The Four Books and the Book of Books (1)

 

            In the previous lectures we discussed the question of creation.  Regarding this question the Kuzari states:

 

            At present I am satisfied with these claims, which will  do for this chapter; if the days of our companionship last long, I will again request that you bring me clear proofs [1:68].

 

            Thus, we may conclude that the discussion until now was an introduction, in which the various religious alternatives, as well as the central concepts that define Judaism, were presented.  The Kuzari reserves the option to re-open the discussion of these issues at a later stage, and to request clear proofs for the principles of Judaism.  And, indeed, we shall return to this discussion in the fifth book [5:17,18].  We now are moving away from the issue of creation, and towards a central and related question, the concept of nature.  Since its inception up until our day, this concept has not lost its significance, and therefore maintains its difficulties as well.  In this discussion, we will once again depart from the atmosphere of the Middle Ages, and approach the battlefields of today, the struggles against our modern opponents.

 

Conscience, Nature and History

 

            Despite the fundamental conflicts that exist, as we have seen, between the Chaver and the philosopher, one element is common to both: the belief in God.  This is a significant similarity, despite the discrepancy between them regarding the image and characteristics of God.  This similarity permits the Chaver to begin his discourse with the exodus from Egypt and not with the more general question of the source of religious certainty and the belief in God.

 

 

            To summarize the section about the central positions of Jewish thought, we must state that God communicates with mankind, and with the Jew in particular, in various ways.  The wellspring of all these ways is the Torah.  It is the Book of books, which directs us in our approach to other books which bear the word of God.  There are three such books: the book of nature, the book of history, and the book of the human soul.  These are the four "stages" wherein Man may encounter his God.  We will now enter upon a discussion of the last two "stages."  Until this point the discussion was focused on the first two levels.  The philosopher's initial words stem from the perspective of nature: he speaks of the "God of heaven and earth."  The Chaver adds history to nature: he refers to the "God who has taken [the Jews] out of Egypt."

 

History

 

            The Torah instructs us by requiring us to pay heed to both general and Jewish history.  This is in fact one of the fundamental elements of Rihal's approach.  Yet, at the same time it is one of the most far-reaching statements that may be made regarding Judaism.  History does not only teach us the concept of Divine providence; it instructs us in actual commandments as well.  People the world over attempt to preserve their lineage and prove that they are descendants of kings, of famous folk, of heroes.  Yet the Torah commands us to recollect that we are the progeny of slaves and foreigners, a fact that most people would probably prefer to forget.  The Torah bids us to remember it, and from this consciousness reach conclusions that in turn influence the way we lead our lives.  Clearly, the recent history of the Jewish people until our day is a book we must study, and the pages about the holocaust and our national re-birth must be read again and again.

 

Perception and Conscience 

 

            The Torah commands us to "understand the years of each generation;" we are expected to learn from history.  However, at one and the same time the Torah commands us to look to the heavens and ask "who created these?"  The cosmic glow that we receive is one of the intimations that have reached us from the creation of the world.  However, there are other traces.  Nature still displays the mark of the Divine.  Rabbi Bachye Ibn Pakuda called one of the chapters of his book the "Gate of Perception."  Perception implies a keen observation of the world, the gleaning of knowledge from the world, and discerning the hand of God that finds expression in the world.

 

            However, Rabbi Bachye's book contains an additional phrase: the doctrine of conscience.  The "conscience" that Rabbi Bachye speaks of is not conscience in the modern sense of the word.  "Conscience" for him is that hidden world which exists in Man, his private psychological world, a world that a stranger has no access to.  My thoughts, my feelings, my pain, even my mind - exist in my conscience.  We exist in that private world, remain in it, but from it we reveal and define facts about the furthest galaxies.  Wise men have discovered planets using only pencil and paper, without any need of a telescope.  And from within this private world they guided others as they searched the skies for the new planet. 

 

            The wisdom of the conscience implies that human intelligence has much to teach us, that much of our knowledge comes from within ourselves.  A number of commandments are based on this concept.  They are generally termed "sikhliyot," or rational commandments.  Our conscience teaches us what is called the "fifth volume of the Shulchan Arukh" (the four-volume code of Jewish law).  We must take our internal world seriously, for God speaks through it as well.  However, our internal world is richer than our mind reveals.  Our Sages state that each day a heavenly voice calls out to people to repent.  The Ba'al Shem Tov, founder of the Chassidic movement, was asked regarding this: why do we not hear the heavenly voice?  The Ba'al Shem Tov responded that thoughts of repentance that we sometimes feel within us, are actually that heavenly voice.  In other words, there are things that come to us from above, but enter us through our internal world, through our conscience.

