Hebrew Voices #230 – A Deeply Human Jewish God
Episode Description
In this episode of Hebrew Voices #230 - A Deeply Human Jewish God, Nehemia talks with Dr. Avi Kadish, a Medieval Jewish Philosophy expert and a Modern Day Masorete, discussing his work on producing an extremely accurate Tanakh text, the human-like character of Elohim versus the Aristotelian Greek view of some past Rabbis, and the part Christian texts played in one scholar's deeper understanding of Torah.
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PODCAST VERSION:
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Avi Kadish: What it means is that God does have corporeal aspects. That God is found, in some way, within a physical group; not born in a human body but dwelling amongst the people of Israel. It means that this is an extraordinarily human god with a very complex personality.
—Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Avi Kadish, who I am going to term a modern-day Masorete. Shalom, Avi.
Avi: Shalom.
Nehemia: Avi works on a project which, I’m probably going to mispronounce the name, or misstate the name: Miqra al pi ha-Mesorah; no, I think I got that right, which is also known as M.A.M. It is the Hebrew text of the Tanakh, of what Christians call the Old Testament, that you will get when you go to Wikitext. And I’ve known about this for a long time, but didn’t think it was very serious because, you know, Wikipedia, right? Who takes that seriously? But I found out a little bit more about it, and I was blown away, that this might be one of the most accurate renditions of the Hebrew text of the Tanakh in digital format in the world. So, Avi, shalom.
Avi: Shalom, good to be with you, Nehemia.
Nehemia: Avi, so this isn’t your day job. What do you do as your profession, that, I think, in a sense prepared you to be able to do this as sort of a side project?
Avi: My profession is somewhat related but didn’t really prepare me to do this. I was a school teacher. And around the year 2000, or 2001, actually, I was invited to do a doctorate with Menachem Kellner in medieval Jewish philosophy at the University of Haifa. And for the past dozen or so years I’ve been teaching at Miklhelet Oranim, which is a teacher’s college in Kiryat Tiv’on in the north of Israel. It’s south of Haifa. I teach there in the History Department and in the Bible Department. In the Bible Department, I teach medieval Jewish exegesis. In the History Department, I teach Jewish thought, Jewish history, and even sometimes areas of general history.
Nehemia: What was the subject of your PhD?
Avi: What was the subject of my PhD? I’ll give you the formal subject and what it means. The formal subject was Rabbi Shimon Ben Zemach Duran, who was an exile from Spain to North Africa in 1391. And he is a central figure in the world of halakha, but also in the world of Jewish philosophy.
Nehemia: He was from Mallorca, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he…
Avi: His family…
Nehemia: He was from one of those islands.
Avi: He himself was not.
Nehemia: Oh, okay.
Avi: And so, he wrote a book of Jewish philosophy that’s less well known. A lot of the works of Jewish philosophy were what you might call books of principles. Meaning, it’s philosophy, but the topics are organized according to a system of dogma, or principles of the Torah. And he wrote the least well known of the books of that genre.
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: And that’s what I did. That’s the specific topic. The actual topic, which I do believe has a connection to Bible and to Mesorah, to some degree, or to at least to why the Bible is important, is that I believe that medieval Jewish philosophy is really a conflict or a debate between the god of Aristotle and the God of Abraham. Or, to put it differently, between a view of the world which is about relationships and meaning and goals, versus a view of the world which is about nature and causation and science, in modern terms.
Nehemia: Wow. So, you’re saying Aristotle had a god of science. Or maybe science was his god, in a sense?
Avi: Or best to say that Aristotle’s god works according to its nature.
Nehemia: What does that mean?
Avi: It has no will.
Nehemia: Okay, so, I don’t want to use big words here, but basically, this idea of the apathetic god; is that what we’re talking about? In other words, like, it’s a god who doesn’t really love, because that would mean it would change. And it’s not really angry because that would mean it would change, because a second ago it wasn’t angry. Is that kind of what we’re talking about?
Avi: Yeah, and that’s not the god of the…
Nehemia: That’s Maimonides’s god too, though, isn’t it?
Avi: It’s either Maimonides’s god, or Maimonides perhaps had some sort of revision of that god. In either case, even the moderate… there’s a radical Maimonides and a moderate Maimonides. Even the moderate Maimonides wasn’t so moderate.
Nehemia: Okay. Maybe we’ll do a different episode about Jewish philosophy, because that is fascinating. But how did that prepare you for working on the Hebrew text of the Tanakh?
Avi: It did not.
Nehemia: Oh, it didn’t? Okay.
Avi: It did not prepare me for working on the text, but it made the topic important. Okay?
Nehemia: Why? Why did it make it important?
Avi: Why? Well, I’ll put it this way. You have a wide range of viewers, I understand. So, I really do believe that Jews and Christians can learn a lot about their own traditions and their own faiths by meeting the other faith. Okay?
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: And I think a prime example of that for me is a lesser-known Jewish philosopher by the name of Rabbi Prof. Michael Wyschogrod. He was actually active at Yeshiva University. I was a student of a student of Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, I had that blessing, and so was Michael Wyschogrod. He was a student of Rabbi Soloveitchik, and in his books, he writes about how he understood the Torah from a traditional perspective much better after confronting Christianity…
Nehemia: Really?
Avi: … for precisely the reasons that we just talked about. In other words, when you get a feel for Christianity, it can help you understand that the God of the Bible and the God of the rabbis, the Midrash and the Talmud, was not the God of Maimonides.
Nehemia: That’s interesting. Wow! So, we’re getting off topic, but I think it’s important…
Avi: We’re totally off topic.
