The chapter of Judaism Reclaimed which relates to parashat Beha’alotecha opens by observing how the parashah’s narratives provide a clear insight into the broad range of spiritual levels that existed among the Jewish People in the Wilderness. We look at how the Torah caters for this diversity with laws which are nuanced and applicable to people on all different rungs of the ladder of spiritual growth.
While the Torah employs anthropomorphic terminology when describing God and His actions, the Targum plays the crucial role of indicating to readers that anthropomorphic descriptions are not to be understood literally. Rambam writes glowingly of how Onkelos’ “translations” subtly departed from the Torah’s literal physical descriptions of God while doing so in a way that the masses were able to comprehend. Onkelos achieved this by, for example, referring in the context of God “moving” to God’s Shechinah (Presence) rather than God Himself, and by God “revealing Himself” rather than descending (a verb that depicts motion from one place to another). Rambam’s position is consistent with the great importance accorded to the Targum by the Gemara, which writes that the Targum Onkelos is an explanation of the Torah’s text which can be traced back to Ezra and which, the commentaries tell us, was part of the oral tradition which originated from Sinai.
Rambam’s position on anthropomorphism, specifically the notion that the Torah initially encourages heretical views as a necessary stepping-stone to achieving true beliefs – is one that many are liable to find shocking. A broader perspective of Rambam’s approach, however, allows one to appreciate that the Torah’s function is not to confront the Jewish People abruptly with a list of strict truths and harsh demands. Rather, it is a handbook which has been drafted in such a way as to coax and guide them towards correct conduct and beliefs (we examine certain examples of this phenomenon). The tension which arises from the need to incorporate within a single system both the ideal pursuit of divine truths and the common perception of religious piety is a central theme in Rambam’s thought, and underlines the Torah’s ability to cater simultaneously for multiple religious levels within the Jewish People.
The late Prof. Marvin Fox writes, in his highly-recommended Interpreting Maimonides, that it is this tension between which underlies the phenomenon of the “contradictions” which Rambam discusses in his introduction to Moreh Nevuchim. Responding to the Maimonidean theories advanced by academics such as Leo Strauss, who understood Rambam to be hinting that he had been forced to conceal his true radical views from the ‘masses’, Fox argues instead that they are indicative of Rambam’s religious realism. Rambam was acutely aware of the delicate balance which must be maintained between what he saw as the Torah’s ultimate goal of elevated intellectual connection to God on the one hand and the practical realities and imperfections of everyday religious engagement on the other.
In one example, he cites the claim of Maimonidean contradiction on the subject of prayer. Rambam teaches the philosophical truth that the only true praise of God is silence, since we are unable to formulate any accurate descriptions of God’s attributes. Yet he also codifies and upholds liturgical references to God being, among other things, “great and mighty”, tacitly recognising the need of the human spirit to express itself in words. Fox concludes that, in allowing both the denial of divine attributes and the duty to pray, Rambam “seems to affirm that there must be a place within a single system for the demands of both religious piety and philosophical truth”.
First posted on Facebook 7 June 2020, here.