 

            Perception is the basis of empirical, experimental science.  However, our conscience tells us to close our eyes to the outside world and learn something from within our internal world.

 

            This idea, that a person can learn from within himself, is seemingly odd, but it constitutes one of the foundations of the Talmud.

 

            Let us read a section from the introduction to Rabbi Bachye's book, Duties of the Heart (Chovot HaLevavot):

 

            And the gates that the Creator opened for the sake of His Torah and his religion are three:

            the first is the intellect that is saved from all harm;

            the second is the Torah given to Moses our teacher;

            and the third is the traditions received by the ancients which they received from the prophets, may they rest in peace.

 

            On the surface this seems like a section that points to philosophical "chutzpa."  Rabbi Bachye makes the intellect a partner to the Torah.  However, it is interesting that these three sources are precisely the Sages' three sources.  The Talmud contains three epistemological terms, and they are: svara (hypothesis), kra (Scripture), and gemara (Talmud).  The svara is the fruit of intellectual study.  The kra is the scriptural verse.  The gemara is the tradition we have received from our Sages.

 

            In the Talmud the svara is of central importance. Svara teaches us the primary principle of Jewish law regarding human life: "One soul may not forfeit another."  This is the basis for all the laws that fall under the rubric of the rule, "yehareg ve-al ya'avor," be killed rather than transgress.  It is interesting that the verse bases itself on a svara when it compares different examples of "yehareg ve-al ya'avor."  We learn the principle of blessings from a svara, as well as many of the laws of swearing in court.  However, at the basis of the talmudic discussion lies the idea that the human intellect reaches a certain level, beyond which we need the kra, the scripture, which gives us the level above thought.

 

            We return here to the problem of our attitude towards the power of the intellect.  Rabbi Bachye does well to say that the source of consciousness is "the intellect that is saved from all harm."  These words are ambiguous and can be understood on different levels.  However, there is no doubt that they point to the fact that the intellect is exposed to the danger of "harm."  And, indeed, many thinkers, such as Rabbi Saadia Gaon, emphasized that the intellect is always faced with the danger of doubt.  Other thinkers have taught us that we must fight against the psychological forces that endanger the intellect and try to steal its crown.  Imagination is an example of one of the forces which endanger the intellect.  The struggle against the dangers in imagination runs from the Rambam all the way to Rabbi Israel Salanter, founder of the Mussar movement.  However, Rihal does not identify absolutely with this approach.  The war between intellect and imagination is not like the conflict in westerns between the hero and the villain.  It is a more complicated war.

 

            Mazes have always interested man.  It was an ancient custom to build a maze of hedges, and we hear of the maze as early as Greek mythology.

 

            Rabbi Bachye uses the model of the maze in order to explain the task of a man who searches for his path in life with his intellect.  The Torah assists us in this search.  In other words, it constitutes a sort of map that accompanies and guides us through the maze, despite the fact that theoretically we could have found our way alone.  Yet occasionally, the time it takes us to find our way out of the maze is longer than the length of our lives.

 

            Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, known by his acronym, Ramchal, uses the model of the maze in a slightly different way in his book, The Path of the Just (Mesilat Yesharim).  A person who is above the maze can guide the person who is in it.  The person above the maze is the person who has achieved his spiritual perfection, and can therefore see what the man in the maze cannot.

 

            The awareness of the dangers that beset the intellect were always apparent to the leaders of the Mussar movement.  Descartes, the great philosopher who revolutionized philosophy, opens his book with the imaginary theory that perhaps there is an evil spirit who tricks him whenever he is involved in logic or mathematics.  However, this theory is not as outlandish as it appears at first glance.  Sometimes there really is an evil spirit that tricks us.  Sometimes there are a number of spirits.  This is one of the central principles of the Rambam's thought.  Why do we make mistakes?  One of the answers is that the evil spirit is sometimes inside of us.  This evil spirit is in fact our personal interests which distort our perception of reality.

 

            This is the difference between rationalism and rationalization.  Rationalism means looking at things logically.  Rationalization is an approach to things which appears to be rational; however, it has a hidden agenda, a bias, something within us that causes us to make mistaken judgments.  In that case, our intellectual theories are not rational; they are merely rationalizations.

 

(This lecture was translated by Gila Weinberg.)

Copyright (c)1997 Prof. Shalom Rosenberg, Yeshivat Har Etzion.  All rights reserved.