Nehemia: No, but you know what? We’ll have to do another program, maybe, and get to the topic, because this is too important to jump past this. That’s really interesting. I once wrote a book, many years ago, which was sort of like an interfaith dialog, and my father read the book. He was an Orthodox rabbi, and he said, “Look, we have our thing, they have their thing. Leave it alone. Interfaith dialog is not productive and it’s not a good thing. Right? We’re happy with our thing. We know our thing is true, and they have their thing. They think it’s true. And unlike Christianity, Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion, so we don’t have to convince them. We’re convinced.”
So, you seem to be bringing a very different perspective that we can learn more about Judaism from studying Christianity. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that from an Orthodox Jew, so run with that.
Avi: Well, it’s not me who invented it. It’s…
Nehemia: What’s that?
Avi: It’s not me who invented it, it’s Michael Wyschogrod.
Nehemia: But you mentioned Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik; wasn’t he famously against Jewish-Christian interfaith dialog?
Avi: He was, yes…
Nehemia: Like, interfaith dialog is avoided by modern Orthodox Jews because he was against it.
Avi: Yeah…
Nehemia: They do it, but they call it something else.
Avi: He wasn’t against cooperation, and he wasn’t even against friendships or anything like that. What he opposed was trying to understand the truth of the other, and he didn’t believe that that was possible.
Nehemia: Is that what interfaith dialog is; trying to understand the truth of the other? I don’t know that I’ve heard it described that way.
Avi: I agree with you, and I think Michael Wyschogrod is an example of this. Michael Wyschogrod, you know, did take this path. He didn’t take…
Nehemia: No, but…
Avi: Yeah?
Nehemia: No, what I said is, I don’t know that I’ve heard interfaith dialog as trying to understand the truth of the other. I mean, the way I’ve always heard it explained was “to try to explain the other ‘my truth’”. I mean, maybe it’s six of one, one-half dozen of the other. Maybe it’s the same thing. But I’ve never heard it presented that way. It’s very interesting.
Avi: To be quite frank, just so I don’t give the wrong impression, I mean, I have here and there been involved in interfaith discussions or meetings, but it’s been very minor. It’s not something central in my life, it’s not something that…
Nehemia: So, Rabbi, and I hope I’m not going to say…
Avi: What?
Nehemia: Rabbi Wyschingrod… is that what his name is?
Avi: Michael Wyschogrod.
Nehemia: Wyschingrod. So, Rabbi Wyschingrod… so what was his…
Avi: Wyschogrod… W-Y-C-H, etc. Wyschogrod.
Nehemia: You’ll have to send it in an email with the spelling so my editor can put it up on the screen.
Avi: I’ll send it to you. Anyways, he wrote a book called The Body of Faith, and I think the title can explain to you how Christianity helped him rediscover… In other words, you said with your father, you know, “We know what we know.” Do we know what we know? That’s the question. And Michael Wyschogrod discovered that he didn’t know what he thought he knew. So… All right, all right.
Nehemia: I want to give an example of that. So, I once asked my father what hashgacha pratit was, and he said, “The truth is, I don’t really know.” And he didn’t study philosophy, he studied Gemara and halakha, but mostly Gemara. That was his focus.
Avi: Of course.
Nehemia: So, for those who don’t know, hashgacha pratit is… and you’re a philosophy guy, you’ll explain better than me. In fact, why don’t you explain what hashgacha pratit is?
Avi: Oh. [Laughter]
Nehemia: No, al regel achat, meaning…
Avi: Al regel achat, I mean the…
Nehemia: What we call…
Avi: The term means that God personally supervises individuals.
Nehemia: Right. Okay. So, my father understood that, but obviously God supervises individuals, so what does it really mean? And I didn’t really come to understand what it meant until I studied medieval philosophy, which was, “Well, the deists say, ‘No, God, He’s in charge of the, you know, of the giraffes. And He makes sure giraffes survive. He’s in charge of elephants; He makes sure His elephants survive. He doesn’t care about an individual giraffe or elephant or human.’” Right? So, there’s hashgacha klalit, which is “general providence.” And even, you know, Benjamin Franklin believed in general providence, as a deist, but individual providence… He’s not the God who hears your prayers because He doesn’t care about that kind of thing. Right? So, my father understood in general the idea, no pun intended, he understood it’s that God individually cares about you. But that’s one of the principles of faith of Maimonides. Why do we need that as a principle of faith? It’s kind of like, “No duh, Sherlock. Of course, that’s what God is,” right? But that’s not what everybody’s God is, so understanding the other person’s concept of God helps you understand what is it that the Torah really teaches.
So, that’s profound. I love what you’re saying. I want to run with this, because I feel like we can return to the Masoretic thing. So, Shimon Ben Zemach Duran… and I feel like I wrote about him in a paper somewhere. Did he have, like, a relative who was from Mallorca who was also a refugee? Is that the one I worked on?
Avi: The truth is, it’s been years…
Nehemia: Rabbi Nissim Duran is…
Avi: I remember in the first chapter of my dissertation about a relative from Mallorca or something like that.
Nehemia: All right, so, it’s not fair that I’m putting you on the spot on something from 20-plus years ago. So, I don’t remember it from six years ago, so, you know… or not the specifics, right? All right. So, in any event, how is he so different? Well, no, I want to go back to Rabbi Wyschin… whoever.
Avi: Wyschogrod.
Nehemia: So, you said it should be obvious from the title of his book that he understood Judaism better from Christianity. I think I know what you mean but, say what you mean. Meaning, like, is this coming from…
Avi: Well, what I mean is that it’s very easy in traditional circles, you know, to take like the 13 principles of Maimonides and to know that Maimonides says, you know, that God has no physical aspects. Which really means that He has no human aspects, no emotions either, okay? And to accept that. Okay? And that’s what many, many people are taught and think, and that’s what Wyschogrod taught and thought. But when he came up hard against the Christian god, who is so human that he’s even born in a human body, right?
