Chayei Sarah: The Source of Life

Greetings to those I did not see earlier. I am translating the first verses of this week’s parashah. It relates death to us through the soul of Sarah. In other words, until now every death has passed unnoticed. Only the death of Sarah is related on the very first page, and as the title of the parashah. But the title of the parashah is not “the death of Sarah”; it is rather “the life of Sarah.” This leads us to say that life and death are not different from one another. You will ask me why, and we shall see. So Sarah lived — and it is also an important detail that the death of Sarah, the wife of Avraham, is related to us at such length.

No, the Torah did not dwell on the death of Avraham as much as on the death of Sarah, nor on the death of Yitzchak, nor on the death of Yaakov — but the death of Sarah is very important. The loss of the wife, the one who truly allows us to realize our own life, to bring it from the virtual to the real — that indeed deserves reflection. For here we are not told that she simply lived a hundred and twenty-seven years. Rather, me’ah shanah, “a hundred years,” is one entity; ve’esrim shanah, “and twenty years,” is another entity; vesheva shanim, “and seven years,” is another entity. Then we read shenei chayei Sarah — the text takes it up again, saying shenei chayei Sarah, “these are the years of the life of Sarah.” We already knew this, since we had been told vayihyu chayei Sarah, “and the life of Sarah was…” But the first idea is to tell us that there are two lives. There is not only one. There are two parallel lives that we lead within every life. Of course, these parallel lives break down into several lives, because in sum either we live within time and try to struggle within the time in which we live, or else we ourselves create our own time. The righteous, our sages say, are the ones who make their days. The wicked, on the other hand, merely fill their days — that is to say: well, there is time to kill, there is time, it weighs on us, it has to be filled.

No — I am going to give time a reality of being. There is the time that flees and that we indeed cannot recapture; but there is a time in the absolute and in the infinite, which is called le’olam, eternity, and which, in sum, is never lost, because a fragment of that time is all of time and all of time is a fragment of that time. So in the life of every being there are these two coordinates: there are times of death, but there are times of life. The ideal is to reduce the times of death to a minimum. Today, in the end, through a computer, we can somewhat understand the phenomenon of this life. In the past, when we were told that there is a world beyond, it was hard to imagine. How can information, a memory, be held in a cloud — and not only preserved beyond the grave in a cloud, but in such a way that I can transfer it from one computer to another, from one mobile phone to another? So is it indeed possible to transfer a person’s information or knowledge, through his heart and his brain, to another person? Of course, we will not claim that heart transplants somehow also convey all the sensitivity that was in that heart into another body. And later on, if we manage to transplant a brain, we will not claim that we will thereby preserve [the person]. There is what is called afar min ha’adamah — what is matter and heavy — and there is what is spirit. And when the Holy One, blessed be He, created man, He created him from these two components: afar min ha’adamah, dust of the earth, on the one hand — and what is dust of the earth in man returns to the dust of the earth — and He joined to it a living soul.

This living soul is the one we spoke about last week, when we said that, in the end, there are two stages of creation in man. The first stage of creation is when the earth is given the possibility of producing man: “Let the earth bring forth the living soul” — the creeping thing, the crawling thing, and also the beast of the field, whatever nature produces, whatever the earth produces. What the earth produces, we said, is only the crawling creature, and I explained that this is man crawling in order to survive. That is how it is — a sensitivity he naturally shares with all the animals. Behemah, chayto eretz — the cattle, the beasts of the earth: they share not only sensitivity, they share the intelligence of animals. Animal intelligence, you see. But it comes to man naturally. Listen: we come into a world already endowed with an acquired intelligence, more or less developed,

though we have not yet cultivated it; it is in our genes. What places us beyond the animal, however, is of course the capacity to give. The capacity to give is not in man’s nature; it lies in the surpassing of his own nature. Why? Because when G-d had to intervene to bring man out, to tear him away from the world of the natural and give him a dimension of the beyond, He had to breathe life into him — and Adam became a nefesh chayah, a living soul. Man was a nefesh chayah, and therefore he was more than the nachash. The nachash is intelligence that merges with cunning — a form of cunning, of quickness of mind, given to man naturally in his natural creation. And this is what the Torah tells us: vehanachash hayah arum mikol chayat hasadeh, “and the serpent was more cunning than all the beasts of the field.” Now this nachash who is cunning — who is he?

