What if man was one of us? The most perplexing verse in the Torah

Parashat Bereishit contains one of the most perplexing verses in the entire Torah, the difficulty of which is compounded by the fact that two of our earliest sources read it in entirely different ways.

In the aftermath of Adam and Eve’s sin in Gan Eden, God declares:

הֵ֤ן הָֽאָדָם֙ הָיָה֙ כְּאַחַ֣ד מִמֶּ֔נּוּ לָדַ֖עַת ט֣וֹב וָרָ֑ע וְעַתָּ֣ה | פֶּן־יִשְׁלַ֣ח יָד֗וֹ וְלָקַח֙ גַּ֚ם מֵעֵ֣ץ הַֽחַיִּ֔ים וְאָכַ֖ל וָחַ֥י לְעֹלָֽם

"Behold man has become like one of us, having the ability of knowing good and evil, and now, lest he stretch forth his hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat and live forever".

Or does He?

The above translation is favoured by Rashi and Ibn Ezra, and is consistent with the cantillation which is traditionally accorded to Ezra. Remarkably, however, Targum Onkelos – an Aramaic translation of the Torah from the Tannaitic era which the Talmud understands to trace back to Sinai – reads these words very differently:

הָא אָדָם הֲוָה יְחִידַי בְּעַלְמָא מִנֵּהּ לְמִידַע טַב וּבִישׁ

“Behold man has become unique in the world, by himself can know good and evil…”

Onkelos’s rendering of this verse is consistent with Rambam’s understanding of his agenda – not simply translating the Torah but also carefully ensuring that it cannot be mistakenly interpreted in a manner that he deems heretical. Rather than reading the verse as God describing Himself as a plurality which might include humanity, a meaning that introduces all sorts of theological complications, Onkelos places the sentence’s pause on the word “ke’achad”. Humanity is therefore described as unique among creatures in its ability to determine right and wrong.

Unsurprisingly, Onkelos’s reading of this verse is adopted by Rambam in Hilchot Teshuva (5:1), and cited as part of his discussion regarding human free will:

“Free will is granted to all men. If one desires to turn himself to the path of good and be righteous, the choice is his. Should he desire to turn to the path of evil and be wicked, the choice is his.

This is [the intent of] the Torah's statement: " Behold man has become unique in the world, by himself can know good and evil," i.e., the human species became singular in the world with no other species resembling it in the following quality: that man can, on his own initiative, with his knowledge and thought, know good and evil, and do what he desires. There is no one who can prevent him from doing good or bad. Accordingly, [there was a need to drive him from the Garden of Eden,] "lest he stretch out his hand [and take from the tree of life]."

Yet even once this verse is interpreted within the context of free will, its purpose and intent remain very unclear. Rambam proceeds to argue that free will is a fundamental pillar upon which the Torah relies. If people were compelled to act a certain way, he explains, there would be no place for God revealing a set of rules which would be the basis for reward and punishment.

But surely all that is required to justify commands, reward and punishment is that people are not compelled and can freely to choose whether to follow God’s word? Is it really necessary to bring in this verse to imply that humans also possess their autonomous moral compass to evaluate right and wrong? Would Rambam not expect a person to obey God’s law even in a situation in which he or she does not understand them to be morally correct?

One discussion that this verse might shed light on is the status of those who have not been exposed to the Torah or even the seven Noachide laws which are sometimes suggested to represent a basic universal moral code. There is no explicit mention of God revealing any set of laws to humanity prior to the Sinai revelation. Nevertheless, it is apparent that God expects certain minimal standards of moral conduct and punishes those such as the generation of the flood and citizens of Sodom for their corruption, cruelty and immorality. Indeed, Rambam in Hilchot Melachim (8:10) seems to consider Noachide laws to be binding upon all non-Jews. Perhaps the justification for this arises from Onkelos and Rambam’s interpretation of this verse to imply that humanity possesses its own moral compass and is therefore responsible for its own actions even without any form of divine command?

Many further perplexing questions remain. How, for example, do Onkelos and Rambam explain the cryptic continuation of the verse – that humanity’s newfound moral compass poses a danger “lest he stretch forth his hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat and live forever”? And is this interpretation to be reconciled with Rambam’s interpretation of the Eden episode found in an early chapter of Moreh Nevuchim, in which “tov vera” represent the negative result of Adam and Eve’s sin – the corruption of their previous praised ability to perceive absolute truths (emet vasheker)?

One possible explanation is that, according to Rambam, humanity’s moral compass in its post-sin state could now also go very badly wrong due to it having internalised harmful imaginative and emotive elements. It is noteworthy that Rambam also follows Onkelos in rendering the Serpent’s promise to Eve as being that:

“on the day that you eat thereof, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like political leaders (ravravei), knowing tov vera."