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: That clarified for him what the Bible means, in his opinion, at least, what the Bible means by “God dwelling amongst the people of Israel”.
Nehemia: So, what does it mean?
Avi: What it means is that God does have corporeal aspects; that God is found, in some way, within a physical group. Not born in a human body but dwelling amongst the people of Israel. It means that this is an extraordinarily human God with a very complex personality. And, I think also from at least the original version of his book, a very male personality, whereas Israel is very female. And it’s a very different outlook than the Maimonidean one.
And my claim, and stuff that came out of the doctorate, after the doctorate, is… is that that’s really what was being argued about in the Middle Ages as well. That all of the systems of dogma that were offered in place of Maimonides’s 13 principles… it’s not just, you know, picking and choosing different details or different foundations… you know, you could have picked those, and instead I pick these, but everybody agrees on the same ones. Anyways, it’s not semantics; rather, it’s substance. That when you build a different vision of dogma, what you’re really trying to do is tell a different story.
Nehemia: Let me ask you this question. So, Maimonides’s god… and just… guys, background… Maimonides was from Cordoba in Spain. Eventually, as a refugee, ended up in Cairo. He died in the year 1204. And when we talk about modern Judaism, in a sense, it’s the Judaism of Maimonides. Rabbi Akiva wouldn’t necessarily recognize what he read in a modern-day prayer book. Some of it he would, right? But the part about, certainly the 13 principles of faith… is that in the prayer book? I feel like that Chabad recites it…
Avi: There’s a version of it in the…
Nehemia: Okay, right. It’s not the one from Pirush Lemishnayot, but it’s a kind of a dumbed down version, maybe. Okay. So, a lot of those things would be like, maybe not recognizable to the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud. And some of them would be, no doubt.
Avi: In some ways, Maimonides would be very recognizable to the rabbis of the Mishnah.
Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.
Avi: In other ways, very much not.
Nehemia: So, but the idea…
Avi: You say that… I don’t know, the Torah today is the Torah of Maimonides, that’s not necessarily the case. Maimonides had a very profound influence…
Nehemia: So, there’s been a lot of development since the 13th century.
Avi: What?
Nehemia: There’s been a lot of development since 1204, is what you’re saying.
Avi: Not just development. Maimonides, in many ways, failed, because the vision that Maimonides opposed overcame his influence; the mystical vision, the Kabbalah.
Nehemia: So, Kabbalah, in a sense, was a response to Maimonides, right? It was…
Avi: It was an attempt to do what Maimonides did even better and more powerfully, with a completely different outlook.
Nehemia: So, the God of Maimonides; when he reads in the Torah that God is angry, what does Maimonides say about that? What does it mean? Is God really angry?
Avi: Okay, I see that we’re going to be doing Jewish philosophy. [Laughter]
Nehemia: No, this is too important to gloss over.
Avi: Okay. So, in Mishnaic times, in the times of the rabbis around, I don’t know, the 1st century…
Nehemia: Let’s be more controversial. When it says, “God loves”, what is Maimonides… When it said “God loves…”
Avi: For all of these things, you have to understand what Maimonides did. There was a rabbi, a contemporary of Rabbi Akiva, 2nd century, Rabbi Yishmael. Okay? And they had debates about how to do midrash. And Rabbi Akiva’s midrash was very radical, and he could…
Nehemia: What is midrash for the audience who’s not familiar with it?
Avi: How to define midrash? Midrash is to take a verse in the Bible and find, at least for Rabbi Akiva, to find infinite meaning in it. Okay?
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: It’s a divine verse, so it has infinite meaning. But Rabbi Yishmael, who was his contemporary, thought he was going too far. He says, “Look, you know, there’s a text here. You have to remain connected to the words, and you can’t do all this crazy stuff,” said Rabbi Yishmael. He said, “You have to remain close to the text because dibra Torah kilshon bnei adam.” “The Torah speaks the language of man.” Even if the Torah is divine, it is speaking to human beings, so it has to speak in human language. And you can’t find meanings in it that are utterly divorced from what these words would mean in human language.
So, Rabbi Yishmael said, “If this is what the verse says, ‘Dibra Torah kilshon bnei adam,’ ‘the Torah speaks in the language of man,’ then that’s how you have to understand it.” You understand it maybe not in a way that’s completely literal, but it’s close to the literal meaning of the verse. A thousand years later, comes along Maimonides, and he quotes Rabbi Yishmael, but he turns it on its head.
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: And he says, “‘Dibra Torah kilshon bnei adam’ ‘the Torah says that God loves. The Torah says that God is angry.’ ‘Dibra Torah kilshon bnei adam,’ ‘the Torah is speaking in the language of human beings.’ Don’t understand it that way.”
Nehemia: So, in other words, Maimonides understands it sort of like a metaphor; God doesn’t really love. Can you explain the basic idea of God?
Avi: God causes the universe to operate in ways which seem to us like love or like anger or what have you.
Nehemia: Ah. But God doesn’t actually have a feeling, or an emotion, called love.
Avi: God is utterly…
Nehemia: According to Maimonides.
Avi: According to Maimonides, yes.
Nehemia: He’s what?
Avi: Utterly not human.
Nehemia: Okay. Explain the thing about God changing, and how that ties… like from the Greek… Like this idea that if God loves right at this moment, that means a minute ago He didn’t love in response to your prayer, so God changed. Explain that philosophy.
Avi: Okay. So, there’s lots of Greek ideas.
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: Lots of Greek concepts that are foreign to the Tanakh, okay? One of them, for instance, is perfection. Okay?