This serpent is nothing but human intelligence, human reason. And as long as that human reason is not accompanied by chesed — that is, by the capacity to give, to surpass oneself — then there is no doubt: there is no tzelem Elokim, no image of G-d, in man. There is no doubt about it: there is no likeness, no image of G-d in man. So I return to my text. There are two essential components in life: the consciousness of life on the one hand, and the consciousness of death on the other. The animal has no consciousness of death; only man has the consciousness of death, only man fights death. So this idea of afar min ha’adamah, the dust of the earth that returns to the dust of the earth, returns to its natural element, and this ruach chayim, the breath of life, which belongs to the beyond — it means that at death there is quite simply a disconnection, a disconnection.

There is no longer that intertwining, if you like, that coordination of spirit and matter which allows man to give the spirit a reality on earth and to raise the earth to the level of the spirit. So there is separation — but is the separation final? Our sages say: if in the end man were to live a certain time and then disappear, what would the Creator be playing at? And, in the end — if we do not believe, chas veshalom (heaven forbid), in a Creator and in a purpose to life — is life worth living? If there is not truly a possibility of overcoming death and regarding it as an accident within life — a fatal accident, a tragedy, but one that is destined to be overcome and to bring us to an olam haba, a world in which this death does not exist: bila hamavet lanetzach umachah Hashem Elokim dimah me’al kol panim, “He will swallow up death forever, and Hashem, G-d, will wipe away the tears from every face” — where the Eternal swallows up death.

Death does not exist. Death is the possibility of dismantling an apparatus that is worn out, that has come to its end, in order to reassemble it. Once it is dismantled it no longer holds together; it must be reassembled and given another dimension of life. And that is the definition of chayim. That is the definition of life in the dual. The dual must not be understood simply as a duality of two elements — no, it is a confrontation of two elements of creation, a confrontation of two worlds: the world here below and the world above. And that is why I… There are people who have turned the Kaddish — the Kaddish recited for someone who has passed away, for a departed loved one — into a kamea, as it were. What would one call a kamea in French today?

I have forgotten the word. An amulet. Thank you. Now, it is not a matter of writing out and reciting the Kaddish [as a charm]. No, careful: until the twelfth century the Kaddish was part of the prayer service. It separated the four levels of prayer — for you know that there are four levels of prayer, as there are four levels of interpretation of the text, as there are four levels of death. This number four comes back constantly; I will not dwell on it, there is a great deal to say. But originally, in the Kaddish, it was the sanctification of the divine Name that constituted a dividing sheet between one world and another within the prayer, as we progressed in our prayer and passed from one mode of prayer to another. Remember it that way; one day we will have occasion to speak about prayer, and I will develop it differently. But from the twelfth century on, it was said: the Kaddish must be recited for a loved one. Since then, everyone vies to recite the Kaddish; people go to recite the Kaddish. Far be it from me to belittle this practice — not at all. I simply recall that the loved one we had has gone, and an energy is missing now to complete the work, to rebuild our agenda, our plan, and to carry it through. So this is how I understand it: I recite the Kaddish because from today on I am going to be the substitute for this loved one who is no more, and I am going to sanctify the divine Name as he did.

This is very important. Very important, because you will say to me, gentlemen: does everyone sanctify the divine Name? It is not for us to judge; it is not for us to judge. If G-d created His world as it is, with such variety, each person is called to take on his own mission. And the more one has, the better — and the more responsible one is. In any painting there is what belongs somewhat to the accessory and what belongs to the essential; but the accessory is important for the beauty of the painting, for the very unity of the painting. So we must start from the principle that when one recites a Kaddish for a loved one, one is there to complete his mission, to fulfill what he can no longer do today.

And this passes through the sanctification of the divine Name, because this sanctification of the divine Name belongs to the world beyond and not to this world — for the world beyond is the world of a memory of the entire universe, which is capable of putting lives back into circulation. That is what is called the resurrection of the dead: whoever says that the resurrection of the dead is not derived from the Torah [has no share in the world to come]. Now, the Torah does not speak to us of olam haba, of this world to come. We do not see it; we see nothing of it. We had to wait for the period of the Mishnah — that is, when the Christians began to exalt the future world rather than this one, and to reject this one — and then our chachamim (sages) had to correct course. But olam haba cannot be locked up in a piece of writing, in a book. No, it is in orality, it is in perpetual becoming.