In this new post-sin scenario, in which the human mind could concoct and persuade itself of the merits of destructive political philosophies such as communism or fascism, a safety valve of mortality had to be placed within its societies. No dictator could be allowed to enslave a society perpetually. God was now therefore concerned “lest he stretch forth his hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat and live forever”.

First posted on Facebook 19 October 2022, here.

Do any of us really have free will?

The opening verse of this week’s parashah describes Pharaoh having his heart hardened by God – his free will being withdrawn from him – a process which various commentators find disturbing. Without getting into any of their detailed responses to this specific event, what emerges is the centrality of free will to Judaism specifically and religion in general. Judaism Reclaimed traces the dispute between Jewish belief and proponents of determinism from its ancient pagan form through to the writings of Rabbi Sacks in the modern era.

In his Hilchot Teshuva (5:3-4), Rambam sets out exactly why free will is considered so important in Judaism:

“This principle is a fundamental concept and a pillar [on which rests the totality] of the Torah and mitzvot…Were God to decree that an individual would be righteous or wicked or that there would be a quality which draws a person by his essential nature to any particular path [of behavior]… how could He command us through [the words of] the prophets: "Do this," "Do not do this," "Improve your behavior," or "Do not follow after your wickedness?"…What place would there be for the entire Torah? According to which judgement or sense of justice would retribution be administered to the wicked or reward to the righteous?”

The impression that one gets from Rambam’s maximalist position is that every aspect of human activity is believed to be governed by free choice. Other rabbinic thinkers, meanwhile, spell out a more nuanced position with Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler writing that, in practice, most of a person’s actions are determined by nature and habit rather than the operation of free will:

“Everyone has free choice – at the point where truth meets falsehood. In other words, behira takes place at the point where the truth as the person sees it confronts the illusion produced in him by the power of falsehood. But the majority of a person’s actions are undertaken without any clash between truth and falsehood taking place. Many of a person’s actions may happen to coincide with what is objectively right because he has been brought up that way and it does not occur to him to do otherwise, and many bad and false decisions may be taken simply because a person does not realise that they are bad. In such cases no valid behira or choice has been made. Free will is exercised and a valid behira made only on the borderline between the forces of good and the forces of evil within that person”. [Strive for Truth vol. 2]

Others have presented the notion of free will like a muscle that people can either exercise and empower to take control of their lives or allow to atrophy and descend into gradual enslavement to the demands of their animalistic physicality.

In the modern era, the notion of free will has increasingly been challenged from the fields of neuroscience and philosophy, which have produced claims that human consciousness in general, and free choice in particular are an illusion. What is really occurring, they argue, can be reduced to electrochemical brain processes meaning that, as Bertrand Russell phrased it:

“[Man’s] origin, his growth, his hope and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve the body beyond the grave…”

These arguments were given a boost in recent decades with a series of experiments performed by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, which appeared to demonstrate that areas of the brain light up – showing mental activity – before a decision had been made to e.g. turn on a switch. What the experiment – as well as subsequent neuroscientific theories – has failed to show, however, is that the sort of painstaking moral dilemmas which we most strongly associate with free will can be traced to a pre-determined mental process. In the accompanying video we see Fagin in the Oliver Twist musical going back and forth as to whether to reform his criminal lifestyle and become an honest citizen. Are we to suppose that each stage of such difficult decision-making can be traced to an electrochemical prompt?

Science has nothing to answer to this question – at least for now. One thing that we can be sure of is that it will not discover any evidence for a spiritual dimension of a human being – a metaphysical soul which is capable of making choices. This should not be seen as a critique of the scientific process but rather as a recognition of its limitations from the outset. As Professor Sam Lebens noted on this group in a different context:

“Methodological naturalism rules out any theories that use God to explain phenomena. So you can guarantee, before you start your investigation into who wrote the Bible, that methodological naturalism won’t discover a Divine author. But its failure to find a Divine author is not evidence that God wasn’t involved. It’s not a finding. It’s not a conclusion.”

(https://www.facebook.com/.../permalink/3174484782780676/)

Those who reject free will with certainty, do so because they cannot make any sense of it within the confines of their parameters of investigation – natural physical phenomena. Refusal to consider the possibility of anything beyond physical cause and effect is not evidence that it doesn’t exist.

Yet on the other side of the equation is the most powerful human intuition – that of self-existence, thought and choice. While we may be prepared to accept that nature and nurture are able to influence and sometimes limit the scope of our choices, can we embrace the implications of our minds being fully governed by physical phenomena? It would seem that the social dynamics and legal systems of even the most secular societies are predicated upon the moral reality of free choice and humans bearing responsibility for the decisions that they make.

Reviewing the situation, here.

First posted to Facebook 22 January 2023, here.