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: So many people talk about God being perfect, but the Tanakh never says that God is perfect. And I don’t even think Chazal… maybe, I don’t know. But in general, Chazal do not say that…
Nehemia: And who are Chazal, for the audience who are not familiar?
Avi: Chazal, meaning the rabbis of the Midrash and the Talmud, they do not speak about God in general as being perfect in a Greek sense, okay? Greek perfection means that if it’s perfect, then it lacks nothing and it needs no change. Would it change, then it would not be perfection.
Nehemia: Or was it perfect a second ago, before it changed, right? Meaning…
Avi: All right. So, the God of the Bible is very human. The God of the Bible learns. The God of the Bible acts in very different ways, in very different circumstances.
Nehemia: Okay. So, let’s… wow! That actually brings up a really interesting question. So, you explain that interestingly. So, it’s not that God actually experiences love, we experience something from God’s actions, according to Maimonides…
Avi: That’s Maimonides.
Nehemia: That’s Maimonides, okay.
Avi: My claim is that the rest of the books of dogma were trying to tell a different story, that this is a God of relationship and not a God of causation.
Nehemia: What would Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael have understood from a verse that says God loves?
Avi: All right. So, I’ll use the 80/20. The 80/20 means this: when you look at the Midrash and the Talmud, at first glance it feels very, very different than the Bible. Extraordinarily different. You could take hours telling all the differences between the world of the rabbis and the world of the Bible. And yet, despite that…
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: …the world of Chazal, of the rabbis of the Midrash and the Talmud, their God, their Israel, is eighty percent, let’s say, a rough continuation of biblical ideas, okay?
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: There are some things which seem completely new, but there are other things… In other words, the God of the Bible is human. The God of the rabbis is human. The covenant of the Bible is human.
Nehemia: What do you mean by human?
Avi: The covenant of the rabbis is human.
Nehemia: What do you mean by human? Explain what you mean by that. In contrast to Maimonides…
Avi: By human, I mean that you can have a relationship with this God in human terms.
Nehemia: Whoa! So that’s really big. So, in Maimonides’s God, you could not have a relationship with that God.
Avi: Correct. Maimonides’s God is not relatable.
Nehemia: Wow! And… wow! So, when Maimonides prayed, why would he pray if God can’t hear him?
Avi: There! You ask all the big…
Nehemia: No, isn’t that the 64-thousand-dollar question? Why would I keep Shabbat if God doesn’t know or care?
Avi: Okay.
Nehemia: Is it only just for me?
Avi: So, if you pray to the god of Aristotle, it’s like banging your head on a wall. Not only does he not hear you and not only does he not care, he doesn’t even know that you exist. The God of Maimonides seems to know that you exist, and maybe even know that you’re praying, and yet the God of Israel… the God of Maimonides, excuse me, is not moved by prayer. And that begs your question; so why pray? Right?
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: Why pray? And, well, I would argue again that Maimonides’s critics wanted to go back to a more traditional view of prayer. But if we’re taking Maimonides himself… so, there’s two ways to do it, okay? One way to do it is to say that, even in the Maimonidean conception, there can be a mechanism for prayers to be answered. In other words, God can cause the universe to work, to operate, in a way that allows prayers to be answered. Okay?
The person who best expressed this was Rabbi Yosef Albo, okay? But he’s expressing something which could be Maimonidean, even though Maimonides doesn’t say it explicitly; that when you pray, you change yourself. So, if you didn’t deserve it before you prayed, then you pray and you change yourself, and then you deserve it after you pray, such that prayer is effective, even if God is not moved.
Nehemia: That’s a sad universe to live in.
Avi: [Laughter]
Nehemia: Wow. I want to read you a verse here. I just plucked out a verse here, Deuteronomy 28:63. This is the JPS translation. It says, “And as the LORD once delighted in making you prosperous and many, so will the LORD now delight,” and in Hebrew it’s Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, “so will the LORD now delight in causing you to perish and wiping you out.” This is the blessing and the curse. So, according to Maimonides, that’s just a metaphor. God doesn’t really delight.
Avi: God is not delighted. God is not angry. But the actions of Israel can have effects that, you know, look like a blessing…
Nehemia: Wow. That’s really interesting. I once heard somebody say that, you know, you perceive your dog as loving you, but the dog doesn’t really love you. The dog’s hungry, the dog’s reacting to certain instincts, and it knows that if it behaves in a certain way, it gets a treat. And you’re projecting your own human understanding onto the dog. And boy, d-o-g and G-o-d, you switch the letters… So, in a sense, God’s actions are perceived, according to Maimonides, as love or anger. What does Rabbi Shimon Ben Duran, who you wrote your dissertation… where does he go with that?
Avi: Where does he go with that? So, there’s different ways that Maimonides could be reacted to. He’s an example of reacting to Maimonides in a way which accepts Maimonides’s framework and then plugs something into it which seems utterly alien to it. Okay? What he does is, he accepts Maimonides’s 13 principles. He does that even though he himself knows… he writes this explicitly, he himself knows that Maimonides’s 13 principles could be describing the Aristotelian god. Okay? He writes explicitly, “it gives you a heart attack when you read Maimonides 13 principles and you realize that they may be describing the Aristotelian god.” He nonetheless accepts them, and he says, “Well, Maimonides wrote his 13 principles standing on two pillars that he didn’t even need to name.” And those two pillars are creation and providence. They’re the understood pillars underlying the 13 principles.
Nehemia: Isn’t providence one of the 13 principles? Am I wrong about that? Ha’hashgacha pratit?
Avi: Not exactly. Close, but not exactly.
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: You have God’s knowledge of human beings, and you have that God rewards and punishes, but…
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: …reward and punish can be understood in a Maimonidean fashion.
Nehemia: Ah.
Avi: I’ll give you a simple example. Let’s say you badmouth people all the time.