That is olam haba; but as long as something is written, that is olam hazeh, this world here below — how you can handle it, how you can work on it. So if the Written Torah does not mention olam haba, it is for a very simple reason: it does not want to strangle the notion of olam haba in writing, in the book. It wants to leave it beyond writing. And life lies beyond writing. That said, we are taught that one short hour of serenity of spirit in this world is better than the whole life of the future, of the world to come; and, conversely, that one hour of serenity in the beyond is better than kol chayei ha’olam hazeh, the whole life here below put together. There is an equation that must be taken into account, which means that even as we invest ourselves in this world, we are building our olam haba; and we cannot, so to speak, cultivate olam haba by detaching ourselves from this world.

So now, if we have understood this principle and accept it — because we hold that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot after all bring creatures into the world only to erase them the way one deletes letters, as we do on our computers with our e-mails and the like, because they become an overload, unmanageable and of little interest — then there is what is called a reshimu. Reshimu means that there is always a trace; a trace always remains. Vechol ma’asecha basefer nichtavim — “and all your deeds are written in a book.” Everything you do is inscribed in a register — but of course, one can correct. That is a possibility on offer: to do tikkun. And do you know what the word tikkun means?

It is a composite of ten kav, “give a line” […]. It is wonderful, it is wonderful. So who, among the living, can give us this — which personality integrates this in a masterly way? It is the feminine. For the feminine has the faculty — the will to create, yetzirah, ko’ach hayetzirah, the creative power, lies in the feminine. And this ko’ach hayetzirah in the feminine means that olam hazeh and olam haba are embodied by the feminine. That is why the Torah, when it relates the death of a person and the importance of this transit from one world to the other, does so through Sarah, the princess of all humanity. Yes? Sorry? Who is asking a question? With pleasure, I am listening. If there is a question — something is bothering you.

“I am sorry, I don’t know whether the others followed, but when you tell me that kedushat Hashem, divine knowledge, belongs to olam haba… I believe that all of this — Rosh Hashanah, […], Yom Kippur, Shabbat — is life; divine knowledge, all our very knowledge of Judaism, is life [here], it is the sanctification of the Name. Why do you say it belongs to olam haba? I don’t understand.” Yes, wait. There are three notions that must be kept apart. Olam hazeh is the prozdor: we are told it is the corridor. You must pass through this corridor to reach the palace, the traklin — and that is olam haba, the world of truth.

If I were to use the language of Plato and Aristotle, I would have said that this world is the world of illusions. Olam haba is the world of reality, where things truly take on substance — because with illusions there is much to eliminate; one must clean, one must weed, yes. Olam haba is the one in which we truly see the fruit of all that we have done. But to obtain the fruit of all that we have done, it was indeed necessary to clear away all the bad branches, all the bad leaves, all the possible deviations. That is why we say — what is death? Hu yetzer hara, hu satan, hu malach hamavet: “He is the evil inclination, he is Satan, he is the angel of death.” What is the angel of death? First and foremost, it is a person’s bad impulses. A bad impulse in a person is a way of tasting the scent of death.

Satan, who is the pure rationalization of things, […]. Someone asked me the question last time: is philosophy not a science? And I had forgotten this quotation from Kant — namely, that there is no philosophy that one can learn, there is no wisdom that one can learn; one can only learn to philosophize. And it is not the chachamim who say this; it is the philosopher himself who says it about his own philosophy. That is to say, in reality, what we do here is the rough draft of a life. And we want to bring this rough draft of a life safely to harbor, so that it can no longer be in conflict with olam haba, but may truly be the gateway to olam haba.

That is what we do through our festivals, our Shabbatot, through everything we hear. And it is this — the consciousness of death — that keeps us from sinking into despair. We do not live with the thought that we are going to die, and that if we are going to die, nothing is worth suffering so much and restraining ourselves — so we might as well have a blast in life. There is a way of thinking about death, the consciousness of death, which is quite simply to allow the passage to the beyond; for this death is already inscribed in our life. As we advance in life we keep drawing nearer to the deadline of death; but when we draw nearer to the deadline of death, that does not mean we are drawing nearer to the end — not at all. We are drawing nearer to ha’olam haba.

And ha’olam haba is not Gan Eden. When someone has passed away, we do not speak of decease, we do not speak of death. How do we say it in Hebrew — I will not use the language of the newspapers, but the accepted language — it is niftar. Today, when you speak of pitturin, pitturin means, well, that you have resigned, or that you were let go from the company. Niftar means that he withdrew — he withdrew; he is not dead, he withdrew. And the best way to withdraw is not by some feat or other. There is a hallowed expression in the Bible: “I will lie down with my fathers” — veshachavti im avotai.