Is God a mind: Rambam and divine knowledge

By Shmuli Phillips with Joshua Maroof.

Human attempts to comprehend and describe God’s knowledge have long led rabbinic thinkers across a theological minefield. The most commonly discussed difficulty relates to attempts to reconcile fundamental doctrines of free will and God’s foreknowledge – a problem which features in several chapters of Judaism Reclaimed. An examination of medieval analyses however show that the very notion of God’s knowledge in its own right is a thorny and troublesome concept. 

This week’s parashah features an episode in which God judges and punishes the denizens of Sodom for their sinful behaviour. A seemingly innocuous verse describes God declaring “I will descend now and see, whether according to her cry, which has come to Me, they have done; [I will wreak] destruction [upon them]; and if not, I will know."” (Bereishit 18:21). Ibn Ezra comments on this that “the truth is that He knows everything generally, not as a particular” – a comment that Ralbag identifies as a support for his understanding that God only knows broad principles and not particular details which occur.

The reason for this is explained by Rabbi Joshua Maroof in his excellent series of online shiurim on the Moreh Nevuchim (link in first comment). For these rabbinic philosophers, who saw the world through the Aristotelian lens which informed scholarly insight in medieval times, the idea of God gaining new knowledge from cognizing events which occurred in the world presented a severe problem.

According to this way of thinking, when a person gains a new idea, it becomes part of the mind and thereby changes and improves it. For example, a person who has understood and internalised the theory of gravity will never look at the world again in the same way. Instead of “angels” moving objects he will now comprehend this movement by means of scientific principles of mass and force. Whatever is imprinting the physical world with these laws is now also imprinting the human mind – in Maimonidean terms the knowledge and the knower become one. This is unproblematic when we are dealing with steady and eternal rules of nature. These can always have been part of God’s Perfect knowledge with which He created the world.

But what about the particulars of the universe – the specific results of the various and changing manifestations of the laws of nature in the material world? And of course human conduct – the results of our free will? If God is understood to gain new knowledge of these, then He is “changed” and made “more perfect” as a result of receiving this knowledge.

It is against this backdrop that we can begin to appreciate quite how radical Rambam’s position on the matter was, remaining faithful to the clear implications of the biblical texts despite the theological challenges that these created when viewed from the prevalent Aristotelian perspective. Rambam’s conservatism prompted Ralbag to declare that “It seems that Maimonides’ position on this question of Divine cognition is not implied by any philosophical principles; indeed, reason denies this view, as I will show. It seems rather that theological considerations have forced him to this view.” (Milchamot Hashem 3:3).

In short, Rambam concludes – consistent with his broader approach to such matters – that we are entirely unable to describe any properties or attributes of God, including His knowledge. Even using the word “know” in relation to God is a borrowed term; it should not be taken to imply any similarity between God’s knowledge and that of humans (Rabbi Maroof points out that this principle also appears in the kabbalistic Patach Eliyahu prayer).

Notwithstanding our inability to fully fathom the nature of divine knowledge, Rambam offers an example to help us distinguish its nature from that of human knowledge:

“There is a great disparity between the knowledge that a designer has of the object he has designed and the knowledge that someone else has of that object. For if this object was made according to the designer’s plan, it is entirely the product of the designer’s knowledge. For another person observing the object, however, his knowledge derives from the object…The designer of a machine understands its properties not through observing how it operates subsequently…

However this is not the case for someone who looks at this machine, for whenever the onlooker observes the object he gains new knowledge…If you suppose that the motions of this instrument are infinite, the onlooker could never contain them all in his knowledge. In addition, the onlooker is incapable of knowing these motions before they occur, for his knowledge arises exclusively from observing what actually takes place.

So too…everything that we know is only through looking at the Creation, therefore our knowledge does not grasp the future or the infinite. Our insights are therefore renewed and increased according to the knowledge that we are able to acquire. God, however, is not like that, since His knowledge of objects is not derived from them…On the contrary, the objects in question are a result of His knowledge which preceded and established them as they are.” (paraphrased from Moreh 3:21)

Ultimately, while we can attempt to describe divine processes and their results, we are bound by a recognition that “knowing” and “mind” are borrowed terms when applied to God. As Rambam makes clear repeatedly in this context, our thoughts and language are unable to positively grasp or depict any aspect of the infinite. Metaphors and borrowed terms from descriptions of human actions help us relate to God to some degree but we must exercise extreme caution over taking them too literally and thereby ascribing positive features to God.

As Rabbi Maroof concludes, almost all theological problems that people raise are a result of them trying to compare God to His creatures. I believe that it is such flawed comparisons between divine and human existence and knowledge which pave the way for the intrusion of flawed theologies – such as corporealism, tzimzum and restrictions of divine knowledge – into Judaism.

First posted on Facebook 9 November 2022, here.