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: What’s going to end up happening?
Nehemia: People won’t trust me, and someone’s going to start badmouthing me.
Avi: Yeah. In other words…
Nehemia: Someone gives me a bunch of gossip, I ask the question, “What are they saying about me?”
Avi: Very nice. In other words, human society has a certain nature and built into that nature are certain kinds of reward and punishment that don’t require divine intervention.
Nehemia: Ah. So, it’s almost like the necessary consequences of bad actions are bad results. Rather than God saying, “I didn’t like that. I’m going to punish you for it.”
Avi: Mm-hmm.
Nehemia: And by the way, what that sort of does is, it negates mercy. Because there’s no God to say, you know, “You’ve repented and now I’m going to forgive you.” No. Your bad actions still have consequences. Am I wrong?
Avi: Yeah. This was just an example…
Nehemia: According to who, I guess, right?
Avi: What? What?
Nehemia: I said, “Am I wrong?” But I guess according to who, right? Am I wrong according to Rabbi Shimon Ben Zemach Duran, is the question, right?
Avi: Rabbi Shimon Ben Zemach Duran says that there is hashgacha, meaning that God has volition, God has will, and that God does respond, based on His will, to human action.
Nehemia: Okay. So, he pays lip service to Maimonides, but in practice…
Avi: It’s more than lip service, it’s immense admiration, and it’s also a bit of awe. But what he does is… he does this in many different ways in his writings, even in his halakhic writings he does this; he finds it very easy to combine unlike things.
Nehemia: Is there anyone today, and I know that’s probably too broad of a question; is there any major movement in Judaism today that teaches, like, let’s say, a hyper-Maimonides version of God, that God has no emotion?
Avi: Absolutely.
Nehemia: There is?
Avi: There’s the whole Rambam movement.
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: Okay. My teacher, Menachem Kellner, he likes to joke that a generation ago, or so, there were two prominent leaders who each saw himself as the representative of Maimonides in the generation. The first was the Rebbe of Lubavitch, the rabbi of Chabad. He was a Maimonidean!
Nehemia: Really?
Avi: He’s the one who created a study schedule for Maimonides Mishneh Torah, a cycle of study of it. He viewed everything he did as an embodiment of the Maimonidean outlook, as he understood Maimonides. And then, the other one was, this is the joke; the Rebbe of Leibowitz. This is Isaiah Leibowitz, okay?
Nehemia: Oh, okay.
Avi: Who was a guru of secular Israelis, even though he himself was an observant Jew. He saw himself as a Maimonidean. And the funny thing about it is that the Rebbe of Lubavitch and Isaiah Leibowtiz, both of them of blessed memory, they were so completely unlike each other in every aspect of their outlook that it’s unbelievable to think that they each saw themselves as representatives of Maimonides. In other words, Maimonides is like a mirror, right? The Rebbe of Lubavitch looks at Maimonides and sees Chabad. The… Isaiah Leibowitz looks at Maimonides and sees Isaiah Leibowitz. Maimonides can be taken in almost any direction.
Nehemia: Okay. Let’s now circle back to Rabbi Wysch… Wyschno… What was his name?
Avi: Rabbi Michael Wyschogrod. Who, by the way, I’m not an expert in. I just…
Nehemia: No, but you brought him up. So, I think you were saying, if I’m not mistaken, that he thinks… well, what was his view of God? Let’s ask that question. Or if you want…
Avi: His view of God was far, far more human. His view of God…
Nehemia: So, this was my question: how did studying Christianity bring him to a non-Maimonidean…
Avi: Because the Christian god is so human to the extent of being embodied in flesh, he asked himself, “Okay, so when the rabbis of the Talmud, right, were debating the early Christians, let’s say, or when you look at the Bible itself, and you know that in some way, right, Christianity is growing out of it, okay, what does this teach me? It doesn’t necessarily teach me that God will become embodied in flesh, as the Christians believe. Instead, what it can teach me is that the God of Israel is very, very deeply human and very, very involved in the physical world.” Okay? To give you an example, you asked about emotions, okay?
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: Well, the rabbis of the Talmud, and Christianity, okay, they both deepened the human God of the Bible. It’s a continuation. The God of the Bible is very human. The God of the rabbis is even more human. For example, there’s lots of emotions of God, or experiences of God, that you can find in the Bible, but it’s hard to locate the God of the Bible suffering.
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: I can’t think of a passage, okay, where the God of the Bible suffers. Now, the god of the Christians, we all know, suffers, is capable of suffering, is capable of that aspect of humanity too, right?
Nehemia: Mm-hmm.
Avi: How about the God of the rabbis?
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: The God of the rabbis suffers. When Israel is in exile, the God of the rabbis suffers together with Israel. The God of the rabbis is empathetic and feels the pain of the other.
Nehemia: So, what comes to mind here is, in the Haggadah there’s the part where… and you can probably tell it better than I could, where the Israelites see the dead Egyptians on the shore of the sea, and God is, you know, “Those are My creations.” So, He’s suffering, in a sense.
Avi: Okay. That’s a midrash.
Nehemia: Right, it’s a midrash. But it’s drawn from the story of Jonah, where Jonah’s kikayon, which I heard that in daily speech recently. I don’t even know how to translate. It’s the little bush, or shrub, or whatever. It’s a shrubbery of sorts, as they say in Monty Python.
Avi: It’s something that gives shade.
Nehemia: Right. So, the kikayon dies, and he’s so sad. And God says to him, basically, “How do you think I feel? You’re embarrassed that your prophecy didn’t come true because they repented,” right? “How would you think I would feel if 400,000 people died, who I created?”
Avi: Maybe you’ve thought upon an example!