I will join them. I will complete the work they began, the work I carried out with them. Those are the expressions. So now we can move forward in the text and understand it much better. I have explained to you — is that all right? I have explained to you why there are stretches of life that are not equivalent in terms of content, but which fit into the arc of a harmonious life. That is said in the text: vayihyu chayei Sarah — it can mean “they became”: they became the years of Sarah. Me’ah shanah. Me’ah shanah — does that not tell you something? It is not a longevity of life; it is a quality of lives.

Because at me’ah shanah, a hundred years, one has been freed from all the physical and biological barriers of one’s being, and the spirit alone is shining. Ner Hashem nishmat adam — “the soul of man is the lamp of Hashem.” Ner. We replace the life with a light. That is why, as soon as a person has passed away, we light a light at his bedside. That light is there all the time; it will not leave him; it stands at his head. So: vayihyu me’ah shanah — what is this “hundred years”? We are told: a hundred years, twenty years, seven years. There is a stretch of struggle, and of triumph, of success, of achievement — the challenges a young person sets himself from the age of twenty on, when he becomes, when he takes on his responsibilities. For until twenty he is not yet regarded as sufficiently responsible for his acts.

He is not an entity who can be brought before justice with heightened responsibility; there, extenuating circumstances can still be found. Beyond twenty, his responsibility is far more engaged. So: at a hundred as at twenty, at twenty or at seven — the moment when this coquetry of life begins, when the young boy or the young girl opens up to the beauty of the world, for that too is an element one should not neglect, the beauty of this universe. So Sarah was this whole. And all of it forms a very beautiful necklace. These are not pages torn from the calendar because they have expired — no, we have kept them, because every page has its message; it has raised something up. It is not a torn life; it is a complete life. And that is why [the verse says]: yode’a Hashem yemei temimim — “Hashem knows the days of the wholehearted.”

The days of people who care for integrity, for completeness, for a harmonious whole. And after that we are told: vatamot Sarah beKiryat Arba, “and Sarah died in Kiryat Arba.” If we are to speak of the death of Sarah, we are told beKiryat Arba, in the city of the four. So this city of the four — what is it? It is the meeting place of the spiritual and the material, of shamayim and eretz, heaven and earth. And it is as such that it is Kiryat Arba. […] And it is as such that it is Kiryat Arba — not only because Adam, Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, four patriarchs, not only because Chavah, Sarah, Rivkah and Leah, four matriarchs, found their burial there. No — […] it is because this city had belonged to other forces, which were the elements of death. You know that there are four modes of execution. There is sekilah, stoning. Stoning is the revolt of the forces of the earth against man. It is a way of saying that this man, in his life, is ruled by the deviant forces, so to speak, of nature. There is also burning.

Burning corresponds to the incineration of the desires that consumed this energy, which consumed the person’s life, which was a negative energy. There is hereg, the sword — the death that wars hold in store for us, the violence of man, the ego when it is indeed unleashed. And then there is chenek, strangulation, suffocation. One suffocates, one suffocates, one suffocates because of the world to which one could not adapt, with which one could not find a common language. But that is death when death is a punishment, when it is imposed from outside. When it comes from within, everything is a will to conversion — conversion of all that has been, of all that made up this universe: domem, the inert; tzome’ach, what grows; chai, the living; medaber, the speaking — all those that, in the end, gave meaning to this energy, to this force, to these wars, to these battles they waged, and to this search in dialogue. So that is why there are four; it is the city of the four. And the city of the four is indeed the qualities of the patriarchs, the qualities of the patriarchs.

It is all of this together: that is Hebron, that is Me’arat HaMachpelah. Me’arat HaMachpelah — why? It is the cave of doubling, where everything is doubled; and beyond it, beyond this earth, beyond this burial place, something is set free, set free: a message, a life on four levels, on the side of the patriarchs as on the side of the matriarchs — the whole clan of Israel, which has a share in the world to come, which knows that life is worth only what one builds with a view to the world to come. And that is why the text names it — for it could have told us: Hebron. Why Hebron, why Kiryat Arba — Kiryat Arba or Hebron? No: there is a message to convey through the Me’arat HaMachpelah to all those whose consciousness of death means that, through their burial place, a whole spirit hovers, so that the even, the stone that is laid on the grave, is not a stone […]. No, it is a stone for a new building, through this spirit that emanates from it.

