yid: Jew] because of that. And it’s true. If you take any virtue and take it seriously, you don’t think that you’re, sometimes people like they make their mitzvah [mitzvah: commandment, good deed] one mitzvah and that’s licensed to do everything else wrongly. You can’t do that. But if you accept it as being a part of being a good person, then it does lead you to all the good things.
Does Balance Transfer Across Virtues?
Student: Is the Rambam’s recipe for balance, right, is that, how do I put this in a, does that correspond to what you’re saying? Meaning to say that when I habituate myself to balance in that one, let’s say virtue, everything else will fall into place where I found?
Instructor: I don’t know where I become a balanced person. If there’s something called not balance in the specific virtue, if you talk about the deah [deah: knowledge, understanding], you could talk about not practical wisdom or something that they may be, but it’s not clear that you could like practice that in the abstract. I don’t know. That’s a great question. No, he doesn’t know information like question if that works. I know that all you need to do is, yeah, but no, but that’s not, not true because the perfection of one middah means knowing how the rest of the world works, means knowing how to act and everything else. You can’t do that and you could be after, yeah, yeah.
You could say I’m gonna be just the owner of an order of mean something between a governor and a, and a what do you call this, matter pushover. But that means you have to know how to judge situations correctly. Now it could be that this middah of job, I don’t know. I actually tend to think that not, or the line of thinking that we work with usually tend to think that it’s very hard that like judgment doesn’t carry over. Like there’s all these questions, do skills carry over? If you have a skill that one thing, do you have the second? And so I’m saying it was a question like as for both children not, yeah, like does the transfer? Like I’m good at learning a Gemara [Gemara: Talmudic text], I’m also me look good at learning science. Usually it doesn’t work out as well as you would expect it to work. It works in the sense of you have the real talent and things like that. She doesn’t work as well who are great at learning when they go to a job usually. Okay, that’s because it’s different talents needed in the job. But even if you go to a job that’s similar, like learning a different area of knowledge, very often it doesn’t work because the intuitions that you gain are very specific. They’re related to the domain that you’re into.
The Lecturer’s Personal Position: You Need a Long List
Usually I think that the same thing works for middos. Actually, that’s why I do think that you do have to long list. I’m not masking with my sheet today, personally. I think that the longer your list is, the better you’re going to be, because naming things is one of the ways which we notice how we should act. Like of course then you have to figure out which middah to apply at which time. That’s never going to squeeze out. We resolve having like a long list. But the point is you can’t just say be a good person and just figure out. You need to have like a name. Wait, now I’m doing, now, now I’m being one of them. Now I’m thumbing good devarim [devarim: things, words]. You have to have a word for that. It’s very hard to realize that you’re in the middle of doing that, that you’re doing there. You’re right. I will hit the sheet already about that, yeah.
But so I don’t know if there’s like something, you have to remember when Rambam says be balanced, it doesn’t mean be a kind of moderate, right? The guy that all the politicians are trying to talk to always, the moderate that nobody ever met, right? It doesn’t mean be that, like never too much of anything. It means be the correct. So it’s not clear that finding the correct is like a transferable skill. There might be a theory that it is, but I think that would be the question.
Student: It’s a practice that you can, there is some transfer after, after talk about you could close if you want.
Instructor: I have to think about, I wanted to continue about the Prishah [Prishah: separation, abstinence]. Just there is the way in which transferable, like overcoming, there is something, something like that. Let’s talk about the general thing. What I can’t, I’m gonna have to think about that separately, like the relation between different stages of virtue with where the same kind of thing pertains. Okay, hold it different Russian.
Student: Like an intrepidious part?
Instructor: What time is it?
Student: Three.
Instructor: No problem. It’s 11:17.
Okay and that’s early, late, right, perfectly correct time. Which one? We don’t know. We’ll have to know relative to what, huh?
If you’d like an answer, that’s the story. Okay.