Nehemia: Right. There’s an example, but think; I had to really stretch to find that example. And it’s interesting; God there is expressing “I would have been sad if they died,” in a sense. The way you feel about your shrubbery is how I would have felt many, many fold about the death of all these people. And so, how would Maimonides explain that? “That’s just a metaphor. He doesn’t really feel it.”
Avi: Well, what Maimonides did, and this is the incredible achievement, and the achievement that the Kabbalah tried to do even better; Maimonides succeeded in taking the entire body of both the written Torah, the Tanakh, and the Oral Torah, meaning the traditions of the rabbis, and reinterpreting them globally. Or at least giving keys, or methods, and examples, for interpreting them globally in a rationalistic direction. Okay? The Kabbalah had to reproduce that and to say, “We’ll reinterpret the entire Torah globally in a mystical direction.”
Nehemia: Mm-hmm. So, there’s another verse that comes to mind, which is a very famous verse, Exodus 24:10, which it says, “Va’yer’u et Elohei Yisrael,” “And they saw the God of Israel.” So, I think most Jews, and correct me if I’m wrong here, maybe I’m wrong, but I think, even in Talmudic times they would have said, “That’s a mashal. It’s a metaphor.” Or, “That would be dibra Torah be’lshon bnei adam,” “Torah spoken in the language of men.”
Avi: Well, first of all, you have “ki lo yirani ha’adam vechai,” “For a human…”
Nehemia: Right. So, you have two verses that contradict so you have to reconcile them. Okay?
Avi: Okay.
Nehemia: So, according to Rabbi Ishmael, what does it mean, “They saw the God of Israel,” in Exodus 24:10?
Avi: I honestly don’t… I…
Nehemia: What would you think he would say? If you were Rabbi Ishmael, what would you say?
Avi: I don’t remember. I don’t know, I don’t remember offhand the midrashim on that verse.
Nehemia: That’s fine, but how could you apply…
Avi: Okay.
Nehemia: …a Rabbi Ishmael approach to that? Let me ask you that. I mean, if you don’t know, it’s fine, but…
Avi: Well, you could say, first of all, that the plain meaning of the verses seems to be that it is possible to see God, but that it’s very, very dangerous.
Nehemia: Hmm.
Avi: Okay?
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: It’s very dangerous. You’ll die.
Nehemia: So, in other words there’s a verse that says, “A man cannot see Me and live,” and in the same book, if I’m not mistaken, Exodus…
Avi: Correct. Right. And then it…
Nehemia: It says, “they saw the God of Israel.”
Avi: But in some sense, they did see, okay? What you clearly have here is a God that has some sort of physical semblance, whether it’s that they saw or whether that it’s if you see and then you’ll die.
Nehemia: So, now I want to bring in what I will call the historical critical approach, which is what I was taught at Hebrew University by people who say… So, here’s the way I had one professor who explained it. He said, “When a believer,” and believer here means someone who believes in Scripture, not in the Christian sense. A Jew who believes in Judaism. “When a believer sees contradictions, they want to reconcile the contradictions. When a Bible critic,” that’s the term they use, “sees contradictions, they want to amplify the contradictions.” And so, how would he amplify if I’m going to put myself in his shoes? He would say, “One author in Exodus believed you can’t see God, and the other author thought you could…”
Avi: You’re frozen Nehemia.
—
Nehemia: All right. So, I was talking about… we just had an interruption of the internet. I think Maimonides’s God was upset with us that we were talking about Him so much, but… So, all right. So, when they saw the God of Israel in Exodus… and what were you saying? I feel like you were…
Avi: You were beginning to ask me about source criticism, that the two contradictory verses, if…
Nehemia: If you didn’t believe in the divine authorship of the Torah or that it was divinely inspired, let’s put it that way, then you would say, “Oh, okay. Exodus 24:10 was written by one author who believed the people literally saw God, that there was a physical manifestation of God, or God was physical, and the other one where it says you can’t see Him, man, and live. That’s a later idea, or a different idea from a different author. Right? But if you believe they’re both divinely inspired, then what we want to do is we want to reconcile them. And the way to reconcile them is many different ways, and for Maimonides, I guess you would say the way is that…
So, I’ll tell you that the classic exegetical explanation I’ve heard was, like… Yaakov Qirqisani was a Karaite in the 10th century. He brings it as an example. He says something like this: “You have to interpret everything literally, unless there’s a good reason not to.” And here’s an example of how it would be forbidden to interpret this literally, because then you have another verse that it contradicts. So, it means “and they perceived the God of Israel”, or maybe now I’m putting words in his mouth. “They were in a vision. They weren’t awake.” Right? Meaning, people see God in visions. That’s not controversial, right? Like, Ezekiel and Isaiah saw Him sitting on a throne, right? Is He literally on a throne, or is that just something that they perceived, right? So, Rabbi… and I keep getting the name wrong. The one at Yeshiva University. How would he explain this, if you had to guess, right? I mean, maybe…
Avi: First of all, first of all, I cannot tell you how Michael Wyschogrod of blessed memory would have done that. He wrote a couple of books. I read a couple of his books. I don’t know what he did or what he thought as a…
Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.
Avi: I do know that Maimonides homes in on this particular area, but it’s not something that I’ve looked at recently.
Nehemia: okay.
Avi: He does deal with Moses, and with seeing God, and this whole business.
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: But I think what you’re asking is a little broader. You’re asking, you know, “If you have two verses which seem to contradict,” okay? How they contradict, meaning, in my opinion, the plain meaning of both verses, is that God can be seen, but maybe it’s too dangerous, right?
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: But God has physicality enough, okay, to be seen. And yet, there still is a contradiction between the two verses, and what do you do with that? So, source criticism says, “Okay, this is one school, and this is another school.” I’m not well enough prepared to answer…
Nehemia: No, that’s fair, okay.
