Berachot 12b: The Heart as the seat of the Intellect

On Berachot 12b, the following:

הרהור עבירה והרהור ע"ז מנלן דתניא אחרי לבבכם זו מינות וכן הוא אומר (תהלים יד, א) אמר נבל בלבו אין אלהים

Or, in English:

 But where do we find [warnings against] the opinions of the heretics, and the hankering after immorality and idolatry? — It has been taught: After your own heart:²⁹  this refers to heresy; and so it says, The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.³⁰

At precisely the 34 minute mark in his shiur on the daf, Rabbi Chaim Eisenstein discusses a mussar vort about this. He points out that it does not say the brain but the heart. We see that people go off the derech and adopt heresy not because of intellect, but because of emotion, or because of desires, with the intellectual arguments being ex-post-facto rationalizations. And he gives a practical example of a a philosopher he knows who admits that it was not honest inquiry, but rather difficulties in life that caused the metamorphosis.

Speaker:Rabbi Chaim EisensteinGiven On:Friday August 10, 2012

I'd like to address two points. First, should we actually make such a deduction, from heart = emotion, when in fact Chazal thought heart = mind? Second, whether emotional upheaval involves in some moves to heresy really means that that there is no intellectual merit to the opposing position.

1) In terms of the former, it is already quite well-known that Chazal held, like many ancient Greek scientists, that the heart was the seat of the intellect. If there are scattered references to the brain as the seat of the intellect, in accordance with other ancient Greek scientists, this is because Chazal were not entirely monolithic, but consisted of different very intelligent and learned rabbis, who were exposed to different theories.

I will reproduce here one of my parshablog posts related to this topic, before turning to the second topic:

Summary: A liver is the heart of Pharaoh. So goes a midrash or two. What this may indicate in terms of whether Chazal literally saw the heart as the seat of the intellect.

Post: In last week's parasha, Vaera, we encounter the following pesukim:

יג  וַיֶּחֱזַק לֵב פַּרְעֹה, וְלֹא שָׁמַע אֲלֵהֶם:  כַּאֲשֶׁר, דִּבֶּר ה.  {ס}	13 And Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he hearkened not unto them; as the LORD had spoken. {S}
יד  וַיֹּאמֶר ה אֶל-מֹשֶׁה, כָּבֵד לֵב פַּרְעֹה; מֵאֵן, לְשַׁלַּח הָעָם.	14 And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Pharaoh's heart is stubborn, he refuseth to let the people go.

Kaveid means heavy, or in this case stubborn. However, it also means liver. Place two internal organs in close proximity to a pasuk, where one is indeed an internal organ and the other is a homonym, and a derasha is born!

And that is precisely what Chazal do. In Shemot Rabba, we read:

ח [ויחזק לב פרעה]ע

ויחזק לב פרעה, ויאמר ה' אל משה כבד לב פרעה כועס הוא.
מה הכבד כועס אף לבו של זה נעשה כבד, אינו מבין כסיל הוא. (קהלת ז, ט) כי כעס בחיק כסילים ינוח. במה מייסרים את הכסיל? במטה, שנאמר: (משלי כו, ג) ושבט לגו כסילים, אף משה ייסר פרעה במטה, שנאמר: והמטה אשר נהפך לנחש וגו' 

Thus:
"He was angry. Just as the liver is angry, so too the heart of this one became a liver {kaveid}, without understanding, he is a fool. Then, citing Kohelet, אַל-תְּבַהֵל בְּרוּחֲךָ, לִכְעוֹס: כִּי כַעַס, בְּחֵיק כְּסִילִים יָנוּחַ. Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry; for anger resteth in the bosom of fools..."

This derasha gets better and better. The pasuk in Kohelet is deliciously reinterpreted. Usually, kaas, anger, sits in the liver. This was ancient science, in which the liver is the seat of emotions such as lust and rage. The heart was the seat of the intellect. The heart is located in the cheik, the bosom, which would be higher up. Yet in kesilim, foolish people who lack this intellect, it is kaas which is located in their bosom, in their heart. This was a fine point of interpretation that is easy to miss.

This is not the only midrash which interprets this in this way. There is a slight variation of this in Midrash Lekach Tov on this pasuk:

"That is to say, the heart of Pharaoh was turned into a liver {kaveid} -- just as a liver has no understanding to understand and comprehend, so too there was no understanding in his heart to understand and comprehend. Therefore, his heart was hardened and was stubborn for him."

One could point out that there is no understanding in a person's small intestine or in his left big toe, either. Is this simply random, seizing upon the luckily listed body part? I doubt it. Some ancient philosophers believed in a tripartite soul: the rational soul, the animal soul, and the vegetative soul. The rational soul was located in the brain; the animal soul was located in the heart; and the vegetative soul was located in the liver. See here.

But Aristotle, while disputing this tripartite division, put the primacy in the heart and placing the rational soul in no particular place. And Seneca and other Stoics placed the rational soul in the heart. See here.

It therefore does not seem to me to be an accident that this focus is made on heart and organ, and noting that the liver does not have intellect. This midrash appears to agree with these philosophers in making the heart the seat of the rational soul and the liver the seat of the vegetative soul.

What this strongly suggests to me is that when Chazal were talking about the heart, liver, kidneys, etc., as serving certain functions -- e.g. kidneys giving counsel, they were not talking allegorically. Rather, they were in agreement with the scientific state of the art and were speaking literally. Of course, there is room to maneuver and argue otherwise. Still, my guts tell me that this is right. ;)

By the way, Rabbi Natan Slifkin put out a monograph on a related topic,

The Question of the Kidneys' Counsel. It discusses the Scriptural, Talmudic and Midrashic accounts of the kidneys providing counsel to the heart, and explores the response of Rishonim, Acharonim and contemporary figures to this topic. The topic also has broad and significant ramifications for other conflicts between Torah and science, some of which are discussed in the document.

Check it out, if you'd like.

2) I agree that in a large number of cases, when someone goes "off the derech", even where they have intellectual arguments, the start was an emotional upheaval. But at the same time, I suspect that in a large number of cases, when someone becomes a baal teshuva and goes "on the derech", it does not begin with the intellectual arguments of the Discovery seminar and the like, but with an emotional upheaval, or an emotional draw.

For someone to give up his dogma or, even having given up said dogma, throwing his life and relationships into disarray, takes quite a push. People will stay with the status quo. That does not mean that the heretical positions, perforce, without substance; or that the religious positions are, perforce, without substance. That seems like quite a leap to make. One could say that the emotional upheaval led to a reevaluation of one's life and philosophy.

Further, I don't know that every closet heretic or Orthoprax individual (for each person, in each society, in each time) can be so readily dismissed in such a manner, since the matter may well be one of intellectual conclusions, with absence of an emotional trigger to drive them to action. And further, this comes close to boldly asserting that questions are themselves all insubstantial and the result of the yetzer hara. That attitude is likely to alienate people who honestly have questions, and drive them off the derech.