The coming week’s parashah poses a thorny theological challenge – the notion of God ‘residing’ in a specific location within the physical world. In his dedication of the first Mikdash (Kings I, the wise king Shlomo was highly sensitive to this complexity, stating:
“But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You; much less this temple that I have erected”.
Nevertheless, Shlomo puts aside his apparently unsolved conundrum and states:
"That Your eyes may be open toward this house night and day, toward the place which You said, 'My Name will be there;' to listen to the prayer that Your servant will pray toward this place”.
It is possible that Shlomo’s petition embodies an approach neatly formulated in a far later era by Rabbi S. R. Hirsch, which recognises that God’s existence and essence lie well beyond human comprehension, and instead chooses to focus exclusively on the practicalities of the God-human relationship. R’ Hirsch was adamantly opposed to what he regarded as the over-philosophising of descriptions of God in the Torah, accusing its proponents of causing God’s Personality to become “increasingly blurred and indistinct to our perceptions”. Rather,
“belief in the Personality of God is more important than the speculations of those who reject the attribution of material features to God”.
Professor Joseph Dan, a leading scholar in the subject of medieval Jewish thinkers, proposes a similar interpretation of anthropomorphic statements in the writings of the Rishonim – most striking among them the Bohemian Rabbi, Moshe Taku. R’ Taku’s Ketav Tamim at first glance contains overwhelming evidence of Rabbinic belief in the notion that God has physical attributes, a fact not missed by Prof Marc Shapiro (The Limits of Orthodox Theology) who regards R Taku as the “most significant” example of Rabbinic corporealism. Prof Dan however, whose opinion is not mentioned in The Limits…, writes that:
He [R’ Taku] insists on the literal acceptance of the prophets' descriptions of their visions as well as the anthropomorphic references to God in talmudic-midrashic literature. He does not do so because of his belief in the literal veracity of these descriptions; he only insists that they represent the maximum that can be conveyed concerning God's essence and appearance, and that any further inquiry cannot lead to valid conclusions. God chose to reveal to us in the scriptures whatever is found in them: man should be satisfied with that, and ask no more questions. It is not that Rabbi Moses Taku believed in an anthropomorphic God; most probably, he did not.
Just as R’ Hirsch regarded human speculations as to God’s essence as futile and distracting from the primary religious endeavour since “the maturest mind of the philosopher knows no more about the essence of God than the simple mind of a child”, R’ Taku is similarly dismissive of attempts to place God within what he perceives to be a restrictive rational framework: “they are issuing decrees to the Creator as to how He must be. By doing so they are degrading themselves”. (Some fascinating debate surrounding the proper interpretation of R’ Taku’s work has been taking place in the comments section to this recent blogpost of R’ Slifkin relation to a chapter of Judaism Reclaimed).
Rambam, however, who studied in a philosophical setting more confident in its ability to discern “absolute truths”, is more prepared to embrace the fruit of rational human contemplation even concerning God (he crucially identifies the human intellect with the “image of God” of Bereishit). While he strongly asserts that the human intellect and language cannot make any positive pronouncements in this area, he does allow and even require us to declare what God is NOT. In a similar vein, he is sufficiently confident in the binding nature of his rational conclusions to declare that God’s inability to perform the impossible or take on what we perceive to be limiting physical attributes “signifies neither inability nor deficiency of power on His part”. Rambam’s confidence in human rationality leads him to the philosophising of anthropomorphic passages in the Torah which dominates the opening section of Moreh Nevuchim. Others such as R’ Taku and R’ Hirsch appear to have been more convinced of the limitations of human speculation regarding the divine. Their interpretation of anthropomorphic texts was therefore limited to the practicalities of the religious message they sought to convey.
First posted to Facebook 22 February 2020, here.