Avi: …this particular example, but I can tell you my approach in general.
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: I’m not a professional Bible scholar, okay?
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: Even the biblical exegesis that I teach, it’s more as Middle Ages than as Bible. And yet, I would say the following, okay? And I think that this would fit in with both the medieval thinkers that we’ve talked about and with Michael Wyschogrod. And that is the following: that human beings simultaneously can be shallow and deep. Human beings can be refreshingly simple and, at the same time, can be devastatingly complex. That’s how human beings are.
And the God of the Bible, and after that, the God of the rabbis, is a very, very deeply human God, okay? What does that mean? What does that mean? For our discussion, what does it mean? Is that, if in the Bible you get, in different places, very different images of God, that actually fits the idea, okay? First of all, the text, okay? First of all, the text. Good literature, for that reason, is both simple and complex, okay? The Bible, I think, unlike the classic source critics, is very good literature, okay? But not in a Western secular sense, necessarily. Okay? Very good literature, because it’s dealing on both sides, meaning with humanity and God, with very complex beings that change. Okay?
Nehemia: So, wait, you’re saying that the God of the Bible changes.
Avi: Because the God of the Bible is not perfect in the Greek sense.
Nehemia: Hmm.
Avi: The God of the Bible is an organism. If an organism doesn’t change, it means it’s dead.
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: Okay? Greek perfection is static.
Nehemia: Hmm.
Avi: But beauty and goodness and, I don’t know, and life, okay, relationships; they’re alive, and they’re constantly changing. And if the Bible didn’t reflect that, it would not only not be good literature, okay, it also, in that case, would not be divine. In other words, the simple way of looking at it is that if God is perfect, he can’t contradict Himself. So, if there’s contradictions, then, you know, it cannot be divine. But, if a human being produces something living and reflects life and doesn’t contain contradictions, then it’s not a reflection of life.
Nehemia: Mm-hmm.
Avi: With the same business, maybe it’s dangerous to see the king. And yet, maybe on another occasion, the king allows himself to be seen.
Nehemia: And it’s interesting, and I’m just thinking out loud here, so this is very poorly formulated perhaps… so, you’re saying that God is very human, but we have the verse that says that He made man in His image. So maybe, in a sense, we’re very divine, and divine doesn’t mean what the Greeks said. If we look at humans, we get a reflection of what God…
I had a friend who once explained… and he got in a lot of trouble because it was misunderstood. But he said, “If you look at the different ethnic groups, each of them has certain things they emphasize. And if you put them all together, that’s this beautiful rainbow that’s a reflection of God. Because God made this group, and He made that group, and He made the other group, and each of them maybe emphasizes certain aspects in their culture. If you take them all together, you get this beautiful picture of God.” He was called a racist for that, but it sounds so beautiful. How is that racist? It’s the opposite of racism!
So, maybe it’s pretending all human cultures are the same. But obviously they’re not the same, or anthropologists wouldn’t have jobs, right? You know, they study the differences in human cultures, right?
Avi: If we’re all the same, then life would be meaningless.
Nehemia: Yeah, well… and we’re all the same biologically, but then there are certain things that we culturally choose to emphasize in our different cultures, and then not everybody fits in with that culture, right? There’s outcasts like me, even in my own culture, but there are certain things I recognize… those are the standard values in the culture, and in a sense, our humanity. It’s not that God is a reflection of us, we’re a reflection of Him, if we take the verse in Genesis. So, I think that’s a wonderful place to end. I want to talk about your M.A.M. text! So, let’s just do a teaser…
Avi: We didn’t talk about Mesorah, but maybe we did talk about why the books that the Masoretes transmitted are important.
Nehemia: And so, let me ask you this question. So, when you were working on your doctorate on Shimon Ben Zemach Duran, were you dealing with manuscripts and the differences in the manuscripts? Or was there like a good critical edition so you didn’t really need to get into that?
Avi: There wasn’t a good critical edition. But by taking a decent version and comparing it when there seemed to be a problem with manuscripts, that was enough.
Nehemia: So, that laid the foundations for you working on the Tanakh, on the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, which we will get to in the next episode that we have.
Avi: I’ll actually tell you who did that for me. It wasn’t that, it was Rabbi Dr. Mitchell Orlian at Yeshiva University…
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: …who taught a course on biblical exegesis. And he told all the guys in the class, he said, “What you’re going to do is, you’re going to go to the library and you’re going to ask them for a manuscript of an unpublished commentary of the Tosafists on the Torah.” The Tosafists didn’t just work on the Talmud, they also worked on the Torah. And so, I sat there. You just had to take one verse, one comment on one verse, you know, figure out what all the letters were and make sense out of the text. And that’s what got me started on manuscripts.
Nehemia: So, again, it’s just a quick teaser for what we’re going to talk about next time. So, you have this WikiText, which is the Hebrew text of the Tanakh, and it’s called Al Pi Ha’mesorah, “according to the Mesorah.” And people might be familiar with the term, I hope, Masoretic Text, which is the transmitted text. But that’s not exactly what Mesorah means.
If I open up different printings of the Tanakh in Hebrew… because I’ll hear people say, “Well, you know, my English is different from this other English, and the third English, but what does it say in the Hebrew?” And, are there differences in the Hebrew text? If we look at different Hebrew manuscripts, or even Hebrew printings, the manuscripts that… we’ll get to that. If I look at different printings of the Hebrew, will I see differences… if I know what I’m looking at, right? I mean…
Avi: Okay, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you will not find many differences at all. Maybe none. The differences are only evident to the people who know what to look for. And to be quite honest and quite frank, the differences, almost all of them, are irrelevant to anyone who is not publishing a text. If you publish a text and you do it right, then you have to justify, why did I publish it this way? But if you’re not publishing a text, you’re just using a text, then almost any printed Tanakh that you might use will be good enough.