I am obliged to stop here. I leave you to ask questions afterwards if you have any. There, starting from this first verse about Sarah, about the death of Sarah, we have sketched — I would say sketched — a line of thought on the conception of death in Judaism. “I have a small question. In the Me’arat HaMachpelah are buried our three fathers, plus Yosef?” No — Adam. “Adam?” Yes. Adam is the first. “In the Me’arat HaMachpelah?” Yes. “And where was Yosef?” Yosef is in Shechem. Today, in fact, when one goes to Shechem, one has to go with an armed escort, unfortunately — to the tomb of Yosef. “Harav, two things I did not quite understand about olam haba.

When you say that it is beyond writing — everything was created through letters, through writing. I don’t understand what you just said when you say ‘beyond writing.’ What is ‘beyond writing’? […] And when you say that olam haba is feminine — it is not that I reject it, I just don’t understand what you mean. What is the link between olam haba and the feminine?” Well, I did suggest it, I would say: I was saying that only the feminine takes on the coming generation. My dear friend, however much you may want to, you are not going to carry the child…

“That is the beginning, but it is not the finality.” But it is your wife who will bring the child into the world — she, she. “It is the beginning, it is not the finality.” There, olam haba is the finality […]. Gan Eden is the finality. I told you that one must distinguish between olam hazeh, olam haba and Gan Eden. At first we say she-niftar leveit olamo, “he has withdrawn to his eternal home” — literally, to the house of his world. That is all. That is his olam haba. That his soul should rest in Gan Eden — that is already another stage. “But what is the connection with the feminine? I still don’t understand what it is.” The feminine, quite simply — it is a suggestion. It is the begetter of the coming generation, that is, of the portion of yourself that is called to take your place, to complete your work, and so on.

Like olam haba, which comes to bring things to completion. “And he tells you it is beyond writing.” I did not hear your question. “He said that olam haba was beyond writing. Personally, I don’t know what ‘beyond writing’ means, and I would really like to understand the meaning of it.” The Christians indeed began to spread their teaching only from the fourth century on. They wrote other books which we did not include — the Maccabees, for example. That is to say, the Christians regarded the Bible, as its name indicates, as a book — a closed book. And as a result, their biblical interpretation holds to the letter of the writing. Now, I have already had occasion to tell you: what is most sacred in the writing of a sefer Torah? What is it?

It is not the letter; it is not the tag, that flourish above the letter. It is not the ta’am, the way you chant the letter; it is not its intonation. No — what matters is the white that surrounds the letter, that white where nothing is written and where everything is still to be discovered. “All right, thank you, Rav, thank you very much.” “I would have a few remarks. First, when you say here that the feminine is what will relay him, to project him into the perspective of olam haba or of a finality — because he is a man — what about me, who am a woman? What is going to relay me? I don’t quite understand that, as it applies to me. Wait.

He, as a man, has a feminine that will connect him; and me — that’s it, nothing connects me? You consider that I am something full, finished — which is not the case, which is not the case. I cannot be something completed.” [Another participant:] “I believe that is the symbolism of the feminine, that’s what it is, the symbolism of the feminine.” “No, wait — here I am putting the question to Mr. Benizri.” “Yes, it should be Mr. Benizri.” “Yes, yes.” “…because it was you who said…” “Yes, I apologize, you are the speaker after all.” The question is excellent. But what I must say is that I have already had occasion to explain it:

namely, that the feminine is an entity sufficient unto itself, which is not the case with the masculine. The man says shelo asani ishah, “who has not made me a woman”; the woman says she’asani kirtzono, “who has made me according to His will” — I am the full expression of the will. “No, that I understand well, but it is when…” So she herself — that is to say, she herself already has this capacity; it is inscribed in her being. If the Torah began by relating to us the death of Sarah — paradoxically, do you know how this death of Sarah comes about? It comes when she was told that Avraham had taken his only son and had already offered him up as a burnt offering. And she said to herself: “But how — what folly! He has been offered. How did he let himself be taken? He was taken in.”

The text says parchah nishmatah, parchah nishmatah. In everyday Hebrew this means her neshamah flew away; in biblical Hebrew it means that her neshamah blossomed — parach, to flower, to blossom. Parchah nishmatah: that is to say, in the end, she considered that the chapter of her life — she had closed it. Now our chachamim say, regarding a son, a child […] — that is, whoever gives him this capacity to blossom, it is as though he had brought him into the world. That is to say, the banim, the children — we do not regard them as beings of flesh and blood, but as spiritual entities that we have realized in our life, and which are our olam haba.

There. “May I — in fact, if we push your reasoning all the way: if we are in the feminine, when you speak of the hundred and twenty-seven years of Sarah’s life, it means that the hundred and twenty-seven years are full, there is no dead time. If the Torah speaks of a hundred and twenty-seven years, it is because there is no dead time. Or are these years of life that also include dead times? Because otherwise we go in the direction of the feminine. And then I would have another question, but about philosophy, if possible.” So, the answer to the question: I will not claim that preparing bread is not dead time.

Is peeling vegetables not dead time? Or making pastry, sometimes with a great many complications because one wants to create — is that not, at times, dead time? And yet they are not dead times, because they fit in, they are integrated into a purpose. It is the purpose that gives life to all the dead times. And so it is in our life too: there are dead times in which you prepare other states in life, and it is the result, the purpose, that counts. There — that is the short answer to the question. “May I ask one more question, or is it the end?” The last one, then — go ahead. “I still have a question about philosophy.”

Yes, yes — I am not a philosopher. “No, but you talk about it; you take the risk of talking about it.” Yes, so what is the question? “I was not able to hear the whole lecture, but at the beginning you said that animals have no consciousness of death.” Yes. “And on that I don’t quite agree. Animals have a very great consciousness of death, because they sense their death coming, and often they isolate themselves or they shut down; they sense death coming.” Yes, all right; but the consciousness of death is not the fact that one has lost one’s strength and, in the end, well, one gives up on everything. That is not the consciousness of death. The consciousness of death is wanting to overcome it.

That is what the consciousness of death is. “Of course, but that is innate in every animal: you try to slaughter it, it flees from you. It will… it will flee.” But it does not want to die. “Yes. And yet it is also written in the Torah that animals see, twenty-four hours a day, the angel of death above people. Does that mean they see the person’s gilgul?” Well, that is not written in the Torah. “Ah, I was told it was written in code, or else it is written in the Gemara that…” Ah, well, now that is something else. Listen — that already belongs to the oral teaching, and the oral teaching must indeed be set in its context, and not given a Catholic reading. That must be avoided — avoided at all costs.

Otherwise it becomes really — how shall I put it? “It was a rabbi who told me that, it was a rabbi who told me that.” Yes, but at a certain moment one can sometimes suffer from infantilism. It happens to us. It happens to us. It happens to us sometimes to take texts like that, literally, and to want at all costs to stick them on like labels on bottles. One must always look at the context — as with Bilaam’s donkey: she spoke because she saw the angel of death. That is written in the Torah, Bilaam’s donkey. There it is written. There comes a moment when man sinks lower than the animal — and then the animal is capable of going ahead of him.

“Okay, yes, yes — something else, another question, the philosophical question. On philosophy, your reaction is already in a way an answer, but I will ask my question anyway. In fact, in this notion of death that you place in perspective with olam hazeh and olam haba — that is, in a perspective of olam haba, not of a finality but of a surpassing — there is always an ambiguity attached to the word philosophy, or to the notion of philosophy. Now, in fact, when one simply listens to a philosopher who is asked questions and speaks, one is, as a rule, struck by the fact that everything he says is attached to this world alone. That is to say, one realizes that he regards this world as the finality of things.

There is no notion of surpassing. Is it in this sense that one can consider philosophy to represent a form of death?” That is the difference between chochmah and yirat Shamayim, the fear of Heaven. Chochmah is a philosophy, is it not? It is indeed the one the nachash develops, and it relates to this world. “All right.” But that is not chochmah [in the true sense]: the vision of the transcendent, of the transcendent, and true wisdom — that is the Jewish vision. And that is what distinguishes the philosophy of the nations from Jewish philosophy. “All right — so the philosophy of the nations belongs more to a deathly notion, in fact?” Insofar as it is confined to this world alone, it does not give itself the means to surpass itself.

Or else, as the Greek philosophers did, they ignored the world here below in order to think only of the world beyond, and to locate the whole reality of things solely in the world beyond and not in this world. They did not join the two spheres together. There we are. “Thank you, Rav. Good evening.” Thank you very much. Thank you very much. May I remind you once more, as indicated behind me, of the lecture on Kabbalah — yes, it is an introduction by Edouard Robberechts, who heads Jewish studies at the University of Aix-Marseille — on Wednesday evening, for those in Brussels. “And you said it would not be on Zoom, is that right?” It is not on Zoom, indeed.

We will nonetheless try to record it, so that we can put it on the YouTube channel; but alas, not everyone will be able to attend. “No — I live in Tiberias, I won’t be able to attend.” Thank you all, and in any case, until next week. Goodbye, everyone.