Nehemia: So, the example I like to give is, we have differences in our Tanakh manuscripts, but there’s no manuscript where Ishmael was bound rather than Isaac. Right? Meaning, like that would be a profound difference.
Avi: The Quran, by the way, does not say that…
Nehemia: No, I didn’t say it did. I’m just saying… We don’t have a version of the Torah where Aaron went up to Mount Sinai instead of Moses and received the Torah, right?
Avi: Okay.
Nehemia: Meaning, like, what we have is, the difference is, is that word spelled with a Vav or without a Vav? Is it spelled with a Yud… And you’re actually dealing with even finer differences, which is… we probably won’t talk about gayot, or maybe we’ll mention them, but the little dots and dashes that even the scribes in some cases considered, you could put that in or not, it doesn’t make a difference; it’s good if you do it, but you don’t have to. And that’s some of the level that you’re dealing… like really precise level of information. But still, and maybe this is a beautiful way to end, because if you believe God is perfect, maybe not in a Greek sense, but in a… And it’s interesting; you say there’s no verse…
Avi: In an organic living sense.
Nehemia: What’s that?
Avi: In an organic living sense.
Nehemia: So, He is a living God, that it says. We don’t have to, you know, we know it says He’s Elohim chayim. So, wow. So, that’s an interesting idea. In other words, if there’s one manuscript with a Vav and one manuscript without a Vav… and this is a theological question, right, outside of the academic realm, would you say, elu ve’elu divrei Elohim chayim, that this is the text we’ve received, and both of those are the words of God? I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud here.
Avi: I don’t quite know how to answer that. Not just for the Masoretes, but also in the centuries, you know, right after the Masoretes.
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: There were details that they considered to be representatives of different traditions…
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: …and there were details that they thought to be just mistakes. In other words, sometimes you might find a text that differs by a Vav, and it’s just because one of the two masoretes was sloppy. But sometimes you’ll find the very same thing, and neither of the Masoretes is being sloppy. Rather, both of these Masoretes are following, either a recorded Masoretic note, or something which appears in many, many, many, many manuscripts and appears to be something, a tradition that was alive among some of the scribes.
Nehemia: So, this is the bigger question of, how do we distinguish between a scribal error, what I’ll call an ad hoc, like, just at the moment the scribe made a mistake, and no, there’s actually a separate tradition that’s a recorded, known, documented tradition where he’s writing something different… We’ll save that for next time. This has been an amazing conversation. Not where I thought it would go, but what a great conversation! I want to call it a deeply human Jewish God. I think that’ll be the name of this episode.
Avi: Oh, and the correction for your listeners. I looked up my own dissertation. It begins with him being young in Mallorca and then studying in Aragon.
Nehemia: Okay. And then he becomes a refugee in North Africa. Was he persecuted by the Catholic Church, or by the Muslim fanatics? I don’t remember, who…
Avi: This is 1391. This is Christian Spain.
Nehemia: It’s the Christian persecution, okay.
Avi: This is what’s called in Hebrew, Gzerot Quf-Nun-Aleph, the Persecutions of 1391, almost exactly a century before 1492, which is the final expulsion.
Nehemia: Right. People think that the Jewish persecutions in Spain started in 1492. That’s not… It’s not… all right.
Avi: Many were murdered, many were forcibly converted, and many fled. And he was one of the ones who fled to North Africa.
Nehemia: Wasn’t there a rumor that he converted and then fled, or is that a different rabbi?
Avi: Yeah. It’s not a rumor. You’re talking first of all about Maimonides.
Nehemia: No, I’m talking about somebody from Mallorca. I know about Maimonides; that’s a different thing.
Avi: There probably were all of these things with people from Mallorca.
Nehemia: Okay.
Avi: With Maimonides, there’s a debate. It’s not just a scholarly debate today, it’s even a debate amongst sources from the Middle Ages.
Nehemia: Yeah.
Avi: Did Maimonides family actually do what he describes in Igeret Ha’shmad, in the Epistle on Persecution?
Nehemia: Of the apostasy… I think you translate it apostasy.
Avi: Oh, apostacy. So, he says that, you know, you should live, become a Muslim, and then, as soon as you can, flee to a land where you can be part of the people of Israel again.
Nehemia: Meaning, if they say, “We’re going to kill you if you don’t convert,” you convert and you pretend, and then you try to get away.
Avi: Yeah. So, he never says that he himself did it, but there are Islamic sources which claim that he did it, and then other Islamic sources which cast doubt upon that. Okay? So, the scholars are divided as to whether…
Nehemia: Well, I’m looking forward to our next conversation, where we’re going to talk about one of the most accurate, and maybe you would say the most accurate, Hebrew text of the Bible. It’s actually used by printers who want to print the Bible in Hebrew, and they go and they take your text, am I right?
Avi: Yes. It’s…
Nehemia: All right. So that’s not every printer, but some of them. All right. Thank you, Avi. Shalom.
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VERSES MENTIONED
Deuteronomy 28:63
Jonah 4
Exodus 24:10
Exodus 33:20
Genesis 1:26-27
Talmud Eruvin 13b:10-13
BOOKS MENTIONED
The Body of Faith: God and the People Israel: Wyschogrod, Michael: 9781568219103:
OTHER LINKS
מקרא על פי המסורה – ויקיטקסט
Miqra al-pi haMasorah
https://journal.libraries.wm.edu/jtr/article/view/243
Ḥasdai Crescas and Simeon ben Ẓemah Duran on Tradition versus Rational Inquiry by Seth (Avi) Kadish
The post Hebrew Voices #230 – A Deeply Human Jewish